Argument · heard from pro-Palestinian voices

“Israel is a settler-colonial state.”

Zionism belongs with the colonisation of the Americas, Australia, Algeria and South Africa: settlers from Europe replaced a native people, so decolonisation — the settlers' power ending, perhaps the settlers leaving — is the just outcome.

Traps in play:◆ Which territory?◆ Which Zionism?

1. Why people find it convincing

   • Most early Zionist settlers came from Europe, backed by a European empire (Britain, through the Balfour Declaration and the Mandate), to a land with an Arab majority that was not consulted.
   • Early Zionists sometimes used colonial language themselves — the Jewish Colonization Association, 'colonies' for settlements; Jabotinsky's 'The Iron Wall' (1923) openly compared the project to colonisation of native peoples.
   • The 1948 displacement of ~700,000 Palestinians and the refusal of their return is what settler colonialism looks like to those it happened to.
   • In the West Bank today, state-backed settlers take land, protected by the army, while the local population lives under military rule — the model almost textbook.

2. What's true

   The West Bank settlement enterprise fits the description well, and the Mandate era had real colonial features.

   Since 1967, the state has moved its own citizens into occupied territory (contrary to the Fourth Geneva Convention, Art. 49(6)), with separate law for them and land taken from the local population — that is a settler-colonial pattern by most definitions. The pre-state movement also relied on an imperial power's patronage and used colonial vocabulary. These points are fair and should be stated first.

   law / courtFourth Geneva Convention (1949), Article 49(6) (1949)

   'The Occupying Power shall not deport or transfer parts of its own civilian population into the territory it occupies.'

   primary documentZe'ev Jabotinsky, 'The Iron Wall' (O Zheleznoi Stene) (1923)

   Quote exactly from a full translation, not excerpts.

   primary documentBalfour Declaration (1917)

   Letter of 2 November 1917, incl. the clause that nothing shall prejudice 'the civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities'.

3. What's left out

   No mother country, refugees rather than colonists, and an old tie to the land.

   Settler colonies extend a metropole — Britain, France, Spain — whose flag, capital and profits the settlers serve. Zionists had no mother country; Britain restricted Jewish immigration (1939 White Paper) and fought the Jewish underground by 1946–47. Many arrivals were refugees from pogroms, Nazi Europe and, after 1948, the Arab world — roughly half of Israel's Jews today descend from Middle Eastern and North African communities. And the Jewish claim is to return to the land its identity, language and liturgy come from, not to a new continent. Colonial vocabulary in the 1900s meant 'settlement' in general; 'colony' was used for Jewish communities in the Americas too (see the archive's 'Use of "colony" to describe Jewish communities' tag).

   Traps here:◆ Which territory?◆ Which Zionism?

   primary documentBritish White Paper of 1939 (Cmd. 6019) (1939)

   75,000 Jewish immigrants over five years.

   primary documentkvetch-of-the-day archive: clippings tagged 'Use of "colony" to describe Jewish communities'

   e.g. 1940 NYT on the Sosua colony (Dominican Republic); pick clipping_ids when finalising.

4. Where it leads if pressed

   What do you want decolonised?

   The West Bank settlements

   A position much of the world and many Israelis share — negotiable.

   → Which territory?

   Israel itself

   The historical models are Algeria 1962 or defeat. For ~7 million Jews, half of them from Arab lands, that's a threat, not a solution.

   → Jews lived peacefully in the Arab world for centuries until Zionism ruined it; they left because Israel lured them.

   Decolonisation of what — the West Bank, or Israel?

   Applied to the West Bank, 'decolonise' means ending the settlement enterprise and the occupation — a position much of the world and many Israelis hold. Applied to Israel within the 1949 lines, the historical models of 'decolonisation' are Algeria in 1962 (a million settlers leaving) or outright defeat; for ~7 million Jews with nowhere else that is theirs, many of them descendants of people expelled from Arab countries, that is not a solution but a threat. Being precise about which territory turns a slogan into a negotiable claim.