Zionism has been described by several scholars as a form of settler colonialism in relation to the region of Palestine and the Israeli–Palestinian conflict. Zionism's founders and early leaders were aware and outspoken about their status as colonizers; early leading Zionists such as Theodor Herzl, Max Nordau, and Ze'ev Jabotinsky described Zionism as colonization.
As the theoretical framework of settler colonialism emerged in the 1960s during the decolonization of Africa and Asia, it was applied by some scholars to the Zionist colonization of Palestine. This perspective contends that Zionism involves processes of displacement and dispossession of Palestinian Arabs, akin to other settler colonial contexts similar to the creation of the United States.
Critics of the characterization of Zionism as settler colonialism argue that it does not fit traditional colonial frameworks, seeing Zionism instead as the repatriation of an indigenous population and an act of self-determination. Critics also note that Jews have had a continuous presence in the land. This debate reflects broader tensions over competing historical and political narratives regarding indigeneity in the Israeli–Palestinian conflict and the founding and legitimacy of the State of Israel.
Concepts
According to Fayez Sayegh, then director of the Palestine Research Center, Settler colonialism differs from classical colonialism in that it focuses on eliminating or removing, rather than exploiting, the original inhabitants of a territory.: "1) Other European settlers who had gone (or were then going) to other parts of Africa and Asia has been animated either by economic or by politico-imperialist motives: they had gone either in order to accumulate fortunes by means of privileged and protected exploitation of immense natural resources, or in order to prepare the ground for (or else aid and abet) the annexation of those coveted territories by imperial European governments. The Zionist colonists, on the other hand, were animated by neither impulse. They were driven to the colonisation of Palestine by the desire to attain nationhood for themselves, and to establish a Jewish state which would be independent of any existing government and subordinate to none, and which would in due course attract to its territories the Jews of the world.(2) Other European settlers could coexist with the indigenous populations – whom they would exploit and dominate, but whose services they would nevertheless require, and whose continued existence in the coveted territory they would therefore tolerate. But the Zionist settlers could not countenance indefinite coexistence with the inhabitants of Palestine. For Palestine was fully populated by Arabs, whose national consciousness has already been awakened, and who had already begun to nurse aspirations of independence and national fulfilment. Zionist colonisation could not possibly assume the physical proportions envisaged by Zionism while the Arab people of Palestine continued to inhabit its homeland; nor could the Zionist political aspirations of racial self-segregation and statehood be accomplished while the nationally-conscious Arab people of Palestine continued to exist in that country. Unlike European colonisation, therefore, the Zionist colonisation of Palestine was essentially incompatible with the continued existence of the ‘native population’ in the coveted country." As theorized by Patrick Wolfe, settler colonialism is an ongoing "structure, not an event" aimed at replacing a native population. Settler colonialism operates by processes including physical elimination of native inhabitants but also can encompass projects of assimilation, segregation, miscegenation, religious conversion, and incarceration. Scholars, such as sociologists Daiva Stasiulis, Nira Yuval-Davis, and specialist in middle eastern studies Joseph Massad have included Israel in their global analyses of settler societies.
Background
Many of the fathers of Zionism described Zionist activity in Palestine as "colonization",: "...for decades Zionists themselves used terms such as 'colonisation' (hityashvut) to describe their project in Palestine." such as Vladimir Jabotinsky, who said "Zionism is a colonization adventure". Theodore Herzl, in a 1902 letter to Cecil Rhodes, described the Zionist project as "something colonial". Previously in 1896 he had spoken of "important experiments in colonization" happening in Palestine. In 1905 Max Nordau said, "Zionism rejects on principle all colonization on a small scale, and the idea of 'sneaking' into Palestine", and that instead it advocates "that the existing and promising beginnings of a Jewish colonization shall be looked after and maintained till the movement will be possible on a large scale".
Ilan Pappe writes that as early as 1882, the Zionist movement used words such as the Hebrew verb le-hitnahel ("to settle") or le-hityashev ("to colonize") and the Hebrew nouns hitanchalut ("settlement") and hitayasvut ("colonization") to describe the Israeli State's takeover of Palestinian land. He says it was following WWII, when colonialism began to be predominantly associated with "negative European policies and practices," that "the Zionist movement and later the state of Israel looked for ways to disassociate the Hebrew terminology from the colonialist one and started to use more universal and positive language to describe their policies."
Major Zionist organizations central to Israel's foundation held colonial identity in their names or departments, such as the Jewish Colonisation Association, the Palestine Jewish Colonisation Association, the Jewish Colonial Trust, and The Jewish Agency's colonization department. On the Colonial bank, Herzl, in a letter to Nordau, wrote that "The Jewish Colonial Bank must actually become the Jewish National Bank. Its colonial aspect is only window-dressing, hokum, a firm-name. A national financial instrument is to be created."
In 1905, some Zionist activists promoted the policy of Hebrew labor, which encouraged Jewish-owned enterprises to employ only Jewish workers. Zionist organizations acquired land under the restriction that it could never pass into non-Jewish ownership. Later on, kibbutzim—collectivist, all-Jewish agricultural settlements—were developed to counter plantation economies relying on Jewish owners and Palestinian farmers. The kibbutz was also the prototype of Jewish-only settlements later established beyond Israel's pre-1967 borders.
Zionist leader Chaim Weizmann wrote in his autobiography that at the 1919 Paris Peace Conference he had spoken to US Secretary of State Robert Lansing of "the hope that by Jewish immigration, Palestine would ultimately become as Jewish as England is English" and described how he had taken as his example "the outstanding success which the French had at that time made of Tunisia. What the French could do in Tunisia," Weizmann said, "the Jews would be able to do in Palestine". Anthropologist Scott Atran wrote of this comparison between Zionism and French colonialism in Tunisia that "whereas direct French colonial rule sought to utilize, rather than displace, the fellah's labor, Zionist colonization had no use for Arab labor, at least in principle".
In 1948, 750,000 Palestinians fled or were forcibly displaced from the area that became Israel, and 500 Palestinian villages, as well as Palestinian-inhabited urban areas, were destroyed. Although considered by some Israelis to be a "brutal twist of fate, unexpected, undesired, unconsidered by the early [Zionist] pioneers", some historians have described the Nakba as a campaign of ethnic cleansing. In the aftermath, Palestinian land was expropriated on a large scale and Palestinian citizens of Israel were in specific areas.
In a 1956 eulogy for Ro'i Rothberg, a kibbutz security officer killed near the Gaza border the previous day, Israeli Chief of Staff Moshe Dayan said: "Who are we that we should argue against their hatred? For eight years now, they sit in their refugee camps in Gaza and, before their very eyes we turn into our homestead the land and the villages in which they and their forefathers have lived. We are a generation of settlers, and without the steel helmet and the cannon we cannot plant a tree and build a home."
Arnon Degani argues that ending military rule over Israel's Palestinian citizens in 1966 shifted from colonial to settler-colonial governance. After the Israeli capture of the Golan Heights in 1967, there was a nearly complete ethnic cleansing of the area, leaving only 6,404 Syrians out of about 128,000 who had lived there before the war. They had been forcibly removed, and those who tried to return were deported. After the Israeli capture of the West Bank, about 250,000 of 850,000 inhabitants fled or were expelled.
Scholarly development
The settler colonial framework on the Palestinian struggle emerged in the 1960s during the decolonization of Africa and the Middle East, and re-emerged in Israeli academia in the 1990s led by Israeli and Palestinian scholars, particularly the New Historians, who refuted some of Israel's foundational myths and considered the Nakba to be ongoing.: "The settler colonial paradigm, linked to Israeli critical sociology, post-Zionism, and postcolonialism, reemerged following changes in the political landscape from the mid-1990s that reframed the history of the Nakba as enduring, challenged the Jewish definition of the state, and legitimated Palestinians as agents of history. Palestinian scholars in Israel lead the paradigm's reformulation." This coincided with a shift from supporting a two-state solution to a one-state solution that constitutes a state for all citizens equally, which challenges the Jewish identity of Israel.
Proponents of the paradigm of Zionism as settler colonialism include Edward Said, Rashid Khalidi, Noam Chomsky, Ilan Pappé, Fayez Sayegh, Maxime Rodinson, , Ibrahim Abu-Lughod, Baha Abu-Laban, , Rosemary Sayigh, Amal Jamal and Ismail Raji al-Faruqi.
Historian Benny Morris refutes this notion of colonialism. "Colonialism is commonly defined as the policy and practice of an imperial power acquiring political control over another country, settling it with its sons, and exploiting it economically. By any objective standard, Zionism fails to fit this definition," he wrote. Zionists were "immigrating to a country that had once been populated and ruled by Jews, not 'another' country, and regaining sovereignty over it," he said.
1960s
One early analysis was that of Palestinian writer Fayez Sayegh in his 1965 essay "Zionist Colonialism in Palestine", which, according to Moshe Behar and the editors of Settler Colonial Studies, was unusual for the pre-1967 era in specifying Zionism as a form of settler colonialism, although it does not use the specific term. Sayegh argues that Zionists originally formed a "settler-community" during the first fifteen years of Zionist colonization (1882–1897) before fulfilling what had been their aspiration from the outset: to form a "settler-state". By imitating the colonial ventures of the ‘Gentile nations’ among whom Jews lived, the ‘Jewish nation’ could send its own colonists into a piece of Afro-Asian territory, establish a settler-community, and, in due course, set up its own state– not, indeed, as an imperial outpost of a metropolitan home-base, but as a home-base in its own right, upon which the entire ‘Jewish nation’ would sooner or later converge from all over the world. ‘Jewish nationalism’ would thus fulfil itself through the process ofcolonisation, which other European nations had utilised for empire-building. For, Zionism, then, colonisation would be the instrument of nation-building, not the by-product of an already-fulfilled nationalism.