Israel / Palestine
The central contested colonialism case of the 21st century
No dispute better shows why “colonialism” is so contested. A large body of settler-colonial-studies scholarship (Fayez Sayegh, Patrick Wolfe, Rashid Khalidi) frames Zionism as a settler-colonial movement that displaced Palestine’s indigenous Arab population, backed by British and later U.S. imperial power. Critics (e.g. Adam Kirsch, and many Israeli/Jewish scholars) reply that Jews are an indigenous people returning to their ancestral homeland, that Israel has no imperial “mother country,” that roughly half of Israeli Jews are Mizrahi refugees rather than agents of a metropole, and that — unlike paradigm settler colonies — the native population was displaced but not eliminated, which is exactly why the conflict endures. Because colonialism has no treaty definition to adjudicate, the argument turns on two irreducibly interpretive questions: is there a metropole, and who is indigenous?
The settler-colonial framing is founded and theorized (1965 → 2006 → 2020)
1965 – 2020Genuinely contestedWhat happened
Fayez Sayegh’s PLO Research Center monograph Zionist Colonialism in Palestine (1965) gave the settler-colonial reading its founding statement, decades before it became academic orthodoxy. It was later given its most-cited theoretical formulation by the historian Patrick Wolfe (2006), whose “logic of elimination” became the field’s central tool, and applied as a full narrative history of the conflict by Columbia historian Rashid Khalidi in The Hundred Years’ War on Palestine (2020).
the modern history of Palestine can best be understood in these terms: as a colonial war waged against the indigenous population, by a variety of parties, to force them to relinquish their homeland to another people against their will. (Rashid Khalidi, 2020)
Under each definition
There is no mother country ruling Palestine for its own extraction; supporters substitute “British/U.S. imperial sponsorship,” critics say a sponsor is not a metropole.
The exact locus of the dispute: supporters say the replacement/elimination logic fits; critics say indigeneity runs the other way (or both ways) and there was no elimination.
Palestine was never an independent state whose post-independence policy is externally “directed”; the category doesn’t map.
“Colonial”/“colonizer” is now in very wide analogical circulation for the conflict.
The case that the label applies
Under Wolfe’s definition, Zionism fits the structural template: “settler colonizers come to stay: invasion is a structure not an event.” Khalidi argues the whole modern history is best read as a colonial war on the indigenous population, enabled by British and then American imperial sponsorship; the 1948 Nakba (expulsion and dispossession of ~700,000 Palestinians) supplies the material core — land taken and a population removed — that the label names.
The case against
Critics argue the model is a poor fit: there is no metropole directing colonists for its own enrichment; the Zionist movement understood itself as the return of an indigenous, exiled and persecuted people, not a European land-grab; roughly half of Israeli Jews are Mizrahi (from the Middle East and North Africa), not European settlers; and, unlike the paradigm settler cases, the native population was not eliminated — the Palestinian population grew — which is why two peoples still contest the same land.
In their words
Racism is not an acquired trait of the Zionist settler-state. Nor is it an accidental, passing feature of the Israeli scene. It is congenital, essential and permanent.
settler colonizers come to stay: invasion is a structure not an event.
the modern history of Palestine can best be understood… as a colonial war waged against the indigenous population… to force them to relinquish their homeland to another people against their will.
The indigeneity contest: who is “native” here?
recurring; sharpened post-2020Genuinely contestedWhat happened
Every settler-colonial claim presupposes a settler and a native — so the Israel/Palestine version collapses into a prior fight over who is indigenous to the land. Settler-colonial theorists deny that modern Jewish immigrants qualify as indigenous; the counter-claim asserts continuous Jewish ties to the land (the very name “Jew” deriving from Judea), while Palestinian scholars describe Palestinians as sharing the experience of other dispossessed indigenous peoples. Unlike a treaty crime, “indigeneity” is a contested political-legal category, not a fact a court has settled.
there is a Jewish people, but I do not think that being a Jew necessarily means that you are indigenous to Palestine… in modern international law, that just doesn’t hold. (attributed to Rashid Khalidi, in the settler-colonialism debate)
Under each definition
The indigeneity question is upstream of the classical lens, which turns on a governing metropole rather than on who is native.
The lens requires a settler and a native; here that very assignment is disputed, so the lens cannot resolve.
Not a post-independence external-control question.
“Colonizer/colonized” is used freely on both sides precisely because the underlying indigeneity claim is unsettled.
The case that the label applies
Proponents argue “indigenous” tracks a living relationship to land and a history of dispossession, not ancient ancestry — so a movement of largely European origin settling Palestine over British and Ottoman objection is the settler, and the Arab fellahin already farming the land are the natives whom the project displaced.
The case against
Critics answer that Jews maintained continuous presence and an unbroken cultural, religious and linguistic connection to the land for millennia (Jerusalem, Hebrew, the festivals all point to it), that treating indigeneity as forfeitable by exile is arbitrary, and that on this land indigeneity is genuinely shared rather than a one-way settler-vs-native binary.
In their words
Palestinians… have come to see themselves, and to be seen, as an indigenous people confronting a settler-colonial movement.
The word ‘Jew’ comes from ‘Judea.’ … Jews are the indigenous people of the land of Israel.
The book-length rebuttal: Adam Kirsch, On Settler Colonialism (2024)
25 August 2024Genuinely contestedWhat happened
After October 7, 2023, and campus debates in which some invoked “settler colonialism” to characterize Israeli civilians as legitimate targets, literary critic Adam Kirsch published On Settler Colonialism: Ideology, Violence, and Justice (2024) — a book-length argument that the framework misdescribes Israel and, he contends, licenses violence.
The Zionist movement never saw itself as white Europeans colonizing someone else’s land. It was a return to the Jewish homeland by Jews who had been in exile for hundreds of years, thousands of years. (Adam Kirsch, 2024)
Under each definition
Per Kirsch there is no governing mother country; supporters counter that imperial sponsorship substitutes for one.
Kirsch says the model fails on indigeneity, metropole and (non-)elimination; his critics say displacement plus imperial backing satisfy it.
Inapplicable category for a non-successor state.
Even Kirsch grants the term’s moral pull; he argues that pull is precisely what makes it dangerously misapplied here.
The case that the label applies
The counter to Kirsch: reviewers note Israel has in fact relied on a succession of imperial sponsors (Britain, then France, then the U.S.), so the “no metropole” claim is weaker than it sounds; and the historical record of 1948 shows expulsion and dispossession regardless of how settlers understood themselves — the material fact the label points to.
The case against
Kirsch’s position: Israel is not a colony of any state, has no metropole to answer to and no “home country” for its people to return to; most Israeli Jews arrived as refugees (from Europe, Arab states, the USSR); Jews regard themselves as indigenous to the land; and unlike classic settler colonies the native population was displaced but not destroyed, so the model’s defining outcome — elimination — is simply absent.
In their words
there are no Israeli civilians because they’re all settlers—and so they’re all legitimate targets.
On Settler Colonialism does not—and cannot—adequately address the paradox that Israel has relied throughout its history on a succession of imperial sponsors, including first the United Kingdom, then France, and then, since 1967, the US.
the Jewish state did not erase or replace the people already living in Palestine, though it did displace them…. The persistence of the conflict… is due precisely to the coexistence of two peoples in the same land.
The verdicts above are how each definition would most likely classify this situation — illustrative guidance, not court rulings. Colonialism has no treaty crime, so no application is a legal “finding”; every characterization is attributed to the person or body that made it. The lenses diverge most on two questions — whether there is a “metropole” and who counts as “indigenous” — and on the difference between a historical judgment and a moral analogy. See the Definition tab for each definition’s full text. Inclusion is documentation, not a finding.