people call israel a colonial project because it's the easiest story to tell. europeans show up, take land, build power. that pattern feels familiar. but that's not what happened. jews weren't sent by an empire. they were the people empire crushed. they came from exile, not conquest, trying to rebuild the only home that ever defined them.
the "but it was 4,000 years" objection misses what makes a people indigenous. indigeneity isn't just about continuous physical presence—it's about unbroken connection. jews never stopped facing jerusalem in prayer, never stopped marking time by the jewish calendar, never stopped speaking about return in every ritual. hebrew wasn't a dead language preserved in museums; it was alive in liturgy, waiting to be revived. that's different from everyone's generic connection to africa or some ancient ancestor. it was specific, maintained, and definitional to jewish identity in a way that has no parallel.
and this isn't about inheriting property rights from distant ancestors. it's about where a stateless people whose entire identity pointed to one specific place could actually go in crisis. after the holocaust, where were they supposed to seek refuge? europe had just tried to exterminate them. arab countries would expel 850,000 jews after 1948. there was no "just stay where you currently live"—they were already refugees with nowhere else that made sense. the logic that displaced peoples lose all claim after enough time passes would invalidate indigenous movements worldwide. native hawaiians haven't governed in over a century. armenians were expelled from artsakh. the rohingya are stateless. do they all lose claims because time passed? the question isn't whether displaced peoples can reclaim homeland—it's how you resolve competing claims when two groups both have ties to the same land. that's what partition tried to do.
zionism wasn't colonial ambition, it was self-rescue. europe's collapse exposed that no country would protect jews. so they turned inward—to language, to memory, to land. hebrew was revived, cities rebuilt, and a culture reborn where it began.
and this wasn't britain carving up foreign territory for extraction. jews had been legally purchasing land under ottoman rule since the 1880s—long before the mandate. the british didn't create jewish claims; if anything, they restricted them, limiting immigration even during the holocaust. the 1947 partition wasn't a colonial power imposing control—it was the un trying to resolve two peoples' competing claims to the same land. messy, imperfect, but fundamentally about self-determination, not empire.
why this wasn't colonialism:- no metropole. colonial projects serve a mother country. there was no empire extracting resources, no london or paris to ship goods to. israel had no imperial sponsor—it was refugees building self-governance.
- indigenous return, not foreign settlement. jews maintained unbroken cultural, religious, and linguistic ties to the land for millennia. this wasn't settlers arriving from elsewhere—it was a people returning to the only place their identity ever pointed.
- continuous presence facing violence. jews had lived in the region continuously for millennia. in the 1920s-30s, they faced pogroms—the hebron massacre (1929), riots, attacks on jewish communities. the holocaust then proved that depending on others for protection was fatal. forming a defense force wasn't colonial aggression; it was survival after watching their community be murdered for being defenseless.
- purchased land legally. most early jewish settlement came through legal land purchases under ottoman and british rule, not military seizure. the ottomans even banned sales in 1892 because they recognized what was happening—land changing hands legally, not colonial conquest.
- no extraction economy. colonial projects existed to extract: cotton, sugar, gold, oil. israel's economy was built by refugees farming swamps and building cities from nothing. there was no resource extraction scheme.
- decolonization era, not colonial expansion. israel's founding (1948) came during the wave of decolonization—india, pakistan, indonesia, ghana. nations were throwing off colonial rule, not extending it. israel fit that pattern: a people reclaiming self-determination.
- rejected by the empire. britain restricted jewish immigration and ultimately abstained from the partition vote. if this was a colonial project, the "colonizer" tried to stop it. that's the opposite of how colonialism works.
- no alternatives. colonialism is about choice and expansion. america could have stayed in britain. french colonists had france. jews were stateless refugees with nowhere else to go and no other homeland to reclaim.
and while the british mandate was still in place, it wasn’t just jews versus locals. arab politics were fractured too. some leaders, like the grand mufti of jerusalem, openly courted the axis powers, betting that a german victory would end british control and block jewish return. others fought for the british against the nazis. the region wasn’t a monolith; it was a battlefield of desperate alignments in a collapsing world.
that period of violence—riots, revolts, bombings—wasn’t about empire in the european sense. it was two peoples, both reacting to centuries of foreign domination, each trying to control their future before someone else did.
some say "both can be true—it was colonial in form but necessary for survival." but that concedes too much. colonialism isn't just "people moving and displacement happening." look at actual colonial projects: america expanded for land and cotton. hawaii was taken by business interests for sugar and naval bases. south africa was about diamonds and gold. these weren't refugees—they were empires with alternatives.
and yes, arab families were displaced, villages lost, lives upended. that's real and tragic. but it happened in the context of a war that arab states started by rejecting partition—not as planned colonial extraction. many left expecting to return after an arab victory; others were forced out in the chaos of war. it was a refugee crisis born of conflict and mutual fear, not a systematic colonial project. calling it colonialism doesn't clarify what happened; it obscures it.
the jewish return wasn't foreign occupation; it was the end of foreignness itself. it wasn't "we want this land"—it was "this is the only land that's ours, and we have nowhere else to go."
and if we start every conversation by misnaming what it is, we guarantee it never moves forward. you can't solve a story you refuse to understand.