Is Israel a Settler Colonialist State?
The claim is made so often that it's hard to fault people for believing it without much thought.
Let's first look at what Settler Colonialism is, then look at the facts to see if Israel fits the definition.
What Is Settler Colonialism again…?
It’s a specific term used by historians and theorists (Patrick Wolfe and his whole "logic of elimination" thing). Features of Settler Colonialism include:
Expansionism, claiming land for its mother country/empire (monopole) and shipping natural resources back to the empire.
Foreign settlers move in to violently displace, erase, or replace the indigenous population.
Any other cultures in the land are suppressed or wiped out
Classic examples include: British Australia, French Algeria, Canada, and North America
Let’s see if the case of Israel demonstrates these features.
Settler colonialism is usually a franchise model. Some imperial HQ says, “Go forth and colonize!” and ships people over with guns, flags, and an expectation to reap wealth torn from the colonized.
The Zionist movement started as a grassroots effort by Jews who were tired of getting pogromed every other Tuesday. Sure, they got a nod from Britain in the form of the Balfour Declaration, but that’s a long way from imperial orchestration.
(While Britain controlled Palestine under the Mandate, it hardly coddled Zionist aims - especially after the 1939 White Paper, which locked Jews out even as the Holocaust raged. Zionists didn’t march under imperial flags; they were often clashing with them.)
Settler colonialism involves one imperial power shuttling in settlers from a single source. But Jewish immigration to Israel? It came from everywhere: Yemen, Iraq, Morocco, Poland, Russia, Ethiopia, Argentina, Brooklyn…everywhere in the Diaspora.
This wasn’t a colonial outpost of one empire. It was a chaotic, desperate, and diverse ingathering of people trying to survive and rebuild. Half the Jews in Israel today descend from communities that were literally kicked out of Middle Eastern and North African countries.
If it’s settler colonialism, it’s doing it very wrong.
Settler colonialism usually involves people showing up in a place they have zero connection to and declaring it theirs. Think: Europeans showing up in Australia and telling the Aboriginal peoples, “Nice continent—don’t mind if we do.”
Jews didn’t just randomly pick Israel from a drop-down menu. They’ve had a connection to that land for, oh, 3,000 years or so. Jerusalem isn’t just spiritually significant; it's central. They didn’t have to invent a historical claim—it’s literally baked into their religion, language, and identity. (Quick Hebrew lesson: “Zion” is kind of a giveaway.)
Jews have maintained a continuous presence in the Land of Israel for over 3,000 years, including communities in Jerusalem, Safed, Hebron, and Tiberias, long before modern Zionism emerged.
Calling Jewish return to Israel “settler colonialism” is like calling your grandma a squatter for moving back into her childhood home.
But What About Palestinian Displacement?
Let’s be clear: Yes, during the 1948 war, a large number of Arabs living in Palestine were displaced. That’s a fact, it's not disputable, and it’s not something to brush aside.
This wasn’t, however, some settler-colonial master plan with color-coded maps and a mission to erase or ethnically cleanse non-Jewish peoples.
The early Zionist movement was buying land legally (much of it from absentee Arab landlords) and building farms, schools, and towns. It was a messy nationalist project, like many others in the 20th century. The displacement of Palestinians came not from a blueprint for ethnic cleansing, but from a war.
The war was launched by neighboring Arab states who made no secret of their goal: to destroy the brand-new Jewish state before it could take its first real breath.
Five Arab armies invaded in 1948, and local Arab leaders, along with the invading forces, told many Palestinian Arabs to temporarily evacuate, assuring them they could return after the Jews were wiped out.
Things didn't go according to their plans, because Israel survived.
Historians like Efraim Karsh and Benny Morris document cases where Arab leaders advised evacuation and cases where displacement occurred amid battle. War is brutal, and real people paid the price.
The tragedy is real, but so is the context. The war wasn’t started by Israel. It was a war of survival that Israel fought while vastly outnumbered, outgunned, and surrounded.
And here’s a twist that is usually ignored in modern retellings:
The term Nakba - which today refers almost exclusively to Palestinian displacement, originally meant something else.
In 1948, Arab intellectuals like Constantin Zureiq used “Nakba,” meaning "catastrophe," not to mourn Palestinian suffering, but to describe the colossal failure of the Arab world to crush Israel. In his own words: “The defeat of the Arabs in Palestine is not a small downfall. It is a catastrophe in every sense of the word.”
The shame wasn’t just about lost land—it was about how a supposedly mighty Arab and Islamic world failed to destroy a state of Holocaust survivors and refugees.
The original "Nakba" was about that failure, not the displacement narrative that would emerge decades later.
History is a lot more complicated than hashtags suggest.
But Israel Sought to Wipe Out Local Culture, right?
If Zionism had been a settler colonial project, you'd expect to see that. Settler colonial regimes tend to come in hot with cultural carpet bombing: banning languages, crushing customs, bulldozing identities.
Israel? Not so much. Israel has official protections for Christian, Muslim, Druze, and Baháʼí religious sites. Ever heard of the “status quo” agreements? They govern holy sites like the Church of the Holy Sepulchre and the Al-Aqsa Mosque. Unlike classic settler-colonial cases like the US, Canada, or Australia where indigenous languages, religions, and identities were suppressed, Israel recognizes Arabic as an official language, protects Muslim and Christian holy sites, and integrates minorities into public life with equal legal rights for all citizens.
Is the situation always perfect? No. Does Israel have a Ministry of Culture Death? Also no.
But Israel stripped the land of its natural resources in the name of their imperial project and destroyed the ecology of the land!
First, there was no empire, no monopole to ship anything to because (again) Israel was not the outpost of a foreign empire - it was a desperate refuge for Jews fleeing pogroms, fascism, and a genocide which had wiped out a third of their people.
Second, what natural resources could they have stripped the land of? Mandate Palestine was not known for its abundant natural treasures. Oil? Nope. Gold? Nada. Fertile, easily farmed land? Not much.
What Zionists did find was malaria, swamps, desert, and the occasional Ottoman tax ledger. The region was, in the words of Samuel Clemens (AKA Mark Twain), "a desolate country whose soil is rich enough, but is given over wholly to weeds."
Not exactly a paradise ripe for exploitation.
Here's a twist: rather than destroying the ecology, Israel has spent 75 years rebuilding it. The country has planted over 240 million trees, turning arid hills green and reversing desertification. Israel pioneered drip irrigation - watering crops with scientific precision to conserve every drop. It recycles nearly 90% of its wastewater (second place is Spain at about 30%). The Negev Desert is now home to solar farms, sustainable agriculture, and research centers where scientists grow cherry tomatoes in saltwater and build fish farms in sand.
Israel’s environmental stewardship of the land is so advanced that experts have come from Africa, South America, and India to partner with Israeli experts to tackle their own climate challenges. If this is what settler-colonial ecological destruction looks like, the planet could use a bit more of it.
So no, Israel isn’t extracting the land’s bounty and mailing it to a mythical European mothership. It’s been reclaiming wasteland, reforesting hills, and creating the most efficient water system in the world. And it did all that while fighting seven wars and inventing the USB stick. Not bad for a country the size of New Jersey.
It's a Colonial Struggle!!
It’s a nationalist conflict, not a colonial one. Two peoples - Jewish and Palestinian - with deep historic ties to the same land, both claiming national self-determination. That’s tragic, painful, and hard to resolve. But it’s not the same as a bunch of white Europeans setting up a Starbucks on someone else’s sacred mountain.
Trying to squeeze this conflict into the settler colonial box doesn’t make it clearer—it flattens it. It erases Jewish history and Palestinian suffering in one fell swoop.
History Deserves Better Than Hashtags
Calling Israel a "settler colonial state" might feel like a tidy moral label, but history is messier than slogans. The story is way more complex than “colonizer vs. colonized.” It’s about trauma, return, identity, nationalism, war, and a shitload of of mistakes along the way by all parties involved.
But if you want to understand it, really understand it, you’ve got to ditch the buzzwords and look at the footnotes, because the truth won’t always fit in a meme.
Aforementioned Footnotes:
Wolfe, Patrick. Settler Colonialism and the Elimination of the Native. Journal of Genocide Research, 2006.
https://www.kooriweb.org/foley/resources/pdfs/89.pdf
Veracini, Lorenzo. Settler Colonialism: A Theoretical Overview. Palgrave Macmillan, 2010.
https://link.springer.com/book/10.1057/9780230299191
Bickerman, Elias. From Ezra to the Last of the Maccabees. Schocken Books, 1962.
https://archive.org/details/in.ernet.dli.2015.59581
Biblical and archaeological records compiled in Israel
Finkelstein & Neil Asher Silberman, The Bible Unearthed, Free Press, 2001.
https://archive.org/details/bibleunearthedar0000fink/page/n5/mode/2up
Anita Shapira, Israel: A History (Harvard University Press): https://www.hup.harvard.edu/books/9780674047426
Jewish National Fund archives of land acquisition documents.
https://archives.cjh.org/repositories/3/resources/19702
https://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/total-immigration-to-israel-by-country-per-year
Protection of Holy Places Law, 1967
https://www.bu.edu/mzank/Jerusalem/tx/lawofholyplaces1967.htm
Shapira, Anita. Yosef Hayim Brenner: A Life. Stanford University Press, 2014.
(Documents Jewish labor ethos and rejection of exploitative structures)
https://archive.org/details/yosefhaimbrenner0000shap
Benny Morris, The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem Revisited:
https://yalebooks.yale.edu/book/9780300126969/the-birth-of-the-palestinian-refugee-problem-revisited/
Efraim Karsh, Palestine Betrayed:
https://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctt1npnkg
Efraim Karsh, 1948, Israel, and the Palestinians – the True Story, Middle East Quarterly (2008)
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/258996946_1948_Israel_and_the_Palestinians_-_The_True_Story
Constantin Zureiq, Ma'na al-Nakba (1948):
https://archive.org/details/zurayk-nakba
If you want to argue with this in the replies, please do- but bring receipts.