Question that I'm asking in good faith because I really do want to know about it: why does Herzl describe israel as a colony if it isn't one?
(All good faith questions are welcome, Anon - thanks for this one!)
TLDR: Because words change meanings over time and Herzl wasn't psychic.
In the 1890s, "colony" just meant a planned settlement or concentrated community. This included Jewish agricultural colonies in the Pale, temperance colonies in Colorado, and utopian communes everywhere.
It was basically the Victorian word for "intentional community," with absolutely no imperial baggage required.
The specific meaning activists now deploy (colony as racial domination, metropole extraction, indigenous suppression) is a 20th century framework that didn't exist when Herzl was writing in 1896.
So a reader of the 21st century finds the word "colony" in an old text and assumes it carries a technical definition that was coined decades later.
It's a little like finding the word "trauma" in a Civil War field report and concluding the surgeon was diagnosing PTSD.
Meanwhile, 'settler colonialism' as applied to Israel isn't a neutral analytical tool that happens to fit badly. It's a framework specifically constructed to exclude the features that distinguish Jewish return from actual settler colonialism...and it still fails on its own stated terms.
Jewish immigrants to the Levant were never agents of any empire. They were overwhelmingly refugees from empires who were fleeing Russian pogroms, Eastern European persecution, and later Nazi Germany. No metropole sent them. No metropole would take them back if the project failed.
That's not a minor quibble about definitions, either - it's the primary distinction between settler colonialism and every other form of large population movement in history.
There's also the matter of indigeneity. The Jews returning to the Levant weren't arriving in a place with which they had no connection.
Jewish presence in the region is documented continuously from ancient history, including in Egyptian records dating to roughly 1210 BCE.
The religious, linguistic, and ancestral connection to the land is what distinguishes this case from the British in Kenya or the French in Algeria, who had no such ties - and it is some of the best-documented, most indisputable history humans have ever gathered. (This is why they're so constantly engaged in historical revisionism.)
So when proponents of the settler colonialism framework of accusation encounter these objections, what do they do?
They move the goalposts.
The absence of a metropole gets explained away as an "exception."
The indigenous origin of the Jewish people to the Levant gets ahistorically dismissed or ignored, despite the fact that the Jewish people are the only group whose national identity, language, and religion originated in and remained oriented toward that specific land throughout their entire existence.
The framework gets rewritten and the history is revised until Israel fits the allegation.
So, one word in Der Judenstaat doesn't settle* any of this.
From The Atlantic: The False Narrative of Settler Colonialism (paywall bypassed)
Much more in this post.
_______________ *(See what I did there?)
Okay, there's actually a lot of interesting history around this, so let's dig into it.
It's completely correct that the semiotics of "colony", "colonization", etc., have evolved over time, and that back in the late 19th Century when Herzl was writing the connotation was more neutral than it became in the 20th Century. (I also need to stress that that one "it is something colonial" quote-mine you see shared everywhere is from a letter that was never even sent, because Herzl realized it was a bad idea.)
But more to the point: the old guard Zionists were fully aware of accusations they were European colonizers - and they actively refuted those claims.
— Jews and Muslims in the Arab World: Haunted by Pasts Real and Imagined (Jacob Lassner, Ilan S. Troen, 2007)
— Hebrew Repatriation to Eretz Yisrael (Samuel Kruglikoff, 1930)
— Eliahu Eliachar, Testimony to UNSCOP (United Nations Special Committee on Palestine) Regarding Jews in Arab Countries (1947)
— Ber Borochov, Poalei Tziyon Peace Manifesto (1917)
— David Ben-Gurion, Statement to the Elected Assembly of Palestine Jewry (1947)
Zionists wrote copious volumes about the indigeneity of Judeans to Eretz Yisrael, and denying accusations that they were merely pawns of an imperialist agenda (initially it was claimed they were Russian agents, and then later British colonists) or seeking to conquer or to exploit the land or its people. Contrary to the popular claim that Zionists thought (or promoted the concept) the land was uninhabited, a very substantial amount was written about the Palestinians (particularly from the perspective of class analysis), and how the return and liberation of Judeans must go hand-in-hand with class solidarity and the liberation of Arab workers. In other words: the exact opposite of colonialism. What we today would call decolonization - and specifically decolonization via proletarian revolution.
The simplistic quote-mining about "colonization" used today is a hundred years outdated: all such arguments were debunked before the state was even founded.
