There are many accusations levelled against Israel today, but few are as aggressively repeated — and as historically illiterate — as the claim that Jews are “colonisers” in their own ancestral land. It is a central pillar of modern anti-Israel activism and the intellectual scaffolding on which contemporary antizionism depends. Yet the moment one examines the archaeology, the history, and even the political context in which the accusation was invented, it collapses.
This editorial dismantles the libel by combining historical record, archaeological fact, and the lived experience of indigenous erasure familiar across the Middle East.
1. The Land Itself Testifies: Archaeology Refutes the Colonialism Lie
It takes a remarkable level of historical amnesia to call Jews “colonisers” while standing atop the ruins of their own temples. Remove the political slogans, look at the physical evidence, and the accusation disintegrates.
Jerusalem tells the story most clearly.
The Dome of the Rock was built directly on the Jewish Temple Mount — not accidentally, but as a deliberate act of imperial dominance over the faith that preceded it.1 This method of conquest — constructing on top of indigenous sacred sites — is historically consistent across the Islamic world, from Iran to North Africa.2
But in Jerusalem, this act had an unintended consequence. By building atop the First and Second Temples, the conquerors preserved the clearest archaeological proof of Jewish presence.3
Excavate the soil and the testimony is overwhelming:
- Hebrew coins minted during revolts against Roman occupation4
- Second Temple–period ritual baths and synagogue foundations5
- Inscriptions in ancient Hebrew and Aramaic6
- Scrolls documenting Jewish law, governance, daily life, and spiritual practice7
Three thousand years of continuous Jewish presence are carved into the land itself. No political slogan can undo that.
What you do not find is evidence of a historical “Palestinian nation.” For centuries, travelers, pilgrims, and officials wrote about Jews, Arabs, Bedouin, Turks, Druze, and Greeks — but no distinct Palestinian national identity appears prior to the twentieth century.8 The Palestinian national movement emerges only in response to Zionism and the restoration of Jewish sovereignty.
Archaeology is not political. It is forensic. And the forensics confirm the Jewish story.
2. Colonialism Requires a Metropole. Israel Has None.
Classical colonialism involves a mother country exporting settlers — Spain to the Americas, France to Algeria, Britain to Australia and India.9 Zionism had no such metropole. There was no “Big Israel” sending Jews to “Little Israel.” There were only Jews returning home.
Jews maintained continuous communities in Jerusalem, Safed, Hebron, and Tiberias throughout the centuries.10 One cannot “colonise” land one originates from and never fully left.
3. Colonialism Is Driven by Resource Extraction. Zionism Was Driven by Survival.
Empires expanded for gold, sugar, rubber, spices, and strategic commodities.11 But 19th-century Ottoman Palestine was economically stagnant — malaria-ridden, sparsely populated, and underdeveloped.12,13
Zionist pioneers did not come for wealth. They came because they were fleeing persecution, seeking safety, and rebuilding a nation where it historically existed. Zionism was not an extractive enterprise. It was national restoration and survival.
4. Colonialism Depends on an Empire. Zionism Fought One.
Colonial outposts rely on imperial armies. Zionism faced the opposite dynamic.
The British Empire restricted Jewish immigration — including Holocaust survivors — confiscated Jewish weapons, and executed Jewish fighters.14 Zionist militias did not serve an empire; they fought one. Like India, Ireland, and Cyprus, Jewish independence was achieved through anti-imperial struggle, not imperial partnership.15
To describe this as “colonialism” is to invert history entirely.
5. Land Was Purchased Legally—Until Arab Leaders Started a War
Colonialism involves seizing land by force. Zionists did the opposite.
From the 1880s onward, Jews purchased land legally from Ottoman authorities, Arab landlords, and absentee estate owners — often at prices above market value.16 Arab newspapers and memoirs at the time even complained that more land was available than Jews could afford.17
Territory changed hands through war only after Arab militias and five Arab armies launched an invasion in 1947–49 to overturn the UN partition plan.8 Winning a defensive war is not colonial conquest.
6. Jews Are Indigenous to the Land of Israel
Israel is the world’s only state whose majority speaks its ancient indigenous language on its original land.18
Jewish culture is inseparable from the landscape:
- Jewish holidays follow the agricultural cycles of the country.
- Jewish law centres on Jerusalem, Hebron, and Shechem.
- Archaeology from Dan to Beersheba reveals continuous Jewish civilisation stretching back millennia.19
According to all internationally accepted criteria of indigeneity — ancestry, culture, language, spiritual connection, and self-identification — Jews are indigenous to the Land of Israel.20
Indigenous return is not “settler-colonialism.” It is national restoration.
7. Why the Libel Persists: A Political Invention, Not a Historical Claim
The “colonial” accusation does not come from historians or archaeologists. It comes from political strategy.
In the 1960s–70s, the PLO, aided by Soviet propaganda, reframed the Arab–Israeli conflict using decolonisation language to win Western support. Later, Western academics retrofitted “settler-colonial theory” to the Middle East for ideological reasons, not scholarly ones.21
The accusation is not history. It is propaganda disguised as theory.
8. The New Threat: The Social Cost of Telling the Truth
Acknowledging these facts today has become politically hazardous. Speaking historical truth invites social ostracism, institutional pressure, and sometimes intimidation. Silencing Jewish history has become a badge of ideological belonging.
But the truth remains immovable. The stones remember. And archaeology does not negotiate with politics.
Conclusion: Israel Is the Opposite of a Colonial Project
The record is clear:
- No mother country
- No imperial army
- No extractive enterprise
- No conquest of foreign land
- No transfer of settlers from an empire
Instead:
- An indigenous people
- Returning to their ancestral homeland
- Purchasing land legally
- Fighting an empire
- Surviving invasion
- Rebuilding sovereignty
The accusation that Israel is a “colonialist project” is not merely false. It is the precise inversion of the truth. Israel is one of the clearest cases of indigenous national restoration in modern history.
References
- Martin Gilbert, Jerusalem: A Biography (London: HarperCollins, 2011).
- Oleg Grabar, The Shape of the Holy: Early Islamic Jerusalem (Princeton University Press, 1996).
- Israel Finkelstein and Neil Asher Silberman, The Bible Unearthed: Archaeology’s New Vision of Ancient Israel and the Origin of Its Sacred Texts (New York: Free Press, 2001);
- Yosef Garfinkel et al., excavation reports, Israel Exploration Journal, multiple issues, 1995–2020.
- Eilat Mazar, Archaeology of the City of David (Jerusalem: Shoham Academic Press, 2003), 33–60.
- Avigad, Corpus of West Semitic Inscriptions (Jerusalem: Israel Academy of Sciences, 1997).
- Amnon Cohen and Bernard Lewis, Jews in the Ottoman Empire and the Turkish Republic (Princeton, NJ: Darwin Press, 1995)
- Benny Morris, 1948: A History of the First Arab–Israeli War (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2008).
- Jürgen Osterhammel, Colonialism: A Theoretical Overview, trans. Shelley L. Frisch (Princeton, NJ: Markus Wiener Publishers, 1997).
- Anita Shapira, Israel: A History (Waltham, MA: Brandeis University Press, 2012).
- Niall Ferguson, Empire: How Britain Made the Modern World (London: Allen Lane, 2003).
- Mark Twain, The Innocents Abroad (Hartford, CT: American Publishing Company, 1869)
- Justin McCarthy, The Population of Palestine: Population Statistics of the Late Ottoman Period and the Mandate (New York: Columbia University Press, 1990).
- Bruce Hoffman, Anonymous Soldiers: The Struggle for Israel, 1917–1947 (New York: Knopf, 2015).
- Michael B. Oren, Power, Faith, and Fantasy: America in the Middle East, 1776 to the Present (New York: W.W. Norton, 2007).
- Kenneth W. Stein, The Land Question in Palestine, 1917–1939 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1984).
- Tom Segev, One Palestine, Complete: Jews and Arabs under the British Mandate (New York: Henry Holt, 2000).
- Ilan Stavans, Resurrecting Hebrew (New York: Nextbook/Schocken Books, 2008).
- José R. Martínez Cobo, “Study of the Problem of Discrimination against Indigenous Populations,” UN Doc. E/CN.4/Sub.2/1986/7 and Add.1-4 (1986); United Nations Department of Economic and Social Affairs, “Indigenous Peoples at the United Nations” https://social.desa.un.org/issues/indigenous-peoples/indigenous-peoples-at-the-united-nations); United Nations Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues, “Criteria for Determining Indigenous Peoples,” UNPFII Guidelines; Ran Ukashi, “Zionism, Imperialism, and Indigeneity in Israel/Palestine: A Critical Analysis,” Peace and Conflict Studies Vol. 25, No. 1 (2018); Ben Freeman, The Jews: An Indigenous People (2025).
- Jeffrey Herf, Undeclared Wars with Israel: East Germany and the West German Far Left, 1967–1989 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016).
- PLO Political Department archives, 1970s.
