Why “Settler-Colonialism” Fails as History — and Survives Only as Ideology

When confronted with Jewish indigeneity — the unbroken presence of Mizrahi and Sephardic Jews for millennia, Hebrew liturgy centred on Jerusalem, a calendar tied to the agricultural cycles of the Levant — critics retreat to a second line of attack. Settler-colonialism.¹

This is not refinement. It is salvage.

The claim that Israel is a “settler-colonial project” emerges precisely where the older accusation of “colonialism” collapses. It is an attempt to preserve a delegitimising conclusion after history, archaeology, and demography have stripped away its foundations. Applied to Israel, settler-colonial theory does not illuminate the conflict. It distorts it — by flattening complexity, inverting regional realities, and erasing Jewish indigeneity.

1. What Settler-Colonialism Actually Describes — and Why Israel Does Not Fit

In its original scholarly formulation, settler-colonialism refers to a specific historical pattern. As articulated by theorists such as Patrick Wolfe and Lorenzo Veracini, it involves:²

• a foreign settler population
• dispatched from or sustained by a metropole
• permanently implanted on distant land
• in service of an external imperial system
• operating through a logic of replacement or elimination of the indigenous population

Classic cases include British Australia, French Algeria, and European North America. In each, settlers arrived as extensions of empire, culturally tethered to a mother country and backed by imperial force.³

Israel satisfies none of these conditions.

There was no metropole. No imperial homeland exporting settlers. No extraction economy. No imperial army enforcing settlement.

A theory that must be radically rewritten to explain Israel is not being applied — it is being forced.

Proponents often respond that settler-colonialism is a “structure, not an event,” and therefore does not require a metropole or a single moment of conquest. But even as a structure, the theory presupposes a foreign settler collective seeking permanent dominance through the displacement or replacement of an indigenous society. When origin, foreignness, continuity, and elimination are all discarded, settler-colonialism ceases to describe a historical pattern and becomes a moral accusation untethered from evidence. A framework so elastic that it can classify an indigenous people returning to their ancestral homeland as “settlers” is no longer analytical. It is ideological.

2. Foreignness Is a Requirement — and Jewish Presence Was Continuous

Settler-colonial theory presupposes foreignness. British settlers were British; French settlers were French. Their identities, languages, and institutions were imported wholesale.

Zionism reverses this dynamic.

Beyond the return of exiles, settler-colonial theory fails to account for those who never left. There were Jewish communities that maintained a continuous presence in Jerusalem, Hebron, Safed, and Tiberias for over two millennia — predating both Islam and modern Zionism.⁴ These Jews were not “returning.” They never left. This is not an appeal to Jewish diversity as moral insulation, but a rejection of the false premise that Jews are foreign to the region in the first place.

Any framework that requires Jews who lived continuously in Jerusalem for 2,000 years to be classified as “foreign settlers” has abandoned coherence entirely.

Hebrew is not a colonial language imposed on a native population; it is an indigenous language revived in its homeland.⁵ Jewish law, ritual, and collective memory are geographically rooted in the land itself.⁶ Jewish exile was imposed through conquest and expulsion — not chosen as migration.⁷

A people returning to their ancestral homeland after forced displacement are not settlers. They are indigenous returnees. No serious theory of indigeneity defines such return as colonialism — except when Jews are involved.⁸

3. Why the Label Persists: Ideological Utility Before Evidence

It is worth stating plainly why the settler-colonial label survives, because this explains its resistance to contradictory evidence.

The term is morally pre-loaded. It allows Israel to be declared illegitimate by definition, compromise to be dismissed as “normalisation,” and violence to be reframed as decolonial “resistance.” It also permits Jews to be excluded from the moral protections afforded to other indigenous peoples within progressive discourse.⁹

This is not a neutral analytical framework. It is a delegitimisation strategy. And that strategy requires bending facts to fit theory, rather than the reverse.

4. The “Logic of Elimination” — A Claim That Collapses Under Regional Comparison

Settler-colonial theory hinges on Wolfe’s concept of a “logic of elimination”: the systematic removal or replacement of an indigenous population to secure permanent settler dominance.2

But in Mandatory Palestine, the historical record shows no such pattern:

• The Arab population grew substantially between the late 19th century and 1948.¹⁰
• Arab life expectancy, literacy, wages, and urbanisation increased.¹¹
• Arabic language, culture, and religion remained dominant.
• Jews accepted partition; Arab leadership rejected it and chose war.¹²

The elimination logic becomes even more incoherent when examined regionally. In the same period, approximately 850,000 Jews were expelled from Iraq, Egypt, Yemen, Libya, Syria, and across North Africa — communities that had existed for millennia, many predating Islam.¹³ Their property was confiscated, synagogues destroyed, and return barred permanently.¹⁴

Israel absorbed these refugees into a fragile new state. By contrast, Arab states confined Palestinian refugees to camps across generations, denying them citizenship and normalisation.¹⁵

If we are identifying elimination patterns in the region, the evidence points in the opposite direction.

5. War, Not Colonial Blueprint: Acknowledging 1948 Without Surrendering History

Palestinian displacement in 1948 was real — and its causes were complex.

They included military necessities in some areas, fear and violence in others, calls from Arab armies for temporary evacuation, and direct expulsion in specific locations.¹² Historians continue to debate proportions and intent.^12,16

But this very complexity undermines the settler-colonial framework, which requires a systematic, ideologically driven programme of elimination. What occurred in 1948 emerged from a regional war initiated to destroy the Jewish state — not from a predetermined colonial logic.^12,16

Acknowledging tragedy does not require adopting a false explanatory model.

6. Empire, Anti-Empire, and the Transjordan Context

Settler-colonial projects operate with empire. Zionism did not.

The British Empire restricted Jewish immigration — including during the Holocaust — confiscated Jewish weapons, and executed Jewish fighters.¹⁷ Zionist militias did not serve imperial interests; they fought them.¹⁸

This imperial context also included the 1922 British separation of Transjordan, which removed 77% of the original Mandate territory to create what became Jordan.⁶ Meanwhile, Arab leaders actively sought great-power patronage throughout the same period.¹⁹

Framing Zionist diplomacy alone as “colonial collaboration” while ignoring parallel Arab strategies and territorial outcomes reveals selective application — not principled analysis.

Empires do not suppress their own settler projects. They do not blockade their refugees or hang their leaders.

7. The Integration That Shouldn’t Exist

Settler-colonial elimination logic predicts marginalisation or removal of indigenous populations. Yet today, around 20% of Israeli citizens are Arab.²⁰

They vote, form political parties, sit in the Knesset, serve on the Supreme Court, practice their religion freely, and enjoy higher living standards than in neighbouring Arab states.²¹ Arabic functions in official contexts. Parties that oppose Zionism itself participate in parliamentary life.^20,21

No recognised settler-colonial state permits the descendants of the ‘eliminated native’ to vote, legislate, litigate, and openly reject the state’s founding from within its parliament.

This does not resemble Australia’s treatment of Aboriginal peoples or America’s treatment of Native Americans. It resembles a multi-ethnic state with integration challenges — imperfect, contested, but fundamentally incompatible with elimination logic.

8. Zionism in Comparative Decolonisation Perspective

Compare Zionism to other post-colonial movements:

• The revival of Hebrew parallels the revival of Irish and other indigenous languages.⁵
• The ingathering of exiles mirrors diasporic return movements elsewhere.¹
• The anti-imperial struggle mirrors independence movements across Asia and Africa.¹⁸
• The assertion of sovereignty follows the same historical arc.⁶

When Jews did what other decolonising peoples did — returned home, revived their language, fought empire, asserted sovereignty — their movement alone was reclassified as colonialism. This is not theoretical inconsistency. It is targeted exception.

Conclusion: The Last Refuge of a Failed Libel

The coloniser accusation fails on history. The settler-colonial accusation survives only by abandoning it.

It is not an analytical framework. It is a moral weapon — deployed to erase Jewish indigeneity, flatten regional complexity, and deny legitimacy by definition.

History remains stubborn. And no amount of theory can turn an indigenous people into strangers in their own land.

References

1. Ben M. Freeman, The Jews: An Indigenous People (No Pasaran Media, 2025).
2. Patrick Wolfe, “Settler Colonialism and the Elimination of the Native,” Journal of Genocide Research 8, no. 4 (2006).
3. Lorenzo Veracini, Settler Colonialism: A Theoretical Overview (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010).
4. Amnon Cohen and Bernard Lewis, Population and Revenue in the Towns of Palestine in the Sixteenth Century (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1978).
5. Ilan Stavans, Resurrecting Hebrew (New York: Nextbook/Schocken, 2008).
6. Anita Shapira, Israel: A History (Waltham, MA: Brandeis University Press, 2012).
7. Bernard Lewis, The Jews of Islam (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1984).
8. José R. Martínez Cobo, Study of the Problem of Discrimination against Indigenous Populations, UN Doc. E/CN.4/Sub.2/1986/7.
9. United Nations Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues, Indigenous Peoples: Defining Indigenous Peoples (2004).
10. Justin McCarthy, The Population of Palestine (New York: Columbia University Press, 1990).
11. Martin Gilbert, Israel: A History (London: Black Swan, 2008).
12. Benny Morris, 1948: A History of the First Arab–Israeli War (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2008).
13. Norman A. Stillman, The Jews of Arab Lands in Modern Times (Philadelphia: JPS, 1991).
14. Maurice Roumani, The Case of the Jews from Arab Countries (Jerusalem: WOJAC, 1975).
15. United Nations General Assembly, Report of the UN Conciliation Commission for Palestine, A/1985 (1951).
16. Efraim Karsh, Palestine Betrayed (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2010).
17. Tom Segev, One Palestine, Complete (New York: Henry Holt, 2000).
18. Bruce Hoffman, Anonymous Soldiers (New York: Knopf, 2015).
19. Michael B. Oren, Power, Faith, and Fantasy (New York: W.W. Norton, 2007).
20. Gad Barzilai et al., “Arab Citizens of Israel,” Israel Studies 19, no. 1 (2014): 1–23.
21. Sammy Smooha, “Ethnic Democracy,” Nations and Nationalism 8, no. 4 (2002): 475–503.