The “colonialism” that Herzl & co. were referring to is exactly the same kind of “colonialism” that refers to the displacement & oppression of indigenous people(s). Zionist founders literally said it themselves:
“We can be the vanguard of culture against barbarianism.” [Max Nordau believed the Jews would not lose their European culture in Palestine and adopt Asia’s inferior culture, just as the British had not become Indians in America, Hottentots in Africa, or Papuans in Australia.] “We will endeavor to do in the Near East what the English did in India,” he said at an early Zionist Congress. “It is our intention to come to Palestine as the representatives of culture and to take the moral borders of Europe to the Euphrates River.”
— One Palestine, Complete: Jews & Arabs Under the British Mandate, by Tom Segev.
The fuller quote, from another source:
"We would endeavor to do in the Near East what the English did in India—I mean the cultural work, not the domination—we propose to come to Palestine as the emissaries of civilized behavior and to push the moral boundaries of Europe up to the Euphrates."
Max Nordau, who said this, was the co-founder of the Zionist Organization along with Theodor Herzl.
There’s also this quote from Jabotinsky:
And it made no difference whatever whether the colonists behaved decently or not. The companions of Cortez and Pizzaro or (as some people will remind us) our own ancestors under Joshua Ben Nun, behaved like brigands; but the Pilgrim Fathers, the first real pioneers of North America, were people of the highest morality, who did not want to do harm to anyone, least of all to the Red Indians, and they honestly believed that there was room enough in the prairies both for the Paleface and the Redskin. Yet the native population fought with the same ferocity against the good colonists as against the bad
— Jabotinsky’s The Iron Wall
Even if these sorts of quotes did not exist to explicitly confirm the colonial intentions of zionism, the actions and relations of zionists is damning enough. Theodor Herzl wrote Cecil fucking Rhodes a letter, referencing as well as expressing admiration for his colonial projects in Africa (Rhodes is the man who headed the colonization of Mashonaland and Matabeleland— today known as Zimbabwe— dispossessing thousands of Africans of land in order to found his settler-colony Rhodesia), and asked Rhodes for his “stamp of approval” upon the zionist project.
Herzl admired European settler-colonial projects in Africa and, as his intended communication with Rhodes demonstrates, was directly inspired by their “success” & methods.
operate in a paradigm where the desire of a people to return to the land from which their ancestors were forcibly driven out would NEVER be referred to as "colonialism" - unless it's the Jews, and Israel. That's what they mean when they say "it's not colonialism".
Settler-colonialism is defined by what you do, not who you are or what your “ancient history” in that land is. It is the process and project of replacing an inhabitant group with another people. This is precisely what was done in Palestine. Whether the settlers committing displacement & ethnic cleansing “have a history” with the piece of land they are doing it on is irrelevant; having ancestors from 2,000 years ago be from a place does not mean your violent conquest of that place now is given a free pass from being considered “settler-colonial” when all your actions follow the paradigm of the settler-colonial process, in particular forcefully displacing the populations living there to take their land for your own settlers.
It’s also disingenuous to act like the Israel project was just “people returning to the land their ancestors were driven out of”; Zionist early leaders (including first Prime Minister Ben-Gurion) described ethnically cleansing Palestinians from the land— and replacing them with Jewish settlers— as important to creating Israel. Israel is correctly identified as a settler state because that is the process of its creation. It seeks an exemption from being considered a settler state— arguing it’s magically different from every other state who does these same things— through appeals to antiquity & bullshit "blood and soil" nationalist logics.
but that doesn't mean there are no good arguments for why the Jews should be allowed to live in Israel. (See: it was the land of their ancestors, long before the Arab expansion.)
What the fuck are you talking about? Firstly, whether your 'ancestors' were in a given place or not has no bearing on your right to be there today. Everyone should have the right to safely immigrate and live anywhere. If Jewish people wanted to live in Palestine, they should have avenues to safely immigrate & do that-- same for anywhere else. Jewish people and non-Jewish people alike should have the right to safely immigrate and live anywhere, because where you should be 'allowed' to live shouldn't be constrained to where your fucking ancestors were. And just because your ancestors were supposedly in some place doesn't give you more of a "right" to live there than other people whose ancestors 'weren't'.
Secondly, the concern isn't whether Jewish people should be allowed to live in Palestine, it's about the state of Israel and its actions since its founding.
This doesn't excuse the methods used to take and keep control of the country - which do owe a lot to colonialist methods - but saying it's exactly the same thing as white Europeans subjugating African nations is ridiculous.
Why? Why is it 'ridiculous' to compare one situation of a group displacing & violently oppressing a population to steal their land, to another instance of just that? Why is it 'ridiculous' when Herzl himself even admitted he looked to Rhodes and his settler-colonialism in Africa as inspiration for what he wanted to do? You acknowledge that Israel literally used colonial methods in making and maintaining its state, but still hesitate to refer to it as 'colonial'? Why? If it had been non-Jewish European settlers that founded their own state on the ruins they made of Palestinian society, had done exactly everything that the Jewish settlers had done to make Israel, would you hesitate to call it 'colonial'? Why is ethnicity what stops you from identifying it as colonial? Does race trump actions when it comes to identifying wrongdoing-- do some people get a "pass" from being identified as settler-colonizers because of their ethnicity, in spite of their actions being that of settler-colonizers’?
