These days, many people apply the word “colonialism” to Zionism and Israel as if it were a settled fact, deploying the word as if its meaning were fixed and uncontested, like a scientific fact, when there are at least two different concepts hiding inside it. The argument almost always collapses into noise because people think they are disagreeing about reality when they are really using two different definitions of the same word, but one definition is highly misleading and ahistorical.
The classical definition of colonialism arose in the age of European empires. It means ruling another territory in order to extract wealth for the home country. In that sense Israel does not resemble Belgium in the Congo or Britain in India. Whatever else one believes about Israel or Zionism, that template does not map onto them in any meaningful way. Neither the Jewish community in Palestine nor the State of Israel existed to extract raw materials, labor, or surplus revenue on behalf of some foreign center of capital. People who insist on calling Israel a colony in the classical sense are not expanding its definition, they are changing its meaning. When early Zionists used words like “colonization” (in organizations like the Jewish Colonization Association or the Hebrew hitnachalut), they meant building agricultural settlements and returning a people to land (its root is nachalah or “inheritance”), not extracting wealth for a European power. Treating that usage as if it meant an extractive empire is historically inaccurate. Historians of classical colonialism do not treat the two as the same phenomenon.
The second meaning of the term, what is now called “settler-colonialism,” is a different intellectual creature altogether. It refers to demographic replacement and the transfer of sovereignty through migration and institutions. There are genuine historical cases of settler colonialism, such as French Algeria or Afrikaner South Africa, where a foreign imperial center directed and benefited from settlement and imposed racial hierarchy backed by empire, but neither of those conditions describes Zionism. The label as applied to Zionism was not discovered by neutral historical research at the time, but entered circulation decades later. As historians such as Jeffrey Herf and others have documented from Cold War archives and contemporaneous sources (1,2), the recoding of Zionism as “settler-colonial” entered circulation through the PLO’s intellectual milieu in the 1960s and 1970s, drawing heavily on Soviet-aligned anti-Zionist discourse. And as Walter Laqueur documented (3), the movement arose from statelessness, persecution, and national restoration – certainly not as an extension of any European empire. This later labeling was not the result of dispassionate evaluation of evidence to see whether the category fit; rather, it operated as a political reframing in which a pre-existing ideological template was applied to Israel. As such, it rhetorically grafts the moral severity of classical colonialism onto a phenomenon that is substantively and historically different.
This lineage explains why the word “colonialism” persists even when no imperial center exists, no extractive transfer occurs, and the demographic movement in question was the flight of refugees rather than the projection of a European power. A term born in the world of rubber quotas and plantation labor is being used to describe a society built by stateless refugees, agrarian collectivists, and survivors of annihilation — it is simply not the same phenomenon.
The larger cost of the “settler-colonial” frame is that it obscures what Israel and Zionism actually are. They are not reducible to demographic substitution nor to an imperial outpost. Israel and Zionism are indigenous claims, rooted not just in 20th-century migration, but in a continuous civilizational presence and a return to the only place on earth where Jews ever were a sovereign people. It is a project born not of surplus capital looking outward but of stateless people with nowhere else to go. To call that “colonialism” is polemical and a category error, and there is a cost to it.
Applying the wrong concept distorts moral reasoning. When a term carries the emotional freight of Belgian atrocities or Rhodesian apartheid, using it for a case that does not share those causal foundations creates a false equivalence that radicalizes discourse and forecloses thought. It teaches people to see one picture, empire versus victims, even when the actual picture is entangled, bidirectional, and historically complex. Once the wrong category is installed, every fact is forced to fit it; evidence is not weighed but assimilated, and disagreement is framed as bad faith rather than as a dispute about reality. It turns a problem to be solved into a simple slogan that fuels the mob.
For that reason the term should be retired in this context. If nations and political actors are to be criticized, the categories we use must be accurate, not borrowed indictments. The “settler-colonial” label does not clarify reality; it replaces it with a prefabricated accusation. It is an analytic mistake with social and political consequences and it should be abandoned.
References:
1. Jeffrey Herf, Undeclared Wars with Israel, Cambridge University Press, 2016.
2. Jeffrey Herf, “Nazi Antisemitism & Islamist Hate,” Tablet Magazine, July 5, 2022.
3. Walter Laqueur, A History of Zionism: From the French Revolution to the Establishment of the State of Israel. Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, 2009.
I’m a Jewish community lay leader with personal interests in Jewish life, practice, and communal dynamics. By day, I’m a cardiologist and professor. The views expressed are my own and do not reflect those of my employers.