Talk:Zionism as settler colonialism

Sources

A potentially useful source which is not cited in the current article or the one on settler colonialism is the 2006 article by Bashir Abu-Manneh[1][2][3] in New Formations Volume 2006 Issue 59 called "Israel in US Empire"[4]. A copy is stored on the University of Kent archive here.

A source which is cited in the current article, but not in the one on settler colonialism is Elia Zureik's "Israel's Colonial Project in Palestine, Brutal Pursuit" (2016, Routledge Studies on the Arab-Israeli Conflict). A full copy of the book is available at the cdn.lbryplayer.xyz domain.

Some other sources making references which are perhaps of interest:

1. "Genesis: Truman, American Jews, and the Origins of the Arab/Israeli Conflict" (2015) by John B. Judis:

Page 82.4 / 970 of the electronic edition:

"Ben-Gurion and the socialist Zionists wanted to avoid being seen as colonialists, but they ended up replacing the colonialism of the European settler in Africa who exploited the native laborers with the colonialism of the European settler in North America who displaced rather than employed the Native Americans who lived on the lands they coveted. Moreover, in justifying their displacement of Arab labor, the Zionists invoked the same arguments that European settler colonialists had used in Australia, Africa, and North America: they were putting to good use lands the Arabs had desolated."

With regard to "Zionists [invoking] the same arguments that European settler colonialists had used", examples found elsewhere in the book include:

Page 65.0 / 970:

"Herzl’s appeal was geopolitical but also cultural, reflecting the widespread European justification of imperialism as an instrument of civilization. The new state, he promised, “should there form a part of a wall of defense for Europe in Asia, an outpost of civilization against barbarism.” The writer Max Nordau, who would become Herzl’s second-in-command in the Zionist movement, agreed. “We will endeavor to do in the Near East what the English did in India. It is our intention to come to Palestine as the representatives of culture and to take the moral borders of Europe to the Euphrates.” ... But, like other Europeans during this age of imperialism, he viewed the natives in Asia, Africa, and Latin America as lesser beings who could be bought off—and, if that failed, subjugated."

Page 79.3 / 970:

"Gordon’s vision of a Jewish nation and state could be described as an ethnocracy. It excluded not only Arab labor but the Arab people themselves. Gordon acknowledged that Arabs had “a historical right to the country, just as we do,” but he claimed that the Jewish right “is undoubtedly greater.” “And what did the Arabs produce in all the years they lived in the country?” he asked. “Such creations, or even the creation of the Bible alone, give us a perpetual right over the land in which we were so creative, especially since the people that came after us did not create such works in this country, or did not create anything at all.”58 Gordon added: “Some hold that when we come to Palestine to settle upon the land, we are dispossessing Arabs who are its natural masters. But what does this term mean? If mastery of the land implies political mastery, then the Arabs have long ago forfeited their title.” Ahad Ha’am’s vision of Palestine left an opening for compromise with its existing inhabitants. Gordon’s did not; and Gordon’s vision of nationhood eventually superseded that of Ahad Ha’am. Ben-Gurion, Katznelson, and the socialist Zionists who arrived during the Second Aliyah still gave some adherence to international socialism, but they subordinated the dictates of the international class struggle to the attempt to create a Jewish state. Zeev Sternhell calls them “nationalist socialists.” Within nationalist socialism, there was still room for concern about Arab workers and their fate; and at intervals over their first thirty years in Palestine, some of the socialists would voice support for a more democratic or binational Palestine."

Page 294.8 / 970:

"Faced with an Arab challenge, backed up by Europe’s fascists and Nazis, Labor Zionists declared themselves victims of a “feudalist-imperialist” coalition. The Arab “savages” were now part of this “feudalist-imperialist” coalition led by Nazi Germany. Over the next decades, even after the Allied victory in World War II and the collapse of Western colonialism in the Middle East, Asia, and Africa, Zionists and later Israelis would continue to view their conflict with the Arabs through this twin prism of higher versus lower races and democracy against fascism and Nazism. They continued to describe Arabs as savages and barbarians, and their leaders as the heirs of Hitler. That included the mufti after World War II, Egypt’s Gamal Abdel Nasser, PLO leader Yasir Arafat, and Hamas’s Khaled Meshal. Such a view highlighted Zionism as a national liberation movement for oppressed Jewry and ally of the world’s advanced democracies and obscured its role as a settler-colonial movement that had displaced or driven out a native population."

Page 324.1 / 970:

"Declaring that “colonization on a large scale is the greatest work of national life,” Asher asserted that the Jews were following the example of the British in Southern and Central Africa and in Australia and New England who had turned “barren deserts … into places of habitation … The attempts of other nations in other parts of the world give us courage.”"

Page p368.8 / 970:

"One factor that may have encouraged this was the imperial mind-set with which many Americans and Europeans viewed Palestine’s Arabs. Herzl had displayed this mind-set in saying that Palestinian Arabs could be won over to Jewish rule by the prosperity that Jews would bring to Palestinians. More advanced peoples might covet self-rule, but primitives would be satisfied with bread on the table. Brandeis and his circle shared this view. Palestine’s Arabs, Wise wrote, “do not desire anything particularly except food. They are … in the depths of primitive life.” ... Americans, of course, didn’t have to look to Europe to acquire a hierarchical view of humanity that justified conquest. Americans had invoked the need to civilize savage races to justify Indian removal and Manifest Destiny. Brandeis and his circle viewed the Zionist settlers as “pioneers,” “pilgrims,” and “puritans” and the Arabs as “Indians.” The comparison was partly an apt one. America was the original settler colony where the immigrants displaced the native inhabitants and eventually established a state of their own. Brandeis saw it as justifying Jews displacing Arabs in Palestine. Until well after World War II, the rout of the Indians was seen as a triumph of civilization over savagery. In his Winning of the West, Theodore Roosevelt wrote of the Indian Wars that “the struggle could not possibly have been avoided. Unless we were willing that the whole continent west of the Alleghenies should remain an unpeopled waste, the hunting ground of savages, war was inevitable … It is wholly impossible to avoid conflicts with the weaker race.” Brandeis and other progressives saw the conflict between the Jews and Arabs in Palestine similarly."

Page p629.0 / 970:

"The Zionist leaders preferred that Arabs in a Jewish state become citizens of the Arab state. In that case, Ben-Gurion said, “we would be able to expel them.”"

2. "Dear Palestine, A Social History of the 1948 War" (2021) - Shay Hazkani:

"For many early Zionists, including the founding father of political Zionism, Theodor Herzl, European settler colonialism — especially the German experience before the First World War — was a model. In the German case, the Colonization Commission (Ansiedlungskommission), set up in 1886 by Otto von Bismarck, worked to transfer lands from Polish to German ownership in Poznan and West Prussia in order to transform the demographic balance there and reduce the Slavs to a minority population, subdued and depoliticized. The commission bought large farms from Poles, divided them into small parcels, and settled German farmers on them. Arthur Ruppin, who headed the Palestine office of the Zionist Organization (ZO), was born in Poznan and explicitly sought to replicate this model to transform the demographic balance in Palestine in favor of the Jews. To centralize the purchase of Arab lands and prevent the resale of Jewish-owned land to Arabs, the Jewish National Fund (JNF) was established in 1901. By 1907 Ruppin helped set up the Palestine Land Development Company (PLDC) along the lines of the German Colonization Commission, and even hired a former official from the German commission as a special advisor. The PLDC aimed to create homogeneous groups of Jewish farmers and support new agricultural settlements. Many of those farmers were Jews from eastern Europe, where antisemitic violence intensified in the late nineteenth century."

    ←   ZScarpia   12:50, 30 April 2022 (UTC)

3. "Settler Colonialism in the Twentieth Century" (2005, Routledge) - Caroline Elkins, Susan Pedersen (eds.): The Introduction defines settler colonialism and outlines different types and variations. Chapter 2, "Settler Citizenship in the Jewish Colonization of Palestine", by Gershon Shafir, deals specifically with Palestine. In the introduction to Part 1, how later settler projects learned lessons from earlier ones, including Zionism from the French experience in Algeria, is noted.

4. "Colonialism and the Jews" (2017) - Ethan B. Katz, Lisa Moses Leff, Maud S. Mandel (eds.): A review of the book by John Strawson in Fathom Journal may be read here. As noted, in Part 3, the "the focus of the debate is whether the Yishuv can be mainly characterised as an example of settler-colonialism." Chapter 8 discusses Zionism in the context of the "emigrant colonialism" pushed by European states which came late to the race to establish colonies, a category which should perhaps be added to the article on colonialism. Something which is not mentioned much elsewhere, though straying from the subject of the current article, is how various European states pushed for the establishment of colonies for their 'surplus' Jewish populations, which in turn led them to support Zionists in their efforts to create a state for themselves in Palestine. The influence which the settler colonial activities of the German Settlement Commission in West Prussia had on Alfred Ruppin is mentioned on page 174.

"A Century of Settler Colonialism in Palestine: Zionism’s Entangled Project", an article in edition Fall/Winter 2017, volume xxiv, issue i of The Brown Journal of World Affairs by Tariq Dana and Ali Jarbawi of Birzeit University, may be read here.

Some Wikipedia articles on topics of potential interest: Palestine Jewish Colonization Association[5][6][7]; Jewish Colonisation Association[8].

    ←   ZScarpia   23:32, 3 May 2022 (UTC)

Slater 2020 pp. 40-41 is a section called "Is Zionism Colonialism?" and available via Google Books preview. TLDR he says maybe pre-67, definitely post-67. Levivich (talk) 19:19, 4 January 2024 (UTC)

Another one I came across, Pappe 2020 (free): Still, despite a body of scholarship and research that frames the Zionist movement as a settler-colonial project—including the relatively new Settler Colonial Studies, a journal that, at this writing, has already devoted two special issues to Palestine—such a depiction is not accepted in mainstream academia (or the media generally). By and large, Israel/Palestine is still perceived as a conflict between two national movements that are equally responsible for violence—one of them a Western-style democracy that occasionally resorts to excessive power, and the other an Arab society endowed with a violent political culture. Levivich (talk) 19:47, 17 January 2024 (UTC)

Rouhana 2017 p. 3: Many scholars now accept the premise that the Zionist project that aimed at establishing a Jewish state in Palestine is a settler-colonial project (for just a few examples, see Lloyd 2012; Mamdani 2015; Pappé 2012; Robinson 2013; Rouhana 2014; Sabbagh-Khoury 2015; Shalhoub-Kevorkian 2015; Shihade 2011; Veracini 2010; and Wolfe 2006, 2012). - Rouhana, Nadim (2017). "The Psychopolitical Foundations of Ethnic Privileges in the Jewish State". In Rouhana, Nadim N.; Huneidi, Sahar S. (eds.). Israel and its Palestinian Citizens: Ethnic Privileges in the Jewish State. Cambridge University Press. pp. 3–35. ISBN 978-1-107-04483-8. Levivich (talk) 04:45, 21 January 2024 (UTC)

In the same book, in another chapter that Rouhana co-authors with Areej Sabbagh-Khoury, p. 397: The descriptor 'settler colonialism' has been applied intermittently over the past several decades in analyses of the Israeli–Palestinian conflict; especially when scholars have examined how the Zionist movement (and later the Israeli state) sought to control and accumulate land before the 1948 Nakba (see, for example, Hilal 1976; Rodinson 1973; Shafir 1989). Many accept the application of the term 'settler colonialism' to the occupation of the West Bank and Gaza (for example, Reuveny, 2008; Veracini, 2013). Palestinian historians and intellectuals in general conceived the Zionist project as a settler-colonial project (see, for example, Khalidi 1992, 2009; Said 1980). But, interestingly, there is a burgeoning tendency among Palestinian and other scholars to return to the colonial framework to analyze the Israeli–Palestinian history and present (Nasasra 2012; Rouhana 2014; Rouhana and Sabbagh-Khoury 2014; Sabbagh-Khoury 2015a; Shalhoub-Kevorkian 2015; Shihade 2011; Wolfe 2006). Levivich (talk) 05:12, 21 January 2024 (UTC)

"was not part of the process of imperial expansion in search of power and markets."

schould be deleted becouse of beeing false. Weizmann letter 1914: “… should Palestine fall within the British sphere of influence, and should Britain encourage a Jewish settlement there, as a British dependency, we could have in 20 to 30 years a million Jews out there – perhaps more; they would … form a very effective guard for the Suez Canal.”

(1916): "The British Cabinet is not only sympathetic toward the Palestinian aspirations of the Jews, but would like to see these aspirations realized" … “England … would have in the Jews the best possible friends, who would be the best national interpreters of ideas in the eastern countries and would serve as a bridge between the two civilizations. That again is not a material argument, but certainly it ought to carry great weight with any politician who likes to look 50 years ahead" The zionist movment did often apeal to british national interrest and Britten. And the succes of the Zionist project was obviously in there interrest concerning markets in Asia (espacially India). not so sure if this is the right place sry if not but the statement ist simply wrong. Also see rashid khalidi newest book. 109.43.177.222 (talk) 05:42, 7 November 2023 (UTC)

One might add that Ronald Storrs, the British military governor, drew specific parallels with Ireland, stating that Zionism provided the opportunity to form "a little loyal Jewish Ulster" (See page 8 of this work). Iskandar323 (talk) 08:05, 7 November 2023 (UTC)

What dose this have to do with settler colonialism

„argues that Zionism was the repatriation of a long displaced indigenous population to their historic homeland“ this is one kind of justification for Settler colonialism, I mean who ever lived there 3000 Years ago has nothing to do with the theory. At best it is a moral argument 2A02:3035:A0F:5DB2:D023:C5B5:593F:7545 (talk) 20:14, 23 November 2023 (UTC)

Restore removal of content

I reverted this edit [9], restoring the content it removed, which was:

Many of the fathers of Zionism themselves described it as colonialism, such as Vladimir Jabotinsky who said "Zionism is a colonization adventure".

Explanation given for removal was: "WP:SYNTH, not settler... He speaks of use of term colonization which is of a different context - is out of context, and the quote also doesn't refer to many."
@Homerethegreat. IOHANNVSVERVS (talk) 04:57, 29 December 2023 (UTC)

Note you need to do a proper internal primary citation of Jabotinsky (#15). SamuelRiv (talk) 04:42, 1 January 2024 (UTC)

I'm not sure how to do that. I've only recently been learning how to cite references properly. IOHANNVSVERVS (talk) 04:53, 1 January 2024 (UTC)

Hey there, yes the source speaks of Jabotinsky using colonization in a different context. And also the source doesn't talk about many... What is the issue? Homerethegreat (talk) 12:23, 1 January 2024 (UTC)

The content has been removed again [10] without discussion. Edit summary "Settler colonialism never mentioned". @Agmonsnir. IOHANNVSVERVS (talk) 19:50, 31 December 2023 (UTC)

How difficult is it to understand that settler colonialism and colonization go hand in hand?? These editors are grasping at straws just for a reason to be disruptive. Salmoonlight (talk) 20:47, 31 December 2023 (UTC)

It's important you understand that there are a variety of different perspectives and the two are different concepts. There's no need to assert that one is being disruptive even if you don't agree. Homerethegreat (talk) 12:15, 1 January 2024 (UTC)

The quote in question is quite clearly about settlement within the context of a colonial framework - and the reason for removal is inmerited. Given the absence of actual discussion here, further removal will be clear edit warring. Iskandar323 (talk) 05:07, 1 January 2024 (UTC)

I saw you restored the sentence, note that per WP:ONUS you need to show the source backs what you're writing. The current source refers only to Jabotinsky.

Many of the fathers of Zionism themselves described it as colonialism, such as Vladimir Jabotinsky who said "Zionism is a colonization adventure"

Therefore the above is incorrect per the source. Iskandar it would be great if you could self rv the content until you've proven per WP:ONUS. Homerethegreat (talk) 12:13, 1 January 2024 (UTC)

I don't think this source is so great. Though it is correct about Jabotinsky, it is more significant that practically every Zionist leader, and the Zionism organisations, called it colonialism. The protocols of the Zionist congresses do that hundreds of times. It would be possible to go through all of the "fathers" of Zionism and find somewhere they called it colonialism, but really a source with a good summary is needed. Zero^talk 13:31, 1 January 2024 (UTC)

I think it should be removed until then. And again I think the context of use was different and therefore I think it does not merit so much use here. Homerethegreat (talk) 14:55, 1 January 2024 (UTC)

Not sure who added back the sentence, but the source Alan Hart is really not great... He's been accused of antisemitism and is considered a conspiracy theorist by some [11] Homerethegreat (talk) 14:02, 3 January 2024 (UTC)

Being accused of antisemitism by ADL only means he said something negative about Israel, which is irrelevant to reliability. However, subscribing to conspiracy theories is a black mark which confirms my opinion that we need a better source. Zero^talk 01:58, 4 January 2024 (UTC)

Masalha 2012 p. 60: For over half a century, in the period between 1882 and 1948, terms such as Zionist ‘colonies’ and Zionist ‘colonisation’ were universally and unashamedly used by senior Zionist leaders... Levivich (talk) 19:27, 4 January 2024 (UTC)

References

Edit dispute

This recent edit dispute should be discussed. @PrimaPrime, @Skitash. - IOHANNVSVERVS (talk) 03:35, 10 March 2024 (UTC)

@PrimaPrime I'm uncertain about the reasoning behind your decision to completely alter the lede, as it appears to lack neutrality. Your deletion of a crucial and well-supported statement, which is integral to the article's notability Many of the fathers of Zionism themselves described it as colonialism, such as Vladimir Jabotinsky who said "Zionism is a colonization adventure." and the addition of an excessive amount of WP:UNDUE criticism by associating the topic with a one-state solution in the second sentence indicate a potential POV issue. I suggest familiarizing yourself with WP:NPOV and reconsidering your edit, as I am unable to revert it again due to the one-revert rule. Skitash (talk) 12:27, 10 March 2024 (UTC)

I don't think I completely altered it at all...I moved Jabotinsky up to that second sentence. And the sources are pretty clear that the analogy is today near inherently associated with 1SS proponents. Not sure how that's a "criticism" from a POV standpoint. PrimaPrime (talk) 13:10, 10 March 2024 (UTC)

What made you delete the crucial statement about Zionist leaders characterizing Zionism as a "colonization adventure"? Skitash (talk) 13:13, 10 March 2024 (UTC)

Again, it's right there: "Zionism has been described as a form of settler colonialism in relation to the region of Palestine and the Israeli–Palestinian conflict. Although notable early Zionists employed this characterization like Ze'ev Jabotinsky in 'The Iron Wall'..."

Of course the complication with the exact wording you mention is the academic settler colonialism framing posits that "settler colonization" is almost the inverse of simple "colonization", a point which has previously been stressed in discussions on this page, but I've put the relevant quote in the reference for now. PrimaPrime (talk) 18:09, 10 March 2024 (UTC)

Can't say I understand the sentence "Although notable early Zionists employed this characterization like Ze'ev Jabotinsky in "The Iron Wall", today it is associated with anti-zionist activists and academics who support a one-state solution to the conflict". IOHANNVSVERVS (talk) 18:30, 10 March 2024 (UTC)

What's unclear? The zionism-as-colonialism analogy was indeed notable among early zionists, but now that colonialism is seen as a bad thing in most circles, it's anti-zionist one-staters who promote the idea. From Tawil-Souri (2016) for instance:

"Calling Israel a settler colonial regime is an argument increasingly gaining purchase in activist and, to a lesser extent, academic circles. The work of Elia Zureik, who has been making this argument since at least 1979, has been formative therein...

Implicitly there are a number of political conclusions that are of importance in Zureik's book: thinking of 'Israel proper' and the Palestinian Territories as separate entities, and separating Israel’s policies according to a pre- and post-1967 time frame hide what is a long-lasting and pervasive structure of control. The reality on the ground is a striated and segregated hierarchy imposed ultimately by one regime across the entirety of Israel/Palestine. By implication, the two-state solution is long dead."

PrimaPrime (talk) 20:52, 10 March 2024 (UTC)