Is Israel a “settler colonial” state?
That charge has been the subject of fierce debate in recent months amid the continuing Israeli assault on Gaza after the October 7 attacks by Hamas.
Colonialism is a system in which one people dominates another and uses the subjugated group’s resources for its own benefit (the British Raj in India is a classic example). Colonial projects take many forms, but Israel is accused of being the result of a specific variety: settler colonialism.
According to the Cornell Law School Legal Information Institute, settler colonialism has “an additional criterion that is the complete destruction and replacement of indigenous people and their cultures by the settler’s own in order to establish themselves as the rightful inhabitants.”
Settler colonialism does not have a definition under international humanitarian law (unlike many other terms used during this latest war), although Article 49 of the Geneva Convention prohibits certain actions often associated with that term; it is instead a concept that historians use to describe the system of replacing an existing population with a new one through land theft and exploitation, which is enabled by occupation, apartheid, forced assimilation, or genocide.
Historians often apply the term to the projects that founded the United States, Canada, South Africa, and others.
Within that cohort, there are scholars who apply the term to Israel’s founding, too. The argument begins with the 30-year period during which the British Empire controlled historic Palestine and facilitated the mass migration of Jews, particularly those persecuted in Europe before the Holocaust and in the wake of it. That migration, they argue, displaced the existing Arab population and launched a conflict that continues to this day.
But critics of the argument view accusing Israel of settler colonialism as a distortion of the term, in large part because of Judaism’s deep historical ties to present-day…
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