Jews have historical ties to Palestine. Israel is still a settler-colonial project

An Israeli soldier ignores a Palestinian woman as he protects a settler grazing cows on agricultural lands belonging to the Palestinian village of Susiya, in Masafer Yatta, January 31, 2026. (Avishay Mohar/Activestills)

Before October 7, the view that Zionism and the State of Israel constituted a settler-colonial project was a relatively marginal position, confined to academic and activist circles. In the past two and a half years, however, settler colonialism has become a dominant framework for understanding the past and present in Palestine.

For many supporters of Israel, this is a difficult characterization to accept, in part because they see it as imposing a rigid division: The Palestinians are natives, the Israelis are settlers. This discomfort does not exempt us from serious discussion. Are all Israelis settlers and all Palestinians natives? And does a historical connection to the land negate participation in a settler-colonial project in the present?

To grapple with these questions, it is necessary to distinguish between historical indigeneity and settler colonialism as a political practice. Indigeneity, as it is mobilized in public debate, is presented as a claim about origin, precedence, and an ancient connection. Settler colonialism, by contrast, is not a story about origins but about power. It is a situation in which one group settles in a land already inhabited by another and seeks to establish a new political order through the dispossession, replacement, exclusion, or subordination of the local population.

The pertinent question, therefore, is not “Who was here first?” but rather “What kind of regime has been created, by whom, and at whose expense?”

Settler societies are typically established at the expense of Indigenous populations, driven by what Patrick Wolfe has termed a “logic of elimination.” Settlement is not merely a movement through space; it is above all an organization of power. It involves the concentration of resources, organizational superiority, and the ability to shape the legal, economic, and spatial order.

The question of land — who owns it, who enjoys sovereignty over it, who is allowed to build on it, and who is excluded from it — reveals this clearly. The framework of settler colonialism helps us understand Israel’s quest for control over the entire land between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea: It illuminates what underpins the dispossession of Palestinians, the regime of separation and apartheid, inequalities in citizenship and sovereignty, and the ongoing Israeli effort to “Judaize” the space.

Israeli Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich attends a press conference announcing his plans to approve more than 3,000 housing units in the E1 settlement project between Jerusalem and Ma’ale Adumim, August 14, 2025. (Yonatan Sindel/Flash90)

Yet the prevailing discourse on settler colonialism often remains overly simplistic. It assumes from the outset the existence of two distinct, fixed, and pure groups: “settlers” on the one hand and “natives” on the other.

As a Palestinian and as a scholar, I have no doubt that what the State of Israel is carrying out here is a project of settler colonialism; this is the most accurate analytical framework for describing reality. Precisely for that reason, I would urge those adopting it to exercise caution in how they discuss some of its core components.

Who is the native?

The question of indigeneity lies at the heart of the Zionist–Palestinian conflict, but it is also saturated with images and struggles over authenticity. Often, these are loaded with Orientalist meanings. Who is the native? The noble savage, the tiller of the soil, the “authentic” Bedouin, the ancient Jew?

In the Zionist version, indigeneity is often used to justify exclusive Jewish sovereignty: Jews are portrayed as an ancient people returning to their homeland, and Zionism is described not as colonialism but as a movement of national revival and liberation. This argument rests on the biblical narrative of the “Promised Land” and the return to Zion, seeking to establish Jews as natives in a sense that grants them a “natural” ownership of the land. The identification of the settler population with a biblical people is also familiar from other colonial projects, as Ron Naiweld has argued.

Conversely, Palestinians claim a contemporary form of indigeneity, grounded in centuries of continuous life in the land and, at times, in an even more ancient connection. Yet a historical perspective makes clear that this land has always been a crossroads of peoples and empires — from the Canaanites and Babylonians all the way to the Ottomans and Europeans — and even antiquity itself does not provide a stable point of reference. Thus, any attempt to resolve present-day realities through a competition over historical precedence, genealogies, or DNA is doomed to reach a dead end.

Graffiti sprayed on ancient archeological artifacts, in Sebastia, near the West Bank city of Nablus, May 12, 2025. (Nasser Ishtayeh/Flash90)

What follows is that indigeneity is not a history lesson but a political question. Throughout most of the last century, the struggle between Jews and Palestinians was not framed in terms of native versus settler, but rather as a confrontation between the Zionist and the Palestinian national movements — and at times broader Arab nationalism. The discourse of indigeneity entered the arena relatively late.

But when indigeneity is measured in terms of “cultural purity,” it becomes a trap: A community is required to prove a frozen authenticity in order to justify its rights, instead of having those rights recognized on the basis of law or as reparations for ongoing political injustice.

This happened, for example, in relation to the Bedouins, when growing international recognition of their indigeneity shifted toward cultural preservation rather than helping them ground a political claim to land, sovereignty, and recognition. For this reason, the concept of indigeneity itself requires critical examination.

Who is a settler? Unlike the native, who can be defined in historical, cultural, or symbolic terms, the settler is defined primarily by the nature of their actions. The distinction between a guest, an immigrant, a resident, and a settler does not lie in biological roots but in the way one positions oneself within a space: Do they integrate into an existing reality, or seek to replace it? Do they live alongside the inhabitants of the land, or work to establish a regime that excludes, replaces, and erases them? Settlement is a political category — one of power, land, labor, and sovereignty.

This distinction becomes especially clear in the case of Jews who lived in the country and the broader Ottoman region before the British Mandate. With the rise of Zionism, the idea of returning to the Land of Israel became a project of settlement that transformed the power relations between Jews and Palestinians living there. Within this framework, even those who did not initiate the project were drawn into it.

Fighters in the Haganah, the prominent pre-state Zionist paramilitary group, get a lesson in topography, near Sheikh Bureik in northern Palestine, December 24, 1938. (GPO)

The argument for Jewish indigeneity, therefore, does not negate a colonial analysis; rather, the two coexist. One may acknowledge a deep historical, religious, and cultural connection to the land while simultaneously recognizing that Israeli sovereignty, as it developed in practice, rests upon a regime of dispossession and hierarchy. Historical connection, in other words, provides no exemption from political responsibility.

Escaping the binary

If “settler” and “native” are political positions produced within relations of power, there is no reason to treat them as fixed categories. Mahmood Mamdani proposed understanding settlers and natives as mutually constituted, such that it is their relationship that produces the categories themselves. From this perspective, the question is not merely who is a native and who is a settler, but what political order creates this distinction and how changing that order would also change the meaning of the distinction.

Moving beyond the binary requires first acknowledging the colonial reality. From there, it becomes possible to think about genuine decolonization as a political process that dismantles domination, ends dispossession, and establishes equality in rights and status.

Perhaps the solution is to stop thinking in terms of a transition from settler to native, and instead begin imagining a different political identity — one grounded neither in settlement nor in exclusive claims to indigeneity. Raef Zreik and others propose envisioning an egalitarian form of citizenship in which attachment to place is not translated into domination. The experience of other settler colonial societies — from South Africa to Northern Ireland and New Zealand — shows that even when history is not erased, the framework can be changed through recognition, redress, autonomy, representation, restitution, and compensation.