Israel's Western critics often use the language of settler colonialism to denounce the Jewish state.

It is, they argue, illegitimate because it is the product of settler colonialism,

according to which history begins after the Jewish expulsion from the land of

Israel in the year 70, and therefore establishes non-Jewish Arab peoples as the native inhabitants

of the land. Then, as Jewish immigration flowed into the land of Israel, and in the 19th century,

established the towns and villages of the First Aliyah, native peoples were displaced.

The great colonial moment was enacted in 1948 when the Jews established political sovereignty in the state of Israel.

Subsequent wars, including and especially the Six-Day War of 1967,

further expanded and entrenched earlier colonial settlement.

According to this sort of analysis, Israel was not only illegitimate at that moment in 1948

when it declared its independence, it is always and forever illegitimate.

Welcome to the Tikva podcast. I'm your host, Jonathan Silver. The designation as

colonial settlement never expires. The sins of the fathers are visited upon the sons. They too are

settlers, and so are all their descendants forevermore. The same is true, by the way, in America,

where European colonists deprive the pure, good, innocent native peoples of their

land, their freedom, and their birthright. And so, what that means is that the United States,

too, was not only illegitimate at the moment it seized native lands, it is still illegitimate.

It will always be illegitimate. In the phrase of Patrick Wolfe, a frequently

quoted Australian scholar of settler colonialism, invasion is a structure, not an event. This idea,

settler colonialism, is an ideological passion. It's a form of spiritual devotion. It is a worldview that establishes a moral

hierarchy, draws political alliances, and establishes political adversaries. It has been at the root

and core of the ideological assault on Israel, America, and the West. It's an idea that the

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