Another point of contention is around the claim that Israel is a settler colonial project.

One of the arguments made against that is that Israel cannot be usefully described in those terms

because although the British Empire promised to enable the creation of a Jewish homeland in the

Balfour Declaration of 1917, by 1939 the British were actively trying to reduce Jewish migration to Palestine.

And between 1944 and 1948, the British fought a bitter counter-insurgency war against Zionist

paramilitaries. Moreover, as you've mentioned, the Jewish settlers, unlike other colonial

settlers, such as the French and Algeria, were moving to Palestine, so the argument goes,

not in order to plunder and

dispossess, but solely because they were fleeing persecution and horrendous anti-Semitism

in Europe. Why do you think the settler colonial lens is in fact an appropriate one with which

to analyze the Israel-Palestine situation, even if it's an unusual case in some ways?

What is settler colonialism?

It is a type of colonialism in which the indigenous peoples of a colonized region

are displaced by the settlers who form a permanent society there.

That's basically an admirably concise description of what's happened to Palestine.

I mean, the Zinist movement from the outset, self-described as colonial. So when Herzl wrote to Cecil Rhodes, looking for help,

he expected him to empathize because he said it was a colonial project. Max Nordau, openly referred

to Zionist colonies in Palestine, so did Japatinsky. The first Zionist Bank was called the Jewish Colonial Fund.

The project was managed by the Jewish Agency Colonial Department.

It was clearly committed to the dispossession of the Palestinian majority.

And we can see from very early on in the movement, the idea was to rely on imperialist arms,

on the one hand, and secret agreements with Arab states on the other

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