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, 31 January 2026
Sleman Altehe writes in +972 on 10 June 2026:
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?”