Zionism as settler colonialism
From The Art and Popular Culture Encyclopedia
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Zionism has been described as a form of settler colonialism in relation to the region of Palestine and the Israeli–Palestinian conflict. Many of the fathers of Zionism themselves described it as colonialism, such as Vladimir Jabotinsky, who said "Zionism is a colonization adventure."
Patrick Wolfe, an influential theorist of settler colonial studies defines settler colonialism as an ongoing "structure, not an event" aimed at replacing a native population rather than exploiting it.
Proponents of the paradigm of Zionism as settler colonialism include Edward Said, Rashid Khalidi, Noam Chomsky, Ilan Pappe, Fayez Sayegh, Maxime Rodinson, George Jabbour, Ibrahim Abu-Lughod, Baha Abu-Laban, Jamil Hilal, and Rosemary Sayigh.
The current conceptual framework emerged in the 1990s among Palestinian scholars in Israel who "reframed the history of the Nakba as enduring" in response to their marginalization by the two-state Israeli–Palestinian peace process. Rachel Busbridge contends that its subsequent popularity is inseparable from frustration at the stagnation of that process and resulting Western left-wing sympathy for Palestinian nationalism. She writes that while a settler colonial analysis "offers a far more accurate portrayal of the conflict than...has conventionally been painted", Wolfe's zero-sum approach is limited in practical application because almost all Israeli Jews naturally reject it, as a form of antisemitism that denies their long-standing history in the land of Israel and aspirations for self-determination.
