The colonialist claim against Israel would lead to the absurdity of the Mamdanis needing to go back to Uganda and South Africa.
Is Israel a colonialist disfiguration?
Is Israel illegitimate?
Is Israel no better than the British were, say, in India?
Is there merit to the claim that Israel represents the worst of the West?
A strong strain of anti-Semitism today originates in the claim that Israel is a colonialist imposition on Palestine, displacing and exploiting the local population. Against the facts of what actually led to the creation of Israel, the colonialist narrative of Israel would fit the Mamdani family’s migration to New York City.
If “colonialists” like Israelis should go back to where they came from, so should “colonialists” like the Mamdanis. Either imperative is absurd, since the colonialist claim against Israel is strictly a polemical weapon —a hammer against Israel’s right to exist — not a claim grounded in what Zionism actually was, and is.
A colonialist seeks control over another country. A colonialist occupies that country with settlers. A colonialist exploits that country’s resources and exploits it economically. A colonialist seeks political country of that country.
Notice the word that keeps popping up in the definition of colonialism: “country.”
What country was it that the early Zionist pioneers came to? There was no country in the Land of Israel. There was no country called Palestine or Lebanon or Jordan — there was no country at all. There was only the Ottoman Empire, the “Sick Man of Europe,” under whose venal rule the early Zionists needed to live. The early Zionists, circa 1880s, had no power — zero — over the Ottoman Empire.
So these supposed Zionist colonialists came to a non-country to create small farming settlements there. There being no country, these Zionists settlers couldn’t very well occupy it.
This is not semantics. Not only was there no country to occupy, there was no inhabitable land to occupy.
Students of early Zionism know how tenuous the early Zionist farms were, how they barely survived. The charge that the early Zionists stole the land of the local Arabs (who did not call themselves Palestinians) would have to mean that infertile, untilled, unproductive land was alluring. That someone would want to steal it.
The agronomical facts of the land belie the claim of theft. Who would want to steal worthless land?
And that’s when the territory was actually land. In many places in the Land of Israel, the “land” was merely swamps.
Continue down the definition of colonialism: After seeking control over another “country,” the “occupiers” of that country’s inhabitable land then exploit the country’s “resources.”
What resources? The Land of Israel to which the early Zionists came had no minerals, almost no water, virtually no trees, no oil, no gas. There was no logging, no shipping, no mining, no irrigating. That’s what the early Zionists faced.
There was nothing to exploit.
That’s what the early Zionists sought to reverse — to turn the Land of Israel into a place worth having.
And political control? The only means of control over the notoriously venal local Ottoman bureaucrats was bribery. That’s not colonialism!
On every plane of the definition of colonialism, early Zionism fails. It had no relation to what the British did in India, for example.
Speaking of the British, after the Balfour Declaration in 1917 granted the Zionist movement the right to a “Jewish National Home” in (not of) Palestine, did Zionism then turn colonialist?
There still was no country to control. The only land that the Zionists occupied was purchased from Arab landowners. The only resources in the land then were those developed by the Zionists themselves — mostly, agricultural and medical resources.
The greatest anti-colonialist element in Zionism after the Balfour Declaration was that the Zionist community in the Land of Israel attracted Arabs, and grew Arab immigration into Palestine.
Zionism wasn’t displacing Arabs. It was catalyzing growth in the Arab population.
With the slow, painstaking growth of the Jewish community after the Balfour Declaration, Zionism’s greater economic opportunities and superior medical care did not repel Arabs from the land but pulled them to it.
The exact opposite of colonialism.
Follow definitional plane of colonialism to its final stage: political control. The British, under its League of Nations Mandate for Palestine, established a ruling council. Keep in mind that the Arab population was roughly five times as great as the Jewish population in Palestine when the British Mandate began in 1922. The British conceived this ruling council as being run jointly by local Arabs and Jews.
The Arabs boycotted it.
They literally handed the political authority to the Zionists.
All this was before the successor to the League of Nations — the United Nations — voted to divide Palestine into two states: one Jewish, one Arab. The Arabs rejected that, too.
So . . . if the Jews in Palestine before the establishment of Israel, and if the Jews in Israel since it became a state, should return to where they came from, so should the Mamdanis.
For the Mamdanis also came to a place where, although it was a country, the Mamdanis — just like the Zionists — did not displace anyone, did not exploit anyone economically, did not take over any natural resources, and did achieve political authority legitimately.
If the Mamdanis call the Zionists colonialists, they have to call themselves colonialists, too.
But of course, the Mamdanis are not colonialists, just like Zionism was not, and is not, colonialist.
© IJN 2026
