Colonialism

Colonialism is the practice by which one people conquers, settles and rules the land of another, extracting wealth and imposing its language, law and religion, while political control stays with a distant mother country, the metropole. It is one of the oldest patterns in recorded history and one of the most universal: Greeks, Romans, Arabs, Turks, Chinese dynasties and European maritime empires all practiced it. The modern academic habit of treating colonialism as a uniquely European sin, and the activist habit of applying the word to the one movement it describes worst, the Jewish return to the land of Israel, are both departures from the honest record.

What colonialism is

The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy defines colonialism as “a practice of domination, which involves the subjugation of one people to another,” and notes plainly that it “is not a modern phenomenon”: world history is full of societies expanding into conquered territory and settling their people on it. What distinguishes a colony from ordinary conquest is the metropole relationship. A colony exists for the benefit of somewhere else: settlers arrive as agents or subjects of a mother country, wealth flows home to it, and the colonist who tires of the venture can sail back to it. Historians distinguish exploitation colonies, run by a thin administrative layer for extraction (British India, the Dutch East Indies), from settler colonies, where the newcomers came to stay and displaced or subordinated the natives (the Americas, Australia, French Algeria). The distinction matters below, because the settler-colonialism charge against Israel borrows the vocabulary while failing the definition.

A world history, not a European one

The Greeks planted colonies around the Mediterranean and Black Sea from the 8th century BCE; Rome settled veterans in coloniae from Britain to Syria. The Arab-Islamic conquests of 632 to 750 took armies out of Arabia and, within a century, ruled from Spain to the Indus: the Levant fell in the 630s, Jerusalem in 638, Egypt by 642, North Africa by the early 700s, Spain in 711. These were not merely raids. They planted garrison towns (Basra, Kufa, Fustat, Kairouan), imposed Arabic and Islam over Aramaic, Coptic, Greek and Berber cultures, and ranked the conquered as dhimmis paying jizya under a succession of caliphates. That is settlement, extraction and imposed rule: the definition, item by item. The Ottoman Turks then ruled an empire from Hungary to Yemen for six centuries, holding Palestine as a province from 1517 to 1917.

European overseas colonialism, from 1492 to the mid-20th century, was the largest wave: by 1914 European states and their offshoots controlled most of the earth’s surface, and the British Empire alone governed roughly a quarter of the world’s land and population in 1920. It is the wave the word usually evokes, and its record is genuinely dark. But it was a chapter of the practice, not the whole book.

The record and the reckoning

Honest history concedes the ledger without flinching. The Atlantic slave trade embarked some 12.5 million Africans; the Congo Free State under Leopold II killed millions; indigenous populations of the Americas and Australia were decimated by disease, war and dispossession; colonial famines in Bengal and elsewhere killed millions more. Honesty also requires the parallel ledger usually omitted: the Arab slave trades across the Sahara and Indian Ocean ran for over a millennium, and the Islamic conquests’ subject peoples were second-class by law, not accident.

The reckoning came fast after 1945. The UN records that some 750 million people, nearly a third of humanity, lived in dependent territories at its founding; more than 80 former colonies have since become independent states, and only 17 non-self-governing territories remain, home to fewer than 2 million people. Decolonization in its plain historical sense, the dismantling of European overseas empires between roughly 1947 and 1975, is one of the most complete political transformations ever recorded.

The definitional gerrymander

Wikipedia’s article resolves the awkwardness of this world history with a scoping decision: colonialism is defined around European overseas expansion, and land empires that conquered adjacent territory are set outside the subject. The effect is not neutral. Under it, the Arab conquest and Arabization of the Levant is not colonialism, four centuries of Ottoman rule over Palestine is not colonialism, but Jews returning to Judea are the textbook colonizers. A definition that exempts the conquerors and indicts the returnees is not a definition, it is a verdict dressed as one. The same maneuver runs through the dedicated Zionism as settler colonialism article, and the charge itself long predates Wikipedia: it was Soviet-bloc propaganda in the 1975 “Zionism is racism” resolution, which the General Assembly revoked in 1991, and it survives today in an academic settler-colonial-studies niche and in activist tracts.

Why the Jews’ return is not colonialism

Test the definition against the facts, element by element. Colonists have a metropole; the Jews who came to Ottoman and Mandate Palestine had none. They fled pogroms in Russia from 1881, persecution in Yemen the same year, Nazi Europe in the 1930s, and after 1948 some 850,000 Jews were driven from the Arab world itself, an exodus from the Muslim world larger than the Palestinian one. No mother country sent them, no crown chartered them, and nothing was extracted or remitted home, because there was no home but the one they were returning to. They are the indigenous people of that land by every marker used for any other people: continuous presence since antiquity, language, religion, archaeology and genetics. Each wave of aliyah before statehood bought its land, often swampland and dune at inflated prices, rather than taking it by conquest. And the international legal basis was not a colonial charter: the San Remo conference of 1920 and the League of Nations Mandate for Palestine of 1922 recognized “the historical connection of the Jewish people with Palestine” and the grounds for “reconstituting their national home,” reconstituting being the League’s own word.

Honesty concedes what there is to concede. Early Zionists wrote in the vocabulary of their era, “colony” and “colonisation” included, and institutions like the Jewish Colonial Trust carry the word in their names. Britain was an empire, and the Mandate was an imperial-age instrument. The 1948 war produced real Arab displacement and real suffering, treated at full depth in the 1948 flight-and-expulsion question. None of that supplies the missing elements. A stateless people returning to its documented homeland, purchasing land, reviving its own language and absorbing refugees from four continents is the inverse of a metropole projecting power abroad. Calling Zionism colonialism does not stretch the definition; it abandons it.

Settler colonialism · Zionism as settler colonialism · Myth: Jews are colonizers in Palestine · Decolonization · Wikipedia & the Conflict: the full audit · The case for statehood