Historian Rashid Khalidi explains how early Zionism was a self-identified Colonial project, a European colonial project backed by British imperialism (see Democracy Now interview below). He points out that up until 1958, an official Jewish Colonization Agency was tasked with the settler colonial transformation of the British Mandate by a systematic dispossession of the Palestinian population. Khalidi claims that the formation of Israel is a unique phenomenon in the annals of Colonialism in that is paradoxically a Nationalist project and a settler Colonial project at the same time. Europeans forcibly settled Arab lands while Jews established an indigenous nation-state, the Europeanness of the settlers being subsumed in their Jewish nationalism.

Today, while Gaza is being decimated and depopulated in what Khalidi has called the ‘last colonial war of the modern age’, the settlement of the West Bank continues at an accelerated pace. While I agree with Khalidi that Israel is a settler-colonial nation and that the assault on Gaza is a colonial war, I wonder if he is right about it being the last such war in the modern age – remember Lebanon, Iraq, Syria, Libya, etc. There is nothing to suggest that more colonial incursions are not forthcoming. Perhaps Khalidi meant to say ‘the last settler-colonial war of the Modern Age’, which I think is a more apt characterization, on the basis of his own premises. Given the extent of Israel’s ongoing aggression in Palestine, and given the history of colonial and neo-colonial incursions in the Middle East, I am surprised at the lack of meaningful opposition and intervention by the other Arab nations.

https://www.latimes.com/opinion/story/2023-12-02/israel-gaza-palestinian-american-history

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/feb/27/israeli-settler-violence-in-west-bank-escalates-huwara

https://historyguy.com/list_of_wars_middle_east.html