Comrade and reader of The Socialist Adham Harash provides an historical account of the colonisation of Palestine. This piece was originally published in May 2025, and has since been revised and updated.
Author’s note – As a Palestinian, I write this not to provoke but to expose the dominant myths that have long shaped public understanding of Zionism and the so-called Israeli-Palestinian conflict which continues to shield Israel from rightful scrutiny. This article is a call to recognise Zionism for what it is – a settler-colonial movement – and to encourage honest, informed conversations about justice, history, and the urgent need for a truly democratic future in Palestine. My aim is to raise awareness, especially among Western readers, so they can see through the layers of propaganda and challenge the so-called two-state solution and join the growing effort – in Palestine and beyond – to speak clearly and truthfully about what has happened, and continues to happen, in that beautiful land.
There are truths that societies often find difficult to confront, and among the most elusive is the recognition of oneself as a coloniser. Throughout history, colonialism has rarely been perceived as such by those who practiced it. It was cloaked in the language of civilising missions, divine promises, or national rebirths. Yet the patterns repeat: the arrival of settlers, the displacement of Indigenous peoples, and the claiming of land under foreign notions of entitlement.
Zionism follows this same historical pattern. It is a political movement that sought to establish a Jewish state in Palestine – a land already inhabited. This is not a theoretical or ancient dispute, but an ongoing reality. From its earliest stages to its present-day manifestations, Zionism has functioned as a settler-colonial project, relying on the displacement of Palestinians to realise its vision. The expulsion of the Indigenous Palestinians was premeditated and intentional. It was not merely a consequence of war; it was the plan.
Prior to the arrival of Zionist settlers, Palestine was a diverse land with Muslim, Christian, and Jewish Palestinians living in established communities. The Zionist project, backed by imperial powers, aimed not to integrate into this existing society, but to replace it. Rather than a mere matter of interpretation, this is a matter of documented historical planning and execution. This is clear from Israel’s land laws, transfer policies, and demographic engineering. This has also been demonstrated by the Israeli historian Ilan Pappe in his documenting of Plan Dalet – the Zionist masterplan for expulsion in 1948 – which he described as a “blueprint for ethnic cleansing.”
Zionism’s colonial intentions were clear from the get-go. In 1895 Theodor Herzl, founder of modern political Zionism, who described it as “something colonial” wrote that “we shall try to spirit the penniless population across the border” in reference to the Indigenous population in Palestine in order to create a Jewish state in their place.
One year later, in 1896, in The Jewish State, he described the Jewish homeland as “a rampart of Europe against Asia, an outpost of civilisation as opposed to barbarism.”
Many early Zionists talked of the need to “transfer” the Palestinians – a euphemism for ethnic cleansing – as a prerequisite for building a Jewish-majority homeland. The Russian-Zionist leader Leo Motzkin spelled this out by stating that: “Our thought is that the colonisation of Palestine has to go in two directions: Jewish settlement in Eretz Israel and the resettlement of the Arabs of Eretz Israel in areas outside the country.”
Zionism’s and Israel’s founding figures and leaders, such as Theodor Herzl and David Ben-Gurion, understood that the establishment of a Jewish state in Palestine would not occur through peaceful coexistence with the native population. Instead, it would necessitate the removal of that population. Israeli New Historians – including Benny Morris, Ilan Pappe, and Avi Shlaim – have demonstrated through Israeli archival material that population transfer was not incidental but embedded in Zionist strategic thinking, formalised through military planning and post-1948 legal mechanisms designed to prevent return.
Vladimir Jabotinsky, leader of the right-wing Revisionist Zionist movement, had recognised the Palestinian rejection of the Zionist project as anti-colonial resistance. “The native populations, civilised or uncivilised, have always stubbornly resisted the colonists,” he wrote in 1923.
The State of Israel was established through a planned mass ethnic cleansing campaign during which over 750,000 Palestinians were driven from their homes, more than 540 villages and towns were destroyed, and tens of massacres committed. This catastrophic event is known as the Nakba.
From that day to this day, Israel’s refusal to allow Palestinian refugees to return, in defiance of UN Resolution 194, further confirms Zionism’s intention to permanently displace, fragment and erase the Palestinians as a distinct group of people from their ancestral homeland through exile, denial of return, and demographic engineering. Had integration or coexistence been the goal, Israel would have allowed return, restitution, and reconstruction. Instead, it has only expanded its colonial project.
Today, this settler-colonial reality continues through settlement expansion, military occupation, home demolitions, and land theft. The Israeli state names these as “security measures”. They are the modern practice of the same project that began over a century ago: to secure maximum land with minimum Palestinians.
An honest reckoning with the past and the present is necessary, if Palestinians and Israelis are ever to build a shared future together. The longer the world continues to avoid speaking honestly and bravely about the nature and essence of the actual settler-colonial relations between Israel and the Palestinians, the longer we continue to be participants in sustaining Israel’s criminal apartheid regime – until it reaches its own version of a final solution stage.
The Western powers’ blessing of the Zionist colonisation of Palestine was cynically branded as partition. Today, the so-called two-state solution continues the same deceit, dressing up a brutal colonial project as a peace offer.
When you hear “two-state solution” you should hear “partition” and recognise it for what it is: a form and a tool of colonisation. Partition does not dismantle colonial realities; it preserves them. It legitimises the outcome of dispossession while blocking restitution, return, and equality.
Partition was proposed in South Africa to create separate homelands for Black South Africans. It was urged by some in the United States after the Civil War to preserve the Confederacy. French settlers in Algeria pushed for it. So too did colonial powers in Vietnam, carving the country into north and south.
Whether it was through wars of liberation or internal revolution, the lesson was the same: partition is unjust, unsustainable, and must be called out and rejected.
In a world that is increasingly recognising and reckoning with the facts and impacts of colonialism – from the Americas to Africa and the Pacific – it is time to extend this recognition to Palestine.
A just future in Palestine cannot be built on ethnic privilege, enforced separation, or permanent exile. The only just and lasting way forward is a shared country. Justice requires one democratic state, equal rights for all who live there, and the return of those who were forcibly expelled. Anything less is not peace.
About the author:
Adham Harash is a Palestinian–New Zealander activist from the Galilee in Palestine, a region currently under the apartheid settler colonial state of Israel. He rejects the label “Arab Israeli” entirely. Adham writes poetry and political commentary on Palestine, aiming to raise awareness – particularly among Western audiences – and to foster honest, informed conversations about justice, history, and the urgent need for a truly democratic future in Palestine.
Banner Image: Zionist “Settler Colonialism” yields unrelenting takeover of Palestinian land.
Image credit: Palestine Solidarity Campaign
