Subject: Re: Cracks in the dem coalition over Israel
How is Israel not a settler colonial state? There was and is an indigenous population in, let's call it the Levant for the sake of neutrality. The current Palestinians are descendants of the Canaanites and Philistines, all the way back to biblical times. Only a tiny percentage were and are still Bedouins.

Current Israelites are largely Eastern European.

Two main points.

First, the current Israelites are also descendants of the indigenous population of the Levant. They were expelled from the immediate area by the Assyrians (and then from other homelands, over and over again throughout history, I might add). While many Israelites returned to the area directly from Eastern Europe, others were expelled from other countries in the vicinity of the Levant - notably from Egypt and Syria, but many others from Yemen, Iraq, and other countries of the region. About half of all Israeli Jews are descended from European immigrants, and the other half are descended from Jews living in Arabic countries.

Second, Israel wasn't a colony at any time. From the 1500's through WWI, the Levant was part of the Ottoman Empire. There were no countries at all in the region. The first two large waves of Jewish immigrants to the area weren't colonizers - they were just people legally and lawfully emigrating to the region with the permission and concurrence of the government, many of which were moving within the country. They were no more colonizers than any of the folks who immigrate to any other country, or people who move around within a country.

By the time of the collapse of the Ottoman Empire, there were about 120K Jews living within the boundaries of what would become the British Mandate (as the victorious Allies assumed administrative control over the former Ottoman and German Imperial territories). Many more emigrated to the area when the U.S. shut down immigration in the early 20th century. Again lawfully and with the concurrence of the Mandatory government. It's no more accurate to refer to them as "colonizers" than it would be to refer to Chinese, German, Irish, Hispanic, and other large immigrant waves to the U.S. "colonizing" the U.S. from its English and Dutch population.

When the British withdrew, and returned sovereignty to the then-existing population of the region, those folks weren't colonizers. They were the legal extant population of the Mandate area, with no less right and legitimacy to be there than the other ethnic and demographic groups that lived there. Many had been living there for generations, by 1948.