Following the 1947 UN resolution on the establishment of a Jewish state alongside a Palestinian state (in the area between the Jordan River & the Mediterranean Sea), there was a large increase in Jewish population, as many Jewish refugees started flowing in. These were both European Jews looking for a safe haven after the Holocaust, and Middle-Eastern Jews fleeing widespread persecution in the surrounding Arab countries, but both groups are descendants of people who were previously deported from this land.

Thus, while the concept of settler colonialism may broadly and usefully describe varied patterns throughout history of economically opportunistic, socially organized migration, use of the term as a normative, value-laden accusation is the product rather of postcolonial ideology, specific to the post-Columbian era and that has nothing to do with Jews’ reestablishment of a state in their historic homeland. In fact, much of Jewish displacement from their ancient homeland came as the product of settler colonialist practices of the various empires who conquered and ruled their lands over the past 2600 years. At the same time as Jews in the land of Israel were being persecuted and oppressed by their colonizers, Jews in the diaspora, both in Christian Europe and Islamic North Africa and the Middle East, were likewise being oppressed until both came to a head in the middle of the 20th Century with the Holocaust in Europe followed shortly thereafter by Jews in Arab lands being driven out of their homes there as well. The vast majority of Israel’s current Jewish population derive from these two mass immigrations. Therefore, while the settler colonialist model can explain some aspects of the Jewish return to their ancestral homeland (particularly the experience of Palestinians on the receiving end of this return), a much more apt model to describe how most Jews arrived in Palestine/Israel in the middle of the 20th century would be as refugees. Moreover, the main reason to choose to describe these immigrants as settler colonialists rather than as refugees would seemingly be anti-Semitism (https://nypl.overdrive.com/media/3971174 ).