Colonialism Analogies

When Israel as a state or the policies of its government are compared to past colonial projects, the academic and historical dimension of debates about the concept and history of colonialism are overshadowed by the political uses and meanings ascribed to the concept today. Rather than an exploration of the complex historical relationship between Israel and colonialism—a task complicated by the positive use of the term by some early Zionist leaders, the fact that the State of Israel was formed in anti-imperialist struggle against the British, the lack of a Jewish ‘metropole’ from which a ‘peripheral’ colony could derive and the problem of Jewish settlements in the West Bank—contemporary political uses of the concept in relation to Israel do so in a simplistic, condemnatory manner. They erase the specific political and historical specificities of Zionism and Israel in order to conflate them in their entirety with the broader European colonial project.