The big dictionaries have announced their “Word of the Year” for 2024, based on the recorded jump in its use from 2023. Among the winners are “polarization” at Merriam-Webster, “brat” at Collier, “manifest” at Cambridge, “brain rot” at Oxford, and “demure” at Dictionary.com. Relying on my more limited reading, my own vote might be for “settler colonialism.”

A phrase that I’m not sure that I ever encountered before the October 2023 Hamas massacre but that I’ve come across innumerable times since, “settler colonialism” apparently goes back to the late 1960s or 1970s. Although its first appearance has been attributed to a 1965 article on “Zionist Colonialism in Palestine” by the Syrian-born intellectual and diplomat Fayez Sayegh, I was unable to find it there, and its absence indicates that it did not yet exist at the time. The closest Sayegh came to it was when he wrote of Zionism’s aims:

By imitating the colonial ventures of the “Gentile nations” among whom Jews lived, the “Jewish nation” could send its own colonists into a piece of Afro-Asian territory, establish a settler-community, and, in due course, set up its own state—not, indeed, as an imperial outpost of a metropolitan home-base, but as a home-base in its own right, upon which the entire “Jewish nation” would sooner or later converge from all over the world.

All in all, this is not an unfair description of the Zionist project. (Not that Sayegh, who co-authored the UN “Zionism is racism” resolution eleven years later, was a paragon of fairness when it came to Zionism.) It makes the important point that the Zionist settlers who came to Ottoman-ruled Palestine in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, largely from Eastern Europe, were unlike other European settlers in non-European lands in not having a government or quasi-governmental institution as their sponsor and protector. True, this situation changed when England issued the Balfour Declaration calling for a “Jewish national home” in Palestine and replaced the Turks as Palestine’s rulers after World War I. Then, too, however, Palestine’s Jews were not English as the colons in Algeria were French and the Boers in South Africa were Dutch. England, which ultimately did as much to harm their cause as to help it, was not their mother-country and they were neither considered by it, nor considered themselves, to be its overseas extension.

In stressing Zionism’s uniqueness among the colonizing movements of modern times, Sayegh was saying nothing that any proponent of Zionism would not have agreed with. Yet as the term “settler colonialism” began to be used in the academic writing of the 1980s and the 1990s, particularly in the seminal work of the Anglo-Australian historian Patrick Wolfe (1949–2016), who is thought of as having founded settler-colonialist theory, it assumed a wider meaning. Though it continued to be applied to Zionism too, it now came to refer precisely to situations like those of the Algerian colons, the South African Boers, and the British settlers of North America and Australia—that is, to a form of colonialism in which a mother-country encourages and supports the mass settlement of its citizens in an overseas territory that it wishes to take possession of, as opposed to a territory whose native population it controls for economic and/or military ends without seeking to change its demographic composition. (As typical instances of non-settler colonialism one might cite French Indochina, Dutch Indonesia, and British India.)

Traditionally, settler and non-settler colonialism were treated by historians as two variants of a single phenomenon, This, Wolfe wrote, was a mistake. Settler colonialism is fundamentally different from its non-settler counterpart because, in its attitude toward native populations, it is “inherently eliminatory.” Whether, it succeeds in wiping out or nearly wiping out these populations, as it did in North America and Australia, or ends up living alongside them, as happened in Algeria, its settlers always crave more land, whose native occupants must be driven from it. While it is not “invariably genocidal,” Wolfe wrote, there being many ways short of killing them to strip natives of their land and rights, “the question of genocide is never far from discussions of settler colonialism.”

Because Israel is in the view of Wolfe and his followers, though sui generis in some ways, no less settler colonialist than America or Australia, being built on the dispossession of “Palestine’s indigenous owners,” it too is potentially genocidal—and because settler-colonialist theory has become so influential in the American academy in recent years, Israel’s linkage to genocide was already established in the academic mind well before the Israeli assault on Gaza. This helps to explain why the preposterous charge of genocide made against Israel as early as this assault’s first days was so quick to gain wide acceptance on American campuses.

Indeed, as the American literary and cultural critic Adam Kirsch points out in his On Settler Colonialism: Ideology, Violence, and Justice, a book published last August, no small amount of anti-Americanism lies behind the campus’s anti-Zionism: just as American support for Israel feeds anger at America, so anti-American attitudes feed anger at Israel, whose history is perceived to be like that which led to the near extermination of North America’s pre-Columbian peoples. No longer able to fight a real genocide that took place in the past, Israel’s violent critics can feel virtuous by fighting an imaginary one thought to be taking place in the present. “For many academics and activists,” Kirsch writes, “describing Israel as a settler-colonial state was a sufficient justification for the Hamas attack.”

Kirsch’s response to this is to maintain that Zionism was not settler colonialist, and in this he reflects the thinking of most defenders of Israel, who, whatever their criticisms of some of its actions may be, find the extreme charges made against it outrageous. Their arguments are many. The Jews, it is claimed, are as indigenous to Palestine as are its Arabs; Jewish settlers in Palestine never intended to replace its Arab population; every inch of Arab land acquired by them in Zionism’s formative stage, from 1882 to Israel’s establishment in 1948, was legally purchased from its owners; it was the Arabs who sought to eliminate Palestine’s Jews by starting the 1948 war, not the other way around; it is absurd to label as “colonists” the millions of Jews who settled in Israel as refugees from European anti-Semitism, from the Holocaust, from persecution in Arab lands, and from repression in the Soviet Union, etc. How can one compare an Israeli Jew to a French colon, a Boer farmer, or an American frontiersman?

Yet as true as these arguments may be, they miss the mark. It’s not only that they’re not inconsistent with Fayez Sayegh’s description of Zionism. It’s also that, from its inception, Zionism itself thought it was a colonizing movement and spoke of itself in such terms. The first Zionist farming settlements created in the 1880s and 90s called themselves “colonies” (kolonyot or moshavot in Hebrew) and their inhabitants were routinely referred to as “colonists.” When Baron Edmond de Rothschild took most of these settlements under his wing, they became known as moshavot ha-baron, “the baron’s colonies,” and when he eventually ceded control over them, the organization he ceded it to was the Jewish Colonization Association. Herzl, who was critical of Rothschild’s efforts, said of them in an address to the Fifth Zionist Congress in 1901, “Philanthropic colonization is a failure,” and then added, referring to his own plan, “National colonization will succeed.” Two years earlier, in addressing the Third Congress, he had said of the charter for Jewish settlement in Palestine that he hoped to obtain from the Turks: “Only when we shall be in possession of this charter, can we begin practical colonization on a large scale.”

Though Herzl’s plans fell through, Fayez Sayegh was right. Zionism was settler colonialism par excellence. It’s not wrong to think that it was. What is wrong is thinking that the type of colonialism that Sayegh ascribed to Zionism—that which has no “metropolitan home-base” but is “a home-base in its own right”—is automatically reprehensible.

Even more, it is wrong to think that such settler colonialism is a modern phenomenon when, on the contrary, it is one of the oldest in human history. It was such settler colonialism that brought the first homo sapiens out of Africa to Europe, where they gradually replaced the Neanderthals. It was such settler colonialism that led the speakers of proto-Indo-European, from which nearly all the languages of Europe and many of those of West Asia descend, to leave their ancient homeland north of the Black Sea and spread southward, eastward, and westward. It was such settler colonialism when the Aryans invaded India and created a Hindu civilization there; when the ancient Greeks founded their colonies all over the Mediterranean; when the Phoenicians built Carthage and the Arabs brought Islam to the Middle East and North Africa. Such and many similar developments took place over the ages because groups of people set out for new homes, sometimes killing those who lived there, sometime driving them out, sometimes conquering and dominating them, sometimes peacefully mingling with them and assimilating them.

As Wolfe accurately observed, a settler colonialist is not an emigrant. The emigrant leaves home in order to join a society and culture not his own and become part of it. The settler colonialist takes his society and culture with him and implants it in a new environment. Zionism’s message to the Jewish people was, “Let us stop being emigrants to the countries of the world and start being colonists in our own land!” That’s nothing to be ashamed of and we have already lost the intellectual battle when we think that it is. The question is not whether Zionism was settler colonialism; it’s what sort of settler colonialism it was. That’s what needs to be discussed and that’s where we need to take our stand.