This article critically assesses the claim that Israel constitutes a “white settler-colonial state” by examining the applicability of settler-colonial theory to Zionism and Jewish immigration to Palestine. It argues that dominant settler-colonial models—developed primarily from European imperial expansion in the Americas, Africa, and Australasia—do not adequately capture the historical and sociological realities of Jewish state formation.
Drawing on migration studies and classical definitions of colonialism, the article demonstrates that Jewish immigrants arrived largely as refugees fleeing systemic antisemitic persecution, without a sponsoring metropole, imperial military structure, or extractive economic agenda. Land acquisition occurred primarily through legal purchase, and early Jewish communities lacked the political dominance characteristic of settler-colonial regimes. The article further critiques the conceptual elasticity used to subsume Zionism within settler-colonial frameworks.
It proposes the concept of a “settler-refugee state” as a more analytically precise category, offering a historically grounded alternative to prevailing colonial analogies.