Theodor Herzl and Ze’ev Jabotinsky wrote about their own enterprise in the vocabulary of colonization, and the instances can be dated: three texts, from 1896, January 1902 and 4 November 1923, carry the phrases now quoted back at the movement. Herzl’s Der Judenstaat proposes a body that “might be called a ‘Jewish Chartered Company’”; his letter to Cecil Rhodes appeals to him “because it is something colonial”; Jabotinsky’s essay in the Russian-language weekly Rassvet holds that Zionist colonisation “must either be terminated or carried out in defiance of the will of the native population.” The same record holds three things the quotations alone do not: the sovereign Herzl pursued longest was the Ottoman Sultan Abdulhamid II rather than a European power, the movement recorded a vote in 1903 on settling somewhere other than Palestine, and the two men answered the question of Arab consent in opposite directions.
Key Findings
- Herzl, Der Judenstaat (1896), writes that the Jewish Company “is partly modelled on the lines of a great land-acquisition company” and “might be called a ‘Jewish Chartered Company,’ though it cannot exercise sovereign power.”
- Herzl’s letter to Cecil Rhodes, January 1902, recorded in his diaries, asks for support “because it is something colonial.”
- The Jewish Colonial Trust was registered in London in 1899 as a joint-stock company under English company law, with the Anglo-Palestine Company established as its Palestine subsidiary in 1903; the Jewish National Fund was founded by the Fifth Zionist Congress in 1901.
- The Sixth Zionist Congress at Basel, August 1903, recorded a division of roughly 295 in favour to 178 against on sending an investigatory commission to British East Africa, and the Seventh Congress rejected the territory in 1905.
- Becker, Ascone and Troschke (2022, peer-reviewed) coded 1,504 UK comments on media Facebook pages and found 26.9% antisemitic; within that antisemitic set, 7.7% denied Jewish self-determination and 5.2% used an apartheid analogy.
What did Herzl and Jabotinsky call their own enterprise?
Three dated primary texts carry the language. In Der Judenstaat (1896), Herzl writes that the proposed Jewish Company “is partly modelled on the lines of a great land-acquisition company” and “might be called a ‘Jewish Chartered Company,’ though it cannot exercise sovereign power.” The phrasing is the pamphlet’s own, in the standard English translation circulated since 1896.
The second instance is private correspondence. In January 1902 Herzl wrote to Cecil Rhodes, then the most prominent chartered-company figure in the British Empire, and explained why he was approaching a man with no connection to Jewish affairs: “How, then, do I happen to turn to you, since this is an out-of-the-way matter for you? How indeed? Because it is something colonial.” The letter is preserved in Herzl’s diaries, and the sentence is the closest thing in his corpus to a self-classification.
Der Judenstaat also places the project inside the civilizational vocabulary of the 1890s. Writing of Palestine, Herzl states that the Jews “should there form a portion of a rampart of Europe against Asia, an outpost of civilization as opposed to barbarism.” The sentence is addressed to European governments whose consent the plan required, and it is quoted here as the text reads.
The third instance is Jabotinsky’s essay “The Iron Wall (We and the Arabs),” published in Rassvet on 4 November 1923, twenty-one years after the Rhodes letter and nineteen after Herzl’s death. The essay uses “colonisation” as its working term throughout and states the position directly: “Zionist colonisation must either stop, or else proceed regardless of the native population.” Jabotinsky adds the general proposition beneath it: “Every native population in the world resists colonists as long as it has the slightest hope of being able to rid itself of the danger of foreign settlement.”
Between the three texts the vocabulary is consistent and the register is not. Herzl’s appears in a prospectus and a fundraising letter; Jabotinsky’s appears in a polemic written to argue that the movement should stop denying what it was doing.
Is it often said both men openly described Zionism as colonial?
It is, and on the quotations the claim holds: the phrases above appear in the texts as quoted, and Derek Penslar’s peer-reviewed 2005 article in the Journal of Israeli History treats Herzl’s colonial idiom as a documented feature of the writing rather than a later imputation. The base rate is the part the quotations do not supply.
“Colonization” in 1890s German and Russian administrative usage was the ordinary word for organized agricultural settlement, and it named enterprises with no relation to Zionism. Baron Maurice de Hirsch founded the Jewish Colonization Association in London in 1891, five years before Der Judenstaat, to move Russian Jews to farm settlements in Argentina and Brazil. Herzl was arguing against that body’s method, not borrowing its politics: Der Judenstaat faults the existing settlement attempts for proceeding by gradual infiltration rather than by charter. The word was shared; the plan was the point of dispute.
The distinction matters because two different claims travel under one quotation. The first is lexical: both men used the word. That is checkable in the texts and is not contested by the scholars who reject the settler-colonial reading. The second is analytical: that the usage settles what the enterprise was. The second does not follow from the first, and the period usage of the colonial vocabulary is the subject of its own dispute among historians.
Jabotinsky’s 1923 usage is a harder case for the lexical defence, because he is not describing an agricultural method. He is describing a relationship between settlers and an existing population, and he is describing it in the terms a critic would use. “There can be no voluntary agreement between ourselves and the Palestine Arabs,” he writes, and the sentence carries no administrative sense of the word at all. On Jabotinsky the vocabulary and the analysis converge; on Herzl they can be separated, and the separation is where the historiography splits.
Which institutions did Herzl build on the chartered-company model?
The Jewish Colonial Trust was registered in London in 1899 as a joint-stock company under English company law, resolved on at the Second Zionist Congress in 1898 and capitalized by shares sold to Zionist supporters. Its Palestine operating subsidiary, the Anglo-Palestine Company, was established in 1903 and opened in Jaffa, becoming the movement’s banking arm.
The name follows the era’s convention and so does the structure. A chartered colonial company of the period was a joint-stock body incorporated in a metropolitan capital, raising private capital for settlement and infrastructure in a territory where it expected to hold rights granted by a sovereign. Der Judenstaat proposes exactly that shape, and Herzl’s own qualifier is the significant clause: the company “cannot exercise sovereign power.” No sovereign power was ever conferred on it.
The Jewish National Fund was established by the Fifth Zionist Congress at Basel in 1901 on a different principle, as a land-purchase fund holding acquired land in perpetuity for the movement rather than reselling it. Purchase from willing sellers and charter from a sovereign are distinct mechanisms, and the movement built institutions for both in the space of three years.
Structural resemblance is a fact about incorporation, and it is recorded in company registers that a reader can check. It is not by itself a finding about what the founders intended by it, and the incorporation documents contain no statement of intent beyond their commercial purposes.
Which sovereign did Herzl ask to authorize the settlement?
The sovereign Herzl pursued longest was the Ottoman Sultan Abdulhamid II, ruler of the territory itself. Herzl travelled to Constantinople in June 1896, negotiated through intermediaries for five years, and was received in audience by the Sultan in May 1901. His standing offer was financial: Zionist help in consolidating the Ottoman public debt in exchange for a charter permitting organized Jewish settlement in Palestine. No charter was issued.
The European approach came second and concerned a different territory. In 1902 and 1903 Herzl petitioned the British Colonial Office under Joseph Chamberlain for El Arish, in the Sinai peninsula under Egyptian administration, as a settlement area adjacent to Palestine. A survey commission went out in early 1903 and the scheme collapsed over the water it would have required from the Nile. Penslar’s 2005 article treats the sequence as characteristic: Herzl approached whichever authority he judged able to grant a charter, and the German Kaiser, the Ottoman court and the British Cabinet were each approached in turn.
The distinction between what was proposed and what was granted is the load-bearing one on this rung. During Herzl’s lifetime, which ended in July 1904, no state issued a charter of any kind to the Zionist Organization, and the institutions of 1899 to 1903 operated as ordinary companies and funds under English law without a grant of territorial rights. The Balfour Declaration, the first statement of support from a great power, was issued on 2 November 1917, thirteen years after Herzl’s death, and the Mandate that followed was awarded by the League of Nations rather than negotiated by the movement.
The claim that Herzl sought a European power to charter the project is therefore accurate in outline and incomplete in sequence. He sought a charter from whoever might grant one, and the first and most persistent target was the Ottoman state, which is also the state that then held the land.
Where else did Herzl propose to settle Jews, and who voted?
At the Sixth Zionist Congress in Basel in August 1903, Herzl presented a British offer of territory in East Africa, and the delegates recorded a division of roughly 295 in favour to 178 against, with a bloc of abstentions, on sending an investigatory commission. The Congress protocols are the record; the vote authorized an inquiry, not a settlement.
The episode is the clearest documented instance in which the enterprise was treated by its own founder as detachable from a particular territory. The offer originated with the British Colonial Office, following the failed El Arish approach of the previous year, and Herzl presented it as a night shelter rather than a substitute for Palestine. The opposition came chiefly from the Russian delegations, whose members walked out of the hall after the vote. The Seventh Zionist Congress, meeting in 1905 after Herzl’s death, rejected the East Africa territory outright and resolved that the movement would pursue Palestine alone.
Two readings sit on the same record and both are supported by it. On one, a movement willing to vote on East Africa was, in its founding decade, a settlement scheme in search of a charter and a territory, which is the ordinary shape of a colonization enterprise. On the other, the 1905 rejection and the walkout show a movement whose membership refused the substitution precisely because the territorial claim was not interchangeable, which is not the ordinary shape of one.
What the vote establishes without dispute is that the question was live enough inside the movement to be put to a recorded ballot in 1903, and that the answer changed within two years. Any account of what the founders thought they were building has to hold both dates.
What did Jabotinsky say colonization required to succeed?
Jabotinsky’s answer, in Rassvet on 4 November 1923, is a single mechanism: settlement “can proceed and develop only under the protection of a power that is independent of the native population: behind an iron wall, which the native population cannot breach.” The power he had in mind was the British Mandatory administration, and the essay was written to argue that the movement should say so.
The essay separates prediction from prescription more cleanly than its later reputation suggests, and the distinction is worth holding. The predictive claim is anthropological and general: “Every native population in the world resists colonists as long as it has the slightest hope of being able to rid itself of the danger of foreign settlement.” Jabotinsky extends the point to the specific case in terms that concede the strength of the attachment he is describing, writing that the Arabs of Palestine “look upon Palestine with the same instinctive love and true fervour that any Aztec looked upon his Mexico or any Sioux upon his prairie.” On his own account this is not a moral failing of the Arab population but the ordinary conduct of any living nation.
The prescriptive claim follows from the predictive one: because “there can be no voluntary agreement between ourselves and the Palestine Arabs,” the movement should stop seeking one and secure the settlement by force it does not itself have to supply. In the companion essay “The Ethics of the Iron Wall,” published in Rassvet later the same month, Jabotinsky addressed the moral objection rather than the tactical one, arguing that the Jewish claim to a homeland did not depend on Arab agreement to be valid.
Shlomi’s 2025 article in the Journal of Modern Jewish Studies on Jabotinsky’s nationalism and international diplomacy places the essay inside his diplomatic strategy, in which alliance with an imperial power was the instrument through which a movement without a state could act. On that reading the iron wall is a statement about who would hold the ring, and it is why the essay is read as the most explicit statement any founder made about the relationship between settlement and force.
Did either man expect the existing population to consent?
They answered in opposite directions, and the divergence is documented in texts written twenty-one years apart. Jabotinsky wrote in 1923 that consent was unobtainable in principle. Herzl, in his 1902 novel Altneuland and in his 1899 correspondence, wrote as though it were obtainable, and expected the existing inhabitants to welcome the enterprise for the prosperity it would bring.
The correspondence is the sharper evidence. In March 1899 Yusuf Diya al-Khalidi, a former mayor of Jerusalem and Ottoman deputy, wrote warning that the country was inhabited and that the plan would meet resistance. Herzl replied that no one intended to remove anyone: it was the well-being and individual wealth of the existing population that the movement would increase by bringing in its own. Penslar’s 2005 article treats the reply as characteristic of Herzl’s position rather than as diplomacy, and reads Altneuland, where the Arab engineer Rashid Bey explains that the newcomers enriched his people, as its fictional statement.
Against that sits the diary entry of 12 June 1895, in which Herzl wrote of spiriting the penniless population across the border by procuring employment for it in the transit countries while denying it employment in the new one. The entry is a private note written before the movement existed, it names no territory, and its weight is contested: Penslar’s article is built around the reading of exactly this passage and treats it as one line in a diary that also records the opposite intention. It is the single most quoted sentence in the debate and it appears nowhere in Herzl’s published programme.
Jabotinsky’s position leaves no comparable ambiguity, and he wrote in 1923 that Zionists who claimed the Arabs would be reconciled by material benefit were either deceiving themselves or their audience. Two founders separated by a generation therefore held incompatible views of the same population, and the record of early contact between Zionist settlers and Palestinians sits between them.
Where do historians disagree about reading these texts as settler colonialism?
Neither man used the phrase “settler colonialism,” which as an analytic category was consolidated in academic work from the 1990s onward, most influentially by Patrick Wolfe, whose 2006 article “Settler colonialism and the elimination of the native” in the Journal of Genocide Research supplied the framework’s most cited formulation. The category is applied to the texts; it is not found in them.
The settler-colonial reading holds that the label follows from structure rather than vocabulary: a movement that sought a charter from an imperial power, incorporated a land-acquisition company in London, and planned permanent agricultural settlement in an inhabited territory fits Wolfe’s definition regardless of what its founders called it, and Jabotinsky’s 1923 essay states the settler-native relation in almost the framework’s own terms.
The objections are named and specific. Penslar’s 2005 article argues that the standard colonial model requires a metropole on whose behalf settlers act, and that the Zionist movement had none: its members were leaving the European states rather than dispatched by them, and Herzl’s repeated failure to obtain a charter is evidence of a movement without an imperial sponsor rather than one operating as an imperial instrument. The Stroum Center for Jewish Studies at the University of Washington sets out the same objection alongside the persecution and refugee context of the migration, and the organization Third Narrative publishes a standing argument that the category imports a colonizer-colonized structure the case does not have.
Both sides are working from the same quotations, which is why the dispute has not been settled by finding more of them. The disagreement is over what the quotations establish: whether a founder’s self-description in the idiom of his period fixes the character of the enterprise, or whether the structural test (metropole, sponsoring state, extractive relation) governs and the vocabulary is period furniture. The texts of 1896, 1902 and 1923 are consistent with both readings and are cited by both.
Where does colonizer vocabulary appear in measured discourse today?
Becker, Ascone and Troschke (2022, peer-reviewed) coded 1,504 comments on the Facebook pages of leading British media outlets during the May 2021 escalation and found 26.9% antisemitic against an IHRA-based scheme. Within that antisemitic set, 7.7% denied Jewish self-determination and 5.2% used an apartheid analogy, the two categories closest to the colonial framing.
The same study coded 1,500 French comments at 12.6% antisemitic and 1,520 German comments at 13.6%, so the UK share is the highest of the three and the category shares above belong to the UK antisemitic subset only, not to all comments. The authors also report that thread context was needed to infer the antisemitic meaning in 38.7% of the UK antisemitic comments, which bears directly on how a historical framing is read: the same word does different work depending on what it answers.
Jikeli and colleagues (2022, peer-reviewed) coded an expert-annotated corpus of 4,016 English-language tweets and found 11.2% of conversations containing “Jews” antisemitic across January 2019 to August 2020, with 15% of the antisemitic “Jews” tweets fitting the IHRA paragraph on denial of Jewish self-determination. These are shares within keyword-drawn samples, not shares of the platform.
On the association between the two attitude sets, Harber, Bulska, Malloy and Vila (2026, peer-reviewed, abstract-sourced) report across three preregistered studies that conspiracy beliefs implicating Israel and Zionists mediated the association between antisemitism and anti-Israel attitudes, with the model accounting for over 55% of the variance in anti-Israel attitudes, while conspiracy beliefs about Jews unrelated to Israel did not. The finding is correlational and the authors state it as such.
None of this measures what a Herzl or Jabotinsky quotation does when it circulates. No study in the published literature isolates the founders’ texts as a variable, and the figures above measure the prevalence of framings in coded corpora, not the effect of a historical citation on anyone.
Methodology
This report reads primary texts and organizational records, and it measures discourse where discourse is what a source measured. It does not evaluate whether the enterprise was or was not colonial; that is the disputed question the sources themselves divide on, and the division is reported in the section above.
Source types, in the order the Institute weights them. Primary records: Der Judenstaat (1896) in its standard English translation, Herzl’s diaries including the January 1902 letter to Cecil Rhodes and the 12 June 1895 entry, Jabotinsky’s “The Iron Wall (We and the Arabs)” in Rassvet, 4 November 1923, the Zionist Congress protocols for 1901, 1903 and 1905, and the registration records of the Jewish Colonial Trust (1899) and the Anglo-Palestine Company (1903). Peer-reviewed research: Penslar (2005), the Journal of Modern Jewish Studies (2025), Wolfe (2006), Becker and colleagues (2022), Jikeli and colleagues (2022) and Harber and colleagues (2026), the last carried from its abstract. Research-center publications: the Stroum Center for Jewish Studies at the University of Washington, and Third Narrative, each named for the position it holds.
Limitations. Both bodies of text are read here in translation: Der Judenstaat was written in German and its English versions differ in wording, and “The Iron Wall” was written in Russian and circulates in more than one translation, so quotations should be checked against the edition cited. Published tabulations of the 1903 Congress vote differ on the number of abstentions, which is why the division is given as approximate and the two directional counts are given as recorded. No published count exists of how often either man used the word colonization across his corpus; the evidence available is the dated instance, quoted, and this report uses it that way. Herzl’s 1895 diary entry is contested in its meaning and is reported with the contest attached. The measured discourse figures in the final section describe the prevalence of framings in coded samples during specified windows and carry the authors’ own correlational caveats; they are not evidence about the historical question the earlier sections address.
Conclusion
So did the founders describe their project in colonial terms? On the texts, yes, and the words are theirs: a “Jewish Chartered Company” modelled on a land-acquisition company in 1896, “something colonial” in a letter to Cecil Rhodes in January 1902, and colonisation that “must either stop, or else proceed regardless of the native population” in Rassvet on 4 November 1923.
The same record holds more than the quotations do. The company registered in London in 1899 never received the sovereign grant its name evokes, and the sovereign pursued longest was the Ottoman ruler of the territory itself. A congress that voted roughly 295 to 178 in 1903 to investigate East Africa reversed itself in 1905. And the two men most often quoted together answered the central question in opposite directions: Herzl told a former mayor of Jerusalem in 1899 that the existing population would be enriched, and Jabotinsky wrote in 1923 that no population in the world has ever consented to settlement and that the movement should stop pretending otherwise. The vocabulary is shared across the two; the analysis is not.
That gap is where the argument now lives, and it is not an academic one. The founders’ sentences travel today as evidence in a live dispute, and the measured corpora show what the neighbouring framings look like when they arrive: 26.9% of coded UK comments during one escalation registering as antisemitic, with self-determination denial and the apartheid analogy inside that share. A quotation that is accurate in a scholarly footnote is the same string of words in a comment thread. What changes between the two is everything the founder wrote around it, and that context is precisely what a circulating quotation strips. Which raises the question this record sharpens without settling: when a movement’s own century-old vocabulary becomes the shortest available argument about it, what happens to the reader who only ever meets the fragment?
Frequently Asked Questions
Why does the word “colonization” appear in so many Jewish organizational names of the period?
Because it was the standard administrative term for organized agricultural settlement in nineteenth-century German, Russian and English usage. Baron Maurice de Hirsch’s Jewish Colonization Association was founded in London in 1891 to move Russian Jews to farms in Argentina and Brazil, five years before Der Judenstaat, and it had no connection to the Zionist Organization.
What is the difference between a chartered company and an ordinary company here?
A chartered colonial company held rights granted by a sovereign over a territory. The Jewish Colonial Trust, registered in London in 1899, was an ordinary joint-stock company under English company law, and Herzl’s own text is explicit that the proposed company “cannot exercise sovereign power.” No sovereign granted it any.
Did Herzl ever obtain the charter he sought?
No. He negotiated in Constantinople from June 1896, was received by Sultan Abdulhamid II in May 1901, and petitioned the British Colonial Office over El Arish in 1902 and 1903. He died in July 1904 without a charter from any state, and the Balfour Declaration followed on 2 November 1917.
Who wrote the “iron wall” essay and where was it published?
Ze’ev Jabotinsky, in the Russian-language weekly Rassvet, on 4 November 1923, with a companion essay, “The Ethics of the Iron Wall,” in the same publication later that month. The first argues the tactical position, the second the moral one.
When did the term “settler colonialism” enter scholarship?
It consolidated as an analytic category in academic work from the 1990s onward, with Patrick Wolfe’s 2006 article in the Journal of Genocide Research supplying its most cited formulation. Neither Herzl, who died in 1904, nor Jabotinsky, writing in 1923, used the phrase.
Which historians dispute the settler-colonial reading, and on what grounds?
Derek Penslar, in his 2005 Journal of Israeli History article, argues the model requires a metropole on whose behalf settlers act and that the movement had none. The Stroum Center for Jewish Studies at the University of Washington and the organization Third Narrative publish the same structural objection alongside the persecution context of the migration.
Sources
- Becker, M. J., Ascone, L., and Troschke, H., 2022. Antisemitic Comments on Facebook Pages of Leading British, French, and German Media Outlets. Humanities and Social Sciences Communications. DOI 10.1057/s41599-022-01337-8. Peer-reviewed.
- Harber, R. P., Bulska, D., Malloy, T. E., and Vila, J., 2026. Antisemitism, Conspiracy Beliefs, and Anti-Israel Attitudes. American Psychologist. DOI 10.1037/amp0001635. Peer-reviewed, abstract-sourced.
- Herzl, T., 1896. Der Judenstaat (The Jewish State), English translation. Project Gutenberg edition. Primary text.
- Herzl, T., 1895 to 1904. The Complete Diaries of Theodor Herzl, including the entry of 12 June 1895 and the letter to Cecil Rhodes of January 1902. Primary text.
- Jabotinsky, Z., 1923. The Iron Wall (We and the Arabs). Rassvet, 4 November 1923. Primary text.
- Jabotinsky, Z., 1923. The Ethics of the Iron Wall. Rassvet, November 1923. Primary text.
- Jikeli, G., Axelrod, D., Fischer, R. K., Forouzesh, E., Jeong, W., Miehling, D., and Soemer, K., 2022. Differences Between Antisemitic and Non-Antisemitic English Language Tweets. Computational and Mathematical Organization Theory. DOI 10.1007/s10588-022-09363-2. Peer-reviewed.
- Shlomi, 2025. Jewish nationalism and international diplomacy: Ze’ev Jabotinsky and the Revisionist Zionists at the League of Nations. Journal of Modern Jewish Studies, Routledge, volume 24, issue 2, online 13 March 2025. DOI 10.1080/14725886.2025.2476533. Peer-reviewed journal.
- Penslar, D. J., 2005. Theodor Herzl and the Palestinian Arabs: Myth and Counter-Myth. Journal of Israeli History, vol. 24, no. 1, pp. 65 to 77. Peer-reviewed.
- Sixth Zionist Congress, 1903. Congress protocols, Basel, August 1903. Primary record.
- Dowty, 2022. Is Israel a settler colonial state? Stroum Center for Jewish Studies, University of Washington, 10 November 2022. jewishstudies.washington.edu/israel-hebrew/why-israel-isnt-a-settler-colonial-state. Academic centre essay, not peer-reviewed.
- Third Narrative, n.d. Does Zionism = Settler Colonialism? thirdnarrative.org. Organizational publication.
- Wolfe, P., 2006. Settler Colonialism and the Elimination of the Native. Journal of Genocide Research, vol. 8, no. 4, pp. 387 to 409. Peer-reviewed.