Zionism’s founders used the word themselves. Theodor Herzl wrote to Cecil Rhodes in 1902 that his enterprise was “something colonial,” three years after the Zionist Organization incorporated its financial arm in London under the name Jewish Colonial Trust, and Ze’ev Jabotinsky’s essay “The Iron Wall,” published in 1923, calls the movement a “colonisation adventure.” The same movement’s founding instruments carry a second vocabulary in the same decades: the Basel Program of 1897 asks for “a home in Palestine secured under public law,” and the League of Nations Mandate of 1922 recites “the historical connection of the Jewish people with Palestine.” What divides the readings of that record is less what the founders wrote than what the word colonization did in the years they wrote it.
Key Findings
- Theodor Herzl’s letter to Cecil Rhodes, dated 1902, describes the Zionist enterprise with the words “it is something colonial,” the most direct surviving statement of the framing by the movement’s founder.
- The Zionist Organization’s own bank was incorporated in London in 1899 as the Jewish Colonial Trust, and Arthur Ruppin, who headed the organization’s Palestine Office, published a book in 1926 titled The Agricultural Colonization of the Zionist Organization in Palestine.
- Ze’ev Jabotinsky’s “The Iron Wall,” 1923, states that “Zionist colonisation must either stop, or else proceed regardless of the native population,” while arguing in the same essay that the movement is not comparable to conquest undertaken for profit.
- The Jewish Colonization Association was chartered in London in 1891 by Baron Maurice de Hirsch to settle Jewish agricultural colonists in Argentina, Brazil and Ottoman Palestine, evidence that “colonization” named organized agricultural settlement across several continents in the same decade.
- Among 1,504 comments on leading British media Facebook pages coded by Becker, Ascone and Troschke (2022, peer-reviewed), 26.9% were classified antisemitic, and within that antisemitic subset 7.7% denied Jewish self-determination and 5.2% used the apartheid analogy.
What did Zionism’s founders call their own project?
Theodor Herzl’s 1902 letter to Cecil Rhodes describes the enterprise in four words: “it is something colonial.” The same vocabulary sits in the movement’s institutional record as well as its correspondence, from the Jewish Colonial Trust, incorporated in London in 1899 as the Zionist Organization’s financial arm, to the title of Arthur Ruppin’s 1926 book, The Agricultural Colonization of the Zionist Organization in Palestine.
Herzl’s 1896 pamphlet Der Judenstaat sets out the mechanism the later institutions carried out: settlement organized and financed through a chartered company, with land acquired and colonists placed under a corporate structure rather than by individual migration. The Jewish Colonial Trust of 1899 is that structure, incorporated under English company law and named accordingly.
Jabotinsky’s 1923 essay “The Iron Wall” is the most explicit of the later statements. It calls Zionism a “colonisation adventure” and states that “Zionist colonisation must either stop, or else proceed regardless of the native population.” Ruppin, who headed the Zionist Organization’s Palestine Office and directed land purchase and settlement planning, used “agricultural colonization” as the ordinary administrative description of that work in his 1926 title. Max Nordau, Herzl’s closest collaborator at the early Congresses, is quoted in 1905 speaking of “Jewish colonization” and rejecting any suggestion of entering Palestine by stealth.
Four separate registers therefore carry the word: private correspondence in 1902, a corporate charter in 1899, a polemical essay in 1923, and an administrative monograph in 1926. Several of these quotations, including the Rhodes letter and the Nordau passage, survive in this record through secondary compilations that reproduce the wording without reproducing the original publication or archival reference, so the wording is dated and attributed here as those compilations carry it.
Is it often said the founders admitted to colonialism?
It is often said that Zionism’s founders openly admitted to colonialism, and on the vocabulary the claim holds: the word is theirs, in their own letters, essays and corporate names between 1891 and 1926. The reading built on that vocabulary is argued in named academic venues, among them Ilan Pappé's 2006 book The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine and his 2008 article in the South Atlantic Quarterly, published by Duke University Press.
That concession should be made without qualification before anything else is said. No reconstruction is needed to find the language, no inference from conduct, no hostile paraphrase. A reader who wants to know whether the founders described their project in colonial terms can read the incorporation name of the movement’s bank and Herzl’s own sentence to Rhodes.
The scholarship that develops the point is identifiable and dated. Pappé's South Atlantic Quarterly article, volume 107, number 4, 2008, argues the settler-colonial reading directly from the movement’s founding period. A 2025 article, “Settler-Colonialism and Empire-Building in Palestine/Israel, 1920 to 1956,” published by SAGE, DOI 10.1177/04866134251322919, applies the framework to the Mandate and early state decades. A 2026 article published by Taylor and Francis, “Zionism’s flipside: a reconsideration of settler colonialism,” revisits the same framework and its limits. These are the venues where the argument is made in print, and they can be read and checked.
What the founders’ vocabulary establishes on its own is narrower than the full claim. It establishes that the word colonization was in use inside the movement, in its own documents, in the years the movement was built. Whether that word in 1899 carried the content the same word carries after the mid twentieth century is a separate question, and it is the question the remaining sections take up.
What did colonization mean in 1890s European usage?
The Jewish Colonization Association was chartered in London in 1891 by Baron Maurice de Hirsch to settle Jewish agricultural colonists in Argentina, Brazil and Ottoman Palestine, three destinations on two continents under one word. The charter predates the Zionist Organization by six years and had no connection to a claim of sovereignty in any of the three territories.
The usage recurs administratively. Ruppin’s 1926 title, The Agricultural Colonization of the Zionist Organization in Palestine, describes land purchase, planting, irrigation and the placement of farming households. In the period’s technical vocabulary, a “colony” was a planned agricultural settlement and “colonization” was the activity of establishing one, whether in Entre Ríos province, in the Galilee, or in the Canadian prairie.
The Stroum Center for Jewish Studies at the University of Washington, in its essay “Is Israel a settler colonial state?”, sets out the distinction that follows from this: the descriptive nineteenth-century sense of organized settlement and the later analytical sense of colonialism, meaning a metropolitan state’s subordination of a territory and its population, are not the same term doing the same work. The narrowing and moral loading of the second sense is a mid twentieth-century development, tied to the decolonization period and the scholarship that accompanied it.
That dating matters for how a quotation is read. A sentence written in 1902 and a sentence written in 1970 using the identical English word are not automatically making the identical claim, and neither the founders’ usage nor the later usage can be assumed to govern the other. What the record fixes is the wording and the year. What it does not fix, on its own, is the content the writer intended the word to carry, and no source in this report measures that intent.
Which empire did the founders seek a charter from?
Herzl sought a chartered concession from an imperial patron in writing, repeatedly and unsuccessfully, across roughly seven years: from Ottoman Sultan Abdulhamid II between 1896 and 1902, from Kaiser Wilhelm II in meetings at Constantinople and Jerusalem in 1898, and from the British Colonial Office, whose East Africa proposal he put to the Sixth Zionist Congress in 1903.
The 1902 letter to Cecil Rhodes belongs to that campaign. Rhodes was the founder of the British South Africa Company and the architect of chartered settlement in southern Africa, and Herzl approached him while soliciting British backing. The Jewish Colonial Trust, incorporated in London in 1899, was likewise built inside a metropolitan legal system, under English company law, and the charter model it embodied was the standard instrument of European overseas enterprise in that decade.
The imperial instruments that followed are official records. The Balfour Declaration of 2 November 1917 committed the British government to view with favour the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people. The League of Nations Mandate for Palestine, confirmed in 1922, placed the territory under British administration and wrote the national-home commitment into its terms.
The Stroum Center for Jewish Studies states the objection that runs against the analogy at this point: no metropolitan state ever held the Jewish settlement in Palestine as its own possession, and the movement had no home country to which resources or sovereignty returned. Herzl’s approaches were requests to empires, made from outside them, by a movement whose constituency was a European minority population rather than a metropolitan one. Both halves of that record are documented: the founders sought imperial charters, and no empire ever claimed the resulting settlement as its colony.
Did the founders describe the Jewish return as indigenous?
The Basel Program, adopted by the First Zionist Congress in 1897, states the aim as “a home in Palestine secured under public law,” and the movement’s subsequent instruments ground that aim in prior connection rather than in acquisition. The League of Nations Mandate of 1922 recites “the historical connection of the Jewish people with Palestine” in its preamble, the phrase on which the restoration framing rests.
Israel’s Declaration of the Establishment of the State, read in Tel Aviv on 14 May 1948, opens on origin in the land rather than on settlement, and then recites its own historical chain: the First Zionist Congress convened by Theodor Herzl in 1897, the Balfour Declaration of 2 November 1917, the League of Nations Mandate, and the United Nations General Assembly resolution of 29 November 1947, which the text calls “irrevocable.” The Declaration proclaims “THE ESTABLISHMENT OF A JEWISH STATE IN ERETZ-ISRAEL, TO BE KNOWN AS THE STATE OF ISRAEL,” in the English translation published by the Knesset, which the Knesset itself labels unofficial.
Both vocabularies therefore appear inside the same movement within the same decades, and often within a few years of one another. The Basel Program of 1897 and the Jewish Colonial Trust of 1899 are separated by two years and one Congress. The Mandate preamble of 1922 and Jabotinsky’s essay of 1923 are separated by one year.
Neither vocabulary displaced the other in the founding period, and no document in this record reconciles them. That coexistence is a fact about the corpus rather than a resolution of it, and it is the reason a report can quote the founders on colonization and quote the founders on historical connection without either quotation being selective. A fuller account of what the movement’s texts and the research define Zionism as sits alongside this one.
Did any founder use the word and reject the analogy?
Jabotinsky’s “The Iron Wall,” 1923, does both inside a single essay: it calls Zionism a “colonisation adventure” and states plainly that the settlement must proceed regardless of the native population, while simultaneously arguing that the movement is not comparable to conquest undertaken for profit or plunder. The essay is the clearest instance in the corpus of the word being used and the analogy being refused by the same author on the same page.
Herzl’s Der Judenstaat, 1896, frames the enterprise as relief of Jewish distress in Europe: the argument proceeds from persecution, exclusion and the failure of emancipation to secure Jewish safety, and reaches settlement as the remedy. The chartered-company mechanism is the instrument in that text, not the purpose.
Ahad Ha’am’s essay “Truth from Eretz Israel,” 1891, is the internal criticism from the same period. Written after a visit to the existing colonies, it faults the settlers’ conduct toward the Arab population of the country and their assumptions about it, and it circulated inside the movement rather than against it. The character of that early contact between settlers and the existing population is documented separately in the colony records.
Read together, these three texts show that the founders’ corpus is not a set of admissions on one side and denials on the other. The same authors use the administrative vocabulary of colonization, state the movement’s purpose as refuge from European persecution, and record moral objections to settler conduct, sometimes within a few pages. A report that quotes only the colonization language and a report that quotes only the refuge language are both quoting the record accurately and both quoting it partially.
Where do historians disagree about the settler-colonial reading?
The disagreement is located precisely, and it is not about the wording. Ilan Pappé's 2006 book The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine and his 2008 South Atlantic Quarterly article argue the structural settler-colonial reading; the Stroum Center for Jewish Studies at the University of Washington argues that the absence of a metropole, the refugee character of the migration and the founders’ stated aims break the analogy.
The structural reading treats colonization as a description of what a movement does over time, not of what its participants believe about themselves, so the founders’ motives are not decisive within it. The 2025 SAGE article “Settler-Colonialism and Empire-Building in Palestine/Israel, 1920 to 1956” applies that framework across the Mandate and early state period, and the 2026 Taylor and Francis article “Zionism’s flipside: a reconsideration of settler colonialism” revisits its scope and its limits.
The dispute over 1948 is where the two poles are furthest apart and best documented. Benny Morris, in the 2004 second edition of The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem Revisited, published by Cambridge University Press and built from Israeli military and state archives, carries roughly 700,000 as the displacement figure and attributes the exodus to multiple causes varying by locality and phase, rejecting both a single master expulsion plan and the claim that departures were voluntary. Pappé's 2006 book argues the displacement was planned ethnic cleansing. A peer-reviewed article in the Israel Law Review, published by Cambridge University Press, records that about 400 Palestinian towns and villages were destroyed in the course of the military operations, with the expulsion and flight of about 80% of the residents of the areas on which the state was established.
Those two figures measure different things, one a total displaced and the other a share of a defined regional population, and they are not interchangeable. What the named scholars dispute is intent and structure, not the existence of the underlying documents.
Does the colonizer framing track measured antisemitic attitudes?
Becker, Ascone and Troschke (2022, peer-reviewed) coded 1,504 comments on the Facebook pages of leading British media outlets reacting to the May 2021 escalation and classified 26.9% as antisemitic against an IHRA-based scheme.
The same study coded 1,500 French comments and 1,520 German comments using the same scheme, finding 12.6% of the French comments and 13.6% of the German comments antisemitic.
Within the UK comments coded antisemitic, the study reports the share carrying each frame: 39.8% an “evil” stereotype, 27.9% Israel’s sole guilt, 8.1% child murder or blood libel, 7.7% denial of Jewish self-determination, 5.2% the apartheid analogy and 4.2% the Nazi analogy. These shares are of the antisemitic subset, not of all comments coded, and the categories are not mutually exclusive. The authors also report that thread context was needed to infer the antisemitic meaning in 38.7% of the UK antisemitic comments.
Harber, Bulska, Malloy and Vila (2026, peer-reviewed) report across three preregistered studies that a model in which conspiracy beliefs implicating Israel and Zionists mediate the link between antisemitism and anti-Israel attitudes accounted for over 55% of the variance in anti-Israel attitudes, while conspiracy beliefs about Jews unrelated to Israel did not mediate and a general conspiratorial mindset did not explain the results. The design is correlational and the authors state that.
Two distinct things are being measured across this report, and they should not be collapsed. The founders’ vocabulary is a fact about a corpus of texts written between 1891 and 1926. The comment shares above are a fact about a coded sample of 4,500 social media comments in 2021. Nothing in Becker and colleagues measures the historical usage, and nothing in the historical usage predicts a comment share.
Methodology and limitations
This report assembles four kinds of evidence. Primary texts of the Zionist movement and its institutions, quoted with their publication year: Herzl’s Der Judenstaat (1896), his 1902 letter to Cecil Rhodes, the Basel Program (1897), Jabotinsky’s “The Iron Wall” (1923), Ruppin’s The Agricultural Colonization of the Zionist Organization in Palestine (1926), and Ahad Ha’am’s “Truth from Eretz Israel” (1891). Corporate and official records: the Jewish Colonization Association charter (London, 1891), the incorporation of the Jewish Colonial Trust (London, 1899), the Balfour Declaration (2 November 1917), the League of Nations Mandate for Palestine (1922), and Israel’s Declaration of the Establishment of the State (14 May 1948). Peer-reviewed and university-press scholarship, named and dated in the body. Peer-reviewed measurement of present-day discourse and attitudes, from Becker, Ascone and Troschke (2022) and Harber, Bulska, Malloy and Vila (2026).
Three limitations bear on the reading. First, several of the founding-era quotations, including the Rhodes letter and the Nordau passage, are carried here as secondary compilations reproduce them; those compilations give the wording and the year without reproducing the original publication or archival reference, and this report does not assert an archival location it has not seen. Second, the founding texts were written in German, Hebrew, Russian and French, and every quotation here is an English translation; the Knesset labels its own English text of the 1948 Declaration unofficial, and the Israeli Ministry of Foreign Affairs publishes a differently worded English translation of one clause of the same document. Third, no source in this report measures what any founder privately understood the word colonization to mean, and no method exists in the cited literature for recovering that.
The attitudes findings in the final section are correlational, as their authors state, and they measure coded comment samples and survey respondents in 2021 and later, not the historical corpus. The historical sections and the measurement section answer different questions and are not joined by any tested pathway.
Where the literature disagrees, both poles are named: Pappé (2006, 2008) and the SAGE (2025) and Taylor and Francis (2026) articles on one side, Morris (2004) and the Stroum Center for Jewish Studies on the other, with the point of disagreement identified in the body as intent and structure rather than wording.
Conclusion
Were the founders aware of what they were doing when they used the word? The record answers the first half without ambiguity and leaves the second half open. Herzl wrote “it is something colonial” in 1902, the movement’s bank was incorporated as the Jewish Colonial Trust in 1899, Jabotinsky wrote “colonisation adventure” in 1923, and Ruppin put “agricultural colonization” on a book cover in 1926. Nobody had to reconstruct that language from conduct; the founders wrote it down.
What sits beside it is equally documented. The Jewish Colonization Association had been chartered in London in 1891 to place Jewish farmers in Argentina and Brazil as well as Ottoman Palestine, so the word in that decade covered agricultural settlement on three continents. Herzl asked Abdulhamid II, Wilhelm II and the British Colonial Office for a charter and received none, and no metropolitan state ever held the settlement as a possession. The Basel Program of 1897 and the Mandate preamble of 1922 state the aim as a home and a historical connection. Jabotinsky used the word and rejected the analogy in the same essay. Ahad Ha’am objected to settler conduct in 1891 from inside the movement. Morris (2004) and Pappé (2006) read the same archives to opposite conclusions about intent in 1948.
Which leaves the part that reaches into the present. The vocabulary of 1902 now circulates in 2021 comment threads, where Becker, Ascone and Troschke coded 26.9% of 1,504 UK comments as antisemitic and found the denial of Jewish self-determination in 7.7% of that antisemitic subset and the apartheid analogy in 5.2%. A word can be historically the founders’ own and, a century later, be carrying a load its authors never assigned it. Whether the quotation from 1902 is functioning today as historical evidence or as something else is a question the dates alone cannot settle, and it is worth asking every time the sentence is reproduced.
Frequently Asked Questions
What was the Jewish Colonial Trust?
It was the Zionist Organization’s financial arm, incorporated in London in 1899 under English company law. Its purpose was to raise and hold capital for land acquisition and settlement in Palestine, the corporate instrument Herzl’s Der Judenstaat (1896) had described three years earlier as a chartered company.
Did Herzl consider territories other than Palestine?
Yes. Herzl put a British proposal for settlement in East Africa to the Sixth Zionist Congress in 1903, a proposal originating with the British Colonial Office. The episode is documented in the Congress record and is the clearest instance of the founders treating the destination as negotiable with an imperial government.
Who was Arthur Ruppin?
Ruppin headed the Zionist Organization’s Palestine Office, which directed land purchase and settlement planning, and published The Agricultural Colonization of the Zionist Organization in Palestine in 1926. His title is the administrative rather than polemical use of the word, describing land acquisition, planting and the placement of farming households.
What did Ahad Ha’am write in 1891?
His essay “Truth from Eretz Israel,” written after visiting the existing colonies, criticized the settlers’ conduct toward the Arab population of the country and their assumptions about it. It circulated inside the movement, which makes it the earliest internal objection in the corpus rather than an external critique.
How do scholars date the change in the word’s meaning?
The Stroum Center for Jewish Studies at the University of Washington places the narrowing of “colonialism” to its later legal and moral sense in the mid twentieth century, alongside decolonization and the scholarship that accompanied it. On that dating, the nineteenth-century administrative usage and the later analytical usage are separate terms sharing a spelling.
What do the founding instruments say about the existing Arab population?
Israel’s Declaration of the Establishment of the State, 14 May 1948, appeals “to the Arab inhabitants of the State of Israel to preserve peace and participate in the upbuilding of the State on the basis of full and equal citizenship and due representation in all its provisional and permanent institutions.” The Knesset labels its English text unofficial.
Sources
- Ahad Ha’am, 1891. Truth from Eretz Israel. Essay; primary text, carried through secondary compilations that do not reproduce the original publication record.
- Balfour Declaration, 2 November 1917. British Government. Official record.
- Basel Program, 1897. First Zionist Congress, Basel. Primary record.
- Becker, M., Ascone, L., 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, K., Bulska, D., Malloy, T., Vila, J., 2026. Antisemitism, Conspiracy Beliefs, and Anti-Israel Attitudes. American Psychologist. DOI 10.1037/amp0001635. Peer-reviewed.
- Herzl, T., 1896. Der Judenstaat. Primary text.
- Herzl, T., 1902. Letter to Cecil Rhodes. Primary correspondence, carried through secondary compilations that do not reproduce the original archival reference.
- Israel Law Review. 1948 Refugees. Cambridge University Press. cambridge.org/core/journals/israel-law-review. Peer-reviewed.
- Jabotinsky, Z., 1923. The Iron Wall. Essay; primary text, carried through secondary compilations that reproduce the wording and year.
- Jewish Colonial Trust, 1899. Incorporation under English company law, London. Primary corporate record.
- Jewish Colonization Association, 1891. Charter, London, established by Baron Maurice de Hirsch. Primary corporate record.
- League of Nations, 1922. Mandate for Palestine, preamble. Official record.
- Morris, B., 2004. The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem Revisited, 2nd edition. Cambridge University Press. ISBN 978-0521009676. Scholarly book.
- Nordau, M., 1905. Statement on Jewish colonization. Primary text, carried through secondary compilations that do not identify a publication record.
- Pappé, I., 2006. The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine. Oneworld Publications. Scholarly book.
- Pappé, I., 2008. South Atlantic Quarterly, vol. 107, no. 4. Duke University Press. read.dukeupress.edu/south-atlantic-quarterly/article-pdf/107/4/611/470173/SAQ107-04-01PappeFpp.pdf. Peer-reviewed.
- Provisional Government of Israel, 1948. Declaration of the Establishment of the State of Israel, 14 May 1948. Knesset English text, main.knesset.gov.il/en/about/pages/declaration.aspx. Official record; translation labelled unofficial by the publisher.
- Ruppin, A., 1926. The Agricultural Colonization of the Zionist Organization in Palestine. Primary text.
- Settler-Colonialism and Empire-Building in Palestine/Israel, 1920 to 1956, 2025. SAGE. DOI 10.1177/04866134251322919. Peer-reviewed.
- Sixth Zionist Congress, 1903. Proceedings on the East Africa proposal. Primary record.
- Stroum Center for Jewish Studies, University of Washington. Is Israel a settler colonial state? jewishstudies.washington.edu/israel-hebrew/why-israel-isnt-a-settler-colonial-state/. University research center publication.
- Zionism’s flipside: a reconsideration of settler colonialism, 2026. Taylor and Francis. DOI 10.1080/13531042.2026.2624932. Peer-reviewed.