Is Zionism an Indigenous rights movement?

The Knesset’s 2018 Basic Law: Israel as the Nation-State of the Jewish People grounds the state in the Jewish people’s “natural, cultural, religious and historical right to self-determination,” while five named scholarly works from 2018 to 2025 divide two to three: Ukashi’s 2018 essay argues for an Indigenous reading of Zionism and Dowty’s 2022 essay against the settler-colonial label, while three works published from 2023 to 2025 read the movement critically. Is that return or arrival? On Israel’s own official count, the Central Bureau of Statistics recorded 449,000 Jews in the land in 1939, 3% of 16.6 million worldwide, and 7.1 million in 2024, of whom 5.7 million were born there. Before 1948 the national premise itself was contested inside Jewish institutions, by a rabbinical conference in 1885, the Bund in 1901 and a Jewish Cabinet minister in 1917.

Key Findings

• Israel’s 2018 Basic Law rests the state on a “natural, cultural, religious and historical right to self-determination” and declares in clause 1(c) that its realization “is exclusive to the Jewish People” (Knesset, 2018).
• The Law of Return of 5 July 1950 deems “every Jew who was born in this country” to be a person who has come to it as an oleh, a legal status the Knesset’s English text defines as “a Jew immigrating, into Israel” (Knesset, 1950, amended 1970).
• On Israel’s own official count, 449,000 Jews lived in the land in 1939, 3% of a world Jewish population of 16.6 million, against 7.1 million, 45% of 15.7 million, at the beginning of 2024 (Central Bureau of Statistics, 2025).
• A rabbinical conference declared in November 1885 that its members were “no longer a nation, but a religious community” (Pittsburgh Rabbinical Conference, 1885); the Bund’s Fourth Congress in April 1901 called political Zionism’s territorial aim “utopian and unrealisable” insofar as it is meant to concentrate the whole Jewish people or a significant part of it (Bund, 1898 to 1901).
• Ze’ev Jabotinsky wrote on 4 November 1923 that “Colonisation can have only one aim, and Palestine Arabs cannot accept this aim” (Jabotinsky, 1923); five named scholarly works from 2018 to 2025 split two to three between readings that argue for indigeneity or against the settler-colonial label and critical ones (Ukashi, 2018; Dowty, 2022; Ricarte, 2023; Dana, 2024; Locker-Biletzki, 2025).

Does Israel’s own law frame Zionism as an indigenous right?

The Knesset’s 2018 Basic Law declares in clause 1(b) that Israel is “the nation state of the Jewish People in which it realizes its natural, cultural, religious and historical right to self-determination.” The Knesset publishes the English text and labels the translation unofficial. The category the state enacted is a national right of self-determination resting on a historical right, the closest the statute book comes to a legal statement of the claim.

The surrounding clauses specify how that right operates. Clause 1(c) reads: “The realization of the right to national self-determination in the State of Israel is exclusive to the Jewish People.” Clause 5 provides that the State “shall be open to Jewish immigration, and the ingathering of the exiles.” Clause 7 reads: “The State views the development of Jewish settlement as a national value, and shall act to encourage and promote its establishment and consolidation.”

Three of those terms bear directly on the indigeneity question. “Historical right” grounds the claim in the past relationship of a people to a land. “Ingathering of the exiles” describes Jewish immigration as the return of a dispersed people rather than as the arrival of newcomers. “Jewish settlement” uses the vocabulary of building new communities. The law holds all three together in one instrument, enacted in 2018.

The language clause sets out the relation to the other population. Clause 4(a) reads “Hebrew is the language of the State,” clause 4(b) gives Arabic “a special status in the State,” and clause 4(c) preserves “the status given to the Arabic language in practice, before this basic-law came into force.” Clause 3 declares that “The complete and united Jerusalem is the capital of Israel.”

The Basic Law contains no equality clause and no individual-rights clause. That is a feature of the enacted text, not a finding about how the state treats anyone, and the question of exclusivity is examined separately in the Institute’s reading of the nation-state law and the Jewish supremacy claim.

What the instrument settles is the legal category. The State of Israel, through its legislature, framed the Jewish claim to the land as a national right of self-determination with historical grounds, exercised exclusively by the Jewish people, implemented through immigration and settlement. Whether that national claim also qualifies as an indigenous one is the question the remaining sections take up, beginning with who holds that it does.

Who describes Zionism as an indigenous movement, and since when?

Ukashi, writing in the peer-reviewed journal Peace and Conflict Studies in May 2018, argued for reconsidering Zionism as an Indigenous emancipation movement, against imperial and settler-colonial characterisations. The article is an interpretive essay rather than a research study, and its author states his conclusion in the introduction and describes his purpose as an intervention in a live argument.

It is often said that Zionism is the indigenous rights movement of the Jewish people. Ukashi’s essay is a named, dated, peer-reviewed statement of that position, and it is cited here as one side of a dispute. It measured nothing, and no figure in this report rests on it.

The indigenous reading shares a premise with the state’s founding text: a historical chain linking the Jewish people to the land and to the modern instruments that recognised that link. The Declaration of the Establishment of the State of Israel, read in Tel Aviv on 14 May 1948 and signed by the 37 members of the People’s Council, David Ben-Gurion first, proclaimed “THE ESTABLISHMENT OF A JEWISH STATE IN ERETZ-ISRAEL, TO BE KNOWN AS THE STATE OF ISRAEL.”

The Declaration’s own recitals set out a chain of modern instruments behind that act: the First Zionist Congress of 1897, convened by Theodor Herzl; the Balfour Declaration of 2 November 1917; the League of Nations Mandate; and the United Nations General Assembly resolution of 29 November 1947, whose recognition of the Jewish people’s right to its state the Declaration calls “irrevocable.” These recitals are the founding text’s own historical narrative, cited as what it asserts and not as independent historical findings.

Two features of that founding narrative matter for the indigeneity question. First, its modern links are political acts, a congress, a government letter, an international mandate and a recorded resolution, so the claim it advances is framed as a recognised national right. Second, the Declaration addressed the land’s Arab population directly, appealing “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 founding text therefore names two populations, the Jewish people whose state it establishes and the Arab inhabitants it addresses. The indigenous framing, as Ukashi argues it, concerns the first. The critical framings set out in the final section concern the relation between the two. The earliest of the founding links the Declaration recites, the 1917 letter and the Mandate that carried it, set the international terms on which that relation was administered.

What did the 1922 Mandate commit Britain to establishing?

The Mandate for Palestine, approved by the Council of the League of Nations in 1922, made Britain responsible in Article 2 “for placing the country under such political, administrative and economic conditions as will secure the establishment of the Jewish national home.” The same article added a duty of “safeguarding the civil and religious rights of all the inhabitants of Palestine, irrespective of race and religion.” Its category was a national home administered by a mandatory power.

The Mandate’s preamble made the Mandatory “responsible for putting into effect the declaration originally made on November 2nd, 1917, by the Government of His Britannic Majesty, and adopted by the said Powers.” That declaration, sent by Foreign Secretary Arthur James Balfour to Lord Rothschild as a letter, is a single sentence of 67 words, quoted here whole because either half alone changes it:

“His Majesty’s Government view with favour the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people, and will use their best endeavours to facilitate the achievement of this object, it being clearly understood that nothing shall be done which may prejudice the civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine, or the rights and political status enjoyed by Jews in any other country.”

The sentence says “a national home,” not “a state” and not “the national home.” It carries two safeguards: one for “existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine,” limited to their “civil and religious rights,” and one for Jews in “any other country.” The covering letter called it a “declaration of sympathy with Jewish Zionist aspirations” that had been “submitted to, and approved by, the Cabinet.”

The two texts are not interchangeable. The letter reads “view with favour” and “nothing shall be done which may prejudice”; the Mandate’s preamble restates it as “in favor of the establishment” and “nothing should be done which might prejudice.” The letter was a British government statement, not a treaty; its legal force came through the Mandate. Both are quoted here from the Avalon Project transcription at Yale Law School.

Article 4 gave the national home an institutional partner: “An appropriate Jewish agency shall be recognised as a public body for the purpose of advising and co-operating with the Administration of Palestine.”

Read together, the instruments describe a people with a recognised claim to a national home in a country whose existing communities held protected civil and religious rights. The vocabulary is national and administrative: a national home, a mandatory power, a Jewish agency, the inhabitants of Palestine. The Mandate set no boundary for the home and carried no population figure, and it delegated its establishment to an outside power, the arrangement Jabotinsky invoked by name in 1923.

Why does Israeli law count native-born Jews as immigrants?

The Knesset’s Law of Return, passed on 5 July 1950, provides in section 4 that “every Jew who was born in this country, whether before or after the coming into force of this Law, shall be deemed to be a person who has come to this country as an oleh under this Law.” The statute folds birth in the land and arrival from abroad into one legal status of return.

The operative grant is section 1, quoted from the English text of the Law published by the Knesset: “Every Jew has the right to come to this country as an oleh.” A translator’s note attached to it defines the terms: “aliya means immigration of Jews, and oleh (plural: olim) means a Jew immigrating, into Israel.” The English pages are scans from the series Laws of the State of Israel and are marked neither official nor unofficial.

The defined status is the statute’s central device. A Jew arriving from abroad is an oleh. Under section 4, so is a Jew born in the country, before 1950 or after. The law does not create a separate category for Jews whose families never left; it deems them to have come, placing the native-born and the immigrant inside one legal relationship to the land.

The 1950 text also set limits. Section 2(b), as enacted in 1950, granted an oleh’s visa to “every Jew who has expressed his desire to settle in Israel, unless the Minister of Immigration is satisfied that the applicant” is “engaged in an activity directed against the Jewish people” or “is likely to endanger public health or the security of the State.” A 1954 amendment followed, and the page as printed is the enacted wording, not the wording in force today.

For the indigeneity question, the statute is a record of how the state encoded the claim. The Basic Law of 2018 calls immigration “the ingathering of the exiles”; the Law of Return of 1950 makes that ingathering a right of “every Jew” and treats Jewish birth in the land as equivalent to it. Both describe a return of a people to its land in legal form. The Law carries no number of any kind, so the scale of that return belongs to the bureau that counts it.

What share of the world’s Jews lived in the land in 1939?

Israel’s Central Bureau of Statistics recorded in 2025 that 449,000 Jews lived in the land in 1939, 3% of a world Jewish population of 16.6 million, on the eve of the Second World War. The figure is Israel’s own official statistic. Four decades after the First Zionist Congress, the population the movement addressed lived overwhelmingly elsewhere.

The same release gives the count on the eve of statehood: 650,000 Jews in the land in 1948, 6% of a world Jewish population that had fallen to 11.5 million. Between those two dates the world count dropped by 5.1 million, the release’s own framing of the Holocaust years.

At the beginning of 2024 the Bureau counted 7.1 million Jews living in Israel, 45% of a world Jewish population of 15.7 million. Of those 7.1 million, 5.7 million were born in Israel and 1.4 million abroad, including 1.0 million born in Europe or America and 275,000 born in Africa.

The two ends of the series describe different populations, and the indigeneity dispute often turns on which one is meant. In 1939 the people in question was a world population of 16.6 million, of whom 3% lived in the land. In 2024 the Jewish population of Israel was majority native-born, with 5.7 million of its 7.1 million born in the country, the people the Law of Return deems to have come as olim.

The counts carry a method note the release states itself. Jewish population figures for every country other than Israel use a “core” Jewish population definition drawn from the source the release cites, the American Jewish Year Book 2023 published through the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, rather than from Bureau collection. A different definition of who counts as Jewish would move the world totals, and therefore the shares.

The series establishes the base rate for any claim about the movement’s population: political Zionism drew a people living mostly outside the land, and its state now holds a Jewish population most of whose members were born in it.

Which Jewish bodies rejected Zionism’s national claim before 1948?

The Pittsburgh Rabbinical Conference of November 1885 declared in article five of its Declaration of Principles: “We consider ourselves no longer a nation, but a religious community, and therefore expect neither a return to Palestine, nor a sacrificial worship under the sons of Aaron, nor the restoration of any of the laws concerning the Jewish state.”

The clause predates the First Zionist Congress of 1897 by nearly 12 years, and its middle limb places “the Jewish state” in the register of ancient Temple restoration, not the modern state. The text is published today by the Central Conference of American Rabbis, a successor body founded in 1889. Its Columbus Platform of 1937 affirmed “the obligation of all Jewry to aid in its upbuilding as a Jewish homeland,” a reversal traced in the Institute’s reading of how Jewish identity is tied to the land.

The Bund, the General Jewish Workers’ Union in Lithuania, Poland and Russia, adopted a resolution on Zionism at its Fourth Congress in April 1901. The Central Committee’s printed report gives it in full; in the Institute’s working translation from the Russian:

“The Congress considers Zionism a reaction of the bourgeois classes against antisemitism and against the abnormal legal position of the Jewish people. The Congress finds the ultimate aim of political Zionism, obtaining a territory for the Jewish people, to be, insofar as that territory would hold a small part of the people, a matter of no great importance that does not resolve the ‘Jewish question’, and, insofar as it is meant to concentrate the whole Jewish people or even a significant part of it, utopian and unrealisable. The Congress considers that Zionist agitation inflames national feeling and may hinder the development of class consciousness. As for the cultural activity of certain Zionist groups, the Congress regards it as it regards any legal activity.”

In a separate decision, the same congress resolved that Zionists must “in no case” be admitted to its economic or political organisations.

E. S. Montagu, Secretary of State for India, circulated War Cabinet paper G.T. 1868 on 23 August 1917, writing “as the one Jewish Minister in the Government” against a draft British declaration on Palestine. He set out principles including “1. I assert that there is not a Jewish nation” and “3. I deny that Palestine is to-day associated with the Jews or properly to be regarded as a fit place for them to live in.” The paper is one minister’s argument against a draft, and its second page, where those principles appear, was read from a relayed scan of the same print.

How did Jabotinsky describe Zionism and the Arab population in 1923?

Ze’ev Jabotinsky, in “The Iron Wall (We and the Arabs),” published in the Berlin weekly Rassvet on 4 November 1923, described the enterprise as colonisation: “Colonisation can have only one aim, and Palestine Arabs cannot accept this aim.” He referred to the Arab population as “the native population” and argued that settlement could proceed only “behind an iron wall, which the native population cannot breach.”

The central passage reads in full: “Zionist colonisation must either stop, or else proceed regardless of the native population. Which means that it 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.”

Jabotinsky placed the enterprise inside a general category. He invited readers to “consider all the precedents with which they are acquainted, and see whether there is one solitary instance of any colonisation being carried on with the consent of the native population. There is no such precedent.” He drew the conclusion directly: “There can be no voluntary agreement between ourselves and the Palestine Arabs. Not now, nor in the prospective future.”

He presented this as description rather than programme: “That is our Arab policy; not what it should be, but what it actually is, whether we admit it or not. What need, otherwise, of the Balfour Declaration? Or of the Mandate?” The question ties his account to the instruments of 1917 and 1922, which delegated the national home’s establishment to an outside power.

A second essay, “The Ethics of the Iron Wall,” appeared in Rassvet a week later, on 11 November 1923, answering the charge that the first was immoral. The two essays are distinct and are routinely conflated; every quotation above is from the first. The English is a translation, quoted from the typescript held and published by the Jabotinsky Institute in Israel under archive reference A 1 - 7/14.

The essays are evidence of what Jabotinsky wrote in 1923, as founder of the Revisionist current within Zionism. They are not evidence that his account of the Arab response was accurate, and not evidence of the views of other Zionist currents. For the indigeneity question, they record that a founding Zionist leader’s own dated text used the vocabulary of colonisation for the enterprise and of a “native population” for the people already on the land. The wider founding vocabulary is examined in the Institute’s reading of Herzl, Jabotinsky and the colonial vocabulary.

Where do scholars split between indigenous and settler-colonial readings?

Five named works published between 2018 and 2025 mark the scholarly split: two argue for the indigenous reading or against the settler-colonial one, Ukashi (2018) and Dowty (2022), and three read the movement critically, Ricarte (2023), Dana (2024) and Locker-Biletzki (2025). None of the five measured anything, and each is an argument on one side of a live dispute.

Ukashi (2018), in the peer-reviewed journal Peace and Conflict Studies, argues for reconsidering Zionism as an Indigenous emancipation movement, against imperial and settler-colonial characterisations. Dowty (2022), in an essay for the Stroum Center for Jewish Studies at the University of Washington, argues against the settler-colonial characterisation of Israel. The essay is signed faculty commentary, not peer-reviewed, and the page displays the title “Is Israel a settler colonial state?”

Ricarte (2023), in a chapter of a Palgrave Macmillan volume, reads the founding Zionist documents through dehumanization. She writes that “Early signs of a narrative that dehumanizes the ‘other’ by implicitly or explicitly denying identity and community to the autochthonous populations of Palestine can be seen in the first documents associated with the Zionist Movement.” Of the Bilu manifesto of 1882, Herzl’s “The Jewish State” of 1896 and the Basle Declaration of 1897, she writes: “Those perspectives either deliberately ignore the existence of several communities that lived in Palestine at that time or imply that their will over the land is not worth consideration.” That is her stated reading.

Dana (2024), in the peer-reviewed journal Middle East Critique, argues that Israeli settler colonialism should be classed as exceptional within settler-colonial studies, citing its Zionist ideological roots, the absence of a conventional metropole and its reliance on Western alliance. The journal states that it publishes analyses drawing on “heterodox theoretical perspectives.” Locker-Biletzki (2025), in the Review of Radical Political Economics, published by SAGE for the Union for Radical Political Economics, argues about settler-colonialism and capital across 1920 to 1956. The publisher types the piece as a refereed meeting report within a themed symposium.

No body publishes a tally of the readings across the literature, so the split is a list of named positions, not a measured distribution.

Methodology and limitations

The evidence comes from three source types. Primary and official records: the Basic Law of 2018 and the Law of Return of 1950 with its 1970 amendment, both from English texts published by the Knesset; the Declaration of the Establishment of the State of Israel of 1948; the Balfour Declaration of 1917 and the Mandate for Palestine of 1922; the Central Bureau of Statistics release of 2025; and party and movement documents from 1885, 1901 and 1917. Peer-reviewed and scholarly works: Ukashi (2018), Ricarte (2023), Dana (2024) and Locker-Biletzki (2025). One academic centre essay, Dowty (2022), is not peer-reviewed. No source here is a preprint.

The legal and historical texts measure nothing; they record what a legislature enacted, a government declared or a body resolved, on a stated date. The only measured figures are the Bureau’s population counts, which are Israel’s own official statistics; its figures for countries other than Israel use the core Jewish population definition from the American Jewish Year Book 2023.

Several texts carry translation and transmission limits. The Knesset labels its Basic Law translation unofficial; its Law of Return pages are scans from Laws of the State of Israel, marked neither way. The 1950 text of section 2(b) is the wording as enacted in 1950, not necessarily the law in force; the 1970 amendment’s footnote records a 1954 amending statute that the Knesset series does not carry. The Declaration exists in two Israeli government English texts that differ on one word, “citizens” in the Knesset text and “inhabitants” in the Foreign Ministry text; quotations here are from the Knesset text. The Balfour and Mandate texts are the Avalon Project transcription. The Pittsburgh Platform is quoted from the Central Conference of American Rabbis transcription; no facsimile of the 1885 printing was located. The Bund resolution is the Institute’s working translation from the Russian documentary edition published by ROSSPEN in 2010. Pages 2 and 3 of Montagu’s paper were read from a relayed scan whose first page matches The National Archives’ own image word for word. Jabotinsky’s essays are quoted in English translation from the Jabotinsky Institute typescript.

The scholarly works are interpretive and contain no figures. Ricarte’s chapter is cited only for her reading of the founding documents.

Conclusion

So is Zionism a return or an arrival? The record holds both vocabularies at once, and each belongs to a named author on a dated page. Israel’s Basic Law of 2018 grounds the state in a “historical right,” and the Law of Return of 1950 deems every Jew born in the country to have come as an oleh, making birth and arrival one legal status.

The rest of the record fills in the portrait. The Mandate of 1922 created a national home administered by an outside power, alongside the rights of “all the inhabitants of Palestine.” On Israel’s own official count, 3% of the world’s Jews lived in the land in 1939, and 5.7 million of the 7.1 million counted in 2024 were born there. Jewish bodies rejected the national premise in 1885, 1901 and 1917, and the Reform movement reversed in 1937. Jabotinsky called the enterprise colonisation in 1923 and the people on the land “the native population.” The scholarship divides two works to three.

The indigenous framing and the colonial one are not drawn from different archives; they are drawn from the same texts, read for different things. A statute that calls immigration a homecoming and a founder who called it colonisation were describing one movement. If a people can be indigenous to a land while the movement that returned most of it there named its own method in colonial terms, which of those descriptions should govern how a society understands the 5.7 million who were simply born in the country?

Frequently Asked Questions

Does the United Nations have a formal definition of indigenous peoples?

The United Nations Department of Economic and Social Affairs states that the UN has adopted no single formal definition of indigenous peoples. Its working description emphasises historical continuity with pre-colonial societies, distinctness from the now-dominant society, a non-dominant position and attachment to ancestral territory. Applying that description to Zionism therefore depends on which elements a writer weighs.

Who besides Jews gains rights under the Law of Return?

Section 4A, inserted by the Knesset in 1970, vests the rights of a Jew under the Law in “a child and a grandchild of a Jew, the spouse of a Jew, the spouse of a child of a Jew and the spouse of a grandchild of a Jew.” It excludes “a person who has been a Jew and has voluntarily changed his religion.” The extension reaches non-Jewish relatives, so the population entitled to return is wider than the population the Law defines as Jewish.

How does Israeli law define who is a Jew?

Section 4B of the Law of Return, added in 1970, defines a Jew “for the purposes of this Law” as “a person who was born of a Jewish mother or has become converted to Judaism and who is not a member of another religion.” The same amendment inserted section 3A(b) into the Population Registry Law, giving “Jew” “the same meaning as in section 4B” for registry purposes. The two clauses together carry the definition beyond immigration into civil registration.

Did the Bund adopt an anti-Zionist programme at its founding in 1897?

Arkady Kremer, the founding congress’s convener, wrote in a 1922 memoir that “Questions of programme and tactics were not discussed” and that no formulated resolutions were adopted. A 1909 memoir by A. Mutnik describes resolutions passed without debate, so the participants’ accounts differ. The resolution on Zionism dates to the Fourth Congress of April 1901.

Was Montagu’s memorandum a response to the Balfour Declaration?

Montagu’s paper is dated 23 August 1917 and answers Lord Rothschild’s letter of 18 July 1917 and a reply then still in draft. The Balfour Declaration was sent on 2 November 1917, about ten weeks later, in wording the memorandum could not have seen. It argued the policy would be “anti-Semitic in result,” stating that he was not suggesting the Government “is deliberately anti-Semitic.”

What did the 1948 Declaration promise non-Jewish residents?

The Declaration of 14 May 1948 pledged that the state “will ensure complete equality of social and political rights to all its citizens irrespective of religion, race or sex,” in the Knesset’s English text. The Foreign Ministry’s English text reads “inhabitants” in place of “citizens”; both translate a Hebrew original. The same text pledged freedom of “religion, conscience, language, education and culture.”

Where do most Jews outside Israel live today?

The Central Bureau of Statistics counted 6.3 million Jews in the United States at the beginning of 2024, 40% of the world Jewish population, on the core definition it draws from the American Jewish Year Book 2023. France followed with 438,000 and Canada with 400,000. Israel and the United States together held 85% of the world total.

Sources

• Bund, 1898 to 1901. Founding-period documents 4, 5, 6 and 9, including the Central Committee’s report on the Fourth Congress (August 1901), in Bund: Dokumenty i materialy, 1894-1921, ed. Yu. Amiantov, K. Lyashenko, I. Rozental, Z. Peregudova and Z. Tikhonova. Moscow: ROSSPEN, 2010; Electronic Library of Historical Documents, Russian Historical Society. https://docs.historyrussia.org/ru/nodes/106-otchet-tsk-bunda-o-iv-sezde-bunda-v-aprele-1901-g-avgust-1901-g. Primary record (party documents in a scholarly documentary edition).
• Central Bureau of Statistics, 2025. On the Occasion of Holocaust Day, 2025. Central Bureau of Statistics, Israel. https://www.cbs.gov.il/he/mediarelease/DocLib/2025/124/11_25_124e.pdf. Official record.
• Dana, T., 2024. Notes on the ‘Exceptionalism’ of the Israeli Settler-Colonial Project. Middle East Critique, Routledge, pp. 165 to 172. DOI 10.1080/19436149.2024.2342733. Peer-reviewed.
• Dowty, 2022. Is Israel a settler colonial state? Stroum Center for Jewish Studies, University of Washington, 10 November 2022. https://jewishstudies.washington.edu/israel-hebrew/why-israel-isnt-a-settler-colonial-state/. Academic centre essay, not peer-reviewed.
• His Majesty’s Government, 1917. The Balfour Declaration, letter of 2 November 1917, and its restatement in the Mandate for Palestine (1922). Avalon Project, Yale Law School. https://avalon.law.yale.edu/20th_century/balfour.asp and https://avalon.law.yale.edu/20th_century/palmanda.asp. Primary and official record.
• Jabotinsky, Z., 1923. The Iron Wall (We and the Arabs), and The Ethics of the Iron Wall. Rassvet, Berlin, 4 and 11 November 1923; English typescript, Jabotinsky Institute in Israel, archive reference A 1 - 7/14. en.jabotinsky.org. Primary political text.
• Knesset, 1950, amended 1970. Law of Return, 5710-1950, and Law of Return (Amendment No. 2), 5730-1970. https://main.knesset.gov.il/EN/about/history/documents/kns1_return_eng.pdf and https://main.knesset.gov.il/EN/about/history/documents/kns7_return_eng.pdf. Official record.
• Knesset, 2018. Basic Law: Israel as the Nation-State of the Jewish People. https://main.knesset.gov.il/EN/activity/documents/BasicLawsPDF/BasicLawNationState.pdf. Official record.
• Locker-Biletzki, 2025. Settler-Colonialism and Empire-Building in Palestine/Israel, 1920 to 1956. Review of Radical Political Economics, SAGE Publishing for the Union for Radical Political Economics. DOI 10.1177/04866134251322919. Peer-reviewed meeting report (symposium conference paper).
• Montagu, E. S., 1917. The Anti-Semitism of the Present Government. War Cabinet paper G.T. 1868, 23 August 1917. The National Archives, Kew, CAB 24/24/71 and CAB 21/58 folio 218. https://discovery.nationalarchives.gov.uk/details/r/D7640371. Primary and official record.
• Pittsburgh Rabbinical Conference, 1885. Declaration of Principles (“The Pittsburgh Platform”), with the Guiding Principles of Reform Judaism (“The Columbus Platform”), 1937. Published by the Central Conference of American Rabbis. https://www.ccarnet.org/rabbinic-voice/platforms/article-declaration-principles/ and https://www.ccarnet.org/rabbinic-voice/platforms/article-guiding-principles-reform-judaism/. Primary historical text.
• Provisional Government of Israel, 1948. Declaration of the Establishment of the State of Israel. Official Gazette Number 1, 14 May 1948; Knesset English text. https://main.knesset.gov.il/en/about/pages/declaration.aspx. Primary and official record.
• Ricarte, J., 2023. Before the Peace Process: Historical Roots of a Dysfunctional Relationship. In The Impact of Protracted Peace Processes on Identities in Conflict, Palgrave Macmillan, pp. 97 to 116. DOI 10.1007/978-3-031-16567-2_4. Scholarly book chapter.
• Ukashi, 2018. Zionism, Imperialism, and Indigeneity in Israel/Palestine: A Critical Analysis. Peace and Conflict Studies 25(1), article 7. https://nsuworks.nova.edu/pcs/vol25/iss1/7. Peer-reviewed journal (interpretive essay).