The argument that Zionism was a colonial project, explained

The arguments that Zionism was a colonial project rest on dated records, beginning with land. Jewish ownership stood at 1.5 million of Mandate Palestine’s 26.3 million dunams by 1948, and Israeli statutes passed between 1950 and 1960 moved the land of displaced Arabs into state hands (Forman and Kedar, 2004, peer-reviewed). The other strands point to a British charter, the 1922 Mandate for Palestine, which bound the Mandatory to “secure the establishment of the Jewish national home.” They also point to Ze’ev Jabotinsky’s 1923 essay arguing that colonisation could proceed only “behind an iron wall,” and to a 1979 Israeli Supreme Court finding that a West Bank settlement decision was driven by “a Zionist worldview.” The question underneath is whether a movement of refugees and returnees can also be a colonial one, and the record pulls both ways: on its own reported totals, Israel’s Central Bureau of Statistics counts 5.7 million of the 7.1 million Jews in Israel at the start of 2024 as born in the country.

Key Findings

• Forman and Kedar (2004, peer-reviewed) record that 1.5 million of Mandate Palestine’s 26.3 million dunams were Jewish-owned by 1948. They also record that the 1953 Land Acquisition Law expropriated some 1.2 million dunams in its first year of operation.
• The Balfour Declaration of 2 November 1917 is one sentence of 67 words favouring “a national home for the Jewish people.” The Mandate for Palestine of 1922 made the Mandatory responsible “for putting into effect” that declaration (His Majesty’s Government, 1917).
• Ze’ev Jabotinsky wrote on 4 November 1923 that “Colonisation can have only one aim, and Palestine Arabs cannot accept this aim” (Jabotinsky, 1923, in English translation).
• Israel’s Supreme Court ruled 5 to 0 on 22 October 1979 in the Elon Moreh case. The leading opinion found that the ministers behind the settlement decision were “determinatively influenced by reasons stemming from a Zionist worldview” (Israeli Supreme Court, 1979). On 8 March 2000 the Court declared unlawful the allocation of state land for Katzir on a basis of discrimination between Jews and non-Jews (Israeli Supreme Court, 2000).
• Israel’s Central Bureau of Statistics (2025) records 5.7 million of the 7.1 million Jews in Israel at the beginning of 2024 as born in Israel. In 1948, 650,000 Jews lived there.

What are the main arguments that Zionism was a colonial project?

Forman and Kedar (2004, peer-reviewed) record 1.5 million of Mandate Palestine’s 26.3 million dunams as Jewish-owned by 1948. That figure is the baseline for the land strand of the colonial argument. Three further strands attach to dated records: an imperial charter in 1922, separate settlement and labour institutions from 1882, and West Bank settlement, which an Israeli court examined in 1979.

The imperial strand rests on the Mandate for Palestine, approved by the Council of the League of Nations. Its Article 2 made the Mandatory responsible “for placing the country under such political, administrative and economic conditions as will secure the establishment of the Jewish national home.” Article 4 provided that “An appropriate Jewish agency shall be recognised as a public body for the purpose of advising and co-operating with the Administration of Palestine.” The same Article 2 also charged the Mandatory with “safeguarding the civil and religious rights of all the inhabitants of Palestine, irrespective of race and religion.”

The land strand starts from ownership on the eve of statehood. Forman and Kedar (2004) record that Israel’s borders then enclosed 20.6 million dunams. About 13.5%, or 2.8 million dunams, of that land was under formal state or Jewish ownership. The colonial argument concerns how the rest changed hands, which the statutes of 1950 to 1960 record (see below).

The institutional strand draws on Gershon Shafir’s 1989 Cambridge University Press book on the period 1882 to 1914. Shafir locates the conflict’s origins in a struggle over land and labour markets on the frontier of Zionist settlement in the last years of Ottoman rule. He reads the First Aliyah as a drive for a settlement colony that became a plantation economy employing Palestinian Arab labour. He reads the Second Aliyah through the drive for the “conquest of labor.” Shafir’s book is interpretive historical sociology and counts nothing a rate could rest on.

The fourth strand carries the argument past 1948, to settlement in territory Israel took in 1967.

Who makes the colonial argument, and since when?

Ze’ev Jabotinsky called Zionist settlement colonisation in plain terms in the Berlin weekly Rassvet on 4 November 1923. On the movement’s own record, then, early Zionist writing did use the language of colonisation. The academic framework came later. Three named scholarly works developing it span 1989 to 2025 (Shafir, 1989; Dana, 2024; Locker-Biletzki, 2025).

Jabotinsky’s first essay, “The Iron Wall (We and the Arabs),” states the premise directly: “Colonisation carries its own explanation, the only possible explanation, unalterable and as clear as daylight to every ordinary Jew and every ordinary Arab. Colonisation can have only one aim, and Palestine Arabs cannot accept this aim.” Its central sentence ties settlement to outside force: “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.”

He presented this as description, not aspiration: “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?” A second essay, “The Ethics of the Iron Wall,” followed on 11 November 1923 and answered the charge that the first was immoral. Both are quoted here from the English typescript published by the Jabotinsky Institute in Israel. They are a translation from the Russian, and they record the views of the Revisionist current Jabotinsky led. The founders’ wider vocabulary is set out in the founding texts and charters.

Of the three scholarly works, Shafir (1989) supplies the periodisation and the land-and-labour framing. Tariq Dana of the Doha Institute for Graduate Studies argues in Middle East Critique (2024, peer-reviewed) that Israeli settler colonialism should be classed as exceptional within settler-colonial studies. He points to 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,” and Dana’s eight pages contain no figures.

Locker-Biletzki’s “Settler-Colonialism and Empire-Building in Palestine/Israel, 1920 to 1956” appeared in the Review of Radical Political Economics in 2025. It is a refereed conference paper in a themed symposium, published on behalf of the Union for Radical Political Economics, a body with an explicit political economy commitment. It measured nothing; the figures inside it belong to the authors it quotes.

Why does British imperial backing anchor the colonial argument?

The Balfour Declaration of 2 November 1917 is a single sentence of 67 words. It sits inside a letter from the Foreign Secretary, Arthur James Balfour, to Lord Rothschild (His Majesty’s Government, 1917). The colonial argument rests on what followed. The 1922 Mandate for Palestine wrote that policy into a League of Nations instrument, which gave an imperial government’s statement legal force.

The sentence in full reads: “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.” It says “a national home,” not “a state.” It carries two safeguard clauses, one for “existing non-Jewish communities” and one for Jews elsewhere.

The letter was a statement of British policy, not a treaty. Its legal force came through the Mandate, whose preamble made the Mandatory “responsible for putting into effect the declaration originally made on November 2nd, 1917.” The Mandate restates the policy in its own words, “in favor of the establishment,” and “nothing should be done which might prejudice,” where the letter reads “view with favour” and “nothing shall be done which may prejudice.”

The earliest Cabinet record reading the policy as a displacement is a War Cabinet paper of 23 August 1917, G.T. 1868, held by The National Archives (CAB 24/24/71). It was written by E. S. Montagu, Secretary of State for India, who wrote “as the one Jewish Minister in the Government.” He was answering a draft: Lord Rothschild’s letter of 18 July 1917 and a reply still unissued, ten weeks before the Declaration went out. His purpose clause reads in full: “I have chosen the above title for this memorandum, not in any hostile sense, not by any means as quarrelling with an anti-Semitic view which may be held by my colleagues, not with a desire to deny that anti-Semitism can be held by rational men, not even with a view to suggesting that the Government is deliberately anti-Semitic ; but I wish to place on record my view that the policy of His Majesty’s Government is anti-Semitic in result and will prove a rallying ground for Anti-Semites in every country in the world.”

On what the draft meant in Palestine, Montagu wrote: “I assume that it means that Mahommedans and Christians are to make way for the Jews.” The paper records one minister’s argument on one date. It is not a record of what the Cabinet decided or of what the issued Declaration meant.

Does the 1948 to 1960 land record fit a replacement argument?

The 1953 Land Acquisition Law expropriated some 1.2 million dunams in its first year of operation. That figure comes from Forman and Kedar’s (2004, peer-reviewed) archival legal history. The law was one statute in a chain the authors trace from 1948 to 1960, which moved the land of Palestinians displaced in 1948 into state hands. The replacement argument points to this chain.

The chain’s core is a pair of statutes: “The Knesset enacted the Absentee Property Law in March 1950 and the Development Authority (Transfer of Property) Law in July 1950.” Each statute fixed who could sell to whom. Forman and Kedar write: “The Absentee Property Law empowered the CAP to sell land to the DA alone, and the Development Authority Law empowered the DA to sell land to the state and the JNF.” CAP is the Custodian of Absentee Property, DA the Development Authority and JNF the Jewish National Fund.

The definition of an absentee ran from 29 November 1947, the date of the UN partition resolution. Forman and Kedar place it first in the 1948 Absentee Property Regulations, which the 1950 statute carried forward. Its third limb reached “a citizen of Palestine who abandoned his or her normal place of residence.” The authors record the result: “practically no Jewish Israelis, but tens of thousands of Arab Israeli citizens, were classified as absentees, assuming the paradoxical legal identity of ‘present absentee’.”

Within the 1953 total, 311,000 dunams came from private ownership, 304,700 of those from Arab owners, and 704,000 dunams were taken from the Custodian. These are subsets of the 1.2 million, not additions to it. The authors state that it is not clear how much of the 704,000 was present-absentee land. In late July 1960 the Knesset enacted three Israel Lands laws, which consolidated state, Development Authority and JNF holdings into one category under a single administration.

No total for Arab land lost appears in the record. Forman and Kedar write: “There is no one agreed-upon figure for the land that moved from Arab hands to the state in the wake of 1948.” No total for the land that passed through the absentee-property system is published either. The property dispute is set out further in the enacted texts and the claims filed.

Did an Israeli court test the Jewish Agency’s settlement role?

Israel’s Supreme Court, sitting as the High Court of Justice, ruled on 8 March 2000 in HCJ 6698/95 Ka’adan. The Court declared that “the State was not permitted, by law, to allocate state land to the Jewish Agency, for the purpose of establishing the communal settlement of Katzir on the basis of discrimination between Jews and non-Jews.”

The respondent named in the case descends from the body the Mandate’s Article 4 recognised in 1922 as “an appropriate Jewish agency.” In Ka’adan, the Israel Land Administration had allocated land in the Eron valley to the Jewish Agency. The Agency, through a cooperative society, had established Katzir, and the society granted membership only to Jews. The petitioners were an Arab couple who asked to build a home there.

President A. Barak, writing for the majority, held at paragraph 34 that “The State cannot escape its legal obligation to respect the principle of equality by using a third party that adopts a discriminatory policy. What the State cannot do directly, it cannot do indirectly.” At paragraph 31 he rejected the argument that the state’s Jewish character justified the allocation: “There is, therefore, no contradiction between the values of the State of Israel as a Jewish and democratic state and between the absolute equality of all of its citizens.” The same paragraph addresses the Law of Return: “members of the Jewish nation were granted a special key to enter,” but “once a person has lawfully entered the home, he enjoys equal rights with all other household members.”

The remedy was narrower than the declaration. Paragraph 40B required the State to consider the couple’s request “on the basis of the principle of equality.” The State was to decide “whether it can enable the petitioners, within the framework of the law, to build a house for themselves within the bounds of the Katzir communal settlement.” The Court did not order their admission.

Justice Y. Kedmi dissented on retrospectivity, not on equality. He wrote that the ruling “is forward-looking and does not provide grounds for re-examining acts performed in the past.” The equality principle in the judgment is judge-made: Basic Law: Human Dignity and Liberty contains no equality clause, and the Court reached the principle through the values of the State.

The separate-institutions strand points to a settlement body chartered under the Mandate. The domestic record shows Israel’s highest court ruling, in 2000, that the State could not allocate land through that body on a basis of discrimination between Jews and non-Jews.

What did Israel’s own court find drove a 1979 settlement?

Israel’s Supreme Court ruled 5 to 0 on 22 October 1979 in HCJ 390/79 Dweikat, the Elon Moreh case. It found the requisition of Palestinian-owned land for the settlement invalid as to the petitioners’ plots. Deputy President M. Landau found the Ministerial Committee and the cabinet majority “determinatively influenced by reasons stemming from a Zionist worldview as to the settling of the entire Land of Israel.”

The order under review, Order of Possession 16/79, covered about 700 dunams near Nablus. The seventeen petitioners owned about 125 dunams of that area, and the annulment reached their plots alone. The Court gave the state 30 days to remove the settlers and structures from those plots. A second order, covering the access road, stood, because no petitioner owned land under it.

The ruling turned on who initiated the decision. Landau wrote that “the process was inverted: the initiative came from the political echelons, which then reached out to the Chief of the General Staff for his professional opinion.” Applying a dominant-purpose test, he held that “the military consideration was subordinate to the primary, political decision to build the settlement.” He also gave an independent ground: a military administration “cannot create within its territory ‘facts on the ground’” intended “to exist past the end of the military rule.”

The judgment did not hold settlement unlawful as such. Landau accepted that requisition of private land for a civilian settlement “is potentially justified under Article 52 of the Hague Regulations,” where military needs in practice drove the decision. The Court left Article 49(6) of the Fourth Geneva Convention undecided. Justice A. Witkon wrote that the Convention “does apply, though, as noted above, it is not ‘justiciable’ in this Court.” These quotations come from the unofficial English translation published by the Cardozo Israeli Supreme Court Project; the Hebrew governs.

The settlements were later fixed into a signed instrument. Article XII(5) of the 1995 Interim Agreement between Israel and the PLO provides that “the Settlements” means, “in the West Bank the settlements in Area C.” Article XVII(1) excludes “settlements” from the Palestinian Council’s jurisdiction and lists them among the subjects deferred to permanent status talks (Israel and the PLO, 1995).

The post-1967 strand of the argument reads these records as continuity with pre-state settlement. The 1979 judgment supplies a domestic court’s finding of fact about one decision’s motive, decided under administrative law on one site’s record.

Does a native-born Jewish majority weaken the settler argument?

Israel’s Central Bureau of Statistics (2025) counts 5.7 million of the 7.1 million Jews living in Israel at the beginning of 2024 as born in Israel, roughly four in five. Those born abroad numbered 1.4 million. This is the Bureau’s own count of Israel’s population, and it is the figure set against the description of Israel as a settler society.

Of the 1.4 million born abroad, the Bureau records 1.0 million born in Europe or America and 275,000 in Africa. It does not separate Europe from the Americas in that line. On the eve of statehood in 1948, the same release records 650,000 Jews living in the country, 6% of a world Jewish population of 11.5 million (Central Bureau of Statistics, 2025).

The two figures support two readings. Growth from 650,000 in 1948 to 7.1 million in 2024 includes the immigration the colonial argument describes, and the 1.0 million born in Europe or America is the population the “European outpost” image refers to. The 5.7 million native-born are the reply: a majority with no other country of birth.

The 1950 Law of Return, in its text as enacted that year, treats birth and immigration as one status. Section 1 reads: “Every Jew has the right to come to this country as an oleh.” The translator glosses oleh as “a Jew immigrating, into Israel.” Section 4 provides 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” (Knesset, 1950). Under that section, the statute counts a native-born Jew as an immigrant.

What does the refuge argument point to in the record?

Israel’s Central Bureau of Statistics (2025) records world Jewry falling from 16.6 million in 1939 to 11.5 million in 1948. This is the demographic record behind the argument that Zionism was a movement of refuge rather than of colonisation. The same release records 449,000 Jews, 3% of world Jewry, living in the country in 1939.

The Bureau estimates that about 120,000 Holocaust survivors lived in Israel at the beginning of 2025. Of these, 30.3% immigrated in the wave of 1948 to 1951, 6.1% during 1933 to 1947 and 33.6% since the 1990s. The survivor population is not only European. The Bureau records 36.9% as born in Asian and African countries, including 16.8% in Morocco and 10.9% in Iraq, described in the release as “persons who underwent the Farhud pogrom.” All survivor figures are estimates, and the release warns that data for people aged 100 and over may include reporting errors.

The founding text frames the state’s origins as a documentary chain. The Declaration of the Establishment of the State of Israel, read on 14 May 1948, recites the First Zionist Congress of 1897, the Balfour Declaration of 2 November 1917, the League of Nations Mandate and the UN General Assembly resolution of 29 November 1947. It calls the recognition in that resolution “irrevocable” (Provisional Government of Israel, 1948). These recitals are the Declaration’s own historical narrative, not independent findings.

The refuge argument and the colonial argument cite the same two British instruments. In the colonial reading, the Balfour Declaration and the Mandate are evidence of imperial sponsorship. In the founding text, they are links in a chain of legitimacy. The Declaration also pledges, in the Knesset’s English text, “complete equality of social and political rights to all its citizens irrespective of religion, race or sex.” The Ministry of Foreign Affairs publishes the same sentence with “inhabitants.”

Which models do scholars offer in place of colonialism?

Three named alternatives to the colonial model appear across 25 years of scholarship. They are Sammy Smooha’s “ethnic democracy” (1997), Oren Yiftachel’s “ethnocracy” (1999) and Dowty’s 2022 essay arguing against the settler-colonial characterisation. Each defines Israel through its regime or its citizenship rather than through settlement.

Smooha’s archetype statement in Israel Studies (1997, peer-reviewed) defines the type as “a system that combines the extension of civil and political rights to individuals and some collective rights to minorities, with institutionalization of majority control over the state.” He separates it from three other types. It is not liberal, because the state recognises ethnic difference. It is not consociational, because the minority has no power-sharing. It is not Herrenvolk, because citizenship extends to all. His other cases include Northern Ireland from 1921 to 1972 and Malaysia since the early 1970s.

Yiftachel’s article in Constellations (1999, peer-reviewed) defines ethnocratic regimes as “states that maintain a relatively open government, yet facilitate a non-democratic seizure of the country and polity by one ethnic group.” His model is not a full replacement for the colonial one. He builds ethnocracy on three forces, the first of which is the formation of a (colonial) settler society. His comparators include Sri Lanka, Estonia and pre-1972 Northern Ireland.

The two frameworks answer each other in their own footnotes. Smooha’s footnote 22 cites Yiftachel’s 1993 critique of “ethnic democracy,” and Yiftachel’s footnote 37 cites Smooha’s 1997 article. Neither text uses the word “ethnostate.”

Dowty’s essay for the Stroum Center for Jewish Studies at the University of Washington, published 10 November 2022 under the title “Is Israel a settler colonial state?”, argues against the characterisation. It is signed faculty commentary, not peer-reviewed research. Further named arguments are compared in the named scholarship on the settler-colonial question.

Methodology and limitations

The evidence draws on three tiers. The primary and official records are:

• The Balfour letter and the Mandate, as transcribed by the Avalon Project at Yale Law School.
• War Cabinet paper G.T. 1868, held by The National Archives. Page 1 was read from the archive’s published image. The passage running onto page 2 was read from a relayed scan of the same print, whose first page matches the archive’s image word for word.
• Two Supreme Court judgments, quoted from English translations published by the Cardozo Israeli Supreme Court Project. The Hebrew governs, and the Elon Moreh translation misprints the date, which is given here as 22 October 1979.
• The 1995 Interim Agreement, in the text published by the Israeli Ministry of Foreign Affairs, a party to it.
• The Law of Return, from Knesset-hosted scans of the 1950 text as enacted.
• The Declaration of Independence, in the Knesset’s English text.
• A 2025 Central Bureau of Statistics release.

The peer-reviewed tier comprises Forman and Kedar’s archival legal history, two typological articles (Smooha, Yiftachel) and Dana’s interpretive article. Locker-Biletzki (2025) is a refereed conference paper. Shafir (1989) is a university-press book, verified from the publisher’s record and published reviews rather than from its pages, so nothing is quoted from it. Dowty (2022) is not peer-reviewed. Jabotinsky’s essays are quoted in English translation.

None of the scholarship measures a rate. The figures come from the Bureau and from Forman and Kedar, who report the 1953 dunam totals from the archival record. The Bureau’s figures for countries other than Israel use a “core” Jewish population definition from the American Jewish Year Book 2023. Its survivor figures are estimates for the beginning of 2025.

No agreed total exists for land that moved from Arab hands to the state after 1948, and no total for land passing through the absentee-property system is published. Forman and Kedar list others’ estimates, and none is attributed to them here. Whether the colonial category fits Zionism is a live dispute in the cited scholarship, with named authors on each side.

Conclusion

Can a movement of refugees and returnees also be a colonial one? The record holds evidence for both descriptions, often in the same documents.

The movement’s own Revisionist leader wrote “colonisation” in 1923 and tied it to “an iron wall” and to British backing. A 67-word British sentence became, through the 1922 Mandate, an obligation to “secure the establishment of the Jewish national home.” Statutes passed between 1950 and 1960 moved displaced Arabs’ land to the state, 1.2 million dunams in a single year under one law. In 1979 Israel’s own Supreme Court found a settlement decision driven by “a Zionist worldview.” Against these stand a world Jewry that fell from 16.6 million to 11.5 million between 1939 and 1948, and 5.7 million of Israel’s 7.1 million Jews born in the country. In 2000 the same court ruled that the State could not allocate land through the Jewish Agency on a basis of discrimination between Jews and non-Jews.

The Balfour Declaration and the Mandate appear in the founding text’s chain of legitimacy and in the colonial argument’s chain of evidence. If both arguments cite the same two documents, is the dispute about what those documents say, or about which of their clauses each side quotes?

Frequently Asked Questions

Is the Balfour Declaration a treaty?

No. It is a letter of 2 November 1917 conveying a declaration “submitted to, and approved by, the Cabinet,” a statement of British policy rather than an agreement between states (His Majesty’s Government, 1917). The letter asks Lord Rothschild to bring the declaration “to the knowledge of the Zionist Federation.”

Does the Oslo II Agreement say what share of the West Bank is Area C?

No. The 1995 Interim Agreement defines Areas A and B by red lines and shading on map No. 1, and Area C as the remainder (Israel and the PLO, 1995). The words “per cent” and “percent” appear once in the main Agreement, in Article IX on appointments, and never in relation to territory.

Who first used the term “ethnocracy”?

Not Yiftachel. His own footnote 15 states that the term “has appeared in previous literature,” citing Linz and Stepan (1996), Linz (1975) and Mazrui’s The Making of Military Ethnocracy (1975) (Yiftachel, 1999). His contribution was applying the term to Israel/Palestine in September 1999.

What did the 1970 amendment to the Law of Return change?

The Knesset passed Amendment No. 2 on 10 March 1970. Section 4B 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” (Knesset, 1970). Section 4A extends the same rights to a Jew’s child, grandchild and spouse, and to the spouses of a child and a grandchild.

Where were the Holocaust survivors living in Israel born?

The Central Bureau of Statistics (2025) records 60.7% as born in Europe, including 35.9% in the former USSR, 10.6% in Romania and 4.7% in Poland. These are estimates for the beginning of 2025.

What did Arab citizens tell Smooha’s 1995 survey about Zionism?

In Smooha’s September to October 1995 survey of 1,200 Arab citizens living within the pre-1967 borders, excluding East Jerusalem, 50.3% regarded Zionism as racist and 6.8% denied Israel’s right to exist (Smooha, 1997). The figures are 1995 measurements, not current ones.

Does the Declaration of Independence promise equality to citizens or to inhabitants?

That depends on the English text. The Knesset’s English text pledges equality “to all its citizens,” while the Ministry of Foreign Affairs publishes “inhabitants” (Provisional Government of Israel, 1948). The Hebrew is the original, and both English versions are translations of it.

Sources

• 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, 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. jewishstudies.washington.edu/israel-hebrew/why-israel-isnt-a-settler-colonial-state/. Academic centre essay, not peer-reviewed.
• Forman, G. and Kedar, A., 2004. From Arab Land to ‘Israel Lands’: The Legal Dispossession of the Palestinians Displaced by Israel in the Wake of 1948. Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 22(6), pp. 809 to 830. DOI 10.1068/d402. Peer-reviewed.
• His Majesty’s Government, 1917. The Balfour Declaration, letter of 2 November 1917, and 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. Official record.
• Israel and the PLO, 1995. The Israeli-Palestinian Interim Agreement on the West Bank and the Gaza Strip. Text published by the Israeli Ministry of Foreign Affairs. https://www.gov.il/en/Departments/General/the-israeli-palestinian-interim-agreement. Official record.
• Israeli Supreme Court, 1979. HCJ 390/79 Dweikat v. Government of Israel (the Elon Moreh case). Cardozo Israeli Supreme Court Project, unofficial translation. https://versa.cardozo.yu.edu/sites/default/files/upload/opinions/Dweikat%20et%20al.%20v.%20State.pdf. Official record.
• Israeli Supreme Court, 2000. HCJ 6698/95 Ka’adan v. Israel Land Administration. Cardozo Israeli Supreme Court Project. https://versa.cardozo.yu.edu/sites/default/files/upload/opinions/Ka’adan%20v.%20Israel%20Land%20Administration.pdf. Official record.
• Jabotinsky, Z., 1923. The Iron Wall (We and the Arabs), and The Ethics of the Iron Wall. Rassvet 42/43 and 44/45; 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.
• Locker-Biletzki, 2025. Settler-Colonialism and Empire-Building in Palestine/Israel, 1920 to 1956. Review of Radical Political Economics, Union for Radical Political Economics. DOI 10.1177/04866134251322919. Peer-reviewed conference paper.
• Montagu, E. S., 1917. The Anti-Semitism of the Present Government. War Cabinet paper G.T. 1868. The National Archives, Kew, CAB 24/24/71. https://discovery.nationalarchives.gov.uk/details/r/D7640371. Official record.
• Provisional Government of Israel, 1948. Declaration of the Establishment of the State of Israel. Official Gazette Number 1; Knesset English text. main.knesset.gov.il/en/about/pages/declaration.aspx. Official record.
• Shafir, G., 1989. Land, Labor and the Origins of the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict, 1882-1914. Cambridge University Press. ISBN 978-0521353007. Scholarly book.
• Smooha, S., 1997. Ethnic Democracy: Israel as an Archetype. Israel Studies 2(2), pp. 198 to 241. jstor.org/stable/30246820. Peer-reviewed.
• Yiftachel, O., 1999. “Ethnocracy”: The Politics of Judaizing Israel/Palestine. Constellations 6(3), pp. 364 to 390. DOI 10.1111/1467-8675.00151. Peer-reviewed.