What early Zionists meant by “colony”

“Colony” named a specific unit on the ground. In his 2009 Journal of Palestine Studies article, Yuval Ben-Bassat traces six “Judean colonies” (moshvot Yehudah) southeast of Jaffa between 1882 and 1903, each a bounded rural settlement that kept its own logbooks, contracts and maps. Does the word describe what the settlers built, or does it classify it? A settler-colonial reading of the same vocabulary runs through named works published from 1989 to 2025, and a 2022 essay disputing that reading poses the question in its title. The official instruments chose other words for the end point: Britain’s 1917 letter supported “a national home,” and the Knesset’s 2018 Basic Law calls “Jewish settlement” “a national value.”

Key Findings

• Six “Judean colonies” southeast of Jaffa, 1882 to 1903, kept their own logbooks, receipts, contracts and maps. In 1903 Gederah’s managing committee voted to stop leasing land to Arabs, and Rehovot and Rishon le-Zion approved “similar decisions” “around that time” (Ben-Bassat, 2009, peer-reviewed).
• The settler-colonial reading of the period runs through named works published from 1989 to 2025: Shafir (1989) on land and labour, 1882 to 1914; Dana (2024) on the project’s “exceptionalism”; and Locker-Biletzki (2025), a refereed conference paper, on 1920 to 1956. Dowty (2022), an unrefereed essay, argues against that reading.
• His Majesty’s Government’s letter of 2 November 1917 supported “a national home for the Jewish people” in a 67-word sentence that uses neither “colony” nor “settlement” (His Majesty’s Government, 1917).
• War Cabinet paper G.T. 1868, dated 23 August 1917, would grant Jews in Palestine “complete liberty of settlement” and asked the Government to “go no further” (Montagu, 1917). The 1919 Statement to the Peace Conference objected to “the political segregation of the Jews” (Berkowitz, Jastrow, Senior and the signers, 1919).
• Clause 7 of the Knesset’s 2018 Basic Law reads: “The State views the development of Jewish settlement as a national value” (Knesset, 2018, unofficial English translation).

What did a Zionist colony designate on the ground?

Ben-Bassat (2009), a peer-reviewed social history in the Journal of Palestine Studies, anchors the term in six “Judean colonies” (moshvot Yehudah) southeast of Jaffa during the first aliyah, 1882 to 1903. Each was a bounded rural settlement, a moshava in Hebrew, and its own paperwork survives in local archives at five of the six sites.

The study is built on those papers. Ben-Bassat draws on Ottoman state records and the Rothschild Bank Archive, and “centrally” on “the understudied primary documents found in the local archives of five out of the six former first ’aliyah Judean colonies.” He lists them as “logbooks, personal letters, receipts, contracts, maps, and pictures.” On this record, a colony was an administrative unit with its own ledger. It hired, bought, contracted and recorded.

The English word “colony” is Ben-Bassat’s rendering of the Hebrew moshava. The colonists’ own term and the scholar’s translation describe the same object: a named village with a governing body, land holdings and correspondence.

The colony’s economy tied it to the villages around it. Ben-Bassat writes that “economic connections with the Arab population predominantly revolved around the employment of low-wage day workers, especially during the high agricultural seasons, a situation which, according to some indications, created pockets of resentment among the Arab workers.” The article qualifies that last point with “according to some indications” and gives no employment ratio or wage series.

Authority over the colony did not always sit inside it. In the colonies it administered, Ben-Bassat records, the Rothschild administration “set the ratio between Jewish and Arab workers, fixed the workers’ wages, established the rules of conduct vis-a-vis the Arab workers, negotiated the purchase of land from local landowners, and acted to resolve problems with the Arab villagers.” Where the administration ran a colony, then, the unit’s labour terms and its land acquisitions were set by an external patron. Where it did not, the colony’s own committee acted, as the next section’s land decisions show.

The archive therefore fixes the word’s first referent. In the 1880s and 1890s, “colony” named a moshava: a farming settlement founded by Jewish immigrants. It employed seasonal Arab labour, it bought land from local owners, and it kept records of all of it.

Who reads the colonial vocabulary as settler colonialism, and since when?

Named works holding the settler-colonial reading are dated 1989 to 2025. They begin with Gershon Shafir’s Cambridge University Press book on land and labour from 1882 to 1914 and run to Locker-Biletzki’s 2025 paper on settler colonialism and empire-building from 1920 to 1956, published in the Review of Radical Political Economics.

The vocabulary these works examine was used openly. Ben-Bassat (2009) renders the moshvot as “colonies” because that was the settlements’ own designation, and the founders’ use of the word is traced in a separate report on Zionism’s founders and the colonial word. The question the named works raise concerns the structure behind the word, not the word itself.

Shafir (1989) builds its argument on markets rather than labels. In the University of California Press’s description of the 1996 edition, Shafir “challenges the heroic myths about the foundation of the State of Israel by investigating the struggle to control land and labor during the early Zionist enterprise.” The book is interpretive historical sociology. Its title fixes the 1882 to 1914 periodization, and it measures no rate the record can carry.

Dana (2024), writing from the Doha Institute for Graduate Studies in Middle East Critique, argues across eight pages 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 the article contains no figures.

Locker-Biletzki (2025) carries the argument past the Ottoman period into 1920 to 1956. SAGE publishes it on behalf of the Union for Radical Political Economics, which states an explicit political economy commitment. The publisher types it as a meeting report, a conference paper inside a themed symposium, refereed by at least two anonymised reviewers.

Source: Shafir (1989); Dana (2024); Locker-Biletzki (2025).

None of the three rests its classification on the word “colony” alone. Shafir reads land and labour markets, Dana reads ideology, metropole and alliance, and Locker-Biletzki reads capital and empire.

What did the colonies decide about leasing land in 1903?

Gederah’s managing committee decided at a meeting in 1903 to stop leasing land to Arabs. Ben-Bassat (2009) records that “similar decisions were approved by Rehovot and Rishon le-Zion around that time in an effort to limit Arab presence in the colonies and reduce theft and damage to property.” That makes three colonies setting their own land rules within months of one another.

Ben-Bassat marks the break in time: “Meanwhile, several Judean colonies opposed for the first time the lease of Jewish-owned land to Arabs.” The policy rested, he writes, on “the widespread theft and damage to property in the colonies claimed to have been committed by the Arab rural population.” The theft and damage are the colonists’ claim, which the article reports and does not establish.

An earlier signal came from the colonies’ patron. Ben-Bassat cites Baron Edmond de Rothschild’s wish, expressed in 1899, to see “the whole region [hevel] between Eqron and Rishon le-Zion cultivated by Jewish workers and blooming.”

The colonies also acted together in disputes with neighbouring villages. Ben-Bassat records that they financed one another’s legal actions, including a trial Rehovot brought against the village of Zarnuqa “following a severe clash between them sparked by a dispute over grazing rights.” On violence, his wording is precise and carries no frequency: “Massive clashes with neighboring Arab villagers were not common, but they did occur from time to time in several of the colonies (Gederah, Rehovot, and Qastina), culminating in injuries and even deaths.” He adds that “the immediate causes were generally disputes over property boundaries and grazing.”

Read together, these entries show the colony acting as a self-governing body. It held land, decided who could lease it, litigated as a collective and drew financial support from sister colonies. Further detail on colony-village contact sits in a separate report on early Zionist and Palestinian contact.

The word “colony” in 1903 therefore named more than a farm. It named an institution with a committee, minutes and the power to change its land rules by vote.

Did Britain’s 1917 letter promise colonies or a national home?

His Majesty’s Government’s letter to Lord Rothschild, dated 2 November 1917, promised neither colonies nor a state. It stated that the Government viewed “with favour the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people.” The letter conveyed this as a declaration “submitted to, and approved by, the Cabinet.”

The operative sentence runs 67 words, and it reads in full: “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 uses neither “colony” nor “settlement.” It says “a national home,” not “the national home” and not “a state.” It carries two safeguard clauses. The first protects the “civil and religious rights” of “existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine,” and the second protects the “rights and political status enjoyed by Jews in any other country.” The letter states a policy and carries no boundary and no population figure.

The Mandate for Palestine, approved by the Council of the League of Nations, gave the letter its legal force. Its preamble makes the Mandatory “responsible for putting into effect the declaration originally made on November 2nd, 1917.” The wording shifts in the restatement. The preamble reads “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.”

Article 2 of the Mandate makes the Mandatory responsible “for placing the country under such political, administrative and economic conditions as will secure the establishment of the Jewish national home, as laid down in the preamble, and the development of self-governing institutions, and also for safeguarding the civil and religious rights of all the inhabitants of Palestine, irrespective of race and religion.”

The vocabularies differ across these documents. The colonies’ records spoke of colonies. The British instrument named the end point “a national home,” and the Mandate turned that phrase into “the Jewish national home.”

Did early Jewish opponents object to settlement or to nationhood?

On 23 August 1917, ten weeks before Britain’s letter issued, E. S. Montagu, Secretary of State for India, circulated War Cabinet paper G.T. 1868. The paper asked the Government to offer Jews in Palestine “complete liberty of settlement and life on an equality with the inhabitants of that country who profess other religious beliefs.” It then added: “I would ask that the Government should go no further.”

The paper, held by The National Archives at CAB 24/24/71, answered a draft. It was prompted by correspondence between Lord Rothschild and Balfour that had not yet produced the November text. Montagu wrote “as the one Jewish Minister in the Government,” and on page 1 he called Zionism “a mischievous political creed, untenable by any patriotic citizen of the United Kingdom.” His first principle, on page 2, reads: “1. I assert that there is not a Jewish nation.” Pages 2 and 3 were read from a relayed photographic scan of the printed paper, whose first page matches the archive’s own published image word for word. The paper records one minister’s argument on one date. In it, settlement is granted and nationhood is denied.

The Statement to the Peace Conference follows the same line. It was drafted by Rabbi Henry Berkowitz, Professor Morris Jastrow and Max Senior, and Representative Julius Kahn of California presented it to President Woodrow Wilson on 4 March 1919. The document states no signatory count. Douglas Daily International (5 March 1919) and the Wisconsin Weekly Blade (15 March 1919) each reported 300 signers.

Its objection 4, in the text Levitas (1962) reproduced from the drafting committee’s file, protests “against the political segregation of the Jews and the re-establishment in Palestine of a distinctively Jewish State as utterly opposed to the principles of democracy.” Its closing sentence reads: “We do not wish to see Palestine, either now or at any time in the future, organized as a Jewish State.”

The Statement claims to voice “the majority of American Jews born in this country.” That is a claim made inside a petition. The Denver Jewish News of 19 March 1919 printed the Statement on the same page as the Zionist Organization of America’s rival claim to speak for a majority, and neither organisation published a method. On both records, the 1917 paper and the 1919 Statement, the objection is aimed at the national or state claim. Settlement itself is not the point in dispute.

Which word does Israeli law use where colony once stood?

In 2018 the Knesset enacted Basic Law: Israel as the Nation-State of the Jewish People. In the Knesset’s own English translation, which it labels unofficial, 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.”

The clause uses “settlement,” not “colony.” As quoted, it states a value and a duty to act, and it names no place and no count. The translation the Knesset publishes includes amendments through 1 May 2022.

Clause 7 sits beside clauses that carry forward the end point the 1917 letter named. Clause 1(b) reads: “The State of Israel is the nation state of the Jewish People in which it realizes its natural, cultural, religious and historical right to self-determination.” 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.”

Set against the earlier records, the enacted text shows how the vocabulary moved. Ben-Bassat (2009) documents moshvot rendered as “colonies,” administered settlement by settlement, between 1882 and 1903. His Majesty’s Government (1917) named the goal “a national home” without using either word for the settlements themselves. The Knesset (2018) names the activity “Jewish settlement” and assigns it the rank of “a national value.”

Montagu’s 1917 paper offered “complete liberty of settlement” and asked the Government to go no further. The 2018 clause pairs settlement with national self-determination in a single statute. The concept the colonies’ logbooks recorded now appears in a Basic Law under a different noun, enacted by the State the Mandate’s “Jewish national home” preceded.

The Knesset text is the instrument itself, and every argument about what clause 7 does is an argument about these words. The clause is quoted here as enacted.

Does using the word colony make a settler-colonial state?

In 2022 the Stroum Center for Jewish Studies at the University of Washington published Dowty’s essay “Is Israel a settler colonial state?”, which argues against the settler-colonial characterisation of Israel. The centre tags it as signed faculty writing. It has no referees, no DOI and no reference list.

The page’s URL preserves an earlier title, “why-israel-isnt-a-settler-colonial-state.” The displayed headline is now the question. The essay is one Israel Studies scholar’s argument on one side of a live dispute, and it supplies no measurement.

Set against the works in the second section, the essay shows where the dispute turns. Shafir (1989) reads the period from 1882 to 1914 through the struggle over land and labour markets. Dana (2024) classes the case as exceptional because of its ideological roots, its lack of a conventional metropole and its reliance on Western alliance. Locker-Biletzki (2025) carries the analysis to 1956 through capital and empire. Each of these classifications rests on structural criteria. None rests on the moshava’s English name.

The word appears in the record whichever answer a reader favours. Ben-Bassat (2009) shows the colonies were called colonies, and that by 1903 three of them voted on who could lease their land. The question both sides of the literature engage is whether self-description in the vocabulary of the 1880s to the 1920s settles the classification. Dana’s own criteria, which include the absence of a metropole, mark one point of difference from the textbook colony. Shafir’s land and labour frame marks a point of overlap with it.

The dispute therefore turns on the criteria and on the record they are applied to. A further report on the named scholarship and the framework’s criteria covers the settler-colonial evidence. On the sources assembled here, the publication record runs 1989, 2022, 2024 and 2025, with one essay disputing the reading and three works advancing it.

Methodology

The evidence comes from four types of record. The first is primary and official records. His Majesty’s Government’s letter of 2 November 1917 and the Mandate for Palestine were read in the Avalon Project transcription at Yale Law School. War Cabinet paper G.T. 1868 is held by The National Archives, Kew, at CAB 24/24/71. Its page 1 was read from the archive’s published image of the duplicate at CAB 21/58, folio 218, and pages 2 and 3 from a relayed scan of the same print. The Knesset’s 2018 Basic Law was read in the Knesset’s unofficial English translation.

The second is a primary historical artifact. No scan of the printed 1919 Statement to the Peace Conference was located. It was read in The Denver Jewish News of 19 March 1919 and in the text Levitas (1962) reproduced from the drafting committee’s file. The Denver printing abridges objection 3, drops words elsewhere and respells words in house orthography, so passages carried in both are quoted from the Levitas text.

The third and fourth are peer-reviewed research and scholarly works. Ben-Bassat (2009) is archive-based social history, and Dana (2024) is interpretive. Locker-Biletzki (2025) is a refereed conference paper. Shafir (1989) is a university-press book, represented through its title’s periodization and its publisher’s description, with no passage quoted from its pages. Dowty (2022) is an unrefereed essay.

None of these works measures a rate, share or count of colony-level events. Ben-Bassat’s “not common” is as quantitative as the clash record gets. The figure of 300 signers comes from wire reports dated 5 and 15 March 1919, not from the document. The count was still moving after 4 March: Levitas records a Detroit rabbi announcing his decision to sign on 22 April 1919. None of the cited works counts how often Zionist bodies used the word “colony.”

Conclusion

So what did “colony” signify? On the archival record it named a moshava, one of six Judean settlements whose committees kept logbooks, hired seasonal Arab labour, sued a neighbouring village over grazing and, in 1903, voted on who could lease their land.

The word was ordinary and openly used, and the documents that set the political goal chose other words. Britain’s 1917 letter supported “a national home,” and the 2018 Basic Law calls “Jewish settlement” “a national value.” The Jewish opponents on the record drew their line at nationhood. Montagu would grant “complete liberty of settlement” while asserting “there is not a Jewish nation,” and the 1919 signers protested “political segregation” and a “Jewish State.” The scholars who read the period as settler colonialism, publishing from 1989 to 2025, and the 2022 essay that disputes them, argue over land, labour, metropoles and capital. None of them treats the dictionary as decisive.

The colonists’ own word did not settle the classification in 1903, and the instruments that followed set it aside. When “colony” returns to public argument more than a century later, is it describing a village with a ledger, or carrying a classification that only the land and labour records can test?

Frequently Asked Questions

Was Petah Tikvah one of the six Judean colonies?

No. Ben-Bassat (2009) states in a footnote that Petah Tikvah “was not considered one of them.” His study covers the six colonies southeast of Jaffa, with local archives surviving at five.

Who owned the land the Judean colonies were built on?

Ben-Bassat (2009) writes that “about a dozen absentee landlords owned property in the region,” in many cases “Christians from nearby Jaffa,” who “sold the Jewish colonists much of the land.” The figure is the author’s approximation, not a registry count.

How had earlier writing explained colony-village friction?

Ben-Bassat (2009) summarises the existing literature as holding that the colonies’ problems arose “from cultural misunderstandings and disputes over natural resources such as water, land, and grazing rights.” That is his account of prior scholarship. His own archival finding names boundaries and grazing as the immediate causes of clashes.

Where is the original 1917 letter held?

The British original is held at the British Library as Add MS 41178 (His Majesty’s Government, 1917). The text quoted here is the Avalon Project transcription at Yale Law School.

Which body did the Mandate recognise to advise the administration?

Article 4 of the Mandate for Palestine provides 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” (His Majesty’s Government, 1917). The article names the function and does not designate the body.

Was Montagu’s paper a reaction to the declaration as issued?

No. G.T. 1868 is dated 23 August 1917 and responds to Lord Rothschild’s letter of 18 July 1917 and a reply “to be dated August 1917” (Montagu, 1917). The declaration went out on 2 November 1917, in wording the paper could not have seen.

Is “299 signatories” a different count from 300?

No. Max E. Berkowitz’s 1932 biography The Beloved Rabbi, as quoted by Levitas (1962), refers to “the two hundred and ninety-nine other signatories,” meaning 299 besides the drafter. That reconciles with the 300 in Douglas Daily International on 5 March 1919.

Does the 2018 Basic Law contain an equality clause?

No. The enacted text in the Knesset’s translation contains no equality clause and no individual-rights clause (Knesset, 2018). That is a fact about the text and not a finding about how the law is applied.

Sources

• Ben-Bassat, Yuval, 2009. Proto-Zionist-Arab Encounters in Late Nineteenth-Century Palestine: Socioregional Dimensions. Journal of Palestine Studies 38(2), 42 to 63. DOI 10.1525/jps.2009.38.2.42. Peer-reviewed.
• Berkowitz, Henry, Morris Jastrow, Max Senior and the signers, 1919. A Statement to the Peace Conference. Presented 4 March 1919; printed in The Denver Jewish News, 19 March 1919, pages 1 and 3, Library of Congress, https://www.loc.gov/resource/sn91052360/1919-03-19/ed-1/?sp=1. Primary historical artifact, in reproduction.
• Berkowitz, Max E., 1932. The Beloved Rabbi. New York: Macmillan, p. 91, as quoted in Levitas (1962). Biography.
• Dana, Tariq, 2024. Notes on the ‘Exceptionalism’ of the Israeli Settler-Colonial Project. Middle East Critique, 165 to 172. DOI 10.1080/19436149.2024.2342733. Peer-reviewed.
• Douglas Daily International, 1919. Report of 5 March 1919, page 1, Philadelphia dateline. Library of Congress, https://www.loc.gov/resource/sn95060770/1919-03-05/ed-1/?sp=1. Primary record (newspaper).
• Dowty, 2022. Is Israel a settler colonial state? Stroum Center for Jewish Studies, University of Washington. 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. Official or primary record.
• Knesset, 2018. Basic Law: Israel as the Nation-State of the Jewish People. Official English translation (labelled unofficial by the Knesset), https://main.knesset.gov.il/EN/activity/documents/BasicLawsPDF/BasicLawNationState.pdf. Official or primary record.
• Levitas, Irving, 1962. Reform Jews and Zionism, 1919-1921. American Jewish Archives XIV(1). https://sites.americanjewisharchives.org/publications/journal/PDF/1962_14_01_00.pdf. Scholarly journal (documentary history).
• Locker-Biletzki, 2025. Settler-Colonialism and Empire-Building in Palestine/Israel, 1920 to 1956. Review of Radical Political Economics, SAGE for the Union for Radical Political Economics. DOI 10.1177/04866134251322919. Peer-reviewed meeting report (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, https://discovery.nationalarchives.gov.uk/details/r/D7640371. Official or primary record.
• Shafir, Gershon, 1989. Land, Labor and the Origins of the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict, 1882-1914. Cambridge University Press. ISBN 0521353009. Scholarly book.
• Wisconsin Weekly Blade, 1919. Report of 15 March 1919, page 1, Philadelphia dateline. Library of Congress, https://www.loc.gov/resource/sn84025842/1919-03-15/ed-1/?sp=1. Primary record (newspaper).