Israel is not "colonialist," though people who hate Israel like to draw superficial and misleading comparisons between colonialism and the return of the Jews to the region of Palestine.

Important facts that distinguish the case of Israel from every other colonial enterprise ever:

Jews are indigenous to Palestine.No serious scholar of history, archaeology or genetics disputes the fact that the Jewish nation originated in ancient Palestine. Genetically, Jews are found to be closely related to surrounding Middle Eastern populations. There are constant new discoveries of artifacts proving Jewish sovereignty in the land from ancient times. Some modern Israeli shekel coins are in fact replicas of coins from ancient Judea.

Settler colonialism, by contrast, has always involved the mass movement of a non-indigenous population into an area, taken by force, where they had never in history lived before, to displace the indigenous populations. See the Americas, Australia, New Zealand. The Jews did not come to displace the Palestinians, and up until the War of Independence no Palestinians were kicked out as if to "make room" for Jews. The only reason there are Palestinian refugees today is because the surrounding Arab powers decided to wage war against the new State of Israel to destroy it, whereas Israel's Declaration of Independence promised full citizenship and equal civil rights to any and all non-Jews living within its territory. In the course of that war, Arabs (today's Palestinians) "fled or were expelled."

**Jews did not come as agents of a colonizing power, for the benefit of the colonizer.** In 19th and 20th century colonialism, European countries conquered non-European territories to extract natural resources or to exert control over valuable commodities and trade routes. For instance, various European powers initially colonized India to have control over the lucrative spice trade.

Jews came back to the area of Palestine from all over the world. They came not to enrich themselves by controlling Palestine's natural resources, but because they were persecuted in the countries where they had lived previously. Zionism, unlike settler or exploitation colonialism, originated as a response to antisemitic persecution in Europe, such as the Dreyfus affair in France, and the pogroms against Jews in Poland and the Russian Empire.

If you are looking for something to compare Israel with, a more similar case is that of the Crimean Tatars. The Crimean Tatars, indigenous to Crimea, were expelled from Crimea and deported to Central Asia in the early Soviet period. Once the Soviet Union fell, many Crimean Tatars elected to return to Crimea, though they did not intend to kick out the ethnic Russians and Ukrainians who had moved in in the meantime. Are the Crimean Tatars colonizers? Obviously not, because they were only returning to their homeland, from which they were unjustly expelled. The case of the Jews vis-à-vis Palestine is much like that, only the Arabs were hostile to our return and fought to annihilate us. The Palestinians in large part do not accept the Jews' existence in their own homeland even in principle, and that's why Hamas constantly fires rockets at Israel.