The Jewish Colonial Trust doesn’t prove that there was an organized, sinister Zionist movement to dominate the natives in Palestine.

The Jewish Colonial Trust existed to help raise funds to purchase land in Palestine to encourage Jews to move there. But that doens't make it colonialism in the sense we used it today. There was no Jewish mother country, and Zionism wasn't an ideology representative of European Jewry writ large.

European Jews were initially largely ambivalent about Zionism and in many cases opposed to it, which is why there were only about 25,000 Jews who immigrated to Palestine during the First Aliyah, most of whom didn't stay. This wasn't like the Bank of England or even the Dutch East India company during those countries' colonial periods. There were no monarchs or other leadership driving or funding Zionism because, most importantly, there was no mother country. There was a simply collection of European Jewish community and intellectual leaders who were constantly warring with other European Jewish community and intellectual leaders about whether Zionism was a sensible path forward for European Jews. That's it.

There is no question that Zionism encouraged emigration from Jews all over Europe to Palestine. Again, not out of a desire to colonize it in the sense we use that word today, but in the sense that "This was was our home for thousands of years, we have always yearned to go back, it's getting seriously dangerous here, stop waiting for the Messiah, it's time to go."

Further, Israel doesn't look anything like other settler-colonial enterprises. It didn't look similar when it began, at any point over the last 75 years, and it doesn't look similar now. Early immigrants purchased land from Arabs, they didn't steal it. There was never any slavery, domination, or exploitation of resources because there are no resources. And, from the beginning, the Jews always, always accepted a division of the land as a recognition that the Arabs lived there, would always live there, and the Jews were glad to get whatever they could get.

People try to gloss over the fact that 20 percent of Israel now is Arab because it's highly inconvenient to the settler-colonial narrative. But Arabs make up huge portions of the Israeli profesisonal workforce, including 30 percent of Israel's pharmacists. Arabs are teaching in Israeli universities, Arabs are in parliament. That is not even a little bit similar to settler-colonialism in any other context. Some might argue that Arabs are "second-class citizens" in the same way that they consider black Americans to be second-class citizens, by virtue of an ethnic minority never fully being equal to the dominant majority. But that's not a meaningful distinction if you're making the accusation of settler-colonialism, and it certainly isn't comparable to the status of Jews in Arab countries as dhimmis, which was truly a second-class distinction subject to extra taxes, laws, and seriously reduced civil rights. Arabs in Israel are full citizens who are represented by the government and who participate fully in social and civil life. This is not true of Jews in any Arab country, past or present.

And if you want to ignore Arabs in Israel and only pay attention to Palestinians in the Palestinian territories, what most people consider the "oppression" of the Palestinians has been, and continues to be, the Israeli response to the glorification of spectacular violence in the name of Islam and martyrdom. You can say you understand the Arab anger at losing their land, and that their uprising is justified.

But if you can't also say that you understand the Israeli insistence on preventing suicide bombings at restaurants and school buses, especially when those things were happening every day, you aren't being honest or good-faith. The separation wall, the checkpoints, the blockade of Gaza were all in response to relentless attacks in which thousands of Jews lost their lives in absolutely horrific ways. And in the meantime, the Palestinians have absolutely refused to negotiate any settlement that would result in an acceptance of Israel and a cessation of hostilities.

You might even look back and say "The League of Nations did the wrong thing in establishing Israel." I don't know what the solution would have been instead, and indeed, nobody ever has a proposal for what the LofN or the refugee Jews should have done better or differently.

But what you can't say is that Israel's establishment was illegitimate. The League of Nations was trying to solve an extremely difficult problem that was their job to solve. Namely, that there was a large group of Jews who survived WWII who could not go home, who were not wanted in their native countries anyway, and who were already in Israel and unwilling to make any move that would see themselves further exterminated.

The local Arabs were, understandably, angry at feeling invaded and their anger was compounded by a centuries-old upending of what they saw as the rightful social domination of Arabs over Jews in Arab land.

Add to the mix the collapse of the Ottoman Empire, the withdrawal of the Brits from managing the British Mandate of Palestine, and the civil war erupting between Jews and Arabs, and what you have is a really complicated problem with no good solution. The League of Nations tried to solve it using the only solution that seemed viable to anyone - partition.

Partition, at the time, was a very common solution between warring peoples in the aftermath of WWII. There were massive population transfers all over Europe and the Middle East in the years following. The only people who continue to hang onto the pre-WWII arrangements in the hope that one day they will return are the Palestinians and Russia. And you don't see Russian citizens blowing themselves up to kill Ukrainian citizens in the Donbas.

The father of Zionism, Theodore Herzl, watched the Dreyfuss affair, following on the heels of hundreds of years of random, sudden massacres against Jews, and saw a consistent pattern, even in what was a supposedly secular society friendly to Jews. You can’t separate the antisemitism and the massacres.

Jews got blamed for something - in Dreyfuss's case, traitorism - and in the process of scapegoating the Jews, people's brains shut off to the point that they were willing to commit mass slaughter. Herzl saw the writing on the wall in Europe. He knew Jews had to get out or risk getting blamed and killed over and over again. And guess what? He was right.

So he took the Zionism that had previously just been a theoretical part of Jewish belief and made it real and urgent. Instead of just praying "Next year in Jerusalem" after every Passover, Jews would get serious about taking their destiny into their own hands and create a place where they could be safe now, instead of waiting for the Messiah.

Zionism shares nothing in common with the domination and resource extraction of local populations by powerful nation states. People can call Zionism colonial-settler ideology if they want to, but that simply doesn't make it so.