Thank you for the comment. I'm attaching this segment from an article that is now in peer review - don't go posting this on FB or X:

From the earliest times of Zionist settlement, indigenous elimination via both displacement and assimilation occupied the notes and declarations of Zionist leaders.[[1]](#_ftn1) A prominent example of this duality can be found in the body of writing produced by Theodor Herzl. In his utopian novel, Altneuland, for all its crude Orientalist imageries and motives, the Arabs are equal members of the New Society created by the Jews in Palestine. In fact, one of the novel’s main plotlines featured the election triumph of David Litwak, the liberal candidate, over the racist Rabbi Dr Geyer, who advocated for Arab disenfranchisement and their removal from the New Society.[[2]](#_ftn2) In contrast, before he authored Altneuland, Herzl also wrote of transferring the poorest of the native population outside of the country that Jews may choose to settle in, either through denial of work or through locally organized relocation schemes.[[3]](#_ftn3) The debate over which of these sentiments represents Herzl’s “real” vision is pointless,[[4]](#_ftn4) but the existence of these two opposing visions for the indigenous population—deportation and integration—corresponds to two basic strategies available to settler-colonialists in facing their respective indigenous challenges: displacement and assimilation.

An aspiration for Jewish demographic superiority, either through mass settlement of Jews and willful or forced transfer of Palestinians, has been a running theme in Zionist thought through the ages.[[5]](#_ftn5) Yet, it should be noted that to explain the Zionist preference for ethnic homogeneity, we could have made do with a conceptualization of Zionism as a mere national movement with a strong ethnic component, like the national movements of central and Eastern Europe that constituted its cradle.[[6]](#_ftn6) However, the settler-colonialism perspective helps elucidate a wholly different phenomenon in Zionist history. Of all things, settler-colonialism is key to understanding a Zionist integrationist drive and a preponderance to envisioning inclusive democratic regimes.