Zionism developed as a colonialist movement. Today it is forbidden to speak of it, but that was not always the case. I’m not talking about a few bleeding-heart liberals who raised “The Hidden Question” on the dispossession of the Arabs, but about the main leaders of Zionism who wrote of it in simple terms and saw it as an unavoidable necessity. David Ben-Gurion, writes Tom Segev in his new biography of the first prime minister, claimed in a meeting of the Provisional Executive Committee for General Zionist Affairs in 1919, “There is no need at all for Mustafa to know Hebrew. … In practice, he doesn’t care at all if the Jewish farmer who is exploiting the Arab worker knows Arabic, nor whether the Arab who kills the Jew knows Hebrew.” (From “A State at all Costs – The Story of David Ben-Gurion, page 156, in Hebrew) [...]
But they are twice mistaken. First, in not differentiating between the colonialism of the powers (the British Empire, for example) and colonialism of settlement; and second, because they assume one “pure” colonial model, and then they claim the local model is inappropriate. But in practice, in various nations – the United States, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, South Africa, Algeria, Rhodesia and other countries – the colonialism of settlement had different points of origin, different motivations and different ideologies. What is shared by all of them is the arrival of settlers from the outside, with a story of chosenness and purpose that leads to the dispossession of the local population. [...]
The reason for the denial is to be found elsewhere: In order to recognize the colonial past, we need to see it as the past, in other words to write about it in a different spirit, more inclusive and equal. The recognition of American colonialism was written from within the awareness that we live in a different world today, with a different spirit of equality of citizenship (a damaged and problematic equality, we know, but what is important in this context is the philosophy itself). To be able to speak about the colonial past we need to recognize the injustices and strive to correct them.
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