Zionism, Settler Colonialism, and Nationalism: On Motivations and Violence

Abstract

In discourse that normalizes and propagates Israeli settler colonial conquest and domination, analytical attention is given to the supposed nationalist nature of the Zionist project painting Zionism as a liberatory project for persecuted Jewish peoples in Europe and beyond. To counter this discourse and its erasure of the colonized, many critical scholars have emphasized that Zionism is both nationalist and settler colonial. However, to present a decolonial alternative to the exclusive focus on Zionism as a nationalist project, critical analysis must insist that state nationalism is but one of the elements that scholars can analyze within, not alongside, the larger framework of settler colonial sovereignty. This article argues that we must examine the effects of the Zionist project and give the Palestinian experience its proper analytical weight at the forefront of the analysis, not as that which can illuminate the ‘unintended consequences’ of Zionism, but as that which reveals the very logic and nature of Zionism and the Zionist project.