Israel’s 1948 founding was a settler colony amid a decolonial wave

Evidence

Israel, which became a state in 1948, was both a product of those forces and a glaring exception to them. Britain lifted its colonial mandate as part of a broader contraction of its once-global empire. Because a small population of Jews had lived in Palestine continuously, Zionists framed their movement as one of national liberation: like other oppressed people, Jews were getting a state of their own. Of course, from the perspective of the much larger population of Palestinians, who were being evicted from their homes, lands, and communities to make way for a brand-new country, Israel was very far from an anti-colonial project. It was the opposite: a settler colony being established at a time when the rest of the world was going in the opposite direction. This could only have been incendiary. — Naomi Klein, Doppelganger, 978

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the reader’s interest in how the doubling device lands politically — this historical framing is the weight the device must carry. — connects to: The metropolitan Left erased Israel’s settler-colonial origins from its discourse — Aijaz Ahmad, In Theory: Classes, Nations, Literatures, 146; Running against historical decolonization made Israeli settler-colonialism uniquely visible — Nadim N. Rouhana and Nadera Shalhoub-Kevorkian, When Politics Are Sacralized:…, 473
• SEED: Potential essay angle: settler colonialism as anachronism — what it means to found a colony precisely when global decolonization was the reigning norm.