Israel: a “settler” colonial fraud by Robin Qureshi

Israel was built by European settlers who changed their names, rewrote the story and displaced a people already living there. Exposing those origins strikes at the heart of the state’s founding myth.

Israel’s leaders claim to be the descendants of a people “returning” to their ancient homeland. Their birthplaces tell a different story. From the state’s founding generation onwards, its political class has been overwhelmingly foreign-born or one generation removed from Europe. This was not an indigenous population reclaiming its land. It was a settler project.

David Ben-Gurion, born David Grün in Poland, became the face of the new state.

Golda Meir was born Golda Mabovitch in Kyiv, raised in the United States, and arrived in Palestine as a self-proclaimed “returning” native.

Menachem Begin was born in Belarus. Shimon Peres came from the same region as Szymon Perski. Yitzhak Shamir was Yitzhak Yezernitzky from Belarus. The first president, Chaim Weizmann, was also Belarusian.

Ariel Sharon was Ariel Scheinermann, the son of Belarusian immigrants. Yitzhak Rabin was born to a Ukrainian father and Belarusian mother. Ehud Barak entered the world as Ehud Brog, to Lithuanian and Polish parents. Benjamin Netanyahu’s family name was Mileikowsky, from Warsaw, before it was Hebraicised. He was also known in New York as “Ben Netan”.

The current political class is no less foreign in origin: Polish, Romanian, Hungarian, Ukrainian. A state built on a story of return is led by people who arrived as settlers or their immediate descendants.

One of its most powerful figures, Itamar Ben-Gvir, the current minister of national security, was convicted in 2007 of supporting a terrorist organisation and incitement to racism, tied to his activities as a follower of Meir Kahane. He represents the consolidation of violent settler ideology inside the Israeli cabinet.

This matters because it cuts straight through Israel’s founding claim. A state that asserts exclusive rights based on supposed ancient presence cannot square that with the very recent foreign origins of its ruling class. The story of “return” isn’t history. It’s branding. Zionism was not a national revival. It was a twentieth-century settler colonial project.

The myth was built carefully. From the 1920s onwards, immigrants were pushed to drop their European names and adopt Hebrew ones. David Ben-Gurion personally pressed soldiers, civil servants and public figures to Hebraicise. The point was to erase visible foreignness and project the image of an “ancient people” reasserting its place.

Gideon Levy wrote that

“Israel was not founded by natives returning home but by foreigners who took a land that was not theirs,” calling the founding story “a carefully crafted national fantasy.”

Historian Avi Shlaim said:

“Zionism is a settler-colonial project, born in Europe, imposed on an already inhabited land.”

He notes that the early leadership was

“overwhelmingly European in origin, language, culture, and worldview,” and that their Hebraicisation was “political theatre designed to mask colonial reality.”

The slogan “a land without a people for a people without a land” was coined in Europe in the late nineteenth century. It cast Palestine as empty terrain awaiting rightful return.

British colonial records, Ottoman censuses and eyewitness accounts show a fully inhabited land of more than half a million Palestinians. That slogan “a land without a people for a people without a land” erased Palestinians in language before they were expelled in practice.

It was Professor Norman Finkelstein who detonated one of the sharpest challenges to this myth.

He exposed the fraudulent claims in From Time Immemorial by Joan Peters. Published in 1984, the book argued that Palestine was “empty” and that most Palestinians were recent immigrants.

Finkelstein carefully showed how Peters twisted and falsified her sources, including British and Ottoman records. His work shredded the book’s credibility in serious academic circles. Even many pro-Israel scholars admitted its flaws.

On a highly watchable episode of Democracy Now, he confronted Dershowitz over The Case for Israel, accusing him of plagiarism and fabrication. That made him a target. Finkelstein’s tenure was denied at DePaul University in 2007 despite his indisputable academic credentials. The embittered Dershowitz led a public campaign against him.

Holocaust historian Raul Hilberg, one of the most respected figures in his field, publicly defended Finkelstein. He said,

“His place in the whole history of writing history is assured, and those who in the end are proven right triumph, and he will be among those who will have triumphed, albeit, it so seems, at great cost.”

Hilberg’s defence cut through the smear campaigns. It was the judgement of history against the politics of the moment.

Finkelstein’s place as a historian is secure. He is more widely respected now for defending the truth than at any point in his career. He stood up for Gaza through every trial. His words travel fast. For many, especially the young, he has become a reference point — a moral compass in an age of moral cowardice.

More than 700,000 Israeli settlers now live illegally in the West Bank and East Jerusalem, in breach of the Fourth Geneva Convention. They are armed, subsidised and politically represented at the highest levels. Illegal settlement isn’t a side-effect of Israeli policy. It is the spine of it. It anchors imported power in occupied land and stretches the same colonial fiction that built the state: foreigners rebranded as natives.

Palestinian writers have always said it plainly. Writer Susan Abulhawa said:

“They didn’t return. They came. And when they came, they erased us.”

Poet and professor Refaat Alareer, killed in Gaza in 2023, wrote:

“If I must die, let it bring hope. Let it be a bridge. Let it be a story that undoes their myth.”

Settler colonial projects don’t last forever. Some, like End of Apartheid in South Africa, end through negotiated political transition, with settlers remaining but losing control. Others, like the collapse of French Algeria after the Algerian War of Independence, end in mass settler withdrawal. Some combine both. Others survive by force until the balance of power shifts.

Gaza and the West Bank fit this pattern. In Gaza, Israel is driving depopulation through siege, bombardment, starvation and forced displacement. If nothing changes, the most likely outcome is forced movement towards Egypt and permanent unlivable conditions for those left behind. In the West Bank, annexation by stealth is already moving forward. Settlement expansion, militarised zoning and daily settler violence are locking Palestinians into broken fragments while the state swallows the land around them.

Israel’s strategic aim is control without demographic equality. That’s why its leaders cling to the myth of return. Strip that away, and what’s left is a settler colonial project held up by force. No such project has ever been permanent. Their stability depends on how long they can keep the structure of power intact. Once it weakens, whether through outside pressure, political rupture or sustained indigenous resistance, it cracks.