On Palestine

by Noam Chomsky

The reassertion of the “Zionism as colonialism” equation is critical not only because it best explains the Israeli policies of Judaization inside Israel and settlement in the West Bank, but also because it is consistent with the way the early Zionists perceived their project and talked about it. The Hebrew verb le-hitnahel or le-hityashev and the Hebrew nouns hitanchalut and hitayasvut were used ever since 1882 by the Zionist movement and later the state of Israel to describe the takeover of land in Palestine. Their accurate translation into English is “to settle,” “to colonize,” “settlement,” and “colonization,” respectively. Early Zionists used the terms proudly since colonialism was very positively received by the public at the time (and continued to until the end of the First World War). When colonialism’s fortunes changed in the aftermath of the Second World War and colonialism connoted negative European policies and practices, the Zionist movement and later the state of Israel looked for ways of dissociating the Hebrew terminology from the colonialist one and started to use more universal and positive language to describe their policies.