But colonial rule went a step further: it brought back hundreds of thousands of Jewish people living in the diaspora to West Asia after two millennia, and settled them on lands occupied by the Palestinian people. They thus forcibly helped create a Jewish state, Israel, as an expression of what the Palestinian historian Nur Masalha has called ‘Zionist settler-colonialism’ that ignores the existence and rights of the indigenous people.2 The leaders of the Zionist enterprise shared the sense of racist supremacy that the Europeans had towards native peoples: referring to the Palestinians living in
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