Joe Dawson

“Eqbal Ahmad summed it up: "August 1947 marked the beginning of decolonisation, when British rule in India ended. It was in those days of hope and fulfilment that the colonisation of Palestine occurred. Thus at the dawn of decolonisation, we were returned to the earliest, most intense form of colonial menace... exclusivist settler colonialism." In other circumstances or in another era, replacing the indigenous population might have been feasible, especially in light of the long-standing and deep religious link felt by the Jews to the land in question—if this were the eighteenth or nineteenth century, if the Palestinians were as few as the Zionist settlers or as fully decimated as the native peoples of Australasia and North America. The longevity of the Palestinians' resistance to their dispossession, however, indicates that the Zionist movement, in the words of the late historian Tony Judt, "arrived too late," as it "imported a characteristically late-nineteenth-century separatist project into a world that has moved on.”
― Rashid Khalidi, The Hundred Years’ War on Palestine: A History of Settler Colonialism and Resistance, 1917–2017