#colony

(All good faith questions are welcome, Anon - thanks for this one!)

TLDR: Because words change meanings over time and Herzl wasn't psychic.

In the 1890s, "colony" just meant a planned settlement or concentrated community. This included Jewish agricultural colonies in the Pale, temperance colonies in Colorado, and utopian communes everywhere.

It was basically the Victorian word for "intentional community," with absolutely no imperial baggage required.

The specific meaning activists now deploy (colony as racial domination, metropole extraction, indigenous suppression) is a 20th century framework that didn't exist when Herzl was writing in 1896.

So a reader of the 21st century finds the word "colony" in an old text and assumes it carries a technical definition that was coined decades later.

It's a little like finding the word "trauma" in a Civil War field report and concluding the surgeon was diagnosing PTSD.

Meanwhile, 'settler colonialism' as applied to Israel isn't a neutral analytical tool that happens to fit badly. It's a framework specifically constructed to exclude the features that distinguish Jewish return from actual settler colonialism...and it still fails on its own stated terms.

Jewish immigrants to the Levant were never agents of any empire. They were overwhelmingly refugees from empires who were fleeing Russian pogroms, Eastern European persecution, and later Nazi Germany. No metropole sent them. No metropole would take them back if the project failed.

That's not a minor quibble about definitions, either - it's the primary distinction between settler colonialism and every other form of large population movement in history.

There's also the matter of indigeneity. The Jews returning to the Levant weren't arriving in a place with which they had no connection.

Jewish presence in the region is documented continuously from ancient history, including in Egyptian records dating to roughly 1210 BCE.

The religious, linguistic, and ancestral connection to the land is what distinguishes this case from the British in Kenya or the French in Algeria, who had no such ties - and it is some of the best-documented, most indisputable history humans have ever gathered. (This is why they're so constantly engaged in historical revisionism.)

So when proponents of the settler colonialism framework of accusation encounter these objections, what do they do?

They move the goalposts.

The absence of a metropole gets explained away as an "exception."

The indigenous origin of the Jewish people to the Levant gets ahistorically dismissed or ignored, despite the fact that the Jewish people are the only group whose national identity, language, and religion originated in and remained oriented toward that specific land throughout their entire existence.

The framework gets rewritten and the history is revised until Israel fits the allegation.

So, one word in Der Judenstaat doesn't settle* any of this.

From The Atlantic: The False Narrative of Settler Colonialism (paywall bypassed)

Much more in this post.

Jun Ji-hyun and Ji Chang-wook stun at the red carpet of the 79th Cannes Film Festival. Directed by Yeon Sang-ho (Train to Busan, Hellbound, The Ugly), COLONY held its world premiere at the Théâtre Lumière on May 15, 2026 as part of the festival's Midnight Screening section.

Ridge House, Columbia County, New York, USA,

Architecture: Worrell Yeung,

Interior Design: Colony,

Landscape Architect: Understory Landscape Architecture,