The current Israel–Hamas war is one horrific outcome of a century-long Zionist settler colonial project, which continues to violently shape the political geography of Israel/Palestine. Yet a valid account of the war must identify several other structural forces—most conspicuously national, religious, and geopolitical. Such forces interact, intersect, and at times clash with colonial logic. Further, to complete the colonial perspective, scholars must incorporate and illuminate the Palestinian and Islamic “counter-colonial” visions, rarely discussed in critical accounts. Such visions, and their political and terrorist mobilization, radically differ from the horizon commonly taken for granted by most indigenous and progressive narrrations. Hence a distinction should be made between “counter-colonial” and “decolonial” mobilizations. The current war is an expression of the clash between (deeply asymmetric) Israeli and Palestinian colonial and counter-colonial forces.
On October 7 we experienced a pogrom . . . much like our grandparents told us about Jews in Eastern Europe.
—Batsheva Yahalomi, resident of kibbutz Nir Oz; burnt and demolished on 7 October, Ynet, 11 October 2013
My grandmother was driven out of her village into Gaza as a refugee 75 years ago . . . and now when I live as a refugee in a plastic tent, I can’t stop thinking about her.
—Ulfat al-Kurd, Jabaliya, now evicted to Mawassi, southern Gaza, Haaretz, 12 January 2024
Is the current Israel–Gaza conflict a colonial war? In this short essay I suggest that it is indeed a horrific outcome of the settler colonial (SC) relations between Jews and Palestinians in Israel/Palestine. Yet I also suggest that a valid account of the war must identify several other major forces—most conspicuously national, religious, and geopolitical—that interact, bisect, and at times clash with colonial logic. Most notably, I illuminate the Palestinian and Islamic “counter-colonial” vision, rarely discussed in critical scholarly accounts, which differs radically from the horizon adopted by most indigenous and progressive decolonial imaginaries. Hence the current war is an expression of (asymmetric) colonial and counter-colonial forces.
The unfinished, Israel–Hamas violent eruption has already registered several gruesome records, such as “the black sabbath” of 7 October being the worst massacre of Jews since the Holocaust, while Israel’s brutal response marks the most destructive attack on Palestinians in the history of the conflict, currently under investigation by the International Court of Justice as a genocidal war. But beyond the pain, horror, and pervasive violence—Is this a colonial war?
Settler Colonial Settings
Let us at the outset examine a sequel of five historical maps depicting Jewish settlement in Israel/Palestine over the last century, during which nearly 1200 Jewish settlements were established (figure 1). In parallel, 450–500 Palestinian–Arab localities were destroyed by Israel, not including the current disaster in Gaza. Clearly, this is a political geography of highly intensive settler colonialism. The Gaza strip is a creation of this order, populated mainly by 1948 refugees. It was subjected to several rounds of Israeli military occupation and settlement, as well as a rare incidence of Israeli retreat, and a subsequent suffocating blockade, as detailed later.
Figure 1. Expanding Jewish settlement in Israel/Palestine.
Colonialism denotes the organized external imposition of control over a territory, its people, resources, and power structure, and prevention of the indigenous right of self-determination (for elaboration: Veracini, 2006). As the maps depict clearly, the historical context of the current explosion has been a persistent, domineering version of settler colonialism, expanding Jewish space and ethnic supremacy. This territorial project was based on some of the imperial legal foundations inherited from the Ottomans and British (Berda, 2023; Khalidi, 2017; Said, 1979). It has caused massive ethnic cleansing and dispossession of Palestinian land, aided by the might of the Israeli armed forces and Western support, most recently and predominantly from the United States.
Notably, however, Israeli society and academia have largely denied this settler colonial setting, framing the conflict mainly as a struggle between two nations. While one may expect such a distorted view from self-interested politicians and settlers, the silence of academia is inexcusable, leading to long years of willing blindness to the emergence of Jewish apartheid under the false guise of a “Jewish and democratic” state “temporarily” occupying Palestinian territories.
Most importantly, the Zionist settler project has transformed itself through several spatial, legal, and moral stages—from “colonization of refugees” based on land purchases before 1947, to widespread ethnic cleansing during the 1948 war, and establishing an internationally recognized Israeli Jewish state that gave expression to Jewish nationalism. During that period, Israel applied large-scale internal colonialism. Since 1967 it has become external illegal colonialism in the Palestinian Occupied Territories, now including some 280 settlements in the West Bank and al-Quds (East Jerusalem). This form of colonialism blatantly violates international and humanitarian law, denies the Palestinians the right to self-determination, and is regarded as a war crime by most international norms.
The colonial ambition of Israel’s dominant political forces to fully control the entire Land of Israel/Palestine “from the river to the sea” has never been a secret, and has been the official ideology of several past prime ministers, including Menachem Begin, Yitzhak Shamir, Arik Sharon, Naftali Bennet, and Benhamin Netanyahu. However, it has gained considerable vigor in recent years, with repeated plans for annexation promoted by Netanyahu, as blatantly reflected in the ‘“foundational principles” document—the official manifesto of the 2022 Israeli government:
The Jewish people have an exclusive and inalienable right to all parts of the Land of Israeli. The government will promote and develop (Jewish) settlement in all parts of the land . . . Galilee, Negev, Golan and Judea and Samaria. (Government of Israel 2022)
Challenges
As noted, most Jewish and international scholars have argued that Israel cannot be classified as colonial, with this critique becoming louder since October 7. Such scholars point to a direct link between the adoption of a simplistic version of the SC framework, particularly by what is known as “the global left,” and their silence about the Hamas 7 October massacre. [1]
Indeed, the common overlooking of Hamas’s massacre in early reactions to the crisis formed a moral and political stain. Yet this blind spot does not negate the validity of the SC explanation and context; quite the contrary, Hamas’s violent and terrorist insurgency is quite a typical (if regrettable) part of settler–indigenous relations as experienced in similar such settings. This denial appears to be another attempt to silence critique of the colonial nature of the Israeli regime, as well as to justify the brutal nature of Israel’s attack on Gaza.
Yet I also argue that the current crisis has clearly shown that the SC paradigm alone cannot provide a sufficient account of the complex forces driving Israel/Palestine in general, and the Gaza flashpoint in particular. It is clear that national, religious (often fundamentalist Islamist and Jewish), liberal, geopolitical, and global systems of power are at work, intersecting and often clashing with the SC paradigm. There is no room to develop this here, beyond pointing to the powerful presence of these forces, which stretch well beyond the local axis of settler–indigenous dialectics.
In addition, the recent history of Gaza itself provides a notable challenge to that paradigm given the 2005 (unilateral) “disengagement” in which, for the first and only time in its history, Israel dismantled 17 settlements from an area considered Eretz Yisrael—the historic homeland, providing a small speck of decolonization. Hamas’s violent takeover of Gaza from the PA in 2007 and its continuing authoritarian control of the Strip were accepted by Israel, but triggered the imposition of a suffocating blockade, making the area more akin to a “hostile Bantustan” than a colonized territory (Yiftachel, 2006; 2023).
Conceptually, this multi-system account draws on critical “southern” and “eastern” approaches that typically apply a “pluriversal” (rather than universal) framework in understanding historical and spatial processes (Yiftachel and Mammon, 2023). The assemblages of interacting, at times clashing, forces are thus viewed as a process of “dynamic structuralism” (Yiftachel, 2016) through which historical changes over time can be understood, in a more nuanced and comprehensive manner than rigid unidimensional theorizations, such as the SC paradigm now dominant in critical accounts of Israel/Palestine (see Wolfe, 2006; Erakat, 2019; or Abu-Lughod, 2020; see critique by Bashir and Busbridge, 2019).
Decolonial or Counter-Colonial Struggle?
Another challenge to the SC paradigm emerges from the nature of the Hamas insurgency, the October 7 “al-Aqsa flood” attack and its geopolitical connections. Hamas is not monolithic and has used a range of social, political, and terrorist methods over the years. It also had several periods of relative political pragmatism, most notably the participation and victory—receiving 45% of the vote—in the 2006 Palestinian elections (which implicitly recognized the Oslo process), and the publication of a more realistic 2017 policy paper focusing on a Palestinian state within the Green Line as a temporary step in the liberation of the entire “historic Palestine.” Nonetheless, for long decades, it used indiscriminate terror against civilians inside Israeli sovereign and legitimate territories and has consistently denied Israel’s right to exist and the legitimacy of any peace process. Hamas’s 1988 Charter accordingly declares that
Israel will exist until Islam will obliterate it, just as it obliterated others before it . . . (Hamas) strives to raise the banner of Allah over every inch of Palestine . . . peaceful solutions stand in contradiction to the principles of the Islamic resistance movement. (Preamble, articles, 6, 13)
Since October 7, in a series of interviews and statements, Hamas leaders have returned to their hard line positions, and have provided plenty of evidence of their persistent strategic position. For example, Khaled Mash’al, one of the organization’s most senior leaders, made clear that
We will never recognize the legitimacy of the Zionist entity, and hence reject the two-state solution. I believe the October 7 war revived the hope for Palestine from the river to the sea and from the north to the south has been renewed. (Interview with Amar Taki, 21 January 2024) [2]
Hence, the October 7 attack and accompanying discourses by Hamas leaders also revealed—on an unprecedented scale—the strong imprint of Jihadist Messianic ideology, which seeks to recapture all lands once controlled by Muslims and impose sharia law. It also revealed the strong geopolitical connection of a network of Islamists and Jihadist organizations supported by Iran, including Hizballah and the Yemenite Houthis—which joined the Gaza war and openly aspire to destroy Israel.
This coalition is reinforced by several Palestinian and global leftist movements that promote several versions of the one-state solution, which advocates the dissolution of Israel into a new Arab-majority political entity. Hence, conceptually and politically, the ongoing Hamas insurgency since the 1990s, and most notably the October 7 attack, appears not as an attempt to decolonize the Palestinian territories, but rather to counter-colonize the entire land.
The distinction is significant: Decolonization, in its current dominant meaning among indigenous and colonized people, entails the political and legal dismantling of the tools of colonialism, as an avenue for regaining indigenous recognition, self-determination, and the recovery of land and material rights (Amara and Hawari, 2019; Tuck and Yang, 2012). While this concept is contested, following Fanon’s (1962) famous advocacy of violent decolonization, it has been rearticulated in recent years as a nonviolent struggle against oppressive colonial states, using human rights, indigenous rights, deep democracy, and social mobilization as the main platforms of mobilization (Wallace, 2017).
In the Palestinian context, too, decolonization has been envisaged by the Palestinian national movement since the 1980s as ending the occupation and Israeli apartheid and establishing a Palestinian state in the occupied territories, honoring the right of return, democratizing Israeli apartheid, and providing equal rights to the Palestinian Arab minority within Israel.
Counter-colonialism, on the other hand, entails the (violent) overthrow of the regime of a legitimate political entity and the potential eviction or subjugation of the settler-immigrant population, even after several generations. Much like “counter-revolution,” it aspires to turn the political and demographic landscape upside down, and replace the domination of one group with domination of another. The Hamas–Hizballah counter-colonial horizon envisions a violent replacement of Israel with a Muslim Sheria state, in coordination with other Islamic regimes and movements in the region, most notably Iran. The vision of counter-colonizing Israel appears to be disastrous—morally, politically, and physically—giving internal and even international legitimacy to Israel’s war crimes of “flattening” of Gaza and to the massive displacement of its civil population.
In this light, it is important to note the vast power asymmetries between the powerful Israeli state and the Islamist non-state organizations, and the fact that the counter-colonial vision held by Hamas and Islamic Jihad represents only a minority of Palestinians (Shikaki, 2023). More politically, the counter-colonial discourse, supporting “ongoing muqawama” (widely perceived as a rejectionist armed struggle), are morally and politically disastrous, as they have given some legitimacy to the massive destruction wrought by Israel, turning the Hamas attack into a “boomerang insurgency” (Yiftachel, 2023).
The just Palestinian decolonial struggle and the liberal democratic coalition it has built locally and globally—including millions of peace-seeking Israelis—are now seriously threatened not only by Israel’s belligerent occupation and colonial settlement, but also by the maximalist counter-colonial struggle of Hamas and its Jihadist allies.
In summary, then, the Gaza war provides a flashpoint in the struggle between Israeli settler colonialism and the Palestinian and Islamist counter-colonial armed movements. Combining this political geography with the intergenerational fears expressed by Ulfat and Batsheva at the beginning of this essay, it appears that we are indeed facing at the same time an (asymmetric) colonial and counter-colonial war.
Notes
[1] For a few of many examples, see Democratic Socialists of America 2023; International Critical Geographies Group 2023; Jadaliyya Reports 2023. None of them mention the Hamas massacre, placing the blame for the war solely on Israel.
[2] For an excerpt from the six-hour interview, see MEMRI TV 2024.
Oren Yiftachel is a professor of political geography and urban planning at BGU, Beersheba. His recent book, edited with Nisa Mammon, TheoriSE: Debating the Southeastern Turn in Urban Studies presents a diverse range of voices about “southern” and “eastern” urban and social theories. Yiftachel is an activist, working with several human and indigenous rights groups, and a co-founder of “A Land for All”—an Israeli–Palestinian peace movement.
This article first appeared in Palestine/Israel Review Volume 1, Issue 1.
More content from this blog
- Left Renewal Blog Seeking Co-editors
- Mandarin Hegemony: The Past and Future of Linguistic Hierarchies in China, by Gina Anne Tam – 18 April 2024
- The History of the Thai-Chinese and the Chinese-Thai. Interview with Sittithep Eaksittipong – 14 August 2025
- Between Marginalization and Instrumentalization: Anti-Eastern European and Anti-Slavic Racism, by Hans-Christian Petersen – 18 August 2022
- Trump, Putin and the War in Ukraine: Europe’s Painful Awakening to the Rise of Global Fascism, by Hanna Perekhoda – 23 February 2025
- Capitalism Is Not a “Free Labor” System, by Yueran Zhang – 10 January 2021