[homo_ergaster]

? Israel continues to build and operate settlement colonies in the West Bank in internationally recognized Palestinian land. I’m not sure how you can get around calling it a settler colony without some impressive mental backflips

[tome]

I'm not sure what you mean. Even if one agrees that Israel "builds and operates settlement colonies" how does that make Israel a settler colony? But perhaps you consider Tel Aviv a settlement?

[homo_ergaster]

I don’t think anyone denies that Israel is building settlements in internationally recognized Palestinian and Syrian land. They don’t hide it, there’s a lot of very recent news online about it e.g. https://www.nytimes.com/2021/10/27/world/middleeast/israel-s...

[tome]

Yes, I know what the "international community" thinks about that. I'm asking why that makes Israel a settler colony, as you claimed. Do you consider Tel Aviv a "settlement", for example?

[homo_ergaster]

Why is a state that builds settlements in other countries’ land a settler colony? Seems very obvious, I don’t really understand your point?

[tome]

Perhaps it's a simple misunderstanding around terminology. I certainly wouldn't say that Britain at the height of empire was a "settler colony". I would reserve that description for the colonies themselves, i.e. those settlements outside Britain itself! Likewise I wouldn't describe Israel as a "settler colony" simply because it has (perceived) colonies outside its borders. I would only say that if I believe that Israel had no right to exist within any borders. But perhaps that's not what you meant and I just misunderstood you.

[sndman]

"Therefore it would be necessary to carry on colonization against the will of the Palestinian Arabs,...Zionist colonization, even the most restricted, must either be terminated or carried out in defiance of the will of the native population. This colonization can, therefore, continue and develop only under the protection of a force independent of the local population – an iron wall which the native population cannot break through. This is, in toto, our policy towards the Arabs. To formulate it any other way would only be hypocrisy."

--Vladimir Jabotinsky, The Iron Wall, (We and the Arabs) (1923)