Why the Accusation of Settler Colonialism Is So Hollow

The big dictionaries have announced their “Word of the Year” for 2024, based on the recorded jump in its use from 2023. Among the winners are “polarization” at Merriam-Webster, “brat” at Collier, “manifest” at Cambridge, “brain rot” at Oxford, and “demure” at Dictionary.com. Relying on my more limited reading, my own vote might be for “settler colonialism.”

A phrase that I’m not sure that I ever encountered before the October 2023 Hamas massacre but that I’ve come across innumerable times since, “settler colonialism” apparently goes back to the late 1960s or 1970s. Although its first appearance has been attributed to a 1965 article on “Zionist Colonialism in Palestine” by the Syrian-born intellectual and diplomat Fayez Sayegh, I was unable to find it there, and its absence indicates that it did not yet exist at the time. The closest Sayegh came to it was when he wrote of Zionism’s aims:

By imitating the colonial ventures of the “Gentile nations” among whom Jews lived, the “Jewish nation” could send its own colonists into a piece of Afro-Asian territory, establish a settler-community, and, in due course, set up its own state—not, indeed, as an imperial outpost of a metropolitan home-base, but as a home-base in its own right, upon which the entire “Jewish nation” would sooner or later converge from all over the world.