ABSTRACT
The notion that Israel is a settlement-colony type of society became a staple of Arab and Palestinian thought, and from there disseminated to Western radical circles, in the late 1960s and early 1970s, against the background of the new sensitivity to Third-World and post-colonial issues. One publication that gave wide circulation to the idea was a book length essay published in 1973 by the French Marxian (later turned Moslem) scholar, Maxime Rodinson, titled Israel: A Settler-Colonial State? The gist of the book’s argument is that:
[T]he creation of the State of Israel on Palestinian soil is the culmination of a process that fits perfectly into the great European-American movement of expansion in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, whose aim was to settle new inhabitants among other peoples or to dominate them economically and politically.
