What is meant by colonialism when discussing Israel/Palestine?

[elias7]

I’m having a difficult time stretching my
understanding of colonialism to explain the Jewish presence in the Middle East. I can’t help but think then this is a deliberate attempt to make Jews appear more powerful and more sinister than they really are.

Does not colonialism refer to Empire building, expansion by a vast power into already inhabited areas to lay claim to the land and its resources? Israel is not a British, a European, or colony of any other empire, tapping the vast resources of the oil-poor Negev desert to send back to its homeland.

Jews are indigenous to this land, none other. And over the millennia, history has shown that they are not welcome anywhere ultimately.

Israel was formed in exactly the opposite time of empire building and colonization. British and French empires were relinquishing their lands in the Middle East, creating Syria, Iraq, Jordan, Lebanon, Israel, and almost Palestine. The turn of the century and the decades after was the first era of nationalism. All the states created in the Middle East were meant to be Arab states, all except Israel.

For tens of thousands and later hundreds of thousands of Jews to seek safe haven in the only ancestral homeland they had ever truly known, first walking then running, due to forces of persecution, ethnic cleansing, and finally genocide, this strains and really defies my definition of colonialism. They didn’t leave some behemoth empire known as Jewland to spread their tentacles into other peoples’ business. For the many that fled to England, and to America, are these colonizers as well?

Has colonialism been redefined since the age of the expansionistic British, French, Belgian, Dutch, Spanish, Portuguese, Arab empires? Or did I miss that day at school when persecuted refugees returning to their homeland are also colonialists.

Perhaps someone can clear this up for me.