I held off for a bit to reply to this.
First, I definitely agree Israel is not a Colonist endeavor as expressed by the types of Franz Fanon whose focus was more towards the European experience in Africa or the Caribbean.
But, there still remains the idea of a settle-colonial situation. This is where settlers come into permanently replace the pre-existing settlements and totally establish and replace the indigenous people with their own. The best examples here being Australia, New Zealand and the United States. Even smaller examples being places like Haiti, the Canary Islands, etc. There are certainly failed examples such as South Africa (and possibly Algeria).
However, Israel always comes up as an example of this. However, this almost always gets complicated immediately because the debate keeps focusing on different facts. Whenever, this happens I personally like to start breaking down things into smaller units to help provide some consistency - in this case - let's break this along a timeline. I think 1947/8 and the Independence of Israel is the crucial division point.
Prior to 1947 - Jews migrated to Palestine not with the expressed permission of either the Ottoman or the the British empire which were the imperial powers. In fact both powers tried to actually discourage and prevent this migration. So, these people came without support to an area they felt was their ancient homeland. I think this safely categorizes this not as colonialism. To loosely borrow a Tolkien metaphor - the settles felt attacked by a "five nation army" that wanted to exterminate them. As such, the war for Israeli Independence can also easily be framed as a war for survival in the face of genocide.
For the record - I am a person of science and I have seen the DNA reviews and the Palestinians and most Jews are genetically extremely close - almost like what you would expect between Canaanites and the various Jewish tribes which shared a common set of forefathers.
Post 1967 with the rise of Israeli power in the area past the 1948 boundaries, there was a growing pressure by people to settle and replace the Palestinian inhabitants in those areas with a purely Israeli one. Now, is that settler colonialism? I think this is worth an examination. It was distinctly not a case of preservation like 1947 - but of replacement. 1967 also corresponds to the date when Israel was first called a Colonial Settler State by Maxime Robinson in his article - _Israel: A Colonial Settler-State?_. While I have issues with Mr. Robinson's extreme Marxist take - the idea still has merit.
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