Are settlements and settlers on other people land a colonial practices?
As a strictly legal matter, the Jews didn’t take Palestine from the Arabs; they got it from the British, who had exercised sovereign authority in Palestine under a League of Nations mandate for thirty years prior to Israel’s declaration of independence in 1948. And the British don’t want it back. If you consider the British illegitimate usurpers, fine. In that case, this territory is not Arab land but Turkish land, a province of the Ottoman Empire for hundreds of years until the British wrested it from them during the Great War in 1917. And the Turks don’t want it back. If you look back earlier in history than the Ottoman Turks, who took over Palestine over in 1517, you find it under the sovereignty of the yet another empire not indigenous to Palestine: the Mameluks, who were Turkish and Circassian slave-soldiers headquartered in Egypt. And the Mameluks don’t even exist any more, so they can’t want it back. So, going back 800 years, there’s no particularly clear chain of title that mak
