By Richard Martin | The Strategic Code

We are told—endlessly—that Israel is a colonial project, a usurpation of “ancestral Palestinian lands.” The slogan rolls off the tongue easily, but like most slogans, it crumbles the moment you scratch beneath the surface.

First, let’s clear up some basic history. In the late 19th century, there was no Palestinian state, no sovereign nation, no flag, no government. The land was under Ottoman rule, administered by absentee landlords who often lived in Beirut, Damascus, or Istanbul. The bulk of the local Arab population were fellahin, poor tenant farmers, while many others were nomadic or semi-nomadic Bedouins moving seasonally across the broader Levant and Sinai. Whatever else this was, it was not some cohesive, self-governing national entity.

Meanwhile, Jewish communities had been present continuously in Jerusalem, Hebron, Safed, and Tiberias for centuries. They weren’t “colonizers”—they were descendants of those who never left. By the early 1880s, as the First Aliyah began, Zionism arose not out of some imperial scheme, but as a desperate movement of self-preservation after centuries of persecution, pogroms, and expulsions in Europe.

And what did these Zionist pioneers do? Did they march in with imperial armies and seize the land by force? No. They bought it—often at steep prices—from those absentee Ottoman landlords. What kind of “theft” involves paying for swampy, malarial land that no one else wanted, then draining it and making it bloom into productive farms? If anything, that’s a gift. “Colonialism” apparently now means turning wasteland into breadbasket while paying exorbitant rates for the privilege.

The truth is the Arab inhabitants had no coherent sense of national identity at that time beyond being part of the wider Arab or Ottoman world. Palestinian nationalism only crystallized much later, largely in reaction to the rise of Jewish nationalism. That’s not unique; many national identities emerge reactively. But let’s not rewrite history and pretend a fully formed nation-state was robbed from under their feet.

So when anti-Zionists today talk about “stolen land,” it’s projection at best and propaganda at worst. Jews returned to what all credible historians recognize as their ancestral homeland, invested their sweat and blood to make it livable, and built a society against overwhelming odds. That is not theft; that is resilience.

If you really want to see “colonial domination,” look at the Ottoman system that kept both Arabs and Jews politically voiceless for centuries. Zionism didn’t colonize Palestine; it freed it.

I guide leaders and thinkers through the terrain of sovereignty, power, and the individual—illuminating parasovereign systems that enable human action and cooperation beyond the reach of the state and sovereign-dependent institutions and organizations.

© 2025 Richard Martin