What would you say to the zionist jews that were already living in Palestine? Or to those in neighbouring states of the Ottoman empire that moved within those borders to find a place with less oppression? Did they ‘colonize’ their own country?
What would you say to someone that survived a pogrom in Russia and migrated the remains of their family to a collectivist farm in an empty piece of desert, merely as survival because they had nowhere else to go?
There’s a lot of nuance to be found if you are willing to look a little deeper into it
They weren’t Zionist just because they were Jewish people. They integrated into Palestinian society, they did not ethnically cleanse the Territory like the early Zionists.
There were jews already living there that wanted their muslim and christian neighbours replaced with jews, and there were jewish immigrants that were happy to build a kibbutz out in the desert and trade with their Arab neighbours.
What of the jews that were ethnically cleansed out of their Arab and North African countries? Where should they have moved?
Well most of the jews that were living there in the 1880’s will probably be dead by now, so it was mostly a hypothetical question of you travelling back in time and telling someone who was born in Palestine, from parents who were born in Palestine, that they were foreign settlers and had to leave
