Today, let's talk about one of the biggest talking point that keeps coming up in relation to the current war going on in Gaza, and the Israel-Palestine conflict in general: “Israel is a settler colonialist state”. This is often attributed to the Zionist movement coined in the 1882 book “Auto-Emancipation” by Leon Pinsker. We will explore this claim in a bit more detail today.

Since 1516, the land of Israel and Palestine has been governed by the Ottoman Empire. Unlike from the Mamluk period before 1516, we have a lot of good records from this period which were kept in the archives in Istanbul and were being studied extensively. This includes more or less regular census reports from the entire period between 1516 and 1920, when the region fell under the British mandate following the defeat of the Ottoman Empire in the First World War.