Settler terrorism is the modern incarnation of the Zionist dream

Settler terrorism is the modern incarnation of the Zionist dream Submitted by Fadi Zatari on Tue, 08/04/2026 - 16:22 Israel's brutal campaign of apartheid and displacement is putting unbearable pressure on the indigenous Palestinian population An armed Israeli settler is seen in the occupied West Bank village of Ras Ein al-Auja, whose Bedouin community was displaced earlier this year, on 22 April 2026 (Ilia Yefimovich/AFP) On Decades before the Zionist movement’s inception in the late 19th century, the German Jewish thinker Moses Hess proposed in his contentious manuscript Rome and Jerusalem: The Last National Question (1862) that a Jewish state be established through settlements in Palestine as “socialist agricultural communities”. He promoted the colonisation of Palestine, viewing the Holy Land as a forgotten corner of the Ottoman Empire; merely an empty land that should be utilised in the interests of the “Jewish nation”. Twenty years later, in 1882, the Russian Jewish thinker Leon Pinsker published a pamphlet titled “ Auto-Emancipation ”, in which he pronounced: “The land which we are about to purchase must be productive and have a good situation, and an area sufficient to allow the settlement of several millions.