Zion has figured powerfully in the Jewish imagination for millennia, at least from the time of the Babylonian exile, and the pre-exilic Psalms. Enter the “-ism” of the late 19th century, when Theodor Herzl translated that longing into a political movement — Zionism.

Even since Herzl, Zionism has existed in various forms — whether named or simply as an idea: Labour Zionism, Religious Zionism, Political Zionism, Practical Zionism, Cultural Zionism, Christian Zionism, Revisionist Zionism, and more. What most have in common is the conviction that the Jewish people have an ineradicable connection to the Land of Israel.

Enter Indigenous Zionism: a Zionism that recognizes that such connection is an indigenous bond, one in which Jewish Peoplehood is seen to have been forged through the relationship between land, ancestry, Hebrew writings, and the language itself, from which arise cultural and spiritual practices.

In the current torrent of academic fashions and activist orthodoxies, one idea that has captured the imagination of progressive movements is settler colonialism and the associated rhetoric of decolonization.

This theoretical framework purports to explain global history through a tidy dichotomy of settlers and indigenous peoples, of Western power and non‑Western victimhood. Yet when that model is applied beyond the contexts in which it was originally developed, especially in regions with complex histories, it does more harm than good.

Nowhere is this more clearly seen than in the debate over Israel and Zionism. What is too often caricatured as settler colonialism is better understood through the lens of indigenous peoplehood, observing parallels that exist between Jewish historical experience and the stories of other ancient peoples. In this sense, Indigenous Zionism is above all Peoplehood Zionism: a recognition of ancestral connection, continuous presence, and deeply rooted land-based identity.

At its core, Zionism is the expression of a people’s right to self‑determination in its ancestral homeland. For the Jewish people, this is not an abstract political invention of the modern era, but rather the resumption of an identity shaped over millennia in the Land of Israel.

Long before Europe’s age of imperial expansion, Jews maintained a continuous presence in the Levant, a presence expressed culturally, spiritually, linguistically, and demographically. Settler colonial theory, which originates largely in Western academic circles, typically defines settlers as intruders acting on behalf of an external metropolis to subjugate indigenous populations; this definition simply does not fit the historical trajectory of the Jewish people in their homeland.

Contrary to reductionist narratives, Jews did not arrive en masse as white Europeans with the trappings of Western economic power. Firstly, there remained throughout centuries of exile, a small presence of Jews in the land. In Māori thought, this is the concept of “keeping the fires burning.”

The return of Eastern European and Russian Jews during the late 19th and early 20th centuries was a two-fold response. On the one hand, Jewish settlement in Ottoman Palestine was legally enabled within an imperial reform context, whereupon, Jews embraced the opportunity of re-establishing themselves as a people in their ancestral land. On the other hand, it was — in so many cases — a direct reaction to persecution, marginalization, and threats to their existence. These were populations motivated by survival-driven desperation, not imperialist ambition. Whichever the driver, Jews overwhelmingly regarded the Land of Israel as the ancient cradle of their people, not as foreign soil. Even Arab leaders of the time acknowledged the Jewish historical connection. This historical reality is crucial: it differentiates a movement of return rooted in indigeneity from the archetype of colonial conquest.

A core problem with applying settler colonialism to Israel is that the theory collapses complex histories into a binary moral narrative: oppressor versus oppressed. Few human histories are so simple, and the Middle East is a region where multiple layers of civilization, conquest, displacement, and cultural survival overlap.

Indeed, the Arab conquests of the seventh to ninth centuries brought a sweeping linguistic and religious transformation across the region, one that subsumed many ancient peoples. Kurdish, Assyrian, Chaldean, and Amazigh communities, among others, maintained continuous links to their lands yet were subjected to cultural and political marginalization. This complexity underscores a fundamental flaw in settler colonial frameworks when applied universally. Indigeneity is not merely dispossession or victimhood; it is about genealogy, continuous presence, language, ritual, and identity anchored in a specific geography.

The broad misapplication of settler colonialism has very real political consequences. Once adopted unquestioningly by activists and academic institutions, it provides a convenient but woefully simplistic moral certitude: all historical wrongs arise from a single dynamic, and dismantling alleged structures of colonial power is supposedly the path to justice.

In practice, this framework frequently morphs from analytical model into ideological dogma. It becomes a “religion of grievance” with its own categories of original sin, penance, and absolution, where dissolving complexity via the dogma of colonial guilt eclipses other narratives of agency, resilience, and reconciliation. Those who resist this mode of thought are not simply arguing for historical nuance; they are confronting a contemporary orthodoxy that has profound consequences for real peoples and nations.

Consider, for example, the persistent accusation that Israel commits genocide against Palestinians. This claim often rests on rhetoric rather than careful historical and legal analysis, and well established definitions. The “religion of grievance” leads accusers to ignore the atrocities committed by non‑state actors such as Hamas, which has openly declared its intent to destroy the Jewish State. The machinery of international opinion, when driven by such problematic and simplistic narratives, tends to silence any call for impartial and disciplined inquiry.

Indigenous Zionism or peoplehood Zionism recognizes that nations are more than juridical entities. They are living communities formed by shared history, culture, memory, and connection to land. For Jews, this peoplehood has been further forged by exile, persecution, revival, and more recently statehood. In many respects, such experiences are consistent with what indigenous peoples around the world know intimately: that identity persists beyond displacement, and that belonging is more than presence. It is this peoplehood — not colonial conquest — that underpins the legitimacy of Zionism as a movement of self‑determination.

Further, Indigeneity is not contingent upon whether individual members of a community consciously affirm that identity. A Jew, Māori, or Native American person may choose not to self-identify as Indigenous for a range of reasons: cultural dislocation, assimilation pressures, internalized stigma, or the mistaken belief that indigeneity is synonymous with marginalization rather than cultural continuity and pride, or progressive politics rather than an authentic identification.  Yet such individual positioning does not determine the status itself. indigeneity refers to the historical emergence, formation, and ongoing development of a people in relation to a specific ancestral land. It is a collective, relational, and genealogical reality, not merely a matter of personal declaration.

Detractors may object that indigeneity, like Zionism itself, is a political construct. Indeed, both movements have a political element, developed in response to historical circumstances. However, at the core there is a deeper meaning that transcends politics and historical contingency, which speaks to the essential element of peoplehood and its genesis in a particular place.

In an age of narrative wars, Jews have been falsely accused of being foreign white colonizers. The denial of indigeneity to Jewish people maps directly onto the experience of other Indigenous peoples, in which ideologies formed in the Western academy seeks to determine identity. Māori academic Linda Tuhiwai Smith emphasized that Indigenous Peoples must define and assert their own realities: “Our survival, our humanity, our worldview and language, our imagination and spirit, our very place in the world depends on our capacity to act for ourselves, to engage in the world and the actions of our colonizers, to face them head on.”

Jews can take their place in the Indigenous world, forerunners of decolonization, having regained sovereignty and restored their Indigenous language. They will write their own story rather than have it imposed on them by their ideological opponents.

To those ignorant of the deep layers of history involved, the accusation of settler colonialism may seem persuasive. To those who have examined the evidence, and who understand the dangers of flattening complex identities into politically expedient constructs, such claims fall short. Indigenous Zionism is not an oxymoron; it is the affirmation that the Jewish people’s claim to their land arises from continuity, culture, and unique identity — the hallmarks of genuine indigenous connection.

In a world increasingly shaped by monolithic narratives, reclaiming the richness of human histories — including the Jewish story — is not an indulgence in academic detail. It is a defense of a people’s right to define themselves on their own terms, rooted in their own histories. Indigenous Zionism, then, is simply peoplehood Zionism — an assertion that identity and belonging are not abstractions to be judged or negated by a fashionable but woefully superficial ideological dogma, but truths grounded in the enduring experience of a people with their land.

Dr. Sheree Trotter is Māori (Te Arawa). She earned her PhD in history from the University of Auckland, is the Director of Indigenous Embassy Jerusalem, a Fellow of London Centre for the Study of Contemporary Antisemitism, and Alumna of the ISGAP-Oxford Institute.