Neil, as a Zionist myself, I don't disagree that there are colonial elements in Israel's founding (e.g. recognition by the US, arming by the USSR, the Suez Crisis, etc), & certainly in her post-'67 policies towards Gaza & the West Bank. I struggled with the notion until I read some of Jabotinsky's writings. He made no apologies, nor offered the standard revisionist line of a "country w/o a people...". He recognized the connection the Arab Palestinian people had with their land. But he also realized that if the Jews couldn't build a homeland in Palestinian, we never would anywhere else. He wasn't afraid to call the thing what it was.

And if Jews did gain modern Israel by conquest (which is only partly the case), & that's a bad thing, then we have to ask, how did the Palestinian people come to be there in the first place? Did their ancestors not also conquer Palestine, wresting it from Byzantine Christians in the 7th century?