From Exploitation to Exclusivity

How PLO Intellectuals Reversed the Logic of Colonialism

What’s most revealing, if you read carefully through early PLO-associated texts—such as Fayez Sayegh’s 1965 Zionist Colonialism in Palestine or Jamil Hilal’s 1976 contributions to the Journal of Palestine Studies—is that the very attempt to frame Zionism as “settler colonialism” ends up undermining its own claim. Rather than demonstrating how Zionism replicates typical colonial structures of exploitation and extraction, these texts highlight something quite different: the absence of classical colonial exploitation and the substitution of a metaphysical accusation grounded in older anti-Jewish libels that target Jewish collectivity.

In classical colonialism, the colonizer exploits the indigenous population’s labor and resources for the benefit of a distant metropole. But in the Zionist case, this logic fails, as these authors themselves clarify. The early Zionist movement famously insisted on Hebrew labor (avodah ivrit), seeking to avoid exactly the kind of exploitative native labor relations that characterized European colonialism. And it is precisely this refusal to exploit Arab labor that becomes the new “crime.” The issue is no longer economic extraction but what is described as Jewish exclusivity or segregation—a moral metaphysics in which the desire for Jewish self-reliance becomes a sign of racial supremacy.

Thus, the addition of the word “settler” to “colonialism” doesn’t clarify the charge—it transforms it. It pivots away from historical power relations and towards a symbolic structure in which Jewish collective life itself is deemed illegitimate. The narrative mutates from a critique of domination into a theological accusation: Jews are guilty not of conquest, but of existing as a separate people.

What emerges is not a political critique of a state, but a civilizational libel: the myth of the “chosen people,” “Zionist racism,” and “apartheid” become ways of recoding Jewish peoplehood as inherently supremacist. “Apartheid,” in this framing, is not the result of structural subjugation, but of Jewish national self-definition—a grotesque inversion that collapses the distinction between identity and injustice.

In this way, “Zionist settler colonialism” becomes an empty vessel into which old anti-Jewish tropes are poured. It is not a structural analysis, but a moral accusation disguised as anticolonial critique—one that resurrects the canard of Jewish exclusivity in the language of universal justice.