In Israel … the identification of Zionism as a colonial movement is usually regarded as slanderous. The consideration of Israel as a colonialist society, implying that the Jews conquered and expropriated a settled land and exploited or expelled the native dwellers, goes against the grain of the Zionist self-portrayal as a movement of a people without land returning to a land without people. It is considered repugnant by Israel's Zionist left wing, which traditionally has professed self-liberation and redemption of a wasteland through toil, and by Israel's right wing, which traditionally has advocated that the “Whole Land of Israel” is an incontestable asset of the Jewish people by “historical rights” and providential covenant.

Zionist practice necessarily involved a certain degree of colonial practice (in the sociological–descriptive sense of the term), because the Zionist enterprise involved the settlement of one ethno-cultural group in a land already occupied by another group for generations, and the new settlers did not intend to integrate with the local group and adopt its culture but rather to establish a society separate and distinct from the local group, culturally and nationally.