Zionism emerged at the height of European settler colonialism and was realised just as the world turned toward decolonisation. Today, as international law loses force, Israel’s actions are again enabled by the prevailing global order.

Zionism’s late 19th century origins fitted the colonial era, but its fulfilment in 1948 contrasted with the movement towards decolonisation. Today with an apparent decline of a rules-based international order, Israel may again be in line with the times.

Zionism was a European political movement whose origins lay within sections of the European Jewish community, with strong secular strands alongside more religious elements. Early protagonists of Zionist ideas in the 1880s were writing at the time of European colonial consolidation, and final expansion into the lands of “lesser peoples”. They could readily conceive of a settlement outside of Europe because this was then the model of major European states. The colonial division of the Caribbean, the Pacific Ocean, South and South-East Asia were already largely established. At the infamous Berlin Conference of 14 nations in 1884-5 most of Africa was acknowledged as the possessions, or euphemistically named “protectorates”, of European powers.

Settler colonialism which had been so successful in the Americas, Asiatic Russia, Australia, New Zealand and South Africa now extended to Kenya, Rhodesia, Algeria and elsewhere. The Zionist model of settler colonialism was in line with the times: it sought a geographically defined region for those Jewish people who chose resettle there.

In contrast, larger number of Jewish individuals (not all anti-Zionists), sought a new personal homeland instead. Between 1890 and 1900 the Jewish population of the United States grew from around 400,000 to about 1.5 million people (and doubled in the next two decades).

The First Zionist Congress held in Basel in 1897 created the Zionist Organisation, adopting a policy to seek “a legally secured homeland in Palestine for the Jewish people”. Palestine (under Ottoman rule since 1516) at the time held a population of 560,000 of whom the official census counted 22,000 as Jewish and 62,000 Christian. The Jewish population had begun to grow in response to the anti-Jewish pogroms in eastern and central Europe.

Zionist leader Theodor Herzl turned to the Ottoman administration without success. Liaison with Germany, then influential on the Ottoman state, failed to advance the cause. He therefore considered advancing other options for a national home. The Zionist Conference in 1903 agreed to investigate an option (withdrawn in 1905) to which the British government were sympathetic: a Jewish homeland in Uganda, which had become a British “protectorate” in 1894.

Many other locations entered debate on later occasions. These included Jewish suggestions for areas of Australia (the Kimberley or within Tasmania), Suriname on the Caribbean shores of South America, Argentina, Angola, Madagascar.

The entry of the Ottoman Empire into the Great War transformed the issue, leading to a British proposal to offer a Jewish national home within a Palestine that they did not yet control, but (as in other multi-ethnic colonies) with no suggestion of a separate state.

The irony is, of course that if in the later 19th century a group of Europeans (this time from the European Jewish community) had taken up land currently previously occupied by native peoples, it would have been within the norms of the period of consolidation of settler colonialism. By the time it did happen in 1948, the world was quite different.

The establishment of a Jewish territorial state was the decision not of an Ottoman Empire, nor by the British administration in their Palestinian mandate. Nor was it the gift of Jehovah, but of the relatively newly formed United Nations. The 1947 UN resolution, approved by 33 to 13 with 10 abstentions, divided Palestine (2/3 Arab, 1/3 and increasingly Jewish) into Arab and Jewish states with Jerusalem excluded from the split. The UN decision coincided with the beginning of the post war process of decolonisation as India and Burma saw independence. Israel was travelling in the opposite direction to history.

On the formal establishment of Israel in 1948 the failed Arab League attack resulted in the expansion of Israel’s boundaries and displacement of about 700,000 Palestinians. Israel’s military determination and strength would see it through the sequence of further conflicts with Arab neighbours and the Palestinian people; the latest leading to the destructive assault on Gaza, drawing attention away from increasing settler activity in the West Bank of occupied Palestine.

But if the timing of the Zionist movement’s emergence matched the colonial era, while the formal establishment of the Jewish state was in contrast to the mood of decolonisation elsewhere, today Israel’s policies can benefit from the apparent demise of the international rules-based order. The International Criminal Court can issue a warrant to arrest Israel’s prime minister, the International Court of Justice can rule Israel’s occupation of the Gaza strip illegal, and the United Nations can vote 149 to 12 for a resolution demanding a ceasefire in Gaza and restoration of aid all without impact.

One UN member with veto power – Russia – invaded Ukraine and another – the USA – has initiated new international military actions amid making other international threats. While the support to Israel by the United States in diplomacy, major finance and weapons supply is longstanding, the US rejection of the organisations established for international order is new. This sits alongside their most loyal ally Australia’s refusal to criticise them, maintaining ambiguities on the genocide in Gaza and the rights of the Palestinian people, and now the astonishing initiative to invite the President of Israel to visit Australia.

Zionism might well feel that, while it aligned with the mood of settler colonialisms in the late nineteenth century and was already out of step with the foundation of Israel in the era when decolonisation began, in 2026 Israel – as it devastates Gaza and presides over increased settler violence in the West Bank – can ignore the sense that history is not on its side, because the institutions designed to uphold international law and peace have proved ineffective.