Since its inception, the Zionist project was clear in its goals and the strategy required to achieve them. In order for Jews to colonise the lands of the Palestinians and establish an exclusivist Jewish state, Zionist strategists insisted, the natives must be driven out of the country. For Zionism, colonisation and expulsion were to be simultaneous processes that could not be decoupled from one another: indeed, they would become the very same process.
Colonisation as expulsion
At the same time, Zionism insisted, following Millenarian Protestant Restorationist claims, that European Jews, rather than being descendants of European converts to Judaism, were actually descendants of the ancient Hebrews who had been allegedly exiled by the Romans in the 1st century AD. Based on this double fiction, Zionism claimed that European Jews were in fact "returning" to Palestine in order to colonise it, indeed that European Jews had the "right" to return to their original "homeland". Thus Jewish colonisation was one and the same as Jewish "return" to Palestine, just as it was one and the same as the Jewish expulsion of the Palestinians from the country.
Once Zionism had political control of Palestine, it followed two policies to ensure that its colonial project continued unhindered. On the one hand, it insisted that the Palestinians it expelled had no right of return to Palestine and that it would prevent their attempt to return by military means while expelling as many as possible of those who remained; on the other hand, it decreed in 1950 a "Law of Return" for Jews, endowing them with the right to colonise Palestine, which it presented as a right to recolonise it. Turning the rights of the Palestinians to their homes and homeland into the rights of European Jews to "return" to Palestine was and continues to be the main political, legal and ideological strategy of Zionism and the principal policy of the state of Israel. This translates into the only political formula that Zionist and Israeli leaders as well as the Palestinian people agree on, namely that Jewish colonisation means expulsion of the Palestinians, and Palestinian return means Jewish decolonisation. What the two sides disagree on is which part of the formula they want to enforce.
Return as decolonisation
Rhetorically, Zionism has understood the power of the right of return, not only in its legal and ethical dimensions, but also in its ability to undermine the meaning that Zionists attributed to that very same conept. After all, it was Zionism which insisted that European Jewish descendants of European converts to Judaism were in fact descendants of the ancient Hebrews who had been allegedly expelled from ancient Palestine and whose "repatriation" and " return" was a moral and political imperative 2,000 years later. Note that Zionism's argument is not a historical one, wherein it was and is not claiming that the alleged Hebrew exiles of the first century should have had the right to return to Palestine then, but rather that their fictional descendants should have the right to do so two millenia later. These ideological premises would be enshrined in Israel's very own "Law of Return" passed by the Knesset in July 1950. Yet, it is the same Zionists who insist that the return of the Palestinian refugees, whether immediately following the expulsion in 1949, or every year since is imparctical and impossible. Today, they express shock that refugees should have a right to return to their homeland a mere 65 years after their expulsion while they insist on the rights of Jews to "return" after 2,000 years.
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