My wife just dug out a few of her grandparents’ books from storage. They were refugees from Nazi Germany who came to the US in the mid-1930s. One of the books is an original edition of A Palestine Picture Book, published by Schocken in 1947, featuring photographs by Jakob Rosner for the Jewish National Fund. The photographs are stunning, but it’s the text that caught my attention.

From the Preface:

It is barely forty years since the large-scale Jewish colonization of Palestine was begun. Despite natural and political handicaps, Jewish colonization, once begun, continued.”

From chapter 1:

Long a barren waste, it has been transformed by Jewish settlers into a place of fertile fields and green gardens in a generation’s time…. Orange plantations now cover thousands of acres of the once water-starved coastal plain in dramatic contrast with the parched tracts of soil where colonization has not yet begun…. Buried beneath these dunes is the ancient city of Caesarea, the port of Herod the Great, a prey to the shifting sands that the modern settler must continually combat in order to preserve his trees and fields.

From chapter 2:

On its [the Galilee] western shore is the city of Tiberias, which Joseph ha-Nasi, Duke of Naxos, rebuilt in the sixteenth century above the ruins of the ancient city with the intention of inviting colonists all over the world to settle there…. From Lake Chinnereth the Jordan flows through a wide valley studded with new and thriving Jewish settlements… The Jordan sweeps past Kfar Ruppin, southernmost settlements in the Jordan Valley…. From chapter 3: Tel Aviv. In twenty-five years its all-Jewish population has reached a figure of more than 200,000.

From chapter 4:

…they have devoted their life and labor to the one aim of developing their settlements into strong and efficient units. Many of the new agricultural colonies are either… …and landscaped prospects of the permanent settlement….All collective settlements…The fully developed settlements…the collective settlements…Some settlements…especially settlements…A number of settlements…brought upon a settlement…fathers and mothers of the young settlers, left Europe to join the settlements…When a settlement is founded…in every settlement…reproduces the work of the settlement…

From chapter 5:

Even in modern Jerusalem the colorful Jewish tradition lives on—in this colony of Bokharan Jews, for example, who came from the Russo-Persian border…

The book, a gorgeous propaganda of image and word, is rife with references to colonization, settlement, settlers, and ethnic homogeneity. In a completely unapologetic, almost naive way. Indeed, the preface claims that Rosner “has deliberately avoided the controversial issues that at times tend to overshadow, in the eyes of the outside world, the patient and inspired labor that goes forward daily in Jewish Palestine.” Colonization and settlement, in other words, are part of the uncontroversial vocabulary of Zionism ca. 1947.

Yet, call Israel a colonial project today, say that it is and has always been a settler society, and you’ll be branded an anti-Semite or a self-hating Jew.