That Atlantic article is pure propaganda bullshyt. Purposefully misleading, and a hit piece on critics of Israel and leftists.
"Most Israelis are descended from people who migrated to the Holy Land from 1881 to 1949."
Yes, with the aid of Britain, that's when the settler colonialism began. They didn't think the Nakba was worth even mentioning at all? The death of 15k and the ousting of 700k Palestinians from 1947-1949 seems like it should be the first thing mentioned in an article on colonialism. The only reason to omit the Nakba is to mislead people.
"They were not completely new to the region. Today Israel is the only home of 9 million Israelis who have lived there for multiple generations."
"Multiple generations," as if the history of Israeli colonialism only starts after 1949, and nothing before can be discussed. Omitting the fact that before the Nakba, the native Arab Jews, while a minority, lived in relative peace with the Arab Muslims and Christians in the area, also clearly done to mislead people. Also omits the fact that Israel opened up citizenship to Jews around the world to come and settle the area specifically to pump up their population size to overtake the Arab majority.
“Even more preposterous than the ‘colonizer’ label is the ‘whiteness’ trope that is key to the decolonization ideology … Israel has a large community of Ethiopian Jews, and about half of all Israelis … are Mizrahi, the descendants of Jews from Arab and Persian lands,” Montefiore notes."
You don't need to be white to be a colonizer. Entirely disingenuous take. Also it's worth mentioning the history of discrimination Arab and Ethiopian Jews faced from white Azeknazi Jews immediately after they were ousted from Europe and settled into Palestine. Arab Jews were specifically placed as a buffer between Azkenazi Jews and the Arab populations they just ousted/massacred and had just went to war against. This is where some of the first critique of whiteness in Israel comes from, and it is intertwined with the history of Israel/Palestine.
This is worse than Fox news level reporting. The amount of times I've seen a twisted version of history being broadcast from supposed legitimate news organizations is fukking crazy.