Decolonization: The Case of Palestine Introduction Since before the creation of Israel, the Zionist movement’s axiom has been clear: to create a ‘Jewish state’ in Mandatory Palestine and to artificially engineer Jewish ‘purity’ in the land – a goal that was eventually amended to Jewish majority instead due to its perceived impracticality.1 The bedrock on which this vision has been created and maintained is settler-colonialism, racial discrimination, and racial elimination of the Palestinian people through forcible transfer. As such, colonization, apartheid, and forcible transfer constitute Israel’s defining pillars, which continue to be necessary for the regime’s survival. These three pillars are the principal drivers of its racist policies to maintain a ‘Jewish state’ between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea, thereby denying the Palestinian people’s inalienable rights to self-determination and return.2 Emphasizing the nature of the Israeli colonial-apartheid regime is crucial given that the prevailing discourse among the international community has long held that the situation in Palestine is a national conflict in that it “represents a clash between two national movements.”3 This paradigm has defined interventions of third-party states and international actors in Palestine since before the Nakba, as evidenced by the British Mandate’s 1 See, for example, in Zionists’ own words, Theodore Herzl, Der Judenstaat (The Jewish State) (M. Breitenstein's Verlags-Buchhandlung, 1896); Ze'ev Jabotinsky, ‘The Iron Wall’ (1923) <http:// en.jabotinsky.org/media/9747/the-iron-wall.pdf> accessed 5 April 2023. 2 For more information on forcible displacement, see BADIL’s forcible transfer series: BADIL, Forced Population Transfer: The Case of Palestine – Introduction (Working Paper No. 15, BADIL 2014) [hereinafter BADIL, Forced Population Transfer - Introduction] <https://www.badil. org/cached_uploads/view/2021/04/19/wp15-introduction-1618823118.pdf>. 3 Nadim Rouhana, ‘Decolonization as Reconciliation: Rethinking the National Conflict Paradigm in the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict’ (2017) Ethnic and Racial Studies 647. 1