Europe Keeps the Territories. Israel Gets the Label.

Europe grants its own distant sovereignties history, constitutional complexity and democratic nuance. The Jewish state receives one word: colonial.

On 5 August 2026, Mqondisi Moyo, President of the Mthwakazi Republic Party, published Africa’s Decolonization Ended Where European Convenience Began.

His argument is historical and devastatingly simple: Europe withdrew its colonial administrations from Africa but left behind the territorial structures those administrations had created. The colonial flag disappeared. The colonial map became sacred.

Moyo’s article prompted me to examine the other side of that arrangement.

European states did not apply the same territorial rigidity to themselves. They preserved distant sovereignties, integrated some territories, granted autonomy to others, created constituent countries, established special municipalities and developed an entire constitutional thesaurus through which relationships inherited from empire could continue.

Europe kept the territories.
Israel got the label.

Spain’s African geography

Spain is not confined to Europe.

Ceuta and Melilla are Spanish cities on the African mainland. The Canary Islands are a Spanish autonomous community geographically located off the African coast. Spain also maintains sovereignty and permanent military positions at the Chafarinas Islands, the Alhucemas Islands, the Peñón de Vélez de la Gomera and Alborán Island. Spain officially describes its geography as extending into Africa.

Counted as territorial groupings rather than as every individual rock and island, Spain possesses seven identifiable territories in or immediately adjoining Africa:

Spain’s government describes Ceuta and Melilla as autonomous cities and treats them as parts of its national territory. The Spanish Navy calls the smaller North African positions plazas de soberanía nacional and supplies the personnel permanently stationed there. The Navy records these sovereign positions in its own operational reporting.

Are they all classified as “colonies”?

Not under Spain’s constitutional order or the United Nations’ formal list of Non-Self-Governing Territories. But they have different histories, populations and legal arrangements. The Canary Islands are not governed like Chafarinas. Ceuta is not administered like Alborán. Some have substantial civilian populations and representative institutions; others are tiny military positions.

That distinction matters.

It is also the beginning of the hypocrisy.

When discussing Spain, we are expected to understand history, constitutional evolution, local identity, integration, autonomy and competing territorial claims. We are instructed not to use crude terminology that erases these distinctions.

Then the conversation reaches Israel, and every distinction vanishes.

Europe’s constitutional thesaurus

The United Kingdom officially retains 14 Overseas Territories. Each has its own constitutional arrangements, local institutions and relationship with London. The British Government lists and describes all 14.

France possesses an immense overseas system extending through the Atlantic, Caribbean, South America, Indian Ocean, Pacific and Antarctic regions. Its overseas ministry describes 12 overseas territories and separately identifies Clipperton as France’s thirteenth overseas territory. France’s Ministry for Overseas Territories sets out the system.

The Kingdom of the Netherlands encompasses six Caribbean islands. Aruba, Curaçao and Sint Maarten are constituent countries within the Kingdom. Bonaire, Sint Eustatius and Saba are public bodies forming part of the Netherlands itself. The Dutch Government explains these constitutional distinctions.

The Kingdom of Denmark includes Greenland and the Faroe Islands, both operating under extensive systems of self-government. Denmark describes their position within the Realm.

These arrangements are not identical, and I am not claiming that every resident of every territory is living under colonial oppression. Some populations have repeatedly chosen continued association. Some possess extensive autonomy. Some relationships remain contested. Others are comparatively stable.

My point is precisely that Europe allows itself these distinctions.

It permits itself historical depth.

It permits itself territorial complexity.

It permits itself to argue that an arrangement originating during an imperial period may have changed, evolved, democratised or acquired legitimacy through the choices of the people living there.

Europe’s territorial history is presented as a complicated legal inheritance requiring mature analysis.

Jewish history is reduced to a slogan.

The colonies the United Nations still recognises

The United Nations maintains a formal decolonisation system. As of 2026, its Special Committee on Decolonization still identifies 17 Non-Self-Governing Territories. The administering powers represented in that system include the United Kingdom, France, the United States and New Zealand. The UN records this continuing decolonisation agenda.

Israel is not listed as an administering power under this system.

That fact does not resolve the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. The West Bank, Gaza, East Jerusalem, settlements, borders, security, national rights and military control raise separate and serious legal and political questions.

This article addresses the version of the colonial accusation that treats Israel’s creation and Jewish sovereignty itself as the original colonial wrong. It does not argue that occupation, settlement policy, borders or military conduct are immune from separate legal and moral scrutiny.

But it does establish something important.

Within the United Nations’ actual machinery for addressing territories that have not attained full self-government, European and other Western states continue to administer territories officially awaiting decolonisation.

Yet in fashionable political discourse, the word “colonial” has become almost synonymous with Israel.

The states that possess overseas territories are treated as members of the international community with complicated constitutional histories.

The state that possesses no overseas territory is treated as colonialism incarnate.

Where is Israel’s imperial mother country?

A colony ordinarily exists in relation to something else.

There is a metropolitan power, an imperial centre or an external state from which authority, settlers, capital and political direction emanate. Britain had London. France had Paris. Spain had Madrid. The Netherlands had Amsterdam and The Hague.

Where is Israel’s metropole?

Which foreign capital dispatched the Jews as its colonial agents?

To which mother country is Israel an overseas possession?

When Israel declared independence in 1948, Britain did not extend its empire. Britain withdrew. Jewish forces fought the British before independence. The new state did not answer to London, Washington, Moscow, Paris or any other imperial capital.

Jews arrived from Europe, but also from Iraq, Yemen, Morocco, Libya, Egypt, Syria, Lebanon, Tunisia, Algeria, Iran, Turkey and elsewhere. Many did not arrive as triumphant imperial settlers. They arrived as refugees, displaced people and survivors.

To describe this population as a European colonial expedition requires the erasure of a vast part of Israeli Jewish society. In Pew’s national survey, Israeli Jews were nearly evenly divided between those identifying as Sephardi or Mizrahi, at 48 per cent, and Ashkenazi, at 45 per cent.

It also requires something even more astonishing: the erasure of Jewish history itself.

The people named for the land

Jews are not called Jews because they originated in Poland, Germany, Russia, Morocco or Iraq.

The name derives from Judah and Judea.

The central city of Jewish civilisation is not Warsaw, Berlin, Brooklyn or Paris. It is Jerusalem.

Hebrew did not originate in Europe. Much of the foundational literature of Judaism is centred on the land of Israel. Jewish religious practice preserved attachment to that land throughout centuries of dispersion. Jews prayed toward Jerusalem, mourned the destruction of Jerusalem, celebrated festivals structured around the agricultural seasons of the land and repeated the hope of return.

None of this means that Palestinians lack history, identity or attachment to the same land.

Two peoples can possess authentic relationships to one territory. Recognising one does not require annihilating the other.

In its sloganised or eliminationist form, the colonial accusation permits Palestinian indigeneity only by denying Jewish indigeneity. Palestinians are presented as people of the land. Jews are converted into Europeans who suddenly developed an interest in Middle Eastern real estate during the nineteenth century.

That is not history. It is political laundering.

When “settler colonialism” becomes a verdict

Settler-colonial theory does not require an overseas metropole, and it may be used to examine particular institutions, policies or historical processes. But it becomes distortion when it is converted into a total verdict: one that treats Jewish history, refugeehood and return as irrelevant and regards any Jewish sovereignty as inherently illegitimate.

A theoretical category does not become accurate merely because its definition is broadened until it can accommodate the desired defendant.

The theory still must explain why a dispersed indigenous people returning to its place of origin is treated as permanently foreign.

It must explain why Jewish refugees from Baghdad are “European settlers.”

It must explain why a Jew returning to Judea is self-evidently colonial while Spain’s sovereignty on the African mainland is a matter of constitutional subtlety.

It must explain why France may span South America, the Caribbean, the Indian Ocean and the Pacific without French national existence being declared inherently illegitimate.

It must explain why the United Kingdom can administer territories thousands of miles from Britain while remaining merely a state with overseas responsibilities.

It must explain why Denmark’s connection to Greenland may evolve through autonomy and negotiation, but Jewish sovereignty must be understood through a single totalising accusation.

In this use, the colonial label applied to Israel is not functioning primarily as historical analysis.

It is functioning as a verdict.

Criticising Israel is not the issue

Israel can be criticised.

Its government can be opposed. Its military actions can be investigated. Settlement policy can be challenged. Palestinian rights can be defended. Competing legal claims can be argued vigorously.

No state is exempt from scrutiny, and Jewish sovereignty does not confer Jewish infallibility.

But criticism of a government is different from recasting an entire people as foreign intruders in the place from which that people originated.

The phrase “Israeli colonialism” is often used not to identify a specific policy but to invalidate the existence of Israel from its foundation. The establishment of any Jewish-majority state is said to have been the colonial wrong. Jewish sovereignty itself becomes the offence.

That is why no change of government, border adjustment, peace agreement or policy reform can satisfy the ideology. If Israel is inherently colonial, then the problem is not what Israel does.

The problem is that Israel exists.

Few other states are routinely told that their national existence, rather than particular borders, institutions or policies, is itself the continuing offence. States created through conquest, partition, migration, imperial cartography or population displacement may have their histories regretted, studied or criticised, but their national existence is not perpetually placed on trial in the same way.

In this discourse, Jewish sovereignty is treated as ontologically illegitimate.

Europe gets context. Israel gets condemnation.

Spain insists that Ceuta and Melilla are as fully Spanish as any other part of its national territory. Spain’s Prime Minister has expressly described them as part of the country.

Britain describes its territories as members of a modern partnership.

France integrates some overseas possessions directly into the French Republic.

The Netherlands organises its Caribbean territories through constituent-country and public-body arrangements.

Denmark recognises extensive Greenlandic and Faroese self-government within the Danish Realm.

Again, these relationships are not identical, and their populations are not interchangeable. Some may be legitimate expressions of democratic choice. Others remain the subject of unresolved decolonisation claims.

But when Europe explains its own distant sovereignties, it reaches immediately for consent, continuity, law, autonomy, citizenship and constitutional development.

When Jews explain their presence in the land of Israel, none of those concepts is allowed to matter.

Jewish historical continuity is dismissed.

Jewish refugees are renamed settlers.

Jewish self-determination becomes supremacy.

Jewish survival becomes expansionism.

Jewish sovereignty becomes colonialism.

The same international culture that carefully distinguishes a French overseas collectivity from a British Overseas Territory, a Dutch constituent country from a special municipality and a Danish self-governing territory from metropolitan Denmark suddenly loses its entire vocabulary when confronted with Israel.

There is only one word left.

Colonial.

The lesson from Mthwakazi

Mqondisi Moyo’s argument makes this hypocrisy harder to conceal.

Mthwakazi was conquered and combined with other territories through British imperial expansion. The resulting colonial borders were transferred intact to the independent state of Zimbabwe. Mthwakazi’s nationhood was reduced to a regional or ethnic identity, and the territorial structure created by conquest became internationally sacrosanct.

In Africa, colonial borders are treated as inviolable because reconsidering them would allegedly threaten international order.

In Israel, borders inherited from mandates, wars, armistices and failed partition plans are treated as perpetually open to moral repudiation.

An African people is told that colonial history is too old to matter.

The Jews are told that their history is too old to count.

Mthwakazi is denied reconsideration because the present state exists.

Israel is denied legitimacy because a different state might have existed.

The rule changes according to whose sovereignty is under examination.

Apply one standard

I am not arguing that Spain must surrender Ceuta, that France must abandon its overseas departments, that Denmark must expel Greenland from its Realm or that Britain must immediately dissolve every remaining territorial relationship.

The wishes of the people living in those territories matter.

That is the principle.

History matters. Consent matters. Identity matters. Constitutional evolution matters. Security matters. The rights of competing populations matter.

Apply those principles everywhere.

Do not grant Europe endless historical nuance while reducing Jewish sovereignty to an imperial cartoon.

Do not insist that African borders created by colonial conquest are permanently untouchable while declaring Jewish borders permanently illegitimate.

Do not call every European territorial relationship complex and every Jewish territorial relationship colonial.

Israel has no overseas empire.

It has no colonial metropole.

It has no distant dependencies.

It is a small state in the land where the Jewish people originated, surrounded not by subject territories across the oceans but by the unresolved consequences of two peoples claiming the same narrow geography.

That conflict is real. Palestinian rights are real. Jewish rights are real.

It is not clarified by treating Spanish sovereignty in Africa as constitutionally intelligible while treating Jewish connection to Judea as inherently foreign.

Europe kept the territories.
Israel got the label.

And the label tells us far more about those applying it than it does about the history they claim to describe.