Zionism has been described by its founders and early leaders, as well as by many scholars, as a form of settler colonialism in relation to the region of Palestine and the Israeli–Palestinian conflict. Zionism's founders and early leaders were aware and unapologetic about their status as colonizers, with early leading Zionists such as Theodor Herzl, Max Nordau, and Ze'ev Jabotinsky described Zionism as colonization. The paradigm of settler colonialism was also later applied to Zionism by various scholars and figures, including Patrick Wolfe, Edward Said, Fayez Sayegh, Maxime Rodinson, Ilan Pappé and Noam Chomsky.
The settler colonial framework on the conflict emerged in the 1960s during the decolonization of Africa and the Middle East, and re-emerged in Israeli academia in the 1990s led by Israeli and Palestinian scholars, particularly the New Historians, who refuted some of Israel's foundational myths and considered the Nakba to be ongoing. This perspective contends that Zionism involves processes of elimination and assimilation of Palestinians, akin to other settler colonial contexts similar to the creation of the United States and Australia.