Thanks Anselm.
As someone well versed in the history of the region, I would hardly call Israel (or the Kingdom of Judea as it was once called) an "empire." As you allude to, terms are imperfect for encapsulating the scope or significance of what certain historical events or entities are/were, but if we think of empires at least in the context of their legacies as it pertains to the spread of language and religion--two major outcomes of imperialism-- Hebrew and Judaism are still relegated exclusively to the Jewish people who constitute less than 0.2% of the world's population, with one tiny landmass maybe the size of Delaware, with a religion that is decidedly non-proselytizing and ultimately fairly reclusive.
There was never any evidence or intention for the Jewish homeland to spread as any sort of "empire"--there were documented invasions, most notably the Roman and then Arab conquests, but the Jewish people did not seek to extend their borders or religious influence beyond the land they had. Furthermore, there have been thousands of Jewish people who have lived continuously in that land for thousands of years, albeit largely in hiding and in fairly dire circumstances. There was not a full disappearance of Jewish people as there is speculated to be about peoples such as the Mayans; there is no mystery as to what happened or why we were forced out.
Not only that, but if you do any research into the Jewish religion, you will note that the entirety of the faith (which, if you are unaware, is a ethnoreligion, meaning that Jewish people share distinct genetics that tie us together across all of the places that we've lived, and which is very close to the DNA of other Middle Eastern people and Palestinian people in particular) even throughout the thousands of years of diaspora is absolutely incontrovertibly oriented around Israel. There are thousands of archaeological records across Israel which affirm the names and significance of places referred to in the Torah; it is and has been for thousands of year custom for Jewish people to pray for the Temple whose remains still rest in Jerusalem. You cannot treat the matter as if it is merely the ghost or vestige of an alleged empire past; the reverence and unshakeable connection to that land for the Jewish people is alive and well as it has been for the entirety of time we have grieved for our separation from it.
I think the problem with falling back on "scientific literature" in matters of religious history in particular is that A) there are countless people with biases involved in credible and even "scientific" fields, such as the United Nations--where the UNHCR or Amnesty International or the many professors across global universities, a not-inconsequential portion of whom happen to be Muslim Arabs and perhaps have an especially entrenched sense of antisemitism, who dedicate a profound amount of energy and focus into vilifying and discrediting Israel through a pseudo-scientific lens. For clarity, there are billions of Muslim people and hundreds of millions of people who speak Arabic (again, compare that with about 16 million Jewish people and then we can discuss which seems to encompass more of the qualifications of an "empire.").
Settler colonialism is the term unequivocally used by academics who exploit their credentials to selectively push narratives that only discuss Israel from the point of 1948 onward, intentionally providing no context for the history of the struggle, whitewashing the Jewish people and overinflating the number of people in Israel who are Ashkenazi (having lived predominantly in Europe throughout the diaspora) origins, and downplaying not just the corruption but the flagrant terrorism that Israel has been met with, mostly coming from Hamas (but with help from other terror organizations such as Hezbollah).
For academics to refuse to acknowledge those factors or downplay them is tantamount to referring to the Taliban and 9/11 and every other Islamic State-inspired or adjacent act of terrorism as "freedom fighting." You don't have to agree with or understand or even be willing to acknowledge any sentiment or meaning in the Jewish religion, but relying entirely on the precedent of the "scientific literature" without doing research from the many other historians and academics who dispute that language ultimately shows your own bias.
There is a very clear distinction between coming to a land that is absolutely strange to you that you have no connection to (as in European colonizers in America) and returning to your homeland after being forcibly removed; and even still, people flock to America and we typically don't refer to immigrants of color as "settler colonizers." This is less a term of "scientific literature" and more a term that has emerged recently from social justice discourse, almost the entirety of which is not only profoundly biased but also shortsighted and often reductive. As Penguin referenced, you cannot place a Western conception of race or even colonialism onto every other region of the world, tempting as it may be.
And that is the other problem with deferring to "science" in these matters; it's not always clear which phenomena are unique (and to what extent) and which truly fall into a pattern that is semi-accurately worth comparing to something else and thus categorizing as such. The danger of that, however, is that conflating events and phenomena that are infinitely complex and unique, is that we become collectively lazier and more ignorant and more comfortable conferring a bias that is rooted in hatred and bigotry onto events that we don't fully understand.
Anyways, I appreciate you reading and your response!
