I'm going to quote an academic historian, Derek Penslar -Chair of Jewish History at UofT - who argues that while Israel has not always been colonial in the western colonial sense, it is definitely a colonial state post-1967.

One can certainly be critical of the new Israeli state’s policies of expropriating Arab land and subjecting the Galilee’s Arabs to a harsh military rule, but such policies were not necessarily a form of western colonialism. Only after the 1967 war did Israel’s relationship with the Arab minority change to a bona fide form of colonialism, The demographic balance between occupier and occupied tilted increasingly towards the latter, Israel gained substantial economic profit from the occupation, and its military and security forces brutally combated Palestinian nationalism in a fashion similar to French rule in pre-independence Algeria. Perhaps even more important, from the late 1970’s onward Jews were encouraged to move into the occupied territories as state-sponsored settlers, living as a minuscule minority of privileged colonists in areas that remained, unlike post-1948 Israel, overwhelmingly Arab. Source

Israel is a state that justifies its claim to East Jerusalem and the West Bank through religious claims. How on earth is this any different from a fundamentalist Muslim doing the same? Yes, modern day jews have deep cultural and historic ties to Israel. As do the all other populations that have historically lived there. Are you saying that Palestine was historically only Jewish and that it changed after the Arab invasions? Assuming thats correct, if you're going to use that line of reasoning, then do the pre-Jewish inhabitants of the region have a bigger claim to Israel than the Palestinians? What of Jews who have converted to Islam and become culturally and/or ethnically 'Arabized' over the centuries? The very fact that you mention "Jewish settlement" means that you agree that people who were multiple generations removed from living in Israel were moving to the area.