That's a fair point, can try to track down too when I'm not on my phone.

edit: taken from this paywalled substack:

Israel is a genocidal settler-colonial apartheid state set up by the European and North American powers to colonize the middle east. Even early zionists like Theodor Herzl understood Israel in these explicitly settler-colonial terms. Here is Herzl speaking in the 1800s, when Palestine was still Ottoman territory:

If His Majesty the Sultan were to give us Palestine, we could offer to resolve Turkey’s finances. For Europe, we would form part of a bulwark against Asia there, we would serve as the advance post of civilisation against barbarism.

So Theodor Herzel felt not only that European people were entitled to Palestine over the people already living there (including Ottoman Jews), but that the presence of "civilized" Europeans in Israel would form a "bulwark" (forward operating base(offensive, not defensive)) against Asia, which entire continent Herzl racistly characterized as "barbaric."

Herzl was born on May 2 nd , 1860 in Budapest, Hungary to a family of German speaking assimilated Jews. His father, Jakob, was a wealthy businessman and the young Theodor was expected to enter politics or engineering by his parents. In a sense, he did not disappoint, as Herzl was destined to become the father of political Zionism. While Herzl never saw his Jewish state during his lifetime, his ideology remains so influential that even today he is considered the father of Israel.

Herzl’s birthday is a holiday in Israel, his grave is a national monument, the organization he founded is still active today and the largest mountain in the country was re-named in his honor. It is not an exaggeration to say that Herzl and his ideology remain central to Zionism.

As a young man, Herzl was a fanatic Germanophile. He believed that if Jews simply tried hard enough, they could become “Germanized” and shake off what he called “shameful Jewish characteristics.” Herzl viewed German culture and language as inherently superior to that of the reviled working-class Yiddish speaking Jews. At first, he believed that Jews should be Germanized, arguing that Eastern European Jews were so "savage" and backwards that they must learn the very concepts of beauty and nobility by studying the works of authors like Goethe and Shakespeare. He initially envisioned his Zion as a German colony, and waxed poetic about importing German culture to the orient. However, as time went on, Herzl increasingly started to believe that Jews could not and should not assimilate into Europe, and the only solution to the “Jewish question” was the complete removal of all Jews from Europe. If all of this sounds anti-Semitic, that is because it is. Herzl’s Zionism is fundamentally based in antisemitic notions about Jewish incompatibility with gentile society. Herzl dedicated the rest of his life to his goal of a Jewish state. In 1897, he founded the World Zionist Organization, a big tent coalition of Zionists dedicated to creating a Jewish state by any means necessary. As time went on, and the "Labor" Zionist wings were increasingly persecuted by Herzl, the organization moved farther and farther to the right. Given what Herzl believed in, this is understandable. Unlike the Zionists of today, who must pretend to have some respect for the charade known as international law, Herzl was quite open about his plans.

In the view of Herzl, Israel was explicitly a colonial project, and he toured the capitals of Europe trying to drum up support and funding for his cause. Herzl cast a wide net, he was not terribly concerned with who supported him, or why. He gladly worked with some of the most extreme antisemites on earth. After many attempts to get a meeting with Tsar Nicholas II by promising to solve Russia’s “Jewish problem”, Herzl finally got a letter saying Russia would support hisproposed deportation of the Jews. He kept it for the rest of his life, treating it as one of his most prized possessions.

At the same time, Tsarist forces were carrying out reactionary pogroms all throughout the so-called Pale of Settlement, the home of most of Europe’s Jews. In 1903, the same year Herzl was in correspondence with the Tsar, over seven hundred pogroms took place in Ukraine and Moldova alone resulting in the murder of thousands of Jews. In many cases, the pogroms were incited by the Tsar’s secret police and in others the guilty were simply granted clemency by the government. Herzl knew all of this, and his continued support of the Tsarist government was controversial even inside his own movement.

In the end, it was all for nothing. The Tsar did not keep his word and Herzl was perfectly willing to sacrifice thousands of Jews in exchange for empty promises. Sadly, the genocidal tendencies inside Zionism would only accelerate as the movement grew. The Tsar wasn’t the only one who used Herzl as a tool. Starting in 1896, Herzl actively worked with the Ottoman Sultan Abdul Hamid II. After a meeting with the Sultan’s advisors in the Levant to discuss strategy, Herzl threw his support behind the Armenian Genocide, a crime so vile it had cut off the Ottomans from European loans. Herzl believed that he could jump in to fill that gap, offering to pay off the empire’s increasing debts using funds raised from European Zionists in exchange for permission to start a colony in Palestine.

Although he found almost no support even inside the World Zionist Council, Herzl spent 5 years touring Europe, speaking, raising funds and writing articles in support of Turkey’s extermination of the Armenian people. Herzl cast the crumbling empire as a historical ally of the Jews and one they should support. He called the Ottomans civilized and decent people, justified in their actions due to the allegedly backwards and violent ways of the subhuman Armenians. He was even awarded a medal by the Grand Vizier in Istanbul, in commemoration of his loyal service to the Ottoman Empire.

In 1901, Herzl finally got his long-awaited meeting with the Sultan, who rejected his proposal out of hand. Once again, Herzl was perfectly willing to sacrifice thousands of lives for words on paper. Today, Herzl’s "civilized" slaughter is viewed as an act of genocide by all credible historians and groups as diverse as the United Nations, the United States Government, the European Union, the Anti-Defamation League, and the World Jewish Congress, who specifically called it “the blueprint of the Holocaust.” With his options dwindling, Herzl even turned to Cecil Rhodes, the openly white supremacist founder of the unrecognized apartheid state of Rhodesia to ask for his advice and blessing to colonize Palestine. Although his efforts amounted to nothing, the ideological connections remained, and the state of Israel became a close ally of Rhodesia. At one point, Israel was one of the only countries willing to sell weapons and licenses to its fellow apartheid states. Israel even collaborated with apartheid South Africa on its nuclear program, a direct violation of international law which was never punished.

"You are being invited to help make history. It doesn’t involve Africa, but a piece of Asia Minor; not Englishmen but Jews... How, then, do I happen to turn to you since this is an out-of-the-way matter for you? How indeed? Because it is something colonial" - Herzl in a letter to Cecil Rhodes

At best, Herzl represents the sort of reactionary, callous “realpolitik” that the state of Israel still embraces today. At worst, he was a genocidal racist willing to support even the vilest crimes toadvance his movement. When the rest of his actions are considered, it appears the latter is much more likely. Herzl’s actions are those of a man who did not just sit idly by and watch genocide happen, but rather those of a man who viewed the genocide as a cornerstone of his ideology. The simple reality is Theodor Herzl was a reactionary antisemite who openly called for the extermination of the Jews of Europe while simultaneously calling for the colonization of Palestine by European Jews. He viewed both of these ends as codependent upon each other.

While this sounds contradictory, this is only because most people have simply accepted the historical premises of the Zionist movement without question due to decades of well-funded propaganda.