Ever since Patrick Wolfe published his 1999 book Settler Colonialism and the Transformation of Anthropology, scholars have been quoting his famous pronouncement that settler colonialism should be understood as an invasion, and such an “invasion is a structure, not an event.” Settler colonialism, according to Wolfe, is different from other forms of colonialism because the settlers come to stay and put in place a social, economic, and political structure based on “elimination of the native.” Perhaps because the prospect of decolonization has primarily been concerned with dismantling its structure, far less attention has been paid to the “when” of settler colonialism. Drawing on a multidisciplinary body of work including that of Walter Benjamin, Jacques Derrida, Gary Fields, and Gil Anidjar, in addition to settler-colonial theorists Maxime Rodinson, Gershon Shafir, and Lorenzo Veracini, this paper considers the case of Israel/Palestine from a temporal lens. It asks how thinking through periodization, beginnings, repetition, and patterns can enrich our understanding of settler colonialism in general and Israel/Palestine in particular. Thinking through temporality raises questions about presumed causality, the kinds of “problems” that require our attention, and reveals continuities that might otherwise be obscured. This paper is based on over two decades of ethnographic fieldwork in Israel/Palestine and builds on my most recent book that argues for expanding some of Wolfe’s arguments, including his ideas about assimilation as a form of elimination. Here I expand on what we might think of as “invasion,” tracing its roots to early English enclosure and the invention of private property that coincided with a remarkable shift in Christian moral thinking. The continuity of that moral ideology, I will argue, is another way of thinking about the Christian nature of the self-proclaimed Jewish state. Shifting the focus to the temporality of the structure also allows for consideration of the scope of the structure(s) that require dismantling for decolonization to take place.