Zionism’s fulfillment in the creation of the state of Israel was premised on the British withdrawal and the forceful uprooting of the majority of the Palestinians that fell within the state’s borders. Thus, Zionism in 1948 is very similar to other settler movements that detached from direct imperial rule, established sovereign control over the target territory, and depopulated that territory from the majority of its indigenous population. Nevertheless, it would be a gross anachronism to ascribe the results of the 1948 War to a decades-old, clear, consistent and consensual Zionist plan. Recent scholarship has successfully proven that non-statist and bi-national Zionism, though ultimately unfulfilled and thoroughly marginalized, was authentic, and, before the 1930s, even dominant. This paper will examine intellectuals, politicians and organizations that espoused various bi-national and non-statist Zionist programs during the pre-1948 era. Specifically, the paper will focus on seminal Zionist texts that came from diverse ideological camps but all hold in common a vision of shared sovereignty and fundamental political equality between Palestinian-Arabs and Jews within Palestine. These also include academic texts, belle letters, and bodily practices that imagined an ethnic and cultural proximity between Jews and Palestinians. Whereas it is simple to grasp how statist and chauvinist forms of Zionism are settler-colonial in their nature, this paper claims that even those “softer” Zionist programs are fully congruent with the structures of settler-colonialism as a global historical phenomenon. Juxtaposing Zionism against other settler-colonial movements suggests that the early Zionist settlers were, comparatively speaking, rather frail vis-à-vis the indigenous Palestinian population. This frailty, and not a particular Jewish morality imbedded within Zionism, was at the base of the early Zionist drive for shared sovereignty with the Palestinians. I then will show that should these egalitarian programs and ideals have been implemented, the result – as envisioned by the Zionists themselves – would have been the annulment of an autonomous Palestinian sovereign capacity. From a more cultural standpoint, I also claim, egalitarian and assimilationist Zionist tendencies served the purpose of endowing settlers with indigenous traits. To conclude my paper, I will question whether “anti-Zionism” is the most apt term to use for current political agendas that promote a one democratic state shared by Jews and Palestinians.