I don't see how a country with an explicitly ethno-religious constitution can accurately be described as a "secular enlightenment" project. Part of the impetus behind Zionism was that, while the Enlightenment offered Jewish emancipation, it did so on the condition that Jews gave up their distinctively Jewish identity.
The classic statement of this is from Clermont–Tonnerre's "
Speech on Religious Minorities and Questionable Professions" (23 December 1789)
But, they say to me, the Jews have their own judges and laws. I respond that is your fault and you should not allow it. We must refuse everything to the Jews as a nation and accord everything to Jews as individuals. We must withdraw recognition from their judges; they should only have our judges. We must refuse legal protection to the maintenance of the so-called laws of their Judaic organization; they should not be allowed to form in the state either a political body or an order. They must be citizens individually. But, some will say to me, they do not want to be citizens. Well then! If they do not want to be citizens, they should say so, and then, we should banish them. It is repugnant to have in the state an association of non-citizens, and a nation within the nation. . . . In short, Sirs, the presumed status of every man resident in a country is to be a citizen.
Zionism grew out of C19th Romantic nationalism and self-determination, with the idea that, rather than being subjects of multinational, multi-religious empires, various national groups should have their own independent nation states -- Poland for the Poles, Hungary for the Hungarians, Greece for the Greeks, Finland for the Finns, Ireland for the Irish, Israel for the Jews...
Israel was a result of the collapse of the Turkish Ottoman Empire at the end of WW1 , as were Jordan, Iraq, Lebanon and so on, as were Hungary, Romania, Austria and so on the result of the collapse of the Hapsburg Empire, and everyone was perfectly well-aware that there were Arab, Jewish and Christian communities living there at the time.
Nor do I see how Israel can be described as a colonialist enterprise, at least not if by "colonialism" you mean a system of state policy whereby capitalist enterprises, sponsored by their governments, subjugate territories and exploit their labour and natural resources for the benefit of the companies' shareholders and governments. The whole point about a colony is that it's a colony of some other country.
The French colonialists against whom Fanon was fighting in Algeria were French citizens, just as the British Colonialists just about everywhere were British subjects, and they were able to return to the metropole, willingly or not, when the colonies gained their independence. Of where are Israeli Jews supposed to be citizens, other than Israel? Where is their metropole? Palestine was a British protectorate after WW1, but Britain certainly wasn't trying to develop it as a Jewish colony -- on the contrary, Britain was anxious to limit Jewish emigration to Palestine precisely because HM had considerably more Muslim subjects throughout his empire than he had Jewish ones, and his government feared provoking their anger.
The state of Israel was founded because, post WW2, there were hundreds of thousands of Jewish Holocaust survivors from all over Europe stuck in displaced persons camps with nowhere else to go and who desperately wanted to feel safe in their own, Jewish, state rather than to be a minority in someone else's country. And then, post independence, their numbers were swelled by huge numbers of North African and Middle-Eastern Jews who were expelled by their own governments.
Whatever Israel is, it's not someone else's colony, and never has been. The pieds noires in Algeria had France to which to go, however unwillingly. The Israelis don't.
