If you grew up in the United States, it's likely that you have often heard Americans - when referring to conflict in Palestine - say something to the effect of:
"Well, Jews and Muslims have fighting over that land for thousands of years. They hate each other and there's no way we'll ever have peace there."
I think you all be surprised to learn that Americans are complete dumbasses when it comes to history, because this notion of Jews and Muslims struggling in eternal conflict over a piece of land is an absolute myth.
Up until the last hundred years or so, then stretching back to Roman Empire times, Jews and Muslims (and Christians) have lived together in Palestine. From the third or fourth century CE until the emergence of Islam, Jews and Christians both lived there (oftentimes it was Jewish people who converted to Christianity). After Islam emerges then you had three groups living there, in various proportions, with the Muslim proportion steadily getting larger over the centuries; and there really doesn’t seem to be intra-group conflict beyond a sort of baseline for humans.
Of course there was conflict and war. You had Turks and Crusaders and others fighting plenty of wars in the area. But it doesn't seem to me like there was any more amount of war in Palestine during that time than there was, say, in the Rhine Valley. And also, just because there are wars doesn't mean that there is conflict between groups of people. In general, it seems like for centuries, Jews, Muslims and Christians occupying the same space in relative peace seems to be the norm. Even up until before the Balfour declaration, there were a number of Jewish people living alongside Muslims in Palestine. But importantly, the Jewish people in Palestine didn't seek to dominate, but to either mind their own business quietly in their community, or even with a sort of shared Palestinian identity with their Muslim neighbors.
Co-existence has been the historical norm there, not conflict.
As best as I can tell, this whole notion of "they've been fighting forever" comes from one specific source: Evangelical Christians. It's because that group believes that roughly 4,000 years ago, the only humans alive were Noah and his family. Then in a few generations, Jacob and Esau fought over a birthright and then those two literally became the first ancestors of Jews and Muslims, respectively. There's some verse in there about "always struggling against each other" or something. These Evangelicals then go on to believe everything else in the Old Testament - despite the overwhelming historical evidence - is literally true. That the Jewish people were slaves in Egypt and then conquered Palestine (there's no evidence for Jews being slaves in Egypt and most historians believe the Jewish people emerged out of the larger Canaanite people, not as something separate from them). These Evangelicals can then excuse genocide if not encourage it since it’s inevitable anyway (and in that they side with Israel, because they’re all racist pieces of shit).
Once again, Evangelicals making the world worse for everyone.
The earliest Zionist migrations to Palestine took place in the 1880s (First Aliyah). Conflict was relatively minimal though compared to post WW2.
There were forms of early Zionism that just entailed non-Palestinian Jews migrating to Palestine when individually possible, with no settler project, no objective of establishing a Jewish ethnostate, and no efforts to displace the Palestinians. A major reason it existed is because Jews were generally safer in Palestine than they were in Europe.
There have been migrations of Jewish people to Palestine at various times going back to antiquity. The people who did that for personal economic reasons, to escape persecution or out of a religious desire to live in/near holy places weren't early or proto Zionism.
Zionism refers only to Jewish nationalist projects which sought to construct a Jewish national identity centered around a homeland in Palestine, born out of (and in reaction) to the rise of nationalist movements across Europe. The first decades of Zionist migration were a patchwork of different private projects to purchase land and establish communities, with relatively small numbers of people. They intended to build a nation or by definition they weren't Zionists, but prospects like ethnic cleansing to fully realize that national project would have seemed pretty theoretical while they were still only the 3rd largest religion there after the Muslims and the Christians, all under Ottoman rule.
This is true today, but in the early formation of the idea - before Herzl's version came to be the only version - that wasn't true. Although maybe those were more proto-Zionisms, and you could resonably argue that Herzl was the first to truly formulate Zionism into a coherent political objective, making it colonial from the start. It's about where you draw the line at the start of Zionism. Did the movements calling for Jews to immigrate to Palestine without the colonial project (pre-1897) count as Zionism, or did they just influence the later settler movement Herzl and co. established at the turn of the century?
The point I was trying to make, basically, was twofold:
Reinforce OP's argument that Jews and Muslims (and Christians) peacefully coexisted in Palestine before the establishment of the Israeli state by demonstrating that it was seen as a safe haven for European Jews during intense periods of reaction and anti-Semitism in Europe.
Illustrate that there was a path for Jews to make their home in Palestine without a settler colonial project before Herzl's Zionism took over the entire project.
I understand what you're getting at, that saying proto-Zionism or early Zionism wasn't entirely or exclusively a settler project could potentially give cover for the exclusively colonial Zionism that has been in practice for a hundred years. I wouldn't fight to call those early movements Zionism because you're right.