That’s certainly one way of describing it.

Another is: an indigenous people with a continuous presence in the land, joined by mostly legal immigrants (and later by refugees fleeing pogroms and the Holocaust with literally nowhere else to go) built towns, farms and infrastructure, drained swamps and developed an economy that also attracted some Arab immigration and created Arab employment.

This happened under the colonial rule of the Ottomans. Then later under the colonial rule of the British. Finally in 1948, colonial rule ended, much to the dismay of Arab colonialists.