Settler colonialism and Indigeneity: the Case of Israel/Palestine (original) (raw)
Related papers
The Nakba and the Zionist Dream of an Ethnonational State by Alon Confino
History Workshop Journal, 2023
Dream was a key word with which Jews expressed their sentiments in the historic year 1948. It described the improbable turn of events of Jewish history from Auschwitz to independence. Binyamin Etzioni grew up in Tel Aviv. Born in 1926, he was eighteen when he joined the Palmach, the elite troops of the Haganah, the primary militia in the Yishuv (the Jewish community in pre-1948 Palestine). On 12 May 1948, just two days before the British departure from Palestine and the declaration of the State of Israel, he wrote: 'Independence for Jews-this is after all a visionary idea that is almost ungraspable, something we could experience [in the past] only spiritually.. . All the time the Biblical verse echoes in my ears: "When the Lord turned again the captivity of Zion, we were like unto dreamers". How suitable are these ancient words to our own time'. 1 But this dream of Jewish political independence was tied up with another dream-that of the Jewish state with fewer Palestinians. 2 Avraham Riklin, a commander who fought in the battle of Tiberias, described in his diary on 18 April 1948 his emotion as he entered the city's deserted Arab quarter following the forced departure of the Palestinians: 'The joy was enormous. I could not believe my eyes. The fleeing of the Arabs from the city seemed to me like a dream. There was a sense of elation among all [the soldiers]'. 3 We should take Zionist dreams seriously, both the dream of national independence and that of a Jewish state with fewer Palestinians. The argument of this paper is that between 1936 and 1947 the idea of a Jewish state with fewer Palestinians took root politically, socially, and culturally among mainstream Zionists. This idea was articulated in institutional plans for a future state, in discourse about transfer, in settlement and security practices, and last but not least in a Zionist cultural imagination that made a Jewish state with fewer Palestinians as normal as the air Zionists breathed. For mainstream Zionists, I claim, the violent removal of Palestinians was imaginable and legitimate before the ethnic cleansing; under what circumstances it would take place no one knew, but creating a Jewish state with a robust Jewish majority by removing Palestinians seemed obligatory, conceivable, and justifiable. 4 Casting the net wider, this essay makes an argument about Zionism and settler colonialism: that while Zionism was (and is) a settler colonial movement, its history is shot through with an element that is the essence of history-contingency.
Palestinian Society & Politics: Internal and External Causations of the Nakba
Over 60 years have passed since an estimated 700,000 Palestinian Arabs were displaced from their homes in Palestine during and after the Palestinian--Jewish civil war and the Arab--Israeli War that ensued immediately after. This displacement has become a watershed event in the Palestinian--Israeli conflict, known to Palestinians as the Nakba, and has become a point of contention for all involved due to the refugee problem that has resulted from it. This short paper will critically examine this event and reflect on both the internal and external causations that led to it. With regard to internal and external causations, the paper will focus on the Yishuv and the Arab community and the policies, realities and reactions to them that helped to orchestrate the dispersion and defeat in the war. External aspects will include focusing on British policies during WWII and the results of their Mandate style of rule, as well as how the Holocaust and Jewish immigration effected both the Yishuv and the Arab community in Palestine. All of these aspects played a part in the formation of Zionist and Arab consciousness that lead to the formation of policies and decisions by the leadership on both sides. Thus it is the conclusion of this paper that the causations for displacement were a result of the trauma experienced mainly during the revolts of 1936--39, inconsistent and deceptive British policy, collusion on the part of the Arab Palestinians both with the neighboring Arab states as well as with the Axis power of Germany all of which led to the realities on the ground in Palestine during these times.
Palestinian Nationalism and the Anti-Colonial Struggle
Zionism and its Discontents, 2014
All large-scale historical processes can be divided into periods, characterized by crucial landmark events, developments and dates. These usually play a symbolic role but also serve as indicators of important shifts or new directions. Three such dates stand out in the history of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict: The 2nd November 1917: the date of the Balfour Declaration, which recognized the Zionist movement's claim to a 'National Home' in Palestine, and committed Britain to facilitating its realization The 29th November 1947: the date of the UN Palestine partition resolution, which led to the establishment of the State of Israel in the following year and to the Palestinian Nakba (dispossession of hundreds of thousands who became stateless refugees) The 5th June 1967: the date of the war that led to Israel's expansion into its current boundaries, incorporating all of historical Palestine within its system of military and political control. These dates and the events with which they are associated did not create new realities from scratch, of course. Rather, building on existing trends, they served to consolidate pre-existing developments and to open up new historical possibilities. In particular they helped give rise to new patterns of settlement and resistance, and thus reshaped relations between the main protagonists of the evolving conflict. The Balfour Declaration was issued towards the end of the First World War, after Great Britain had gained control over much of Palestine and large areas of the Middle East that used to be part of the Ottoman Empire. It followed 35 years of organized Jewish immigration and settlement activity in the country, which resulted in the consolidation of a small but growing Jewish community (known as the New Yishuv), spread over dozens of new rural settlements, towns and urban neighbourhoods. Although it made no reference to that community, its existence was an important contextual factor for the Declaration. It granted international legitimacy to the new Yishuv and facilitated its further growth under the leadership of the world Zionist movement. Together with the British Mandate for Palestine, officially inaugurated in 1920, it created a new political framework based on boundaries that define the territory to this day. In that way it made the incipient conflict between Jewish settlers and indigenous Palestinian-Arabs more sharply focused on the political future of the country. While Palestinian resistance to Jewish immigration and land settlement preceded the Declaration, going back to the late 19th century, the post-1917 period became crucial in shaping the conflict in its current form. It is also the necessary starting point for discussing the colonial/apartheid question and its relevance for Israel/Palestine. With the demise of the Ottoman Empire and the British takeover of Palestine, two new and related elements were introduced into the country: European imperial rule and a settler political project.
The Arab Minority in Israel: Reconsidering the “1948 Paradigm”
Israel Studies, 2014
The article demonstrates how, in the years since the Oslo Accords of 1993, the Arab Palestinian elites in Israel have begun to focus on reconsidering, and in fact, reconstructing the "1948 Paradigm", the policy guidelines adopted in 1948 by the State of Israel toward the Arabs who remained within the newly established state. It surveys the historical background and the causes for the political and ideological shift, particularly following the 1993 Oslo Accords. The article examines the reconceptualization of the Arabs' status in Israel, highlighting the emphasis on the claim to be acknowledged as a national minority and as an indigenous people. It discusses the newly introduced Nakba discourse, the call for the return of the "internal refugees", and the demand for autonomous Arab representation. It also addresses the alternative models suggested by Palestinian Arab intellectuals and political figures to resolve the apparent contradiction between democracy and Israel's nature as a Jewish state.
NORMALIZING OCCUPATION The Politics of Everyday Life in the West Bank Settlements Edited by Marco Allegra, Ariel Handel, and Erez Maggor Indiana University Press Bloomington and Indianapolis, 2017
The palestinian encounter with the Zionist colonial proj ect, with its varying historical forms and expressions, is a focal point in the Arab discourse in general and the national Palestinian discourse in par tic u lar. One would be hard pressed to fi nd a Palestinian intellectual who has not written on the topic. Some have written about the development of the colonial proj ect, its earlier stages, the plans developed to empty Palestine of its indigenous population and their eff ects and dynamic; others have written about the power relations and the strategy behind the success of the colonial proj ect, the global and regional conditions, and the cooperation between the Zionist movement and the British Mandate. However , alongside such serious scholarship, more superfi cial volumes have also been written, characterized by demagogical and essentialist discourse. Th e result has been an overwhelming deluge of writing about Jews, Zionists, settlements, settlers, colonialism, imperialism, the historical Khaibar tribe and Ibn al-Nadhir, the Jewish plot, and Yajuj and Majuj. Instead of focusing the discussion , a discursive chaos was created. Oft en, the readers fi nd themselves fl oun-dering between two polar opposites, the essentialist pole and the dynamic pole, with numerous variations and levels of complexity between them. At the one pole is a discourse in which the Zionist settler is mediated through a variety of essentialist, cultural, historical ste reo types of the Jew as avaricious, fraudulent, and traitorous. At the other pole, one fi nds rigorous, sociohistorical research that attempts to understand the Zionist enterprise, and its settler-colonial proj ect in par tic u lar, as a product of social dynamics, shaped by the historical conditions and pro cesses created at vari ous crossroads. Th is body of research usually applies a structural and systemic approach, concentrating mainly on macro pro cesses. Between these two trends, the last two de cades have witnessed a growing anthro-pological and so cio log i cal interest in the Palestinian experience vis-à-vis the
Nationalism and Ethnic Politics, 2007
This article analyzes Jewish and Arab national formations by exploring dynamics surrounding their border-zone community of Arabized-Jews during the first half of the 20th century. As the internal composition of the Arab and Zionist-Jewish collectivities was not pre-ordained, their sociopolitical demarcations fluctuated as a consequence of domestic, regional and international developments. The Jewish and Arab national movements sometimes included Arabized-Jews in—and at other times excluded them from—their ranks. From the late 1930s, actions by Zionist and Arab forces vis- a-vis Arabized-Jews converged, producing their dispersal. The events surrounding Arabized-Jews impacted considerably the post-1948 direction that the phenomenon of nationalism in the Middle East has followed and the imbalance of power between Israel and the Arab states.
Israel/Palestine/Middle-East An Ethno-Historical Perspective Project of publications Introduction
One-State, Two-States, Bi-National State: Mandated Imaginations in a Regional Void, by Moshe Behar; Land Regime and Social Relations in Israel, by Alexander Kedar and Oren Yiftachel; The Dream and Its Construction: Mizrahi-Arab Cooperation to Combat Discrimination, by Yifat Bitton: these three papers make up the first volume of the editorial project mentioned in the title, published in Italian by Zambon, October 2016. They frame the Israeli/Palestinian question in a historical and political context which goes further the sterile discussion on One-State, Two-States, Bi-National State solutions. Their value stands out in today’s new, tragic chapter opened in the long history of Western-colonial rule on Near and Middle-East countries.
AL-NAKBAH: THE ETHNIC CLEANSING OF PALESTINE BY ISRAELI JEW-ZIONIST LED FORCES
AL-NAKBAH: THE ETHNIC CLEANSING OF PALESTINE BY ISRAELI JEW-ZIONIST LED FORCES, 2021
By the last weeks we have seen a new escalation in the Middle East region, with fierce rocket and missile exchange between the IED Israeli forces and HAMAS, with hundreds of deaths on the Gaza Strip. Coming up to the 73rd anniversary of the creation of the State of Israel , and the so-called Palestinian Nakbah , it becomes necessary to address the events that ended in the conformation and consolidation of the State of Israel under the management of the Zionist movement and the new settlers. The present essay aims to highlight the events that arose over Palestine that eased the path to the Israeli State, regarding the recorded international agreements, internal mobbing and hostilities from Zionists to the indigenous Palestinian population. Along with these events, we focused on the demographic, geographic, historical and political aftermaths of the expulsion of native Palestinians. On the other hand, it aims to give a peaceful guideline in order to bring together both actors, under the observation of external actors with the main goal to set a peace process in the Middle East region.
Israel Affairs Israel's policy towards its Arab minority, 1947-1950
In the absence of preconceived strategies -despite several pre-state attempts to prepare blueprints for tackling the Arab problem -Israel's early Arab policy was shaped in a process of trial and error, fluctuating between ideological aspirations and good intentions (or wishful thinking) and the needs on the ground: the 1948 war and its consequences, the wide-open borders and regular infiltration, and the fear of a second comprehensive war with the Arab states.