Response to Elia Zureik's Israel's Colonial Project in Palestine: Brutal Pursuit (original) (raw)
Related papers
A Century of Settler Colonialism in Palestine: Zionism's Entangled Project
Brown Journal of World Affairs, 2017
Throughout the past century, the Zionist movement constructed the most sophisticated settler-colonial project of our age: the State of Israel. The violent birth of Israel in 1948 and the subsequent colonization of the entirety of the land of Palestine after the 1967 war are indeed reflections of Zionism's successes in fulfilling its settler-colonial ambitions in Palestine. Yet, while this settlercolonial project continues unabated, it is an entangled one, unable to reach the ultimate point of Jewish exclusivity in the land. Zionist settler colonialism, as its historical precedents suggest, is fundamentally based on the operative logic of "eliminating the native" and failing to utterly marginalize and "minoritize" him. The vibrant Palestinian presence in the land, the everyday resistance to the colonial order, and the robust Palestinian adherence to their rights all stand as structural obstacles to the ultimate realization of the "Zionist dream." 1 Despite Israel's relentless colonial power and domination, Palestinian steadfastness means that this project will remain impeded and incomplete, a matter that may lead to its future demise.
Introduction: the settler-colonial framing of Palestine—Matters of Justice and Truth
International Politics , 2023
As the publication of this forum coincides with the unfolding bombs raining down on the Palestinians of Gaza, the book in question gains heightened significance. Against a backdrop where global audiences are witnessing real-time, genocidal actions by Israel against the Palestinians, contextualizing these horrific events is crucial. An in-depth understanding of the current reality and potential future trajectories requires addressing the root causes and factors that shaped the interaction between the colonizer and the colonized, leading to a highly repressive and unbearable status quo that exploded on the 7th of October 2023. Palestine: Matters of Justice and Truth provides much-needed and timely answers.
For over a century, Zionism has subjected Palestine and Palestinians to a structural and violent form of destruction, dispossession, land appropriation, and erasure in the pursuit of a new colonial Israeli society. Too often, this Palestine 'Question' has been framed as unique; a national, religious, and/or liberation struggle with little semblance to colonial conflicts elsewhere. The two-day conference, Past is Present: Settler Colonialism in Palestine, seeks to reclaim settler colonialism as the central paradigm from which to understand Palestine. It asks: what are the socio-political, economic and spatial processes and mechanisms of settler colonialism in Palestine, and what are the logics underpinning it? By unearthing the histories and geographies of the Palestinian experience of settler colonialism, this conference does not only chart possibilities for understanding Palestine within comparative settler colonial analyses. Rather, it also seeks to break open frameworks binding Palestine, re-align the Palestinian movement within a universal history of decolonisation, and imagine new possibilities for Palestinian resistance, solidarity and common struggle.
In the three years since the outbreak of the second Intifada in October 2000, the policy making of the U.S. government has been haunted by the question of Palestine. The Intifada made briefly visible the consequences of Israel's continued occupation and expanded colonization of the West Bank and Gaza, an expansion facilitated by the Oslo accords of 1993 and disguised under the name of "the peace process." Within a year, however, the launching of the worldwide war on terror provided Washington with a new way to misrepresent the nature of Israel's war against the Palestinians. A century-long history of dispossession, expulsion, occupation, and resistance was reduced, once again, to a series of Palestinian acts of terror. A people's loss of their homes and homeland, of their freedom of movement and human dignity, of their personal security and political future, could instead be framed as a battle of civilization against terror, of democracy against hatred, of the West against Islam. Under the banner of the war on terror, the United States then announced its plans for a war against Iraq as the cornerstone of an unapologetic project to remake the political order of the Middle East. Yet the question of Palestine refused to disappear. From the protests of up to half a million people in several cities of Europe to the revived antiwar activism of the campuses of North American universities (see Vincent Lloyd and Zia Mian's essay in this issue), an emergent peace movement in the West placed the issue of Palestinian rights, alongside the right of the Iraqi people to be spared the devastation of war, at the center of its politics. The importance attached to the Palestine question was a response to the obvious discrepancy between Washington's use of U.N. Security Council resolutions against Iraq, its disregard for council resolutions against Israel, and its vetoing of any international intervention on behalf of the Palestinians. But the importance reflected something larger. The injustice against the Palestinians has always been carried out in the name of the West. Washington supports, funds, and arms many forms of injustice in the Middle East. But only in the case of Israel is the injustice disguised and defended as a moral struggle of the West against the rest. The Palestine question now haunts the West, much as the question of apartheid haunted a previous generation. We draw the analogy with apartheid not to make any simplistic historical comparison between Israel and South
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
American Journal of International Law, 1993
In 1897 Zionism emerged as a European-wide political move ment with the first World Zionist Congress held in Basle, Switzer land, where Theodor Herzl, an editor of the influential Viennese paper, Neue Freie Presse, had emerged as a leader. Herzl's 1896 pamphlet Der Judenstaat (The State of the Jews) had called for a Jewish state in Palestine, and its publication in Vienna made a great impact. Not surprisingly, Zionism had its strongest following in Russia, but even there it was only one of several nationalist currents in Jewry.2 Despite the difficult circumstances of life, most Jews remained in Eastern Europe and of those leaving most still preferred the United States. 3 In Palestine, an Arab-populated country under the Ottoman (Turkish) Empire, Zionist immigrants set up agricultural settlements on pur chased land. "From the very beginning," wrote Ariel Hecht, an Israeli analyst of land tenure in Palestine, "it was clear to the leaders of the Zionist movement that the acquisition of land was a sine qua non towards the realisation of their dream."4 Land was not acquired in a random fashion. The effort, wrote Israeli General Yigal Allon, was "to establish a chain of villages on one continuous area of Jewish land.'0 The Arabs, soon realizing that the immigrant's aim was to establish a Jewish state, began to oppose Zionism.6 As early as 1891 Zionist leader, Ahad Ha'am, wrote that the Arabs "understand very well what we are doing and what we are aiming at."7 In 1 90 1 the World Zionist Organization formed a company, the Keren Kayemeth (Jewish National Fund), to buy land for Jewish settlers.8 According to its charter, the Fund would buy land in "Pal estine, Syria, and other parts of Turkey in Asia and the Peninsula of Sinai."9 The aim of the Fund was "to redeem the land of Palestine as the inalienable possession of the Jewish people."10 Fund director, Abra ham Granovsky, called "land redemption" the "most vital operation in establishing Jewish Palestine."11 The Fund's land could not be sold to anyone and could be leased only to a Jew, an "unincorporated body of Jews," or a Jewish company that promoted Jewish settlement. A lessee was forbidden to sublease.12 Herzl considered land acquisition under a tenure system that kept it in Jewish hands as the key to establishing Zionism in Palestine. "Let the owners of immovable property believe that they are cheating us," he wrote, "selling us things for more than they are worth. But we are The British Connection 5 not going to sell them anything back."13 The Fund thus kept land as a kind of trustee for a future state.14 The Fund purchased large tracts owned by absentee landowners. Most of this land was tilled by farmers whose families had held it for generations with possessory rights recognized by customary law. Re grettably for many of these families, in the late nineteenth century Turkey had instituted a land registration system that led to wealthy absentees gaining legal title to land, often by questionable means. After this occurred, the family farmers continued in possessionas tenantsand considered themselves to retain their customary right to the land, although that was no longer legally the case.15 At the turn of the century the better farmland in Palestine was being cultivated. In 1882 a British traveler, Laurence Oliphant, reported that the Plain of Esdraelon in northern Palestine, an area in which the Fund purchased land, was "a huge green lake of waving wheat."16 This meant that the Fund could not acquire land without displacing Arab farmers. A delegate to a 1905 Zionist congress, Yitzhak Epstein, warned: "Can it be that the dispossessed will keep silent and calmly accept what is being done to them? Will they not ultimately arise to regain, with physical force, that which they were deprived of through the power of gold? Will they not seek justice from the strangers that placed themselves over their land?"17 An element of the Zionist concept of "land redemption" was that the land should be worked by Jews. This meant that Arabs should not be hired as farm laborers. While this policy was not uniformly implemented, it gained adherence. In 191 3 Ha'am objected to it. "I can't put up with the idea that our brethren are morally capable of behaving in such a way to men of another people ... if it is so now, what will be our relation to the others if in truth we shall achieve power?"18 But Herzl viewed the taking of land and expulsion of Arabs as complementary aspects of Zionism. It would be necessary, he thought, to get the Arabs out of Palestine. "We shall try to spirit the penniless population across the border by procuring employment for it in the transit countries, while denying it any employment in our own country.. .. Both the process of expropriation and the removal of the poor must be carried out discreetly and circumspectly."19 Some Zion ist leaders advocated moving Palestine Arabs to neighboring coun Israel as a Fact 89 draw its support for Israel's membership in the United Nations and warned against any further idf offensives.20 Under that pressure Ben-Gurion withdrew the idf from Egyptian territory and canceled plans to take Gaza and the Sinai.21 At the same time Ben-Gurion withdrew the idf from southern Lebanon, where it had penetrated. The Litani River, an important water source, flowed through southern Lebanon. General Yigal Allon criticized Ben-Gurion's decision to withdraw, complaining that the Index Aaland Islands, Abdiilhamid II (sultan of the Ottoman Empire), 7 Abdullah (emir of Transjordan, King of
Israel-Palestine Through a Settler-Colonial Studies Lens
Interventions: International Journal of Postcolonial Studies , 2018
This essay discusses the conflict in Israel-Palestine and its long-term evolution in the context of a settler colonial studies interpretive paradigm. It argues this analytical paradigm may offer valuable insights both in the interpretation of the historical evolution of the conflict and in the analysis of its current circumstances. The first section briefly outlines the possible benefits of such reframing; the second specifically targets exceptionalist claims.
Zionism, Imperialism, and Indigeneity in Israel/Palestine: A Critical Analysis
2018
This article explores the similarities and differences between Zionism and archetypical European modes of settler colonialism to demonstrate the incongruence between the two phenomena. This analysis is contextualized around the recent discourse surrounding the competing claims of indigeneity to historic Israel/Palestine. The claims of both the Jewish and Palestinian Arab communities are explored to demonstrate that both communities can rightfully claim degrees of Indigenous connection to the territory, but that Palestinian Arab claims of being the sole Indigenous inheritors of the land are dubious. The analysis utilizes Burton's unmet human needs theory, and Kriesberg's theories on identity and conflict intractability to demonstrate how perpetuating such claims serves to exacerbate inter-group conflict between Israelis and Palestinians. Furthermore, the relationship between Ottoman and British imperialism in the development of both nationalisms is expounded to illustrate the...
A SPECIAL PROJECT ON THE WAR IN GAZA INTRODUCTION: A COLONIAL WAR
Palestine/Israel Review, 2024
The settler-colonial paradigm has gained traction in the study of Palestine/Israel in recent years. The current war in Gaza, with the International Court of Justice ruling that a genocide is plausible, has highlighted the pivotal role of settler colonialism as an analytical framework to understand and contextualize the current wave of apocalyptic violence. At the same time, references to settler colonialism have triggered discursive resistance among certain academic circles. To debate this issue, Palestine/Israel Review organized a special webinar titled “Israel–Hamas: A Colonial War?”. While the title focuses in its first part on Israel versus Hamas, the second part challenges the claim that Israel is fighting a war against Hamas, and suggests that the recent violence inflicted on Gazans is an escalation of a continuous physical and symbolic erasure of Palestine and Palestinians. Five scholars from different disciplines participated in the webinar.