Purchase by Other Means: The Palestine Nakba and Zionism’s Conquest of Economics

Abstract

This article questions the singularity of the Palestine Nakba. It highlights some of the historical preconditions that enabled the Nakba to occur, revealing it to have been a consolidation rather than a point of origin. The preconditions that had equipped the Zionists for settlement before they first set foot in Palestine combined economic, technological, military, cultural and moral attributes that were the cumulative outcome of centuries of Eurocolonial history. The article introduces the concept of preaccumulation to characterise this complex historical endowment that settlers imported with them. The article also argues that the donors who funded the world Zionist project differed from the speculators who financed territorial expansion in other settler colonies in that they did not require a return on their investment. Unencumbered by the obligation to return a profit, Zionist settlers enjoyed the easiest of imported advantages in relation to the local population, a confounding of capitalist rationality that overwhelmed the limited set of resources available to Native Palestinians. Combining their unconditional funding with the ethnically exclusive strategy known as the Conquest of Labour, Zionists built up a contiguous zone of Jewish-only land on which to fashion their ethnocratic state-in-waiting in Mandate Palestine. Against this background, the article argues that the Nakba accelerated, albeit very radically, the ‘slow-motion’ means to Native dispossession that had been the only means available to Zionists while they were still building their colonial state.