Zionist Settler Colonialism Research Articles

Fire as Elemental Intifada in Colonized Palestine

In August 2021, wildfires erupted in the southwestern hills of Jerusalem, engulfing and ultimately destroying up to 20,000 dunums of pine forests planted by Israeli settlers. The burned landscape revealed a stunning vista of terraced hillsides, a visual testament to the existence of Palestinian land-based relations hidden under the camouflaging foliage. In this experimental visual essay, fire is postulated as an elemental force of Indigenous Palestinian resistance to the ongoing conditions of environmental and human Nakba imposed on Palestinian lands and bodies under Zionist settler colonialism. Fire, as a transformative and atmosphere-altering medium, is thus theorized and visualized as elemental intifada.

Palestine and the Dialectic of Racial Capitalism

This article situates racial capitalism as a historical-theoretical framework to generate new and alternative theory on the question of Palestine. It argues that the genocidal assault on Gaza must be understood as the clearest expression of the logic of racial capitalism and the terrain upon which we must generate theory and strategy able to dismantle Zionism, colonialism and Imperialism. Many of the critiques of Zionism deploy frameworks of apartheid, understood by radicals in South Africa as a social structure reproduced by racial capitalism. It was understood that such a system could only be effectively dismantled through a national liberation project which understood race, class, capital and Imperialism as a single contradiction which must be overthrown as a totality. Similarly, earlier theorists within the Palestinian anti-colonial struggle, such as Fayez Sayegh, understood Zionist settler colonialism as an outpost of Western Imperialism. By tracing the emergence of racial capitalism within the South African anti-apartheid struggle and the similarities between the white minority regime and Zionism, this article acts as a point of departure to drawing together histories of the Black radical tradition and the Palestinian struggle in crafting radical theory relevant for our present moment.

A COMPARATIVE ANALYSIS OF FRENCH AND ZIONIST SETTLER COLONIALISM IN ALGERIA AND PALESTINE

The paper explores and analyzes similarities and differences between French settler colonialism in Algeria and Jewish Zionist settler colonialism in Palestine. This study focuses on the history and historical development of French settler colonialism and Jewish Zionist settler colonialism by deploying the analytical framework of settler colonialism, and the comparative history of settler colonialism. Settler colonial studies and comparative settler colonialism allow for gaining insight into the genesis, and development of settler colonies. The intention behind the application of comparative settler colonialism, specifically in juxtaposing French settler colonialism in Algeria and Jewish Zionist settler colonialism in Palestine is to identify overlaps, similarities as well as differences between these settler polities. The results of this study have shown that French and Zionist settler colonialism share numerous similarities and features. The most important feature that these settler colonialisms adhere to is the logic of elimination, which is defined as policies and practices of settler colonial policies aimed at the dispossession, displacement, ethnic cleansing, genocide, as well as cultural assimilation of the indigenous populations. In this case, both French and Zionist settler colonialisms have subscribed and followed the logic of the elimination of the natives. Yet as opposed to French settler colonialism, Zionist settler colonialism has been less interested in cultural assimilation and integration of the indigenous people of Palestine into settler society. Another conspicuous difference between French and Zionist settler colonialism is that while French settler colonialism is already defunct, Zionist settler colonialism has managed to survive and persist. The current study contributes to settler colonial studies and the comparative history of settler colonialism. Moreover, our research can inform other studies in the field of settler colonialism, and we suggest that more research into comparative settler colonialism needs to be undertaken.

The Coloniality of Academic Freedom and the Palestine Exception

This article reflects on my experience of being suspended and reinstated. It demonstrates how administrators, including those at my institution, knowingly violate academic freedom and free speech. Throughout, I discuss the institutional and political machinations seeking to silence dissident voices, particularly those who critique Israel and Zionist settler colonialism. The aim is to make more visible the linkages between external pressure and the capitulation of administrators influenced by donors. I highlight the university’s role in producing technologies of colonial violence used on Palestinian bodies and the significance of the Gaza solidarity encampments. In the subsequent sections, I critique the weaponization of antisemitism and the Palestine exception to academic freedom. The article concludes by emphasizing the importance of speaking and writing truth to power during a genocide.

Global Hindutva and the Palestinian Cause

A lot of attention has been paid within academic and journalistic literature to how India’s relationship with Israel has improved under the rule of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP). Looking beyond this, the objective of this article is to assess the position of Palestine and its liberation struggle within the Global Hindu Nationalist imaginary. The study’s main argument, therefore, is that the broader Palestinian liberation struggle, in its pluralism, its global scope, and its interconnectivity with various struggles over the course of its history, implicitly represents a refutation of the core ideological mechanisms that underpin the Hindu Nationalist Project, including but not limited to its othering of Muslims and other non-Hindu groups as well as its more recent embrace of neoliberal capitalism. More explicitly, the articles argues that the way Hindu Nationalists construct Indian Muslim and Palestinian subjectivities as being analogous and connected through tropes of them as invaders and terrorists – in line with broader imperialist constructions of Muslim subjectivities – is a key feature of Global Hindutva’s globality. To make this argument, this article first examines the literature on the historical relationship between Hindu Nationalism and Zionist settler colonialism. After this, the article analyses the overlap between Indian state and Hindutva positions on the Palestine Question before exploring practical tensions between the Hindutva outlook and the Palestinian liberation struggle. The final section of the article explores how Global Hindutva’s historic and strategic alignment against the Palestinian liberation struggle manifests in both Indian foreign and domestic policy and in Hindu Nationalist mobilisations across the world.

Israeli Heritage Tourism in Wadi Helweh: Making What Is out of Mind out of Sight

This essay demonstrates how Zionist settler colonialism is swiftly proceeding to claim ownership over the Palestinian neighborhood of Wadi Helweh in Jerusalem through the City of David archaeological park, a controversial project premised on disputed Israeli archaeological methods and biblical claims. It examines how guided tours of the site, consisting of tourists with predisposed beliefs and desires to receive more of what they already know to be true, serve to brand the site as conclusively Zionist and Jewish—a central aim of Israeli heritage tourism in Jerusalem. This takes place through a process referred to as “irrefutable divine internalization,” and through which Israel’s ongoing illegal annexation and occupation of Wadi Helweh is eclipsed, turning tourists’ gaze toward Israeli-Jewish ownership of space instead.

‘On this project depends the glory of Palestine’: childhood and modern futures at the Ramallah clinic

ABSTRACT In 1925, one of the first infant welfare clinics to specifically serve Arab children in Palestine opened in the city of Ramallah. This article examines how that institution brought together various political ideologies that used the Palestinian child’s body as a vehicle for a modern future. The clinic targeted poor children and mothers in an attempt to eradicate local knowledge and indigenous practices of infant care in the name of progress and science. Supported and funded by American missionaries, Palestinian philanthropists, local medical practitioners, colonial administrators, and Zionist health organizations, it produced conceptions of modern Palestinian childhood at the intersections of Zionist settler colonialism, interwar global humanitarianism, and indigenous political claims. The Ramallah clinic, along with other infant welfare projects in Palestine, offers a complicated view of the on-the-ground operation of settler colonial projects and the role of children within them. Based on a study of the different constituencies involved in opening the clinic, this article argues that discourses of infant health became means for articulating different – and sometimes opposing – political futures. In doing so, this article illuminates how settler colonialism interacted with, shaped, and was shaped by other local and global forms of coloniality as well as resistance to colonial structures.

Special edition: chasing truth and (re)conciliation: navigating contexts, tensions, limits and possibilities “Reclaiming truth recovery against the backdrop of ongoing Zionist settler colonialism in Palestine”

PurposeThis article argues that truth recovery practices that take place against the backdrop of ongoing settler colonial erasure, as is the case when considering Zionist colonial violence in Palestine, must focus on combating state-sponsored attempts at erasure, rather than solely providing a platform for the expression of settler guilt.Design/methodology/approachThe article analyses existing literature on truth recovery practices that take place in Palestine, including the work of a variety of local NGOs engaged in such praxis, with a view to considering how this form of transitional justice has germinated incrementally in the space. Critical reflection on the work of a variety of grassroots NGOs is situated alongside other forms of transitional justice intervention.FindingsThe article argues that in the context of enduring settler colonialism, the truth regarding past Zionist atrocities in historic Palestine must avoid being curated in the present day in such a way as to allow for damage limitation rather than the platforming of conversations around meaningful repair. Truth recovery for recovery's sake serves only to reinforce the settler colonial status quo rather than properly agitate for a full decolonisation, one that demands and facilitates indigenous Palestinian return.Originality/valueThe article challenges prevailing notions of the role of truth recovery practices in spaces of enduring settler colonial value. It makes clear that the role of truth recovery interventions in sites where colonial violence endures must be to actively and meaningfully support activities that reinforce native identity, history and presence on the land. Moreover, by reference to existing grassroots attempts at truth recovery in Palestine, the article provides an original and clear argument that states it is simply not enough to platform the revelation of uncomfortable truths or to provide opportunities for settler violence of the past to be “confessed” in public if it is disassociated from challenging the present-day structures of ongoing oppression.

“No Free Homeland Without Free Women:” Tal’at's Indigenous Feminist Movement

On September 3, 2019, Israa Ghrayeb, a 21-year-old woman was murdered by her family. Soon after, on September 26, 2019, thousands of protestors took to the streets throughout 12 cities including Jerusalem, Ramallah, Rafah, and Haifa. The protests were organized by the Indigenous Palestinian feminist movement, Tal’at. Tal’at is translated literally from Arabic as “stepping out” and is semantically translated as “rising up.” It's slogan “No Free Homeland without Free Women” encapsulates the movement's assertion that national liberation and feminist liberation must be fought together. The femicide of Israa Ghrayeb mobilized Palestinian feminists to call for an end to gender-based violence, for legal accountability, and collective liberation. Palestinian women are faced with the intersecting oppression of both Palestinian patriarchal norms as well the Zionist military occupation and apartheid system. This paper examines the emergence and influence of Tal’at and its concurrent resistance to patriarchy and Zionist settler colonialism. It is ultimately a call to action for feminist social workers to act in solidarity with Tal’at's struggle for feminist, queer, and national justice and liberation.

A Gendered Return

A Gendered Return

Indigeneity, Resistance, and Imagination

Zionist settler colonialism is grounded in the interoperating oppressive structures of capitalism, heteropatriarchy and racism. These function alongside Zionist narratives to construct a regressive “native” whose dispossession is justified to realise a Zionist goal of an ethnic nation-state, fashioned after its Euro-American counterparts. This paper comprehends Palestinian resistance to its colonisation as embedded in the opposition to these global oppressive structures, relating them to anti-colonialism movements across the world. Not just this, but Palestinian resistance is also grounded in its dreams of emancipation from these structures. These liberating imaginations draw upon indigenous knowledge and ties to the land, community and body, and in the process, reconstitute the structures on which this world is built. Through this, the paper aims to bring together a vast corpus of literature on Palestine to argue that in combining resistance, liberation and indigeneity, these imaginations present a truly “decolonial” vision for the world.

Liquidity: Water and Investment in Mandate Palestine

In this article, I illustrate two ways in which Zionist settlers appropriated water in Mandate Palestine. The first way was through the imposition of a new kind of property regime, one that measured and defined water rights in terms of volume. This differed from customary Palestinian practice, which distributed water in time-based shares. I argue that volume-based measures made water more easily bought and sold and, by extension, more like a commodity. The second method of appropriation I detail is the granting of concessions to generate hydroelectricity to the Palestine Electric Corporation. These concessions gave the company control over three of Palestine’s major rivers, which it then turned into an object of investment for foreign shareholders. As a result, water use cannot be understood separately from electricity during the Mandate. While these two processes might appear unrelated, I argue that they were both legalized methods of exclusion that, when taken together, reveal a larger process of gradual, albeit incomplete, dispossession of water resources. While Zionist settler colonialism legitimated itself by claiming to efficiently use natural resources, such as water, in actuality, it sustained itself by imposing exclusive property rights.

E-scaping apartheid: Digital ventures of Zionist settler colonialism

The ongoing “Intifada of Unity” against Israel's settler colonialism has resuscitated discussions about the liberatory potential of digital emancipation due to the massive data traffic circulation through its international media coverage. In fact, in a process that has intensified since the outbreak of the global pandemic at the very least, social media platforms and geospatial mapping tools have been subverted from more mundane uses, developing into new forums for organizing, imagining, and practicing more just futures. Yet, the centrality of infrastructure both as a means of digital extractivism and as a site for rupture and resistance demonstrates that the path toward new trajectories of e-scaping cannot be conceived as a virtual venture directed at designing alternative volatile geographies alone, but should always involve facing and challenging power in its everyday forms. By investigating the materiality of cyber colonialism, this paper explores the entanglement between imperial cartography and digital map-making which has reduced Palestinians and their space to a pixelated terra nullius, sanitized from the paradigmatic sites of the occupation and overwritten by a pseudo-biblical narrative that aims to legitimize the re-indigenization of the Zionist settlers. At the same time, it unpacks online processes of hyper-visibility through which Palestine suddenly materializes as a signifier for its dangerous nature, yet fragmented and enclaved by an intangible and discretional regime of im/mobility enforced through the neglect of permits and visas, as well as by the material constraints posed by apartheid roads, barriers, checkpoints, gates, and walls. Finally, it retraces the rationality of Israeli violence diluted through the technical means of built environment, infrastructure, machines and algorithms which, on one hand, contributes to the de-development of Palestine and the censorship of its people, and on the other, normalizes Israel’s position in the region due to its perceived technological superiority vis-à-vis its neighboring counterparts.

Palestinian Lives Matter: Racialising Israeli Settler-Colonialism

Against the background of recent developments in Israel's racial rule over the Palestinians, the Black Lives Matter protests, and in view of Israel's declared intention to annex occupied Palestinian territories, this article theorises Israel's permanent war against the Palestinians as first, state of exception, second, racial state, and third, settler-colony. The paper critiques the focus on ethnicity as an analytical frame by Israeli scholars and posits race as a key concept in analising Zionist settler-colonialism. It proposes that rather than being a solution to European antisemitism, Zionism adopted discourses of race approximating those expressed by antisemitic regimes. As the Black Lives Matter movement proliferates, the article concludes by proposing that Palestine and the question of Palestine are becoming a truly global issue.

Mizrahi Jews and the Zionist settler colonial context: between inclusion and struggle

ABSTRACT This article intends to analyse the ‘in-between' category of Mizrahi Jews within Israeli society. The main objective is to draw attention to how Israel’s Mizrahi majority has been part of the Zionist settler colonial system itself while, at the same time, it has been greatly marginalised from the mainstream Zionist discourse led by white Ashkenazi Jews. Theoretically founded on the interconnection of three major approaches, namely settler colonialism, critical whiteness, and decolonial feminism, this contribution aims to question the current academic debate depicting asymmetric power relations founded on race, ethnic, gender and class discrimination inside Israeli society. Accordingly, Zionist settler colonialism needs to be critically analysed from a Mizrahi perspective, providing an additional element for understanding the relevance of connecting all the actors involved in the Zionist settler colonial project and reinforcing the discourse concerning settlers and indigenous people. Moreover, as the article discusses the wide cultural and political range of the Mizrahi Jews by questioning the viability of the Arab-Jew historical construct up to very recent times, it is also intended to further enhance the examination of an emerging field for studying Israel and Palestine within which several aspects and areas of inquiry remain unexplored.

On Youth and National Identity in the Palestinian Context

This study aims to examine the attitudes and opinions of Palestinian youth in the context of the debate about intergenerational conflict and the specificity of youth in the Palestinian condition. A high percentage of young people in the various Palestinian communities are exposed to unemployment, and in the West Bank and Gaza Strip, they have become targets of the Israeli occupation and its policies. Most Palestinian youth also face a dead-end in the political and living horizons and the scarcity of normal life opportunities (including, work, education, family, freedom of movement, planning for the future, etc.). Young people, as the case with women and other social groups, are also subject to restrictions that limit their access to political, economic, social and cultural decision-making positions. Drawing on studies and surveys that dealt with the situation of Palestinian youth, after discussing the rationale for interest in youth in the past two decades, this study shows the need to deal with youth as an essential component of society and not as an external segment or as outsiders. It also indicates that there are relatively limited differences between the positions and opinions of Palestinian youth and the older age groups. The study concludes that differences in the opinions of youth (and non-youth) can be attributed to the variations in the political situations and life opportunities among Palestinian communities, gender, place of residence, and political affiliation. The study did not find evidence to support the argument that intergenerational conflict exists. The determining factor in this condition is the Israeli occupation, Zionist settler-colonialism, apartheid regime, and the denial of basic rights. This study confirms the vitality of national culture among the various Palestinian communities.

Palestine and the Will to Theorise Decolonial Queering

This article posits a theorisation of decolonisation in relation to queer as it emerges from the settler-colonial context of Palestine, what I call decolonial queering. The first part provides a new reading of Zionist settler-colonialism, which I define as hetero-conquest. Its novelty lies in refocusing the question of colonialism in native grounded knowledge of queering, while showing the limitations of those existing studies whose frames emanate mainly from American and/or global north contexts of racism and homo-nationalism. By tracing the contemporary continuity of hetero-conquest in Palestine, the second part unpacks the need for a radical theory of liberation that weaves decolonization into queer. Bringing Sara Ahmed and Frantz Fanon into dialogue, such a theory emanates from the amalgam of histories, geographies and bodies, whose restoration beyond the strictures of hetero-conquest opens the way for a radical multi-scalar politics of liberation.

Queer Politics of Boycott at the World Social Forum: Free Palestine

AbstractIn 2012, Palestinian anticolonial-queer activists organized a workshop and conference at the World Social Forum: Free Palestine in Porto Alegre, Brazil, titled “Queer Visions at the World Social Forum: Free Palestine.” Queer Visions brought different activists together who had been organizing against Israel’s state-sponsored pinkwashing campaign and for Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS). Since 2010, Palestinian queer activism has publicly engaged with the Palestinian Call for BDS and has urged the Palestinian BDS movement and those in solidarity with it to mobilize around Israel’s pinkwashing campaign and work to better understand Zionism’s underlying settler-colonial sexual politics. Taking the WSF: Free Palestine as a crucial moment in queer engagements with the politics of boycott, this essay reflects on the challenges faced by anticolonial-queer activism in the context of Israel/Palestine and the challenges it poses to Zionist settler colonialism and normative understandings of queer politics and Palestinian liberation.

Reading Abdul Fattah al-Sharif, reading Elor Azaria: anti-Mizrahi racism in the moral economy of Zionist settler colonial violence

ABSTRACTThis article argues that anti-Mizrahi racism plays a crucial role in the legitimation of Zionist settler colonial violence in Palestine. It takes as its point of departure the recent controversy surrounding the killing of Abdul Fattah al-Sharif by the Israeli sergeant Elor Azaria, a Mizrahi Jew. Probing the reasons for the unusual degree of public opprobrium heaped upon Azaria compared with other similar cases of violence, the article seeks to place this episode in the wider context of Zionist attitudes towards Mizrahim and the specificities of Zionist settler colonialism. It locates the origins of this furore in three factors: (i) the prevalence of racist stereotypes portraying Mizrahim as violent; (ii) the emergence of a military sociology of inequality in which Mizrahim are called upon to mete out the most conspicuous forms of coercion against Palestinians; and (iii) the role of racial identities in the ideological construction of Zionist military violence as ‘moral’. Overall, the article shows that Zionist settler colonialism depends on a complex racial moral economy, in which the attempted dispossession and elimination of the racialised native population depends in turn on the stigmatisation of a racialised group within the settler population.

Settlers and citizens: a critical view of Israeli society

This special issue was born out of the SOAS Palestine Society’s 10th annual Conference, held in October 2015 at SOAS. The issue, much like the conference, aims to contribute to the growing body of literature that intersects settler colonial studies with empirical studies of Palestine and Israel. Its thematic focus is grounded in a concrete and contemporary interrogation of the structures and mechanisms of Zionist settler colonialism, through the lens of Israeli politics and polities. Bringing critical studies of Palestine into conversation with a critical study of Israel’s internal workings offers a platform through which the two intertwine and form a united body of knowledge on the settler-colonial realities in which they are situated. This article has been accepted for publication in Settler Colonial Studies, published by Taylor & Francis.