Zionist Settler Colonialism Research Articles

Nation and Class: Generations of Palestinian Liberation

After a century of confrontation with Zionist settler colonialism, the triumph of capitalism and unfettered marketization without justice and national rights for Palestine appears an irresistible and assured process. The Palestinian ruling class and Arab, international, and Israeli forces have sustained belief in a peace process that for a generation has persuaded or coerced Palestinians living in exile and within Israeli colonial dominion to delay or abandon the collective national goals of liberation, independence, and return. The market promises but can hardly deliver individual prosperity, quality services, and civic rights. But in the standoff between the interests of nation and of class, material conditions are being created for a generation of Palestinian liberation that may challenge settler-colonial exclusion and domination. A redefined notion of liberation would demand the people’s systematically denied social, economic, and political rights, which the people’s own political and economic leadership cannot indefinitely subordinate to a lost national struggle.

Palestinian women in Israel: embodied citizen strangers

ABSTRACTPalestinian women’s bodies constitute a central site of the struggle between the Zionist state and Palestinian ‘citizens’ in Israel. At the intersection of critical feminist and settler colonial studies scholarship and drawing on empirical data collected in 2013–2014, it will be argued here that Israel’s continuous drive to control Palestinian women’s bodies plays a pivotal role in the completion of the Zionist project. In line with classic settler colonial logic, this project has always closely linked native women’s bodies and native land in its discourses and practices. Therefore, Zionist settler colonialism must be considered a not only racialised but also gendered process. Palestinian women’s stories are complex and contradictory and cast the body as the key medium through which they experience citizenship in Israel as a continuation of settler colonialism by other means. This paper claims that it is, in fact, via citizenship that the Palestinian women’s forced exclusion from the Israeli body politic is realised, thereby debunking prevailing Zionist myths of citizenship in Israel and the Nakba as a one-off event.

Decolonial Queering: The Politics of Being Queer in Palestine

This article analyzes the work of Palestine's most established queer rights organization, alQaws for Sexual and Gender Diversity in Palestinian Society, to reveal the political power of being queer in Palestine. It argues that an open, feminist, queer space such as alQaws is a productive site to think and practice decolonization. Relying on the author's direct involvement with the group, the article traces the development of queer Palestinian thought to provide a critique of queer politics in Palestine: it recounts how since the establishment of the organization in 2001, alQaws activists have increasingly transcended exclusivist gay identifications and rejected singling out sexuality as a discrete site of oppression disconnected from Zionist settler colonialism. The discussion covers Israeli pinkwashing and its counter, Palestinian pinkwatching; it deconstructs pinkwashing narratives, rejects the myth of the colonial savior, and reveals how discourses of sexual progress reproduce Zionist colonialism. It also documents alQaws's challenge to normalizing development discourse.

‘From the closet into the Knesset’: Zionist sexual politics and the formation of settler subjectivity

ABSTRACTThis article examines Zionist sexual politics as a particular modality of settler colonial subject making. It analyses the inclusion of Israeli LGBTs into the state, by examining the cultural archive of Zionism, in which the colonisation of Palestine and Palestinians is constitutively inscribed and obscured. Tracing the itinerary of Israel’s LGBT movement, it looks at how the Zionist project becomes articulated on novel terms. Focusing on the specific formation of an Israeli gay identity in tandem with Israel’s shifting settler colonial discourse and sexual politics, this article suggests that the itinerary of Israel’s LGBT movement forms the condition of possibility for Israel’s pinkwashing campaign to take shape. Following Palestinian anticolonial queer interventions that see pinkwashing as part of the Zionist project, it intervenes in analytical practices that frame pinkwashing as a manifestation that arises from the global conditions of homonationalism. It asks: how does Zionist settler colonialism form the conditions of possibility for an Israeli gay subjectivity and pinkwashing to emerge? In doing so, it complements contemporary conversations on the formation of sexual subjectivities within settler colonial contexts by suggesting that these not only define modern sexual politics, but simultaneously re-shuffle the foundations of the Zionist settler colonial project itself.

Colonialism and imperialism in Communist thinking in Palestine/Israel, 1919–1965

ABSTRACTThe history of Communism in Palestine/Israel can be seen as an attempt to effect an Arab-Jewish anti-imperialist struggle. This article – which is informed by the literature about settler colonialism and Palestinian nationalism – portrays the way in which local Communists viewed nationalism, Zionism and imperialism. It argues that Palestinian and Jewish Communists did not fully comprehend Zionist settler colonialism and Palestinian nationalism.

The Framing of the Question of Palestine by the Early Palestinian Press: Zionist Settler-Colonialism and the newspaper Filastin, 1912–1922

This article uses a new conceptual approach to the question of Palestine, namely the settler-colonialism paradigm. This paradigm enabled scholars to develop the depiction of Zionism as a settler-colonialist project. However new approaches which have focused on Zionism as a settler-colonialist movement have, in fact, neglected indigenous Palestinian perspectives. The article advocates further refinement to the discourse of anti-colonialism by revisiting early Palestinian perceptions of Zionism. The article also shows that in the early stages of Zionism the movement was clearly depicted as a settler-colonialist project by Palestinian journalists and press commentators of the newspaper Filastin. However the existential implications of such an analysis were ignored by the Palestinian political elite, an oversight which also contributed to the 1948 Palestinian Nakba (catastrophe).

Out of time: colonial history in Ibrahim Nasrallah’s Time of White Horses

In its broadest contours, this article seeks to foreground the importance of colonial history in postcolonial approaches to Palestine. After demonstrating that the hegemonic reading of the Nakba by the Israeli “New Historians” has largely obscured the teleology of Zionist settler-colonialism, it argues that postcolonial studies must follow Palestinian historiography in drawing on oral history to counter such narrative erasure. It then turns to Palestinian historical fiction and explores the functioning of orality in literary counter-narratives of the Nakba. It focuses on Ibrahim Nasrallah’s Time of White Horses (2007; trans. 2012), a historical novel which seeks to resolve the “symbolic problem” of the invisibility of the Nakba in global culture. By directly transcribing oral testimonies in its narrative of the destruction of Palestinian society under colonialism, this novel becomes riven between mythic and historical registers. Nasrallah’s attempt to produce Palestinian historical fiction as form thus reproduces the crisis of Palestinian representation in the form of historical fiction. It concludes that aesthetic resolution in the Palestinian case is impossible without national resolution in the form of return.

Human suffering in colonial contexts: reflections from Palestine

This article investigates the ways in which European colonialism and Zionist settler colonialism evicted the Palestinians from humanity, and how contemporary global racial politics and the emerging “trauma genre” continue to silence and distort their collective suffering and resistance. Specifically, my analysis is inspired by interview material I gathered of experiences of death and dying in East Jerusalem. Drawing from the Israeli legal term “present–absentee”, I suggest that spaces of death under Israeli settler colonialism constitute sites of denial and nonrecognition of Palestinian humanity. The denial of Palestinians’ collective history and continuous suffering has positioned Palestinians as outside of history, time and geography, and therefore as outside of humanity and modernity. This paper argues that individualized psychological readings silence the multidimensional histories of being and surviving in the homeland. Furthermore, the individualizing “trauma genre” inadequately interprets Palestinian suffering when compounded with the interlocking power of colonialism and global racial logics. As such, it conceals the political struggle and social resistance of Palestinians under the Israeli colonial regime.

Setting the Record Straight: The Arabs, Zionism, and the Holocaust

Setting the Record Straight: The Arabs, Zionism, and the Holocaust

Zionist Colonialism in Palestine (1965)

Fayez Abdullah Sayegh (b. 1922 – d. 1980) was born in Kharraba, Syria, where his father was a Presbyterian minister. Starting his studies at the American University of Beirut, he moved to the US and earned a PhD in philosophy from Georgetown University in 1949. He subsequently taught at the American University of Beirut, Yale, Stanford and Macalester College. Publishing widely on numerous topics pertaining to the Arab world, and the question of Palestine in particular, he became one of the foremost intellectuals and diplomats representing Palestine internationally. In 1965, he founded the Research Center of the Palestine Liberation Organization and served as a member of its Executive Committee. In this capacity, he edited and cultivated the main intellectual output of the 1960s revolutionary period in the Palestinian national movement, and was a foundational member of the diplomatic leadership of the movement. He served as the Chargé d’Affaires of the Arab States Delegations' Office at the United Nations. His most lasting legacy came on 10 November, 1975, when, as a delegate of Kuwait, he jointly authored and presented United Nations General Assembly Resolution 3379, which determined Zionism as a form of racism and racial discrimination. This Resolution would be revoked in 1991 by UN General Assembly Resolution 46/86, a precondition set by Israel for its participation in the Madrid Conference. The following excerpts are from of his ‘Zionist Colonialism in Palestine’, which is possibly one of the clearest and most concise descriptions of its generation to discuss the organisational set-up of the Zionist settler colonial movement, its diplomatic strategies, as well as the ideology and structural features underpinning it. As a document of its time, it places Zionist settler colonialism in the context of European colonialism, and yet it distinguishes the Zionist project from other settler colonial movements. Sayegh does so by highlighting Zionism’s aspiration to racial self segregation, its rejection of any form of coexistence or assimilation, its unbending drive towards territorial expansion, and the necessary violence, structural and physical, it has to employ to achieve its goals. These phenomena are not passing features of Zionism, but, as Sayegh remarks, are ‘congenial, essential and permanent’, and consequently also manifest themselves in the policies of the Israeli state towards Palestinians and the wider Arab region. Palestinian resistance to Zionism has demanded many sacrifices, but, as Sayegh argues, these were not in vain, for ‘[r]ights undefended are rights surrendered’, and while the Palestinian nation lost its homeland, it did so ‘not without fighting’. ‘It was dislodged’, he notes, ‘but not for want of the will to defend its heritage’. However, he also argues, the threat emanating from Zionist settler colonialism, and the duty to challenge it, is not only the concern of Palestinians alone. Rather, a regional response to Zionism is necessary, given its constant threat to destabilise the region and wage wars on its neighbours. Likewise, it is also a challenge to anti-colonial movements everywhere, ‘[f]or whenever and wherever the dignity of but one single human being is violated, in pursuance of the creed of racism, a heinous sin is committed against the dignity of all men, everywhere’. The following excerpts from Zionist Colonialism in Palestine were prepared by this issue's editors.

Israeli state power and its liberal alibis

This article explores the tension between Israeli state power and its presentation to the West in ostensibly liberal terms. The historical dynamics of metropolitan sponsorship of Zionist settler colonialism are briefly discussed before focusing on the ways in which the politics of artificial demographic management and pan-Jewish entitlement to Palestine are twisted into a conception of Jewish national self-determination that serves as a liberal licence for Israeli state crimes.

Circumventing the Evils of Colonialism: Yanaihara Tadao and Zionist Settler Colonialism in Palestine

Circumventing the Evils of Colonialism: Yanaihara Tadao and Zionist Settler Colonialism in Palestine

RASHID KHALIDI, Palestinian Identity: The Construction of Modern National Consciousness (New York: Columbia University Press, 1997). Pp. 325. $42.00 cloth, $16.50 paper.

Rashid Khalidi sets out to study the emergence of Palestinian nationalism at the dawn of the 20th century. He explores the early cultural beginnings of Palestinian identity, which precede the encounter with Zionism, and studies the different developments of Palestinian identity in light of that encounter. Whereas a large number of accounts stress that Palestinian identity developed exclusively as a result of the encounter with colonial Zionism, Khalidi sets the record straight. In line with predominant theories of nationalism, Khalidi demonstrates that national identities are defined in relation to an other. Palestine identity, which as early as 1701 manifested itself against a hostile European Christianity, remained Jerusalem-centered until the beginning of the 20th century. That is when a modern Palestinian nationalism was emerging, before the encounter with British colonialism and Zionist settler colonialism changed the configuration of both the Palestinian self and its other. Khalidi charts the changes in the forms of knowledge that the Palestinian intelligentsia was acquiring in the course of the 19th and early 20th centuries, noting the shift from Islamic studies to modern social science and the humanities. Through an inventory of Palestinian libraries, Khalidi carefully chronicles these changes in forms of knowledge, correlating them with the new and emerging political ideas in the country.

The Palestinian Wedding: MAJOR THEMES OF CONTEMPORARY PALESTINIAN RESISTANCE POETRY

(1981). The Palestinian Wedding: MAJOR THEMES OF CONTEMPORARY PALESTINIAN RESISTANCE POETRY. Journal of Palestine Studies: Vol. 10, No. 3, pp. 77-99.