Zionist Settler Research Articles

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.

Writing/righting Palestine studies: settler colonialism, indigenous sovereignty and resisting the ghost(s) of history

ABSTRACTThis essay explores the limitations of a settler colonial analysis in writing Palestinian history. While the past decade has witnessed a plethora of interventions exploring this very concept, this essay attempts to layout the evolution of the concept within the literature on Palestine. In doing so, the utility of a settler-colonial analysis will become clearer and more substantially grounded in the discursive differences between literatures on Palestine and literatures on Zionism. This distinction between literature on Palestine and literature on Zionism is an important line to draw in the midst of a violent matrix that includes the on-going Zionist settler colonial occupation of Palestine. The essay suggests that Palestine studies should refer to Indigenous studies. It argues that while the settler-colonial analysis is fitting for the study of Zionism as an ideology and its history, frameworks that grew out of Indigenous studies are a more fitting political and academic home for the study of Palestinian history.

Gender and Settler Colonialism in Palestinian Agriculture: Structural Transformations

The gendered nature of the agricultural sector is significantly influenced by the political and socio-economic and cultural structure of any society. The division of labor between males and females within the family farm is seriously affected as a response to economic pressures along with the impact of other restrictions imposed by predetermined gender roles. In the Palestinian context, economic pressures were created mainly by the structural transformation in Palestinian agriculture following the Zionist settler colonization of Palestine, along with other minor factors related to the Palestinian neoliberal economic policies dictated by the international financial institution and Zionist interests. This article argues that the gendered nature of the Palestinian agriculture sector has been transformed and has promoted women's exploitation as follows: First, restructure of the agricultural employment by the decline of both women's and men's employment of the total Palestinian labor force within serious exploitive and fluctuating conditions; second, changes in tasks and division of labor, women's property rights for agricultural land resources and services provided by the Palestinian Authority; and finally increasing women's burden by increasing their time allocation for agricultural tasks. The data presented in the article are based on a comprehensive analysis of secondary information on Palestinian agriculture, and primary data collected in 2010 with the help of a few households case studies (life history) from two locations in the central region of the West Bank.

Sumud: A Palestinian Philosophy of Confrontation in Colonial Prisons

This article investigates Palestinian-Zionist colonial relations from the perspective of the interrogation encounter between Palestinian munadilin (strugglers) in prison and their interrogators from the Israeli security agency during the past forty years of Zionist settler colonization in Palestine. The interrogation site constitutes a condensation point for reading the colonial relations. Each interrogation encounter reflects a singular relation and simultaneously encodes the collective history of past, present, and future colonial relations. The interrogation encounter is a revealing ethnographic site for analyzing the dialectic of the colonial relations and how Palestinians have simultaneously carved out a space for a form of subjectivity and politics that breaks with the predicament of the colonial dialectic through the cultivation of sumud, or “steadfastness.” In the context of colonized Palestine, sumud has come to embody a whole range of significations, sensibilities, affections, attachments, aspirations, and practices. It is a form of subjectivity and politics that embodies the possibility of escaping hegemonic configurations of colonial liberal politics. To practice sumud in the interrogation means to refuse to confess in order to protect one’s comrades, political organization, and community, as well as the Palestinian revolution more broadly. However, sumud is not a definable practice. For there are as many ways to practice sumud as there are Palestinians-in-sumud; the significance of sumud lies in its nonconceptualized features. Sumud is a form of what Gilles Deleuze might term “singular revolutionary becoming,” a creative way of restructuring the self that assumes an absolute difference as immanent to the self, a “difference-in-itself,” and not merely in relation to an outside other, as presupposed by the Hegelian dialectic. The article explicates the complex web of relations that sumud incarnates. Through ethnographic cases, it discusses the form of nonrecognitive politics made possible through sumud.

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.

Guiding Settler Jerusalem: Voice and the Transpositions of History in Religious Zionist Pilgrimage

This article examines how Elad, a religious Zionist settler group, attempts to reanimate biblical tales by transposing biblical text as part of tours for Jewish visitors to the City of David archaeological site in East Jerusalem. Since the early 1990s, Elad has created controversy by settling in the Palestinian neighborhood of Silwan, provoking criticism from Israeli archaeologists and peace activists. In an effort to avoid 'politics' during tours, the group emphasizes a now globalized historicist reading of the Bible, an interpretation popularized by archaeology over the last century and a half. The article considers how transposition from this historicist reading into the here and now is a rhetorical device used to create a biblical realism that does not yet exist in the contested landscape. However, rather than producing an erasure of the Palestinian presence, and in contradiction to the professed desire to refrain from politics, I show that the very communicative situation and multiple framings for producing this biblical realism inevitably remind visitors of the contemporary context.

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.

Racism, Zionism and the Palestinian Working Class,1920–1947

There are few studies which link Zionism to racism, and fewer which see the Palestinians as victims of racism or of Zionist national exclusivism. To redress such grave deficiencies, this paper will explore the role of Zionism as the ideology and practice of the dominant European (Jewish) settler class in Palestine. It will examine the role of Zionism both as racist ideology and as state or official nationalism. The development of Zionist settler rule will be examined within the broader context of the social, economic and political transformation of Palestine between 1920-47, with an emphasis on the role of Zionism in shaping and intensifying indigenous Palestinian class formation.