Zionism as settler colonialism

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Vladimir Jabotinsky, who said "Zionism is a colonization adventure."[1][2]

Fayez Sayegh, Maxime Rodinson, George Jabbour, Ibrahim Abu-Lughod, Baha Abu-Laban, Jamil Hilal, and Rosemary Sayigh.[6][7]

The current conceptual framework emerged in the 1990s among

its legitimate right to exist and calls for its destruction. Hussein Ibish argues that such zero-sum calls are "a gift that no occupying power and no colonizing settler movement deserves."[11]

Background

Map of Israeli settlements (magenta) in the occupied West Bank in 2020
Main article: Settler colonialism

In contrast to classical colonialism, in settler colonialism the focus is on eliminating, rather than exploiting, the original inhabitants of a territory. Commonly cited cases of settler colonialism include the United States, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand.[12] As theorized by Patrick Wolfe, settler colonialism is a structure, not an event. Settler colonialism operates by processes including physical elimination of native inhabitants but also can encompass projects of assimilation, segregation, miscegenation, religious conversion, and incarceration.[13]

Many of the fathers of Zionism themselves described it as colonialism, such as

Vladimir Jabotinsky who said "Zionism is a colonization adventure".[14]

In 1967, the French historian

accommodation of a Palestinian Israeli autonomy within the institutions of the Israeli state".[17] Other commentators, such as Daiva Stasiulis, Nira Yuval-Davis,[18] and Joseph Massad in the "Post Colonial Colony: time, space and bodies in Palestine/ Israel in the persistence of the Palestinian Question"[19][20] have included Israel in their global analysis of settler societies. Ilan Pappé describes Zionism and Israel in similar terms.[21][22] Israel has no metropole, and its population is diverse and multihued, much of which has fled persecution from diverse locations such as Iraq or Europe.[23] Scholar Amal Jamal, from Tel Aviv University, has stated, "Israel was created by a settler-colonial movement of Jewish immigrants".[24] However, Yuval Shany of Tel Aviv university has said that categorizing Israel as colonialist project is a significant category error since "It cannot apply to a conflict involving "two indigenous peoples".[23]

Manifestations

In 1905, Jewish immigrants to the region promoted the idea of

750,000 Palestinians fled or were forcibly displaced from the area that became Israel, and 500 Palestinian villages, as well as Palestinian-inhabited urban areas, were destroyed.[27][28] Although considered by some Israelis to be a "brutal twist of fate, unexpected, undesired, unconsidered by the early [Zionist] pioneers", some historians have described the Nakba as a campaign of ethnic cleansing.[27]

In the aftermath of the Nakba, Palestinian land was expropriated on a large scale and

dual legal structure in the West Bank compared to the unitary Israeli law imposed in the Golan Heights.[32]

According to Patrick Wolfe, Israel's settler colonialism manifests in immigration policies that promote unlimited immigration of Jews while denying family reunification for Palestinian citizens. Wolfe adds, "Despite Zionism's chronic addiction to territorial expansion, Israel's borders do not preclude the option of removal [of Palestinians] (in this connection, it is hardly surprising that a nation that has driven so many of its original inhabitants into the sand should express an abiding fear of itself being driven into the sea)."[33]

Salamanca et al. state that Israeli practices have often been studied as distinct but related phenomena, and that the settler-colonial paradigm is an opportunity to understand them together. As examples of settler colonial phenomena they include "aerial and maritime bombardment, massacre and invasion, home demolitions, land theft, identity card confiscation, racist laws and loyalty tests,

siege on Gaza, cultural appropriation, dependence on willing (or unwilling) native collaboration regarding security arrangements".[34]

Some scholars have stated the lack of an imperial power to benefit from exploiting the region, means a colonial paradigm does not apply.[35] Other scholars have stated that Israel's external supporters, either private organizations or various states (such as the United Kingdom, France, Germany,[36] Australia,[28] or the United States), may function as a metropole.[37]

Historiography

According to the Israeli sociologist Uri Ram, the characterization of Zionism as colonial "is probably as old as the Zionist movement".

Zionism is racism" resolution.[42] After Israel assumed control of the whole Mandatory Palestine in 1967, settler-colonial analyses became prominent among Palestinians.[43] In Israel, the New Historians, a movement that emerged in the 1980s, was associated with colonial analysis.[38] Along with explicitly settler colonial analysis, another persistent view is that the "Zionist national project has been predicated on the destruction of the Palestinian one".[38]

Although settler colonialism is an empirical framework, it is associated with favoring a one-state solution.[44] Rachel Busbridge argues that settler colonialism is "a coherent and legible frame" and "a far more accurate portrayal of the conflict than the picture of Palestinian criminality and Israeli victimhood that has conventionally been painted".[45] She also argues that settler colonial analysis is limited, especially when it comes to the question of decolonization.[46]

Anthropologist Anne de Jong says that early Zionists promoted a narrative of binary conflict between two competing groups with equally valid claims in order to deflect criticisms of settler colonialism.[47] In 2013, historian Lorenzo Veracini argued that settler colonialism has been successful in Israel proper but unsuccessful in the territories occupied in 1967.[48] Historian Rashid Khalidi argues that all other settler-colonial wars in the twentieth century ended in defeat for colonists, making Palestine an exception: "Israel has been extremely successful in forcibly establishing itself as a colonial reality in a post-colonial age".[49]

Elia Zureik's Israel's Colonial Project in Palestine: Brutal Pursuit, updates his earlier work on colonialism and Palestine and applies Michel Foucault's work on biopolitics to colonialism, arguing that racism plays a central role and that surveillance becomes a tool of governance. It also analyses the dispossession of indigenous people and population transfer, including sociological, historical and postcolonial studies into an examination of the Zionist project in Palestine.[50] Sánchez and Pita argue that Israeli settler colonialism has had far more severe effects on the indigenous Palestinian population than the discriminations suffered by the Spanish and Mexican populations in the Southwest of the United States in the wake of the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo which ended the Mexican–American War.[51] Most scholars who have addressed Israeli settler colonialism have not discussed the Golan Heights.[32]

Reception

The portrayal of

legitimacy of Israel, a form of antisemitism,[10] or historically inaccurate.[37][52] Some critics highlight ideas such as the putative non-exploitation of indigenous labor by Zionists or the lack of a metropole as reasons not to consider it a colonial movement.[37]

Historian S. Ilan Troen, in "De-Judaizing the Homeland: Academic Politics in Rewriting the History of Palestine", argues that Zionism was the repatriation of a long displaced indigenous population to their historic homeland, and that Zionism does not fit the framework of a settler society as it "was not part of the process of imperial expansion in search of power and markets." Troen further argues that there are several differences between European colonialism and the Zionist movement, including that "there is no New Vilna, New Bialystock, New Warsaw, New England, New York,...and so on" in Israel.[52] Troen, along with his wife Carol Troen, a former applied linguist at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, write that the concept that Palestinians are the indigenous people is a recent phenomenon and is "a crucial addition to the linguistic arsenal of lawfare used to deny Israel's legitimacy" as it "follows implicitly and explicitly that the Jewish state is a colonial-settler society, reprehensible in its exploitation of the indigenous".[53]

Sociologist Areej Sabbagh-Khoury suggests that "in tracing the settler colonial paradigm ... Israeli critical sociology, albeit groundbreaking, has suffered from a myopia engendered through hegemony."[54] She notes that "until recently, most Israeli academics engaged in discussing the nature of the state ignored its settler colonial components", and that scholarship conducted "within a settler colonial framework" has not been given serious attention in Israeli critical academia, "perhaps due to the general disavowal of the colonial framework among Israeli scholars."[54]

Historian Benny Morris rejects the labeling. In a negative review of Rashid Khalidi's book The Hundred Years' War on Palestine Morris said of the claim:

Colonialism is commonly defined as the policy and practice of an imperial power acquiring political control over another country, settling it with its sons, and exploiting it economically. By any objective standard, Zionism fails to fit this definition. Zionism was a movement of desperate, idealistic Jews from Eastern and Central Europe bent on immigrating to a country that had once been populated and ruled by Jews, not "another" country, and regaining sovereignty over it. The settlers were not the sons of an imperial power, and the settlement enterprise was never designed to politically or strategically serve an imperial mother country or economically exploit it on behalf of any empire. The land was known to lack natural resources. And most Zionists, rather than wanting to exploit the natives, were indifferent to their fate or wanted to simply see them leave (something Khalidi repeatedly acknowledges throughout the book).[55]

References

Notes

  1. ^ The settler colonial paradigm, linked to Israeli critical sociology, post-Zionism, and postcolonialism, reemerged following changes in the political landscape from the mid-1990s that reframed the history of the Nakba as enduring, challenged the Jewish definition of the state, and legitimated Palestinians as agents of history. Palestinian scholars in Israel lead the paradigm's reformulation.[6]

Citations

  1. ISBN 978-0-932863-78-2
    . A voluntary reconciliation with the Arabs is out of the question either now or in the future. If you wish to colonize a land in which people are already living, you must provide a garrison for the land, or find some rich man or benefactor who will provide a garrison on your behalf. Or else-or else, give up your colonization, for without an armed force which will render physically impossible any attempt to destroy or prevent this colonization, colonization is impossible, not difficult, not dangerous, but IMPOSSIBLE!… Zionism is a colonization adventure and therefore it stands or falls by the question of armed force. It is important… to speak Hebrew, but, unfortunately, it is even more important to be able to shoot – or else I am through with playing at colonizing.
  2. ^ Jabotinsky, Ze'ev (4 November 1923). "The Iron Wall" (PDF). Colonisation can have only one aim, and Palestine Arabs cannot accept this aim. It lies in the very nature of things, and in this particular regard nature cannot be changed...Zionist colonisation must either stop, or else proceed regardless of the native population.
  3. ^ Wolfe 2006.
  4. ^ "Forum on Patrick Wolfe". Versobooks.com. Archived from the original on 21 June 2021. Retrieved 26 April 2022.
  5. ^ "What is at Stake in the Study of Settler Colonialism?". Developing Economics. 26 October 2020. Archived from the original on 25 November 2021. Retrieved 26 April 2022.
  6. ^ a b Sabbagh-Khoury 2022, first section.
  7. JSTOR 10.13169/arabstudquar.38.4.0683. Archived
    from the original on 9 June 2022. Retrieved 9 June 2022. Calling Israel a settler colonial regime is an argument increasingly gaining purchase in activist and, to a lesser extent, academic circles.
  8. ^ Sabbagh-Khoury 2022, Conclusion.
  9. S2CID 216148316
    .
  10. ^ a b Busbridge 2018, pp. 97–98.
  11. ISBN 978-0978561413
    . Retrieved 9 March 2024.
  12. ^ Busbridge 2018, p. 92.
  13. ^ Busbridge 2018, p. 95.
  14. ISBN 978-0-932863-78-2
    . A voluntary reconciliation with the Arabs is out of the question either now or in the future. If you wish to colonize a land in which people are already living, you must provide a garrison for the land, or find some rich man or benefactor who will provide a garrison on your behalf. Or else-or else, give up your colonization, for without an armed force which will render physically impossible any attempt to destroy or prevent this colonization, colonization is impossible, not difficult, not dangerous, but IMPOSSIBLE!… Zionism is a colonization adventure and therefore it stands or falls by the question of armed force. It is important… to speak Hebrew, but, unfortunately, it is even more important to be able to shoot – or else I am through with playing at colonizing.
  15. OCLC 673646. Archived
    (PDF) from the original on 1 February 2021. Retrieved 10 June 2022.
  16. ^ Veracini, Lorenzo (2007). "Settler Colonialism and Decolonisation". Borderlands. 6 (2). Australian National University. Archived from the original on 30 March 2020. Israel could celebrate its anticolonial/anti-British struggle exactly because it was able to establish a number of colonial relationships within and without the borders of 1948.
  17. doi:10.2307/j.ctt18fs3dn. Archived
    from the original on 10 June 2022. Retrieved 10 June 2022.
  18. ISBN 9780803986947. Archived
    from the original on 10 June 2022. Retrieved 10 June 2022.
  19. ISBN 9780203965351. Archived
    from the original on 10 June 2022. Retrieved 10 June 2022.
  20. ISBN 9780822325215. Archived
    from the original on 3 March 2021. Retrieved 10 June 2022.
  21. ^ "The Palestinian Enclaves Struggle: An Interview with Ilan Pappé". King's Review. Archived from the original on 19 May 2017.
  22. ^ Pappé, Ilan (5 April 2017). "Decolonizing Israel. Ilan Pappé on Viewing Israel-Palestine Through the Lens of Settler-Colonialism". Antiwar.com. Archived from the original on 16 August 2021. Retrieved 10 June 2022.
  23. ^
    ISSN 0362-4331
    . Retrieved 10 December 2023.
  24. ISBN 978-1-136-82412-8. Archived
    from the original on 14 August 2021. Retrieved 10 June 2022.
  25. ^ Svirsky 2021, pp. 80–81.
  26. ^ a b Svirsky 2021, p. 81.
  27. ^ a b Collins 2011, p. 170.
  28. ^ a b Busbridge 2018, p. 96.
  29. ^ Gordon & Ram 2016, p. 22.
  30. ^ Degani 2015, p. 84.
  31. ^ Gordon & Ram 2016, pp. 22–23.
  32. ^ a b Gordon & Ram 2016, p. 26.
  33. ^ Wolfe 2006, p. 401.
  34. ^ Salamanca et al. 2012, p. 2.
  35. ^ Morris, Benny (Spring 2020). "The War on History". Jewish Review of Books.
  36. ^ Anonymous 2021, p. 375.
  37. ^ a b c Sabbagh-Khoury 2022, The Settler Colonial Paradigm in the Israeli-Palestinian Context.
  38. ^ a b c Busbridge 2018, p. 94.
  39. ^ Collins 2011, p. 174.
  40. S2CID 149255739. Archived
    from the original on 10 June 2022. Retrieved 12 May 2022.
  41. ^ Behar 2020, p. 221.
  42. ^ a b Sayegh 2012, p. 206.
  43. ^ Behar 2020, p. 227.
  44. ^ Busbridge 2018, p. 104.
  45. ^ Busbridge 2018, pp. 92–93.
  46. ^ Busbridge 2018, p. 93.
  47. ^ de Jong 2018, p. 364.
  48. ^ Veracini 2013, p. 38.
  49. ^ "Introduction: Historical Landmarks in the Hundred Years' War on Palestine". Institute for Palestine Studies. Archived from the original on 20 June 2021. Retrieved 23 April 2022.
  50. ISBN 978-1-315-66155-1
    . The Zionist project can be best described as a cumulative, colonial enterprise that has continued unabated since its inception
  51. ^ Sánchez & Pita 2014, p. 1050.
  52. ^
    S2CID 216148316
    .
  53. S2CID 262013035
    .
  54. ^ a b Sabbagh-Khoury 2022, Critical Sociology.
  55. ^ Morris, Benny (Spring 2020). "The War on History". Jewish Review of Books.

Sources

Further reading

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