Summary
In Shtetl Colonialism: First and Last Impressions of Indigeneity by Colonised Colonisers, the question at the centre of the Zionist project as Pappé presents it: who is indigenous to Palestine, the engagement with which — the native population treated as aliens who usurped a home country — he argues remained steadfast and dominant at every moment since the early 20th century (Shtetl Colonialism: First and Last Impressions of Indigeneity by Colonised Colonisers, PDF p.3 / printed p.41).
Details
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The engagement summed up in the article: its basic assumption is that the native population is comprised of aliens who usurped a home country and, as long as they are there, they are inevitably involved in an attempt to prevent a Jewish presence in Palestine; from that assumption follow, in Pappé’s chain, the 1948 ethnic cleansing, military rule, the post-1967 occupation and discriminatory policies towards Palestinian citizens (PDF p.3-4).
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Its first impression form: the newly arrived settler as the inhabitant and the lifelong Arab resident as the nomad and alien, in the 1915 epigraph from Shlomo Blumgarten (PDF p.1).
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The article’s conclusion returns to the formative moment at which a particular perception of indigeneity was born, arguing that analysing it may help question Israel’s immunity from depiction as a settler colonial project (PDF p.18 / printed p.56).
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The editors of the same special issue make the complementary claim that the framework reiterates the fact that Palestinians are an indigenous people, and aligns Palestine scholarship with indigenous and native studies (Past is Present: Settler Colonialism in Palestine, PDF p.4).
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In The Ongoing Judaisation of the Naqab and the Struggle for Recognising the Indigenous Rights of the Arab Bedouin People, the concept is applied to the Naqab Bedouin against Cobo’s 1986 definition, which the article sets out in full and finds the Bedouin meet point by point — pastoralism, wells, traditional agriculture, cemeteries, pre-1948 villages, language, laws, customs, tribal belonging and a traditional economy (PDF p.2-3, 7 / printed p.82-83, 87).
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The position taken is that all Palestinians should be considered indigenous to the land, and ‘indigenous people’ is adopted expressly as a form of Bedouin identity and resistance against the state’s ‘ethnic group’ framing (PDF p.6, 8).
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The application is contested in the work itself: Israeli scholars dispute it, some scholars associate indigeneity with pre-urban attributes, Bedouin elders used neither the term nor ‘Naqab’, some local leaders contested UN indigenous identification, and many Arab activists prefer ‘national minority’ (PDF p.6-7).
Related pages
Shtetl Colonialism: First and Last Impressions of Indigeneity by Colonised Colonisers, Settler Colonialism, Shtetl Colonialism, Shlomo Blumgarten, The Ongoing Judaisation of the Naqab and the Struggle for Recognising the Indigenous Rights of the Arab Bedouin People, Naqab, Jose Martinez Cobo