Summary
James Belich’s concept, extended by Lorenzo Veracini from its economic dimensions to its political manifestations, for the process by which a settler colonial project comes again to depend on external support, eroding the settler autonomy and Indigenisation a settler project requires (The Other Shift: Settler Colonial Studies and the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict, PDF p.15 / printed p.14).
Details
- Settler colonial forms are inherently premised on settler autonomy and on a substantive localised sovereign capacity that can use metropolitan, Diasporic and/or imperial support but can also dispose of it when necessary; the need to mobilise the Diaspora and other supporters, such as the US Christian Zionists, in order to colonise the West Bank has produced a situation in which the whole settler colonial project depends again on external support (PDF p.15 / printed p.14).
- “There is a crucial difference between taking advantage of external support and having to rely on it.” Dependency on external support is entirely natural for a colonial project; it is never good news for a settler colonial one (PDF p.15 / printed p.14).
- The recurring prospect of making Israel the country of all Jews, rather than a country of some Jewish people — those who would move there — produces an inevitable recolonisation effect that subjects Jewish Israelis to the political determination of others (PDF p.16 / printed p.15).
- Recolonisation is also an endogenous Israeli trend with the ostensible support of the majority of the Israeli public, which does not change its inherently anti-settler colonial character: as it erases the distinction between settler insiders and exogenous outsiders, it prevents effective settler indigenisation (PDF p.17 / printed p.16).
- All recolonisation processes rely necessarily both on a recolonisation party located in the settler periphery and on a recolonisation lobby firmly established in the metropolitan core, and their entanglements: “One can be the colony of a diaspora as well as a colony of a particular lobby or a corporate body and its local allies” (PDF p.21 / printed p.20).
- Recolonisation processes constitute a ‘new old land’, not the ‘old new land’ of settler colonial and Zionist imaginings (PDF p.18 / printed p.17).
- The pro-Israel lobby’s activities, on this account, should be framed in the context of the recolonisation of Israeli circumstances, not in the context of an Israeli ‘colonisation’ of US policy, even if the two processes can look alike (PDF p.20 / printed p.19).
Related pages
The Other Shift: Settler Colonial Studies and the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict, Settler Colonialism, Indigenisation, Elective Belonging, James Belich, Lorenzo Veracini