Summary
Kanafani describes the process in Palestine as a transformation from a British mandate into Zionist settler colonialism, reaching its climax in the mid-1930s: settlement through Jewish immigration and capital, seizure and purchase of land, exclusion of Arab labour, and the building of a separate settler economy and armed force under British protection.
Details
-
The process of establishing the roots of colonialism and transforming it from a British mandate into Zionist settler colonialism reached its climax in the mid-1930s (The 1936-39 Revolt in Palestine, PDF p.19 / printed p.36).
-
Its rural mechanism was land: nearly one million dunums expropriated, almost one-third of the agricultural land, with 20,000 peasant families evicted by 1931, destroying a rural society in which agriculture was a social, religious and ritual way of life (The 1936-39 Revolt in Palestine, PDF p.11 / printed p.20).
-
Its urban mechanism was capital and exclusion: by 1935 Jews controlled 872 of 1,212 industrial firms and 90% of Mandate concessions, and the Jewish Labour Only policy barred Arab workers from the settler economy (The 1936-39 Revolt in Palestine, PDF p.7 / printed p.13).
-
Its political result was the Zionist settler entity whose principal military and economic foundations, Kanafani argues, were established in 1936-1939, so that the conditions for the Zionist victory of 1948 were created during the Arab revolt (The 1936-39 Revolt in Palestine, PDF p.28 / printed p.54-55).
-
Sayegh’s account is the editors’ framing source for this concept: Zionist settler colonialism is distinguished from other European settler colonial movements by racial self-segregation, rejection of coexistence or assimilation, an unbending drive towards territorial expansion, and necessary structural and physical violence, all congenial, essential and permanent in his remark (Zionist Colonialism in Palestine, PDF p.1 / printed p.206).
-
The differentiating mechanism, for Sayegh: other European settlers could coexist with and exploit indigenous populations, but Zionist colonisation was essentially incompatible with the continued existence of the native population in the coveted country, because a fully populated, nationally conscious Palestine could not accommodate racial self-segregation and statehood while its Arab people remained (Zionist Colonialism in Palestine, PDF p.4 / printed p.209).
-
Its sequence in Sayegh: sporadic colonisation 1882-1897, organised colonisation after Basel 1897, a militantly segregationist second wave from 1907/1908, success only under the British alliance of 1917-1948, and a settler-state thereafter sustained by the United States (Zionist Colonialism in Palestine, PDF p.3-8 / printed p.208-213).
-
In Said, the Zionist project for and conquest of Palestine was, for the Arab Palestinian, simply the most successful and to date the most protracted of many European projects for Palestine since the Middle Ages; Palestinian actuality is built upon resistance to this new foreign colonialism (The Question of Palestine, PDF p.29, p.31 / printed p.8, p.10).
Related pages
The 1936-39 Revolt in Palestine, Zionism, Imperialism, Jewish Labour Only, 1936-39 Revolt in Palestine