Summary
Author of The Shift: Israel-Palestine from Border Struggle to Ethnic Conflict (New York, Columbia University Press, 2010), the book Lorenzo Veracini’s 2013 article answers: Klein proposed that the post-1967 Israeli ‘control system’ transformed a border dispute into an ethnic confrontation (The Other Shift: Settler Colonial Studies and the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict, PDF p.2 / printed p.1).
Details
- Klein’s reinterpretation, as Veracini presents it, is centred on the transformations that followed the Israeli victory in the war of 1967: an Israeli-determined ‘control system’ instituted no less than 5 different Palestinian constituencies defined by their subjection to different administrative regimes — the citizens of Israel, the residents of East Jerusalem, those who live in Gaza, and those who live in the West Bank west and east of the recently erected separation wall (PDF p.2 / printed p.1).
- Klein’s conclusion on the form: he does compare the various regimes Israel established with a number of colonial settings, but his overall conclusion is that colonialism is not the issue (PDF p.3 / printed p.2). Veracini argues the opposite in form: the conflict should be understood as crucially informed by a variety of colonial forms.
- In the Conclusion Veracini restates Klein’s thesis in order to date his own differently: The Shift argues that since 1967 the confrontation has progressively reverted into what it was before 1948, an ethnic conflict; Veracini integrates rather than dismisses the approach, holding that Klein’s shift produced circumstances in which the confrontation can now be read as an ethnic conflict and a territorial solution has become impracticable (PDF p.22-23 / printed p.21-22).
Related pages
The Other Shift: Settler Colonial Studies and the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict, Lorenzo Veracini, Settler Colonialism, Separation wall, Meron Benvenisti, Oren Yiftachel