Zachary Lockman

Summary

Historian whose Comrades and Enemies: Arab and Jewish Workers in Palestine, 1906-1948 (1996) is cited in Shtetl Colonialism: First and Last Impressions of Indigeneity by Colonised Colonisers and in the Settler Colonial Studies editors’ introduction for the history of Arab and Jewish workers under the Conquest of Labour (Shtetl Colonialism: First and Last Impressions of Indigeneity by Colonised Colonisers, PDF p.11, note 19 / printed p.49, p.57).

Lockman has shown, as Pappé reports it, that the manipulations by which socialist Zionists explained exclusion as the Palestinians’ own fault became more sophisticated beginning from the late 1920s; the first impressions, by contrast, depicted the locals as shifty characters and as an obstacle not just to Zionism but to socialism as well (PDF p.11).
In Past is Present: Settler Colonialism in Palestine, Lockman’s work is presented in the issue survey as a critical and constructive engagement with Gershon Shafir and an alternative narrative of the Zionist labour movement (PDF p.5-6 of that source).
In his own article Land, Labor and the Logic of Zionism: A Critical Engagement with Gershon Shafir (2012), Lockman — professor of Middle Eastern and Islamic Studies and of History at New York University, author of Comrades and Enemies: Arab and Jewish Workers in Palestine, 1906-1948 (1996) and Contending Visions of the Middle East (2004/2009) — argues against Gershon Shafir that labour Zionism’s separatist strategy could only succeed within a context of coercion, state intervention and violence, and that labour-Zionist ‘moderation’ was one phase in a longer history of dispossession, expansion and domination (PDF p.1, p.20-23, p.28).

tags
aliases