Shtetl Colonialism: First and Last Impressions of Indigeneity by Colonised Colonisers

Summary

Ilan Pappé argues that the settler colonialism and Apartheid paradigms are adequate for understanding Zionism and Israel but leave phenomena needing further elaboration, and he fine-tunes them through one constant feature: the steadfast, exclusionary and racist perception of what is ‘Arab’ in Jewish Palestine and Israel from the late 19th century to the present, whose basic assumption is that the native population is made up of aliens who usurped a home country (Shtetl Colonialism: First and Last Impressions of Indigeneity by Colonised Colonisers, PDF p.1-3 / printed p.39-41). Two phenomena follow, which the paradigms alone do not explain: the rapid transformation of the Jews of Europe from the ultimate victims of that continent to the chief victimisers in Palestine, and the total immunity the Zionist movement and later the Jewish state received as a result of that transformation (PDF p.1). The article traces the constant from its birth in the Shtetl existence of Eastern Europe, through the first impressions of the Second Aliya — the core group from which the Zionist and Israeli Jewish leadership sprang, whose diaries and letters recorded Palestinians as an alien, aggressive and ungrateful presence in the homeland, to be distanced, excluded from labour, and finally removed — to its persistence in the 1948 Ethnic Cleansing, in military rule, in the 1976 Koenig Report, and in the 2011 consensus for an exclusive Jewish majority, concluding that ethnic cleansing began as an idea, turned into a strategy, was executed as policy, and remains a vision for the future (PDF p.16-18 / printed p.54-56). The framework Pappé proposes for the transformation and the immunity is Postcolonial Jewish Studies: the East European Jews, understood there as victims of internal colonialism, traded the Shtetl for a new kind of exclusion in Palestine, a Shtetl Colonialism in which their genuine victimhood, above all after the Holocaust, shields their ideological and biological descendants from depiction as a settler colonial or apartheid state in Western mainstream media and academia (PDF p.5-7 / printed p.43-45).

What the file is

• The file is Ilan Pappé’s article in settler colonial studies 2, 1 (2012), the special issue Past is Present: Settler Colonialism in Palestine, ISSN 1838-0743; printed pages 39-58, PDF p.1 carrying printed p.39 and PDF p.20 carrying printed p.58, so printed page = PDF page + 38 throughout. The running head is Pappé, ‘Shtetl Colonialism’.
• The byline is Ilan Pappé, University of Exeter (PDF p.1). The Biographical Note (PDF p.18 / printed p.56) describes him as Director of the European Centre for Palestine Studies and a Fellow of the Institute of Arab and Islamic Studies at the University of Exeter, and lists his latest works to that date.
• Structure: an opening argument in continuous prose (PDF p.1-10 / printed p.39-48) that states the thesis, the postcolonial Jewish studies proposal, and the section headed THE LASTING POWER OF FIRST IMPRESSIONS, which continues the Second Aliya evidence; a continuation of that evidence (PDF p.11-17 / printed p.49-55); a section headed CONCLUSIONS (PDF p.17-18 / printed p.55-56); the Biographical Note (PDF p.18); and 42 Notes (PDF p.19-20 / printed p.57-58), most of them pointing to entries in The Book of the Second Aliya (1947).
• Access basis given with delivery: open-license (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0), downloaded from the URL in the frontmatter.
• Text copy: the supplied text copy (raw/2012-pappe-shtetl-colonialism.txt) is clean and complete for all 20 pages, with PDF page markers at the head of each page, about 7,645 words in the copy as delivered. Two passages have their line order scrambled in the copy — the sentence on settler societies’ reformed image at PDF p.8 and the Yuval-Davis quotation at PDF p.17 — and are read in the reading notes in printed-page order, as noted there. A number of slips in the printed text and notes are recorded under Open questions; none affects an argument relied on, except the two different datings of military rule, which are kept side by side.

Section by section

Opening argument: two paradigms and a missing dimension (PDF p.1-3 / printed p.39-41)

The article opens with an epigraph from Shlomo Blumgarten (1915, as attributed), a Second Aliya poet newly arrived, who passed an old barefoot Arab leading a loaded camel and recorded: ‘I saw this Arab as an alien. I was the inhabitant and he was the nomad’ (PDF p.1 / printed p.39, with the full passage in the reading notes). Pappé argues that the colonialist and apartheid paradigms challenge the official and mainstream scholarly Israeli paradigm, which insists on seeing Zionism exclusively as a national liberation movement and Israel as a liberal democracy, but that they apply historical case studies with a known closure to an ongoing reality: in conventional study settler colonialist states are states whose colonialist history is behind them, and generic apartheid has two historical examples which are over (note 1, to Ran Greenstein). The article is written within the comparative settler colonialist paradigm, of which the journal is a leading representative, arguing the Australian and North American societies still face issues today that result from their settler colonialist existence, but that the continuity of colonialist patterns in Israel is far more unique in its intensity and presence (PDF p.2 / printed p.40). The paradigms also miss particulars: the settler colonialist paradigm offers no particular wisdom about the Gaza Strip at the moment, and the apartheid model misses crucial aspects of being a Palestinian citizen in Israel (PDF p.2). The missing dimension instanced is ethnic purity: ‘the steadfastness of ethnic ‘purity’ ideas as a cornerstone of Zionist policy from the day of its inception has turned the means, the ethnic cleansing, into an ideology and a vision’ (PDF p.2-3). In Israel the means have not been transformed or adapted to the present, as in Australia and North America, but remain bare and exposed, and the reaction to them enjoys a global immunity (PDF p.3 / printed p.41). Because the debate stems from competing ethical perspectives as much as from theoretical ones, Pappé focuses on the ethical and moral aspects of the bare realities and the global immunity, through the one feature he presents as unchanged since the first settlers arrived.

The constant engagement with indigeneity (PDF p.3-4 / printed p.41-42)

The constant is the Zionist and Israeli Jewish engagement with the question of Indigeneity in Palestine, which, unlike political structures, economic realities and balances of power, remains steadfast and dominant at every moment since the early 20th century (PDF p.3). Summed up as exclusionary and racist, its assumption is that the native population is comprised of aliens who usurped a home country and are inevitably involved in an attempt to prevent a Jewish presence in Palestine. That perception, Pappé argues, led to the 1948 ethnic cleansing operation and to military rule over the remaining Palestinians, regarded as a ‘fifth column’ between 1948 and 1967 as printed here, and incorporation of a large Palestinian population after 1967 strengthened it, leading to an oppressive occupation in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip and to discriminatory policies towards the Palestinian citizens in Israel, an approach with the potential of turning Israel into a pariah state that has not prevented it remaining part of the civilised and developed world (PDF p.3-4). Its basic features are within the settler colonialist paradigm — past attitudes towards the native population, territorial expansionism, and the establishment of an ethnocratic regime (PDF p.4, note 2, to Abdelwahab Elmessiri). Gabriel Piterberg has shown, Pappé reports, that its hegemonic narrative is a typical settler colonialist one, in an emphasis on the exceptionality of each settler nation, the exclusiveness of the settlers’ subjectivity, and the refusal to recognise the presence of colonised people, concretised for Zionism as the alleged uniqueness of the Jewish nation in its search for sovereignty in the biblically endowed homeland, the privileging of Zionist settlers’ consciousness at the expense of the colonised, and a focus on settler intentions rather than outcomes; Piterberg sees the Zionist denial of the presence of the Palestinian Arabs on the land destined for colonisation as the single most significant factor in determining the shape taken by the settlers’ nation (PDF p.4 / printed p.42). The article offers a diachronic view of this formula, treating the engagement as the principal signifier of the state and a constant variable in the history of Zionism, whose permanency amid the transition from colonialism to postcolonialism may explain why Israel is depicted as both a colonial and a postcolonial phenomenon (PDF p.4, note 3).

Postcolonial Jewish studies and the Shtetl (PDF p.4-7 / printed p.42-45)

Pappé places Israel within a postcolonial framework through postcolonial Jewish studies (note 4, to Piterberg). Ellah Shohat’s critique of the term ‘postcolonial’ is reported at length — its ahistorical and universalising nature and de-politicisation, that neo-colonialism was good enough in many cases, that it implies colonialism is over and lumps together too many distinct phenomena, and that it does not leave one with political agency — and Pappé accepts it in full, in the sentence ‘I fully accept this critical approach’ (PDF p.5 / printed p.43). He argues nonetheless that for the Jews’ transformation from victims to victimisers the perspective can offer a better account of where to locate Israel today and of why Israel is immune from depiction as a settler colonialist or apartheid state in Western mainstream media and academia (PDF p.5). The engagement gels in the humble and impoverished Jewish existence in Eastern Europe and on the shores of Palestine, conveyed through the first impressions of the Second Aliya, who built the Zionist presence as a gated and self-excluded community trying to fend off the strangeness of the country and its people (PDF p.5). The Shtetls, small towns in Yiddish inhabited mostly by Jews, formed the nucleus for the Pale, the Pale of Settlement, the restricted area in which Jews were allowed to live within Tsarist Russia between 1791 to 1914 as printed, much of it previously within historical Poland; with pogroms and harassment many were deserted for urban life, immigration to the new world and Zionism. They symbolised rich Jewish life in poor socio-economic conditions and in an excluded and secluded existence, popularised as heaven upon earth in Fiddler on the Roof and gone forever with the Holocaust (PDF p.5-6 / printed p.43-44). The Shtetl was traded for a new kind of exclusion, the Zionist colonies amid an indigenous people regarded as stranger to Jewish life, as the gentiles of Europe, but, unlike the ‘Goyim’, blamed for being foreign to the land (PDF p.6). On Israel Shahak’s notion, Zionism extracted and magnified the existing historical and theological drive towards separation in Judaism, and, while it claimed to free the Jews from that drive, actually drove them back into separateness willingly and knowingly (PDF p.6, note 5). Indigenous peoples were understood as the principal obstacle to final liberation from the exilic existence the Shtetl symbolised, so their removal by every possible means was contemplated early on as the best solution (note 6, to Nur Masalha on Transfer); the diffuse ideas became a strategy in the 1930s, an ethnic cleansing policy was executed in 1948, and the incomplete cleansing and the continued presence of Palestinians transformed ethnic cleansing into a vision and an ideological infrastructure for the new state (PDF p.6, note 7). The metamorphosis is to be analysed within postcolonial Jewish studies, in which the Jews of Eastern Europe are understood as victims of internal colonialism. What marks it, Pappé stresses, is not the transformation itself — the Puritans and Huguenots in North America underwent it too — but the historical period and pace, in particular after the Holocaust, which is accepted as a sui generis historical event: the victims of the worst modern atrocity becoming in no time a victimiser (PDF p.6-7 / printed p.44-45). That this view of Palestinians as an obstacle has not undermined Israel’s global standing is the immunity to be explained: in 2012 the Western mainstream media and academia treat Israel as a unique case, supported academically by Zionist and pro-Zionist scholarship; the Holocaust memory and its manipulation play a crucial role in the impunity, but Zionism was globally legitimised long before the events in Europe; the denial of the transformation is a crucial part of Israel’s success in remaining part of the civilised world, a shield that cannot be explained by lobbies, strategy and cynical economic considerations alone (PDF p.7 / printed p.45).

The lasting power of first impressions (PDF p.7-8 / printed p.45-46)

A new heading, THE LASTING POWER OF FIRST IMPRESSIONS, borrows from personality psychology (notes 8-9, to H. Kelly and Philip Tetlock as cited): first impressions influence how later impressions and fresh information are interpreted, accountability sometimes transforms them, but when they pertain to questions of ‘ethnicity’ or ‘race’ they remain steadfast, and under harsh conflict and violent reality the chances of re-evaluation are slimmer (PDF p.7-8). Settler colonialist societies that got rid of the indigenous population, in the Americas and the Pacific, retained their basic impressions of the natives, though many perceptions have been delegitimised, sometimes by laws, and at least an appearance of a reformed image conveyed; in the very few cases where the indigenous population was neither exterminated nor the colonisers driven out, defeating first impressions was part of reconciliation, by force in Zimbabwe or through reconciliation and struggle in South Africa. Israel is now the unique example of a settler colonialist project that has the indigenous population as an integral part of the state it created (PDF p.8 / printed p.46). Yet Jewish first impressions moved very little, if at all, and those of the core group dominate present-day Israeli discourse about the same native population first encountered at the beginning of the twentieth century. Official Israel and large segments of society hold to them: the 2011 Zionist consensus is stated to be to maintain a state with a stable Jewish majority within an allegedly democratic state, and Pappé summarises the research of Zeev Hanin, scientific advisor to the Israeli Ministry of Immigration and a researcher of the Russian Jewish community, as showing that the vast majority of Jewish immigrants from the former Soviet Union subscribe to the dominant view among Jews in Israel about the need to exclude the Palestinian citizens of Israel from the common public good (PDF p.8, note 10, to Haaretz, 07/07/11).

From the shtetl to the gated colony (PDF p.9-10 / printed p.47-48)

The connecting thread between the first and last settlers, both coming from the same part of the world, is the wish to establish an exclusive Jewish state over much of Palestine; what is Jewish, what is Palestine and the best means changed, but not the impulse for exclusivity, which meant almost from the start demographic ‘purity’ at best and demographic majority at worst, extreme means being sought by messianic Zionists for the first and pragmatic ones employed by the dominant labour movement for the second (PDF p.9 / printed p.47). The leading members of the early colonisation came from gated Jewish communities, mostly townships, yet built once more gated communities in Palestine, introduced fenced settlement to a rural area that never had it, and created an exclusive Jewish presence in urban space by dominating the labour market, then building separate neighbourhoods and towns, and finally by Urbicide in 1948 — not just expulsions or destruction of buildings, but annihilating the political, social, cultural and economic centres of the indigenous society (PDF p.9, note 12). The formidable and fierce shtetl state in the making was the historical answer to the weak and poor shtetl of Eastern Europe; the cognitive atmosphere of the gated existence explains the uniqueness of the settler strategy against the old Jewish colonies described by Gershon Shafir (note 13). The early settlers were described by the Second Aliya as ‘colonists’, and the self-depiction of Zionism as colonialism ended after the Second Aliya (note 14, to The Book of the Second Aliya). The core group numbered between 20,000 and 40,000 people, came mainly from Russia — only 4% of those who left Russia at the time, as printed — was not a success story, as 90% of them left mainly to the US, and was only a few thousand strong; they nonetheless expelled the Palestinian workforce from the old Jewish colonies, Kibbush Ha-Avoda, glossed Conquest of the Labour Market (see Conquest of Labour), and laid the foundations for the future state (PDF p.9-10 / printed p.47-48). Their trajectories converged: the Jaffa shore, labouring alongside Palestinians in the veteran colonies, meeting them as neighbours in the towns; self-exclusion produced the first pure settlements, and finally paramilitary forces guarded the enclaves, congregation being both a response to the impulse of exclusivity and a material necessity of conquering the labour market to secure jobs and immigration, a separateness the British Mandatory authorities recognised early and legalised (PDF p.10, note 15, to Barbara Smith). The settlers were compulsory diarists and letter writers, and the first anti-Arab entries were written while they were still hosted by Palestinians on the way to the colonies or in the towns; the complaints stemmed from the search for labour and subsistence, which required working shoulder to shoulder with Palestinian farmers or workers, by which intimate contact even the most ignorant realised Palestine was totally an Arab country in its human landscape — ‘county’ as printed (PDF p.10). This first impression was a recognition of an unpleasant reality intertwined with early thought of how to change it. David Ben-Gurion, then a leading activist of the Second Aliya, described Palestinian workers and farmers as Beit Mihush, glossed ‘an infested hotbed of pain’, and, by medical metaphors, conjured exclusive Jewish labour as a panacea, Hebrew workers appearing in the letters as the healthy blood that would immunise the nation from rottenness and death; employing ‘Arabs’ reminded him, continued on the next page, of a story of resuscitation that ends in being devoured (PDF p.10-11 / printed p.48-49).

Socialism turned national, and the alienated homeland (PDF p.11-12 / printed p.49-50)

The presence itself was the problem: distancing them, or distancing yourself from them, was always a solution that could be very brutal in the first instance and alluringly peaceful in the second (PDF p.11 / printed p.49, note 16, to Ben-Gurion’s speech in The Book of the Second Aliya). Some recollections were written in the early 1940s, already driven by a wish to justify racist attitudes, where socialism was still a meaningful dogma and exclusion did not fit it: the ethnic purity paradigm was justified by the bizarre argumentation that employing Arabs was ‘exploitation’, hence they should not be employed and not be part of the Jewish state. Zeev Sternhell has shown, as Pappé cites him, that once Zionism territorialised Palestine as the coveted land of social freedom and equality, socialism became secondary to the national project (note 17, spellings as printed in text and note, recorded under Open questions). Turning socialism into national socialism was explained as the fault of the Palestinians themselves: Neta Harpaz, a leading member of Hapoel Hatzair who came in 1909 and learned Arabic in order to organise a joint industrial action, recorded that the Palestinians were ‘traitors’ who told the Jewish farmer of the strike intention and asked for a raise, and that Yitzhak Ben-Zvi explained to him that international revolution meant in Palestine Jewish and Western revolution alone (PDF p.11, note 18). Zachary Lockman has shown these manipulations became more sophisticated beginning from the late 1920s, but the first impressions depicted the locals as ‘shifty’ characters, an obstacle not just to Zionism but to socialism as well (note 19). The most enduring paradox produced by the desire for demographic purity was the alienated homeland, which became a strange place wherever ‘Arabs’ were: nature seemed weird and unfriendly, but much worse was the alien human landscape, and the land was simultaneously home and a foreign land, a persistent feeling Pappé presents as unique in our times (PDF p.12 / printed p.50; note 20 is to eco-feminist research on the land as a woman to be conquered). The settlers talked of Palestine as Nechar, a foreign land, or Yam Nechar, a sea of foreignness and alienation, and alien had as a synonym wilderness, Shemama, a bareness wherever there were Palestinians that set some settlers contemplating return from a land of nothingness; the 1929 diary sentence quoted is from Moshe Bellinson, name as printed: ‘We have nothing in common with the majority of the people living here’ (PDF p.12, note 22). Ideologically it looked foreign because the foreigners living in it gave the place its alien character, and they were aggressive aliens from the first encounter: the disembarkation at Jaffa, by way of Alexandria and ferry and small boats, appears in the settler view as assault — the phrase ‘Aravim Hetikifu Ottanu’, glossed ‘the Arabs assaulted us’, used for Palestinian boys helping settlers to the small boats, who shouted because the waves were high and asked for Baksheesh, tipping, as their way of living — and the shore women’s traditional welcome salute for returning fishermen becomes menacing noise, in the words quoted at the head of the next page (PDF p.12-13, note 23).

Shame, honour, theft and the necessary evil (PDF p.13-14 / printed p.51-52)

Language, dress and camels were all reported back to Europe as unpleasant realities (PDF p.13, note 24, to Natan Hofshi). Surprise at the old First Aliya colonies followed: Yona Hurewitz was disgusted to find part of the houses in Hadera occupied by ‘Arabs’ (note 25), and in Rishon Lezion, described as the jewel of the Zionist crown, Hofshi reported his disgust at ‘Arab’ men, women and children crossing through it, asked whether it had been a terrible mistake to come and whether this was a foreign country, and noted later that once the Arabs were not allowed to pass through it became home (note 26). Palestinian presence in or near the colonies is named Kalon, Shame, accentuated by La’ag, contempt, and Buz, scorn; the settlers recalled being called ‘Masakin’, glossed the pathetic poor ones, and saw Palestinians guarding early settler property as most eminently absurd (note 27). The solution for Kalon was Kavod, honour, pursued through competition with Palestinian workers on production and through brutal retaliation for what settlers deemed theft of newly acquired land — an old rural habit of cultivating public or even private land, sanctioned under the Ottoman Empire, such as picking fruit from orchards or common use of water wells, which became robbery only once Zionism purchased the land, its practitioners named Robber, Shoded, and Assassin, Rozeach (PDF p.13-14, notes 28, to Alexander Zaid). Yet the locals’ way had to be learned to survive: the ‘Arab way of cultivating and dressing and behaving’ was depicted as a necessary initial evil to be abandoned as soon as possible, one of the principal declared missions of the Second Aliya, together with creating a ‘pure’ Jewish defence force (note 29). Appropriating local habits in order to get rid of locals was a necessary and temporary evil, sometimes prolonged: Arthur Ruppin conceived building a Madafa, the traditional guest tent, hall or room, to settle with local notables the final transition of land from absentee landlords to Zionist hands, the notables, representing the tenants with the landlord’s agent, having to be convinced to expel the tenants; cleansing the farmers and tenants was done first through the Zionist Madafa meeting, then by force of eviction in Mandatory times, and those who refused were robbers and murderers, even men who had shared horse ownership or long hours guarding property (PDF p.14, notes 30-31). Urban Palestine triggered another impression: the towns’ large number of Christians, reported by Ben-Gurion, educated nationalists in his colleague Nathan Shifris’s lament, who grasped what Zionism was about and were impertinent and too assertive; Israel Kadishman believed wits as well as power would be needed to combat them (notes 32-33). Jaffa symbolised everything the Second Aliya dreaded and detested, and in 2012 Nazareth occupies a similar image in the Zionist imagination as a hub of self-assertive national Palestinian sentiment and activity (PDF p.14). Urban and rural Palestinians disappointed twice, by being there and by being ungrateful — continued over the page.

Ungratefulness, exclusion as the message, and the line to 1976 and after (PDF p.15-17 / printed p.53-55)

For all that the Second Aliya did very little for Palestinians — the first wave had at least offered employment, albeit exploitative — they were sensed as ungrateful to the blessings bestowed by the Zionist movement, a point Pappé notes is made today by Ephraim Karsh in Palestine Betrayed (PDF p.14-15, note 34). The ‘good Arabs’ of Theodor Herzl’s Altneuland, exemplified by Rashid Bey, beyond himself with joy when Zionism arrived, were not to be found; Oriental, Arab, Muslim and gentile are a mishmash in the recollections. Berl Katznelson, the group’s ideologue, in 1945 reported his own account of his benign proclivities and immense longing for the Yishmaelite, while recording he already knew it hopeless from meeting unfriendly Turks in Russia (note 35). Humanist indulgence was not allowed: Yosef Rabinowitch, momentarily charmed by an Arab village and a shepherd’s flute in a moment of weakness, reminded himself these were foreigners on the homeland (note 36). The summary message of the Second Aliya voices is the need to exclude the Palestinians in order to turn Palestine into a safe haven for Jews; Rabinowitch fought zealously against employing Palestinians, defining it ‘the evil’, Hara’ Hazeh, feared an uprising, and recorded even a decent farmer as potentially ‘Raa Hola’, glossed ‘a malignant evil’ (PDF p.15, note 37, name spellings varying in text and note as recorded under Open questions). That phrase was used often in official discussions to describe the Palestinian minority in Israel during the years of the Military Rule, bracketed 1948-1966 as printed here, against the 1948-1967 dating at PDF p.3; expulsion of that minority was seriously discussed as an alternative to the regime imposed under the British Mandatory emergency regulations, which robbed them of most basic human and civil rights up to 1967 (note 38). The characterisations reappeared in official discourse in 1976 in the Koenig Report: a phrase about a cancer in the heart of the nation was related to its author, who had recommended severe measures against the Palestinians in order to Judaise the areas where they were still present, and whose report represented Palestinians as a virus threatening to kill a healthy body, although he was not the one who said it, as Pappé presents it (PDF p.16 / printed p.54, note 39, to The Forgotten Palestinians; the report itself is treated in The Question of Palestine and on the Koenig Report page). After 1967 alienation became more institutionalised through discriminatory legislation, governmental policies and official conduct, and the annual indexes of racism and discrimination by Palestinian NGOs in Israel, named in the text as Musawwa and Adalah (spelling as printed; see Mossawa), drive home that for most Jews in Israel Palestinians in Israel are deemed immigrants, aliens and hostile (PDF p.16, notes 40-41). The first impressions have not changed. Against the argument, made by Zionist and anti-Zionist historians alike, that exclusiveness was a material necessity of survival and immigration, Pappé answers that there was no need to be exclusive in order to survive, or even to secure immigration, only a need to secure exclusiveness if one wanted to get rid of the local population — as, in his earlier book’s argument restated here, the war of 1948 was the means, not the cause, of the ethnic cleansing (PDF p.16). Change requires a different moral evaluation of the Zionist project, and Nira Yuval-Davis is quoted at length on how ignoring the construction of Israel as a settler society prevents most Israelis, emotionally and analytically, from understanding epistemological and ontological aspects of the conflict, and on the need for transversal dialogue beyond the manipulative simulation games of conflict resolution models in the Oslo negotiations (PDF p.17 / printed p.55, note 42, the full quotation in Key passages). What has to be understood is the transition of the East European Jews from victims to victimisers, recurring whenever new settlers arrive from imagined or really oppressed communities: today most Israeli Jews are not victims of any oppression, yet the self-perception of victimhood is dominant, laid down by the early group, whose transformation into victimisers occurred while they were still poor — hence postcolonialism is the best prism for how subaltern oppressed groups become so quickly and absolutely oppressive — and whose genuine victimhood protects their ideological and biological descendants today, although that victimhood was not unique and its transformation was also quite common (PDF p.17).

Conclusions (PDF p.17-18 / printed p.55-56)

Under the heading CONCLUSIONS Pappé restates the argument: the early perception of the native as an ‘alien’ in the ‘homeland’, an alien that had to be spirited away in Herzl’s suggestion, in any possible way, has remained the dominant perception in Israel today, yet it has not undermined the legitimacy of the state nor its place in the civilised world; Israel’s immunity stems from its success in negating any description of Zionism and Israel as a settler colonial project and an apartheid state (PDF p.17-18 / printed p.55-56). Focus on the formative moment, and analysis of first impressions as part of the transformation of victims of colonialism and oppression into oppressive colonisers, may help question this immunity, as may disproving Western and Israeli claims about Israel’s sui generis status, and a critical research on Zionism attentive to the origins of the settlers in the timeless sense of who they and their supporters perceived them to be. The lack of moral and ethical discussion of Zionism is the result either of a public relations machine that does not include it in colonialism or apartheid studies, or of genuine apprehension or submission to fear among Europeans who have not yet had closure on the Holocaust (PDF p.18). The unambiguous reference to the native as an ‘alien’ is the constant feature of past attitudes, present policies (printed ‘polices’) and probable future vision, whose ideological centrality has to be explained: this is why ethnic cleansing began as an idea, turned into a strategy, was executed as policy, and remains a vision for the future, and the project sustained today is named the uncompleted project of Judaising whatever is deemed geopolitically as Israel (PDF p.18 / printed p.56).

Biographical Note and Notes (PDF p.18-20 / printed p.56-58)

The Biographical Note (PDF p.18) gives Pappé’s Exeter posts and lists The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine (Oneworld 2007, the date as printed here, against 2006 in note 7), The Forgotten Palestinians (Yale University Press, 2011), The Rise and Fall of a Palestinian Dynasty: The Husaynis 1700-1948 (University of California Press, 2011), and Gaza in Crisis, with Noam Chomsky (Penguin, 2010). The 42 Notes (PDF p.19-20) are recorded in the reading notes at each marker: framework citations to Greenstein, Elmessiri, Piterberg, Shahak and Masalha; psychology citations to Kelly and Tetlock as printed; the Haaretz 07/07/11 item for Hanin; Shafir and Barbara Smith; and, for the Second Aliya evidence, the entries of The Book of the Second Aliya by or about Ben-Gurion, Harpaz, Bellinson, Zinger, Hofshi, Hurewitz, Zaid, Shifris, Kadishman, Katznelson and Rabinowitch, with later citations to Baumel, Karsh, and Pappé’s own The Forgotten Palestinians and to Yuval-Davis.

Key passages

• “I saw this Arab as an alien. I was the inhabitant and he was the nomad.” — Shlomo Blumgarten, as quoted in the epigraph (PDF p.1 / printed p.39)
• “the rapid transformation of the Jews of Europe from the ultimate victims of that continent and that civilisation to the chief victimisers in Palestine” (PDF p.1 / printed p.39)
• “They apply historical case studies with a known closure to an ongoing reality.” (PDF p.2 / printed p.40)
• “the steadfastness of ethnic ‘purity’ ideas as a cornerstone of Zionist policy from the day of its inception has turned the means, the ethnic cleansing, into an ideology and a vision” (PDF p.2-3 / printed p.40-41)
• “I fully accept this critical approach.” (PDF p.5 / printed p.43, of Shohat’s critique)
• “The Shtetl was traded by the settlers for a new kind of exclusion” (PDF p.6 / printed p.44)
• “Even worse, indigenous peoples were understood as the principal obstacle for the final liberation from the exilic existence symbolised by the Shtetl.” (PDF p.6 / printed p.44)
• “The Holocaust memory and its manipulation play a crucial role in this ongoing Israeli impunity” (PDF p.7 / printed p.45)
• “Israel in this respect constitutes now the unique example of a settler colonialist project that has the indigenous population as integral part of the state it created” (PDF p.8 / printed p.46)
• “This first impression constitutes therefore a process of recognition of an ‘unpleasant reality’ intertwined with early thought of how to change it.” (PDF p.10 / printed p.48)
• “The problem was the very presence of the Palestinians” (PDF p.11 / printed p.49)
• “the need to exclude the Palestinians in order to turn Palestine into a safe haven for Jews is the strongest and most common message coming from the second Aliya voices” (PDF p.15 / printed p.53)
• “There was no need to be exclusive in order to survive, or even to secure immigration.” (PDF p.16 / printed p.54)
• “Ignoring or marginalizing the construction of Israel as a settler society, with its own specific characteristics, prevents most Israelis, both emotionally and analytically, from understanding some epistemological and ontological aspects of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.” — Nira Yuval-Davis, quoted by Pappé (PDF p.17 / printed p.55)
• “Israel’s immunity stems from its success in negating any description of Zionism and Israel as a settler colonial project and an Apartheid state.” (PDF p.18 / printed p.56)
• “This is why ethnic cleansing began as an idea, turned into a strategy, was executed as policy, and remains a vision for the future.” (PDF p.18 / printed p.56)

Evidence the work relies on

• This is an interpretive and programmatic article, not an archival study presenting new documents: its historical evidence is the published Second Aliya diaries, letters and recollections collected in The Book of the Second Aliya — The Book of the Second Aliya (Tel-Aviv: Am Oved, 1947), described in note 14 as the largest published collection of Second Aliya diary entries, letters and articles — cited entry by entry in notes 14, 16-18, 21-28 and 30-37 for Ben-Gurion, Harpaz, Bellinson, Zinger, Hofshi, Hurewitz, Zaid, Shifris, Kadishman, Katznelson and Rabinowitch.
• For the framework: Gabriel Piterberg, The Returns of Zionism (Verso, 2008), pp.6, 62 (notes 3-4); Ran Greenstein on the apartheid analogy, Monthly Review Zine, 22/08/10 (note 1); Abdelwhaab Elmessiri, Land of Promise: A Critique of Political Zionism (1977), pp.101-108 (note 2); Israel Shahak, Jewish History, Jewish Religion (Pluto, 2010, as cited) (note 5); Gershon Shafir, Land, Labor and the Origins of the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict, 1882-1914 (1989) (note 13); Barbara Smith, The Roots of Separatism in Palestine: British Economic Policy, 1920-1929 (1993) (note 15); and Zeev Sternhell’s The Founding Myths of Israel (1998, as cited with David Maisel) and Zachary Lockman’s Comrades and Enemies (1996) (notes 17, 19).
• For transfer as early Zionist thought: Nur Masalha, The Expulsion of the Palestinians (1992) (note 6).
• For first-impression psychology: the Kelly warm-cold study, Journal of Personality 18, 4 (1950), and Philip Tetlock on accountability and preservation of first impressions, Social Psychology Quarterly 46, 4 (1983), both as printed in notes 8-9.
• For the present-day end of the continuity claim: the Haaretz item of 07/07/11 summarising Zeev Hanin’s research on immigrants from the former Soviet Union (note 10); Pappé’s own The Forgotten Palestinians (2011), pp.1-8 and 126-127, for post-1967 institutionalised discrimination and the Koenig Report (notes 39-41); Yair Baumel, Blue and White Shadow (2007, in Hebrew), for the Military Rule discussions (note 38); and Ephraim Karsh, Palestine Betrayed (2011), instanced as the present-day form of the ungratefulness claim (note 34).
• For its author’s earlier findings, cited as his own: The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine (2006), including pp.91-103 for urbicide (notes 7, 12).
• For the change the article calls for: Nira Yuval-Davis, ‘Conclusion’, in The Challenge of Post-Zionism (Zed, 2007), p.191 (note 42).

Analysis

The article’s method is diachronic reading of a settler corpus against its own framing question: rather than deduce from the settler colonial framework or compare case studies, it follows one perception — the native as alien in the homeland — from Second Aliya diaries and letters to official discourse in 1976 and the consensus Pappé reports for 2011, and treats its steadfastness as the constant that the settler colonialism and apartheid paradigms, each built on closed historical cases, do not by themselves explain. Its perspective is openly ethical: the debate is stated to stem from competing ethical perspectives, and the proposed remedy is a moral evaluation of the Zionist project, not a challenge to Jewish victimhood but to the morality of what was done in Palestine. Its strongest internal support is the density and convergence of the Book of the Second Aliya citations across PDF p.10-15, in which labour, shame and honour, land use, and urban nationalism all return to presence and exclusion, and the chain it then draws through the ‘Raa Hola’ usage under military rule and the Koenig Report gives the continuity claim documentary anchors beyond the Mandate period. Its limits follow from its form and its own statements: it is a 2012 fine-tuning essay in a special issue whose other articles it does not reproduce, so the Gaza and Palestinian-citizen aspects it says the paradigms miss are named rather than demonstrated here; the 2011 consensus is asserted — official and public statements have not as yet appeared in the scholarly literature, Pappé writes (PDF p.8) — and rests in the text on a Haaretz summary of Hanin’s research; the psychology of first impressions is borrowed in two notes and applied by analogy; the post-1967 institutional development is expressly not documented in the article, the literature being called overwhelming and the point referred to the author’s 2011 book; and the casualty-free, figure-light text carries only the Second Aliya group figures (20,000-40,000 arrivals, 4% of those who left Russia, 90% leaving), which are given without a note. The two datings of military rule in the same article, 1948-1967 at PDF p.3 and 1948-1966 at PDF p.15, are kept side by side under Open questions.

People, organizations, places and events

Ilan Pappe, Shlomo Blumgarten, Gabriel Piterberg, Ellah Shohat, Israel Shahak, Nur Masalha, Ran Greenstein, Abdelwahab Elmessiri, Zeev Hanin, David Ben-Gurion, Yitzhak Ben-Zvi, Berl Katznelson, Zeev Sternhell, Zachary Lockman, Neta Harpaz, Natan Hofshi, Alexander Zaid, Yosef Rabinowitch, Ephraim Karsh, Nira Yuval-Davis, Gershon Shafir, Arthur Ruppin, Theodor Herzl, Second Aliya, Hapoel Hatzair, Brit Shalom, The Book of the Second Aliya, Koenig Report, Adalah, Mossawa, Pale of Settlement, Jaffa, Hadera, Rishon Lezion, Nazareth, Gaza, West Bank

Concepts

Shtetl Colonialism, Shtetl, Settler Colonialism, Apartheid, Indigeneity, Postcolonial Jewish Studies, Zionism, Ethnic Cleansing, Transfer, Ethnocracy, Conquest of Labour, New Jew, Urbicide, Judaization, Racism

How it relates to other sources

• The article appears in the same special issue as Past is Present: Settler Colonialism in Palestine and Purchase by Other Means: The Palestine Nakba and Zionism’s Conquest of Economics. The editors’ introduction summarises it in advance as Pappé on the complications of applying a framework largely based on historical case studies to an Israeli settler colonialism still expanding its frontiers (Past is Present: Settler Colonialism in Palestine, PDF p.5-6), and the article itself carries out that complication by asking what the settler colonial and apartheid paradigms leave unexplained in an ongoing case. With Wolfe it shares the Second Aliya and the Conquest of Labour as the formative formation, but where Wolfe’s mechanism is Preaccumulation and the Conquest of Economics, Pappé’s constant is perceptual and ethical: the first impression of the native as alien, formed before and independently of the purchase mechanism Wolfe documents.
• It restates, in essay form, the causal claim of The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine — that the war of 1948 was the means, not the cause, of the ethnic cleansing (PDF p.16) — and extends the book’s Dalet Plan-centred account backwards to an idea contemplated from the Second Aliya onward and forwards to ethnic cleansing as a continuing vision, citing the book for the Urbicide analysis (note 12).
• With The Arab Worker under the Palestine Mandate it shares the labour-exclusion evidence from the other side of the encounter: Mansour’s 1937 record of the Histadrut campaign documents in administrative form the displacement that Pappé’s Second Aliya diarists record as first impressions and as Kibbush Ha-Avoda.
• Its account of the Koenig Report converges with The Question of Palestine, which quotes the 1976 report at length, while Pappé adds the framing that the phrase about a cancer in the heart of the nation was related to the report’s author rather than said by him, and that the report represented Palestinians as a virus threatening a healthy body (PDF p.16). The characterisation stands as Pappé’s; Said’s page keeps the report’s own proposals as quoted there.
• On the Shtetl, The Jewish State: A Century Later traces continuing Israeli political habits to shtetl self-government and treats that continuity as the root of Israeli democracy; Pappé traces a different continuity from the same origin, gated exclusiveness reproduced as settler enclaves. Both accounts are kept, attributed, on the Shtetl page.
• The Herzl ‘spirited away’ suggestion in its Conclusions is the same diary material The Question of Palestine and The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine quote on removal across the border; Pappé’s 2012 use of it is as the first form of the perception whose persistence the article tracks.

Open questions

• The opening sentence says the paradigms ‘leave few of the phenomena in that part of the world unexplained and in need of further elaboration’, as printed at PDF p.1. Read against the rest of the article, which argues they leave the transformation and the immunity unexplained, the wording stands as printed and is not silently corrected.
• Military rule is dated in two ways in the same article: the remaining Palestinians were under military rule, regarded as a ‘fifth column’, ‘between 1948 and 1967’ (PDF p.3), while ‘Raa Hola’ is said to have described the Palestinian minority ‘during the years of the Military Rule [1948-1966]’ (PDF p.15), and the emergency-regulations regime is said to have robbed them of most rights ‘up to 1967’ (PDF p.15). All three statements are kept as printed.
• Spellings of names vary between main text and notes and within them, all kept as printed in the reading notes: Zeev ‘Sternhall’ in the main text (PDF p.11) against ‘Strenhell’ in note 17, for the author of The Founding Myths of Israel; Berl ‘Katznelson’ in the main text against ‘Katzanelson’ in note 35; Yosef Rabinowitch also printed ‘Rabinowtich’ and, in the notes, ‘Rabinnowitch’; ‘Nathan Shifris’ in the main text (PDF p.14) against ‘Natan Shifris’ in note 32; Moshe ‘Bellinson’ (note 22); Amnon ‘Raz-Karkozkin’ (note 11); Abdelwhaab Elmessiri (note 2); ‘J Harlod’ for the first author of note 8; Michal Sadan’s thesis titled ‘The Hebrew Shepard’ (note 29) and Alexander Zaid’s entry titled ‘The Gensis’ in note 28 against ‘The Genesis’ in notes 30-31; Lockman’s publisher printed ‘Berkley: California University Press’ (note 19); Yuval-Davis printed once without the hyphen, ‘Yuval Davis’ (PDF p.17), and her editor printed ‘Ephraim Nimi’ (note 42).
• Other slips kept as printed: Palestine called totally ‘an Arab county’ in its human landscape (PDF p.10); present ‘polices’ for policies (PDF p.18); ‘Accountablity and Preservance’ in note 9’s title; the settlers’ period given as ‘one hundred and fifty years ago’ for the first settlers (PDF p.3) in an article whose evidence begins with the Second Aliya of the early 20th century; and the Biographical Note’s date for The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine, 2007 (PDF p.18), against 2006 in note 7 and in the wiki’s own page for the book.
• The Palestinian NGO named in the text as ‘Musawwa’ (PDF p.16, notes 40-41 citing The Forgotten Palestinians, pp.1-8) is linked on this page to Mossawa, the spelling used elsewhere in the wiki; whether the two spellings name the same organisation cannot be resolved from this file alone, and the text spelling is kept in the reading notes.
• Note 38’s cited work, Baumel’s Blue and White Shadow, carries title dates 1958-1968 as printed, while the text uses it for discussions of expelling the Palestinian minority under a regime dated in the same paragraph to 1948-1966/1967. The discrepancy is in the printed citation and is left as printed.
• The Second Aliya figures at PDF p.9-10 — 20,000 to 40,000 people, 4% of those who left Russia, 90% leaving mainly to the US — are given without a note in the article; note 14 identifies the group’s published collection but not a source for the figures.

Coverage

PDF p.1-20 of 20, read in full