Past is Present: Settler Colonialism in Palestine

Summary

The four editors of the Settler Colonial Studies special issue “Past is Present: Settler Colonialism in Palestine” — Omar Jabary Salamanca, Mezna Qato, Kareem Rabie and Sobhi Samour — argue that Palestine studies has catalogued Zionist practices as a series of distinct events while neglecting the settler colonial structure that underpins them, and that the framework, once a primary touchstone of the Palestinian national movement, has fallen into disuse as Palestinian politics moved from liberation to piecemeal sovereignty under the Israeli settler colonial regime. Their central claims are that control of land is a zero-sum contest at the centre of Zionism, so the continued existence of Palestinians obstructs the completion of the Zionist project; that Transfer has been part of Israeli policy and public discourse since the creation of the state; that the Nakba is not a singular 1948 event but a continuing structure manifested in the present subjection of Palestinians; that study of “the occupation” as a category separate from settler colonialism, organised around the Green Line, fragments the Palestinian polity and absolves pre-1967 Zionism; and that the remedy is a praxis restoring Decolonisation and liberation as the imperative goal, comparing Israel with South Africa, Rhodesia, French Algeria and the earlier settler formations rather than with European democracies, and embedding the Palestinian struggle in broader anti-imperial, anti-racist and indigenous struggles. The introduction then surveys the issue’s contents, including the historical-document excerpts from George Mansour (1937) and Fayez Sayegh (1965) ingested separately in this wiki.

What the file is

• The file is the Editors’ Introduction to settler colonial studies 2, 1 (2012), ISSN 1838-0743, the special issue titled “Past is Present: Settler Colonialism in Palestine”. The running head is “Editors’ Introduction” and the printed page numbers 1-8 match the PDF pages one for one (PDF p.1 / printed p.1 to PDF p.8 / printed p.8).
• The byline is Omar Jabary Salamanca, Mezna Qato, Kareem Rabie and Sobhi Samour, in that order (PDF p.1). Biographical notes for all four, each then completing a doctorate, are given on PDF p.7 and are recorded on their entity pages.
• The PDF metadata (not the text) gives the document title “Editors’ Introduction”, lists the four editors as author, and gives creation on 21 March 2012.
• Structure: an untitled editorial argument in continuous prose (PDF p.1-5), a survey of the issue’s contents (PDF p.5-6), Acknowledgements (PDF p.7), a Biographical Note (PDF p.7), and seven Notes (PDF p.7-8).
• 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-salamanca-qato-rabie-samour-past-is-present-settler-colonialism-in-palestine.txt) is clean and complete for all eight pages, with PDF page markers at the head of each page. No page is garbled. The only visual matter referred to is the issue’s cover, an OSPAAAL declaration of solidarity, which the text describes in words only (PDF p.5); the cover itself is not in this file.

Section by section

Origin and purpose (PDF p.1)

The special issue “emerges out of a March 2011 conference on settler colonialism in Palestine organised by the Palestine Society and the London Middle East Institute at the School of Oriental and African Studies”. The editors hope it “will catalyse creative, collaborative work that puts the settler colonial framework firmly on the agenda of Palestine studies”. The need, as they state it, is that while Zionism and the Palestinians are gradually being included in comparative settler colonial scholarship, “the analytical framework that comparative settler colonialism offers has yet to enter the field of Palestine studies” (PDF p.1, note 1).

The editorial thesis on Zionism, land and transfer (PDF p.1-2)

The crimes against Palestinian society by the Zionist movement and the state it built “have been well recorded” from the earliest Palestinian accounts onward. The editors define their object: “Zionism is an ideology and a political movement that subjects Palestine and Palestinians to structural and violent forms of dispossession, land appropriation, and erasure in the pursuit of a new Jewish state and society.” As for other settler colonial movements, “for Zionism, the control of land is a zero-sum contest fought against the indigenous population. The drive to control the maximum amount of land is at its centre.” It follows, they argue, that “the continued existence of Palestinians, therefore, poses severe problems for the completion of the Zionist project, and, consequently, informs Israeli state policies against Palestinians inside Israel, in the Occupied Territories, and in exile” (PDF p.1). Transfer — defined on PDF p.2 as “a Zionist euphemism for the coordinated, at times randomly applied, plethora of legal, military, and economic tactics to expel Palestinians” — “has been part of Israeli policy and public discourse since the creation of the state” (PDF p.1-2, note 2).

The editors quote Benny Morris, described as “Israeli historian and neoconservative”, from his 2004 Haaretz interview: “had [David Ben Gurion] carried out full expulsion – rather than partial – he would have stabilized the State of Israel for generations” (PDF p.2, note 3). Against that claimed instability they catalogue the structure’s present manifestations: “aerial and maritime bombardment, massacre and invasion, home demolitions, land theft, identity card confiscation, racist laws and loyalty tests, the wall, the siege on Gaza, cultural appropriation, dependence on willing (or unwilling) native collaboration regarding security arrangements, all with the continued support and backing of imperial powers” (PDF p.2).

The Nakba as structure, not event (PDF p.2)

Without a cohesive framework, scholarship catalogues Zionist practices “as a series of distinct – yet related – events”, and “the Palestinian nation is pushed from one catastrophe to another as the Zionist project accelerates”. Through the settler colonial lens, by contrast, “the Nakba in 1948 is not simply a precondition for the creation of Israel or the outcome of early Zionist ambitions; the Nakba is not a singular event but is manifested today in the continuing subjection of Palestinians by Israelis”. The analytical task is Zionism’s “structural continuities and the ideology that informs Israeli policies and practices in Israel and toward Palestinians everywhere”: “while Israel’s tactics have often been described as settler colonial, the settler colonial structure underpinning them must be a central object of analysis” (PDF p.2, note 4).

The fall into disuse, and politics mirrored in scholarship (PDF p.2-3)

“Despite the endurance of Israeli settler colonialism, settler colonial analysis has largely fallen into disuse in Palestine studies.” It once “served as a primary ideological and political touchstone for the Palestinian national movement, and informed the intellectual work of many committed activists and revolutionary scholars, whether Palestinians, Israelis, or allies” (PDF p.2, note 5, completed on PDF p.8: the PLO Research Center’s 1960s-70s publications, founded 1965, and Matzpen, founded 1962, are the named carriers). Today “research tends to focus on Palestine as an exceptional case, constituted in local contexts, in particular the West Bank” (PDF p.2-3). The editors tie the scholarly shift to politics: “Recent Palestinian political history has been a long march away from a liberation agenda and towards a piecemeal approach to the establishment of some kind of sovereignty under the structure of the Israeli settler colonial regime”, so even solidarity scholarship “tends to shy away from structural questions” and overworks “micro-political issues or Israeli administrative practices within a given context”. Their five rhetorical questions ask when Palestinians were ever in a “‘post-colonial’ condition”, when the struggle over land and for return became a “‘post-conflict’ situation”, when Israel became a “‘post-Zionist’ society”, when indigenous Palestinians in the Galilee became an “‘ethnic minority’”, and when the establishment of the Palestinian Authority and “the consequent fortification of Palestinian reserves” became “‘state-building’” (PDF p.3).

The occupation as internalised category, and the Green Line (PDF p.3)

“The trend towards studying the occupation often internalises it as an ontological category distinct from the larger structures of Israeli settler colonialism.” The Green Line, “the border between Israel and the Palestinian reserves”, is their example: “a powerful symbolic and material signifier that enforces, and takes for granted, the fragmentation of the Palestinian polity”, a line “rarely crossed in scholarly accounts of Palestine – in either direction”, leaving Palestinian populations “represented as isolated, analytically separate, pieces of an impossible puzzle”. Focusing on “the second stage of colonisation, the 1967 occupation” also “absolves previous generations of Zionists and Israel itself of settler colonialism” by emphasising settlement in the West Bank (PDF p.3).

Elimination, decolonisation and comparison (PDF p.4)

Quoting Patrick Wolfe — “‘For natives’, as Patrick Wolfe puts it, ‘the issue is that, at the hands of the settlers, they face [physical and symbolic] elimination’” (PDF p.4, note 6) — the editors draw the practical conclusion: “the central question for committed scholarship and liberatory movements should be how to develop a praxis that brings back decolonisation and liberation as the imperative goal”. The framework “dismantles deep-seeded analyses and assumptions sustaining claims of exceptionalism” (spelling as printed). “It brings Israel into comparison with cases such as South Africa, Rhodesia and French-Algeria, and earlier settler colonial formations such as the United States, Canada or Australia, rather than the contemporary European democracies to which Israel seeks comparison. For Palestine, it means the reiteration of the fact that Palestinians are an indigenous people, and an alignment of Palestine scholarship with indigenous and native studies” (PDF p.4).

Strategy: from description to decolonisation (PDF p.4-5)

John Collins is quoted on the challenge of engaged scholarship: “to understand the complex set of structures and processes […] that have combined to produce the intolerable reality evident today; and to think creatively about how this understanding might enable individuals to transform that reality” (PDF p.4, note 7). “Otherwise, settler colonialism remains a descriptive category that does not move beyond sentiment and into strategy.” Activists push back against Zionist encroachment, intensify the demand for equal rights, and build “a boycott, divestment and sanctions movement aimed at shaming and delegitimising Israel internationally”, but the paradigm’s “creative offerings” remain underutilised, with consequences for movement building: “The historic response to settler colonialism has been the struggle for decolonisation; in the absence of a settler colonial analysis, Palestinian strategies have tended to target or accommodate settler colonial outcomes rather than aiming to decolonise the structure itself” (PDF p.4-5).

Solidarity and internationalism (PDF p.5)

The paradigm “offers a powerful political tool to reorient and recreate genuine bi-directional solidarity alliances and political fraternity. As attested by the cover of this issue, a declaration of solidarity for Palestinians in their struggle against Zionist aggression by the Organization of Solidarity for the People of Asia, Africa and Latin America (OSPAAAL), this convergence is not new.” The editors envisage “a new in-gathering of movements”, a “principled Palestinian alignment with the Arab struggle for self-determination, and indigenous struggles in North America, Latin America, Oceania, and elsewhere”, reconnecting the struggle “to its own history of anti-colonial internationalism”. Its core: “the Palestinian struggle against Zionist settler colonialism can only be won when it is embedded within, and empowered by, broader struggles – all anti-imperial, all anti-racist, and all struggling to make another world possible” (PDF p.5).

Contents of the issue (PDF p.5-6)

The survey, in the editors’ order and words in substance: Zachary Lockman’s “critical and constructive engagement” with Gershon Shafir’s Land, Labor and the Origins of the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict, 1882-1914, presenting an alternative narrative of the Zionist labour movement and highlighting “the coercive power employed by the British colonial state in Palestine against Palestinian Arabs”; Ilan Pappe on the complications of applying a framework “largely based on historical case studies” to an Israeli settler colonialism “still expanding its frontiers”; David Lloyd on Giorgio Agamben’s state of exception and Palestinian uniqueness; Mansour Nasasra on Zionist expulsions and village destructions in the Naqab; Magid Shihade on state practices “fragmenting and dissolving Palestinian social identities”; Shir Hever on Israel’s approaches to indigenous labour and the indigenous economy; Patrick Wolfe comparing Zionist colonisation with Australia and the United States, arguing “Zionism constitutes an intensification of, rather than a departure from, settler colonialism”; and Waziyatawin, “indigenous scholar and activist” who had visited Palestine with a delegation of feminist women of colour, on lessons for indigenous resistance and sovereignty (PDF p.5-6).

The historical documents: excerpts from George Mansour’s The Arab worker under the Palestine mandate (1937), showing “the dire socio-economic consequences that Zionist colonisation, and British support for it, had on Palestinian indigenous workers”, exposing the Histadrut’s “Conquest of Labour” strategy and refuting British claims for the national home’s benefits; excerpts from Fayez Sayegh’s Zionist colonialism in Palestine (1965), “arguably one of the clearest and most potent analyses of its generation”; and the Arabic translation of Wolfe’s “Settler Colonialism and the Elimination of the Native”, “a foundational text for comparative settler colonial studies”, translated, per the Acknowledgements, by Dalia Taha with additional edits by Hamzeh Asad, Hazen Alnamla and Magid Shihade (PDF p.6-7). Both excerpted documents are ingested in this wiki as The Arab Worker under the Palestine Mandate and Zionist Colonialism in Palestine.

Acknowledgements and biographical notes (PDF p.7)

The editors thank the SOAS Organising Collective (Batoul Al-Mehdar, Naira Antoun, Joseph Daher, Majd Dahoud, Mariam Jaja, Stefanie Kirster, Stuart Platt, Elian Weizman, Susan Worsfold, Khaled Ziada and Raya Ziada, as printed), the twenty-six named conference participants (among them Omar Barghouti, As’ad Ghanem, Laleh Khalili, Mouin Rabbani, Sherene Seikaly, Gershon Shafir, Lorenzo Veracini, Eyal Weizman and Patrick Wolfe), the Wolfe translation team, and the peer reviewers, “especially to Lorenzo Veracini and Edward Cavanagh”. The biographical notes place Salamanca completing a PhD in political and human geography at Ghent University, Qato a DPhil in history at Oxford, Rabie a PhD in anthropology at the City University of New York Graduate Center, and Samour a PhD in economics at SOAS (PDF p.7).

Notes (PDF p.7-8)

Seven notes. Note 1: the comparative collections of Bateman and Pilkington (2011) and Elkins and Pedersen (2005). Note 2: Blecher (2005) and Masalha (2000) on transfer. Note 3: the Morris Haaretz interview, “Survival of the Fittest”, 09/01/04. Note 4: the exceptions list — Abdo (2011), Abdo and Yuval-Davis (1995), Collins (2012), Greenstein (1995), Hassan (2011), Makdisi (2011), Massad (2006), Piterberg (2008) and Veracini (2006). Note 5: the PLO Research Center, Matzpen, and the early radical scholarship of Abu-Laban and Abu-Lughod (1974), Emmanuel (1972), Hilal (1976), Jabbour (1976), Rodinson (1973) and Trabulsi (1969), plus the Machover lecture of 2006. Note 6: Wolfe’s chapter “Palestine, Project Europe and the (Un)Making of the New Jew: In Memory of Edward W. Said”, p.333, in Curthoys and Ganguly (eds), Edward Said: The Legacy of a Public Intellectual — no year given as printed. Note 7: Collins, Global Palestine, p.10.

Key passages

• “Zionism is an ideology and a political movement that subjects Palestine and Palestinians to structural and violent forms of dispossession, land appropriation, and erasure in the pursuit of a new Jewish state and society.” (PDF p.1)
• “for Zionism, the control of land is a zero-sum contest fought against the indigenous population” (PDF p.1)
• “had [David Ben Gurion] carried out full expulsion – rather than partial – he would have stabilized the State of Israel for generations” — Benny Morris, quoted by the editors (PDF p.2)
• “the Nakba is not a singular event but is manifested today in the continuing subjection of Palestinians by Israelis” (PDF p.2)
• “while Israel’s tactics have often been described as settler colonial, the settler colonial structure underpinning them must be a central object of analysis” (PDF p.2)
• “the central question for committed scholarship and liberatory movements should be how to develop a praxis that brings back decolonisation and liberation as the imperative goal” (PDF p.4)
• “The historic response to settler colonialism has been the struggle for decolonisation; in the absence of a settler colonial analysis, Palestinian strategies have tended to target or accommodate settler colonial outcomes rather than aiming to decolonise the structure itself” (PDF p.4-5)
• “the Palestinian struggle against Zionist settler colonialism can only be won when it is embedded within, and empowered by, broader struggles” (PDF p.5)

Evidence the work relies on

• This is an editorial programme statement, not a research article: it presents no new data, tables or archival evidence of its own. Its claims rest on the scholarship it cites in its seven notes, each credited as the editors present it.
• For transfer as policy and discourse: R. Blecher, “Citizens without Sovereignty: Transfer and Ethnic Cleansing in Israel”, Comparative Studies in Society and History 47 (2005), and N. Masalha, Imperial Israel and the Palestinians: The Politics of Expansion (2000) (PDF p.1-2, note 2).
• For the Morris position on expulsion: the Haaretz interview “Survival of the Fittest”, 09/01/04 (PDF p.2, note 3).
• For the framework’s comparative literature: Bateman and Pilkington (eds), Studies in Settler Colonialism (2011), and Elkins and Pedersen, Settler Colonialism in the Twentieth Century (2005) (PDF p.1, note 1).
• For prior settler colonial analysis of Palestine, the exceptions of note 4 (PDF p.7-8) and the 1960s-70s literature of note 5, including the PLO Research Center’s publications and Matzpen’s analysis (PDF p.8).
• For the elimination claim: Patrick Wolfe’s chapter in Edward Said: The Legacy of a Public Intellectual, p.333 (PDF p.4, note 6).
• For the praxis claim: John Collins, Global Palestine (2012), quoted at p.10 (PDF p.4, note 7).
• For the issue’s own contents as its worked example: the articles and excerpts surveyed on PDF p.5-6, including the Mansour (1937) and Sayegh (1965) excerpts reprinted in the same issue.

Analysis

The work’s method is programmatic: an editors’ introduction that diagnoses a field, names the political conditions that produced its blind spots, and announces a special issue as the corrective. Its perspective is openly committed — “committed scholarship and liberatory movements” are its subject position, and decolonisation is stated as a goal rather than argued as a conclusion — so its claims are presented as a framework to be applied by the issue’s articles, not as findings demonstrated in the introduction itself. Its strongest internal support is bibliographic: notes 4 and 5 document both that a settler colonial literature on Palestine existed (PLO Research Center, Matzpen, Rodinson, Sayegh and others) and that it had thinned, which is the factual core of the “fallen into disuse” claim. Its limits follow from its genre and date: it is a 2012 agenda statement, so its descriptions of scholarship and of Palestinian politics are as of 2011-2012; the catalogue of Israeli practices on PDF p.2 is asserted in one sentence without itemised sourcing; the Morris quotation is taken from a newspaper interview as cited; and the issue’s articles, whose arguments the introduction summarises in a sentence each, are not themselves in this file, so those summaries cannot be checked against the articles from this file alone.

People, organizations, places and events

Omar Jabary Salamanca, Mezna Qato, Kareem Rabie, Sobhi Samour, Patrick Wolfe, John Collins, Benny Morris, David Ben-Gurion, Gershon Shafir, Ilan Pappe, George Mansour, Fayez Sayegh, OSPAAAL, Matzpen, Palestinian Authority, Histadrut, Gaza, West Bank

Concepts

Settler Colonialism, Zionism, Transfer, Nakba, Decolonisation, BDS movement, Conquest of Labour, Right of Return, Self-determination

How it relates to other sources

• This introduction is the framing text of the very issue from which two sources already in the wiki were taken: the excerpts of The Arab Worker under the Palestine Mandate and Zionist Colonialism in Palestine are the issue’s historical documents, and the editors’ one-paragraph readings of each (PDF p.6) match the editorial introductions printed with those excerpts — Mansour exposing the Conquest of Labour and refuting British claims for the national home, Sayegh giving the structural features of Zionist colonisation. What is new here is the programme around them: neither excerpt’s own introduction states the disuse thesis, the critique of occupation studies, or the decolonisation praxis in these terms.
• With Zionist Colonialism in Palestine: agreement on the structure. Sayegh is named in note 5 as a product of the PLO Research Center milieu that framed the conflict as settler colonial, and the editors’ land-as-zero-sum thesis restates in programmatic form the incompatibility Sayegh argued in 1965 — that Zionist colonisation could not coexist with the continued existence of Palestine’s Arab population.
• With Palestine: The Legitimacy of Hope and The Political Economy of Israeli Occupation: What is Colonial about It?: both later/earlier works apply the same distinction the editors insist on — a settler colonialism defined by making the land the settlers’ own and replacing rather than exploiting the indigenous population — Falk in definition, Farsakh as political economy of the post-1967 occupation. The editors’ warning against treating the occupation as a category separate from the structure is the point Farsakh’s framing, which starts from the occupation, most nearly tests; the accounts are kept as their authors present them.
• With Nakba and Survival: the Morris quotation is from the same 2004 Haaretz “Survival of the Fittest” interview that Manna’s Introduction reports, in which Morris declared support for the expulsion policy Ben-Gurion led and blamed him for not expelling all Palestinians (Nakba and Survival, PDF p.38-39). The editors quote the interview’s conditional — full expulsion would have stabilised Israel “for generations” — as evidence that transfer remains part of public discourse; Manna reports the same interview as Morris’s turn. No conflict.
• With Palestine: A Socialist Introduction: that work’s use of Shafir’s pure settlement form and Wolfe’s “logic of elimination” is an instance of the framework this introduction called, in 2012, to put “firmly on the agenda of Palestine studies”; Wolfe’s elimination is quoted here in its earlier form, from his Said memorial chapter, as physical and symbolic elimination faced by natives at the hands of settlers.
• With Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions: The Global Struggle for Palestinian Rights: the BDS movement appears here as one activist front among others, its stated aim in the editors’ words “shaming and delegitimising Israel internationally”, and is faulted only by implication — the paradigm that would aim it at the structure itself “remains underutilised”. Barghouti’s book, published the year before this issue, is the movement’s own programmatic statement in the wiki.

Open questions

• The editors describe Benny Morris as “Israeli historian and neoconservative” (PDF p.2); no other source in the wiki applies that label to Morris, and the introduction gives no source for it. It is recorded here as the editors’ characterisation.
• Note 6 gives no year for Curthoys and Ganguly (eds), Edward Said: The Legacy of a Public Intellectual, from which the Wolfe quotation is taken (PDF p.8, as printed).
• Note 1 as printed lacks the opening parenthesis before “London: Routledge, 2005)” in the Elkins and Pedersen entry (PDF p.7), and note 5’s Machover lecture URL is broken across lines in the text copy as “2006l” / “ecture_b.pdf” (PDF p.8); both are kept as printed.
• Printed slip: “deep-seeded” for deep-seated (PDF p.4), kept as printed.
• The editors date the March 2011 SOAS conference as the issue’s origin and thank twenty-six named participants (PDF p.1, p.7); whether every named participant contributed to the issue is not stated, and the contents survey on PDF p.5-6 names only nine contributions plus the three historical documents.
• The Morris quotation’s square brackets around “[David Ben Gurion]” are in the text as printed (PDF p.2), marking an editorial insertion into the interview wording; the interview itself is not in this file, so the unbracketed original wording cannot be checked from this file.

Coverage

PDF p.1-8 of 8, read in full.