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The Other Shift: Settler Colonial Studies and the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict

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Summary

Lorenzo Veracini answers Menachem Klein’s The Shift, which read the post-1967 transformation as a border dispute becoming an ethnic conflict under a ‘control system’ that divided Palestinians into five constituencies (The Other Shift: Settler Colonial Studies and the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict, PDF p.2 / printed p.1). Veracini argues the other, more important shift is in the form of domination itself: from a system of relationships that could be understood as settler colonial to one crucially characterised by colonial forms (PDF p.2). Settler colonialism aims to supersede itself — the settler becomes a ‘native’, indigenous autonomy is terminated, and the project is no longer settler colonial — while colonialism aims to reproduce itself, retaining the separation of coloniser and colonised (PDF p.6-7 / printed p.5-6). On that test Zionist settler colonialism was remarkably successful before 1967 and largely unsuccessful after it: the Occupation, meant to enable settlement, produces a subjected external Palestinian collective rather than the assimilated ‘domestic dependent nation’ that would mark a settler triumph, so “failed settler colonialism reverts to colonialism” (PDF p.11 / printed p.10). A second shift follows: dependence on the Diaspora, US Christian Zionists and the pro-Israel lobby to colonise the West Bank is a Recolonisation that erodes settler autonomy and Indigenisation (PDF p.15-20 / printed p.14-19). The conclusion is interpretative and political: the ‘one-state’ solution is the settler colonial solution, the Occupation’s perpetuation is the colonial solution likely to produce two unequal polities, and the decolonisation paradigm remains available for the West Bank and Gaza while other frameworks are needed for the Palestinians trapped within and without the area Israel controlled in 1949 (PDF p.23 / printed p.22).

What the file is

  • The file is the author’s version of Lorenzo Veracini’s article, posted in the Swinburne Research Bank with the publisher’s permission for personal use (PDF p.1). The cover page gives the citation as “Veracini, L. (2013). The other shift: settler colonialism, Israel, and the occupation”, originally published in Journal of Palestine Studies, 42(2), 26–42, available from http://dx.doi.org/10.1525/jps.2013.42.2.26, copyright © 2013 by the Institute for Palestine Studies, with the definitive version at JSTOR (PDF p.1). The title printed on the article itself (PDF p.2) is “The Other Shift: Settler Colonial Studies and the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict”, and that title is used for this page.
  • Byline: Lorenzo Veracini, Swinburne Institute for Social Research, Melbourne (PDF p.2 / printed p.1).
  • Pagination: PDF p.1 is the Swinburne cover page; PDF p.2-24 carry printed p.1-23 (printed page = PDF page − 1 throughout). The published journal pagination, 26-42, is given only on the cover and is not printed on the article pages in this version.
  • Structure: an untitled opening against Klein (PDF p.2-5 / printed p.1-4); the headed sections ‘A failed settler colonialism’ (PDF p.5-10 / printed p.4-9), ‘Settler colonialism to colonialism’ (PDF p.10-15 / printed p.9-14), ‘Settler colonialism to recolonisation’ (PDF p.15-21 / printed p.14-20), a block quotation from David Bromwich opening the close of that section (PDF p.21 / printed p.20), and ‘Conclusion’ (PDF p.22-24 / printed p.21-23). There is no abstract, bibliography or biographical note; the apparatus is 36 footnotes printed at the foot of the pages.
  • The author calls the piece “these preliminary notes” in the Conclusion (PDF p.22 / printed p.21).
  • Access basis: author-copy, downloaded from the figshare file given in url.
  • The text copy is clean and complete, with === PDF p.N === markers for all 24 pages; quotations were checked against it. Footnotes 32-33 are split across PDF p.21-22, and note 33’s continuation is reassembled in printed reading order in the reading notes. Printed slips are kept as printed and recorded under Open questions.

Section by section

Opening: Klein’s shift and the other shift (PDF p.2-4 / printed p.1-3)

Menachem Klein’s The Shift: Israel-Palestine from Border Struggle to Ethnic Conflict (2010, note 1) reinterpreted the conflict around the transformations after the Israeli victory in the war of 1967: an Israeli-determined ‘control system’ instituted no less than 5 Palestinian constituencies defined by their subjection to different administrative regimes — the citizens of Israel, the residents of East Jerusalem, those who live in Gaza, those who live in the West Bank west of the recently erected Separation wall, and those who live in the West Bank east of it. The progressive emergence of this ‘pattern of control’ transformed, Klein argues, a border dispute into an ethnic confrontation; approaching a border conflict necessarily involves a search for a territorial resolution, while an ethnic confrontation by definition rules this out. On Palestinian ‘fragmentation’ the note cites Meron Benvenisti and Oren Yiftachel (note 2), noting Benvenisti refers to Settler Colonialism as a suitable concept for current circumstances. Veracini’s addition: “the shift” is also and especially from a settler colonial system of relationships to one crucially characterised by colonial forms.

The distinction is drawn from a growing comparative literature (note 3, from Denoon 1983 to the 2011 Bateman and Pilkington collection, and the new journal settler colonial studies): colonial formations permanently dominate an external constituency while ruling it from a metropolitan centre, as in India and Nigeria; settler colonial formations erase an indigenous constituency in order to replace it with another sociopolitical body, as in the US, Canada, Australia and New Zealand. The latter required the primary extermination or expulsion of the indigenous populations, followed by their subsequent demographic ‘swamping’; the former primarily needed to focus on controlling the ‘natives’. Klein compares Israel’s regimes with colonial settings but concludes colonialism is not the issue; Veracini argues by contrast that the conflict should be understood as crucially informed by a variety of colonial forms. The contribution is expressly theoretical, to be read with the empirical literature on the occupation regime (note 4: Neve Gordon, Israel’s Occupation, 2008; Saree Makdisi, Palestine Inside Out, 2008), and is by no means meant to stand on its own.

The framework matters because the ‘two-state’ prospect — through negotiations and then recognition, or vice versa, as discussed in September 2011 and possibly again in November 2012, when the Palestinian Authority leadership applied for UN membership and upgraded status — is premised on a colonial subjection to decolonisation paradigm: a formerly nonsovereign entity subjected to external control becomes emancipated within an international system. That approach neglects settler colonialism as a formation distinct from, indeed largely antithetical to, colonialism; fails to understand Zionism as a settler colonial movement; and cannot address the Palestinians ‘transferred’ in 1948 (the Diaspora) or those not ‘transferred’ in 1948 (the ‘Israeli Arabs’). It rests on a partial understanding of Zionist history and practice and addresses only one Palestinian constituency among many. Reflection should not face the purportedly exclusive alternative between the ‘one-state’ and ‘two-state’ solutions; approaching the conflict would probably require a suite of solutions. Note 5 quotes Moshe Behar: the ‘1S2S’ debate ignores what happens outside its parameters, supporters of the ‘one-ethnically-cleansed-state solution’ have never been so powerful, and the exchange remains “utterly esoteric once juxtaposed with ongoing material politics free from doses of wishful thinking”.

A failed settler colonialism (PDF p.5-10 / printed p.4-9)

Settler colonial objectives informed pre-1948, post-independence and post-1967 Zionist actions (note 6 lists the interventions interpreting Zionism as primarily a settler colonial movement, from Maxime Rodinson 1973, Baruch Kimmerling 1983 and Gershon Shafir 1989 to Veracini’s own Israel and Settler Society, 2006, Steven Salaita 2006 and Gabriel Piterberg 2008, plus the 2012 Past is present special issue as forthcoming). Because settler colonial phenomena are defined by an exogenous collective replacing an indigenous one, there is an underlying and uninterrupted continuity of intent that attempts to distinguish pre- and post-1967 circumstances cannot disguise. The crucial difference is capacity: Israeli/Zionist settler colonialism was remarkably successful before 1967 and largely unsuccessful after, and the occupation of the West Bank has ultimately very little to show for over 40 years of unrestrained rule. Debates on the settlements normally focus on morality and legality; without discounting the moral compass, the failure of post-1967 attempts to turn the Occupied Palestinian Territories into an extension of an otherwise largely successful settler society should also be emphasised.

The theoretical distinction: Veracini has no preference for one form over the other — both are inherently unequal and unjust systems characterised by exogenous dominance and indigenous subjection (note 7: the definition allows colonising endeavours emanating from a diaspora; most settler societies’ colonists came from a multiplicity of locations and construct their identities via a denial of diasporic origins). One form aims to supersede itself, the other to reproduce itself (note 8: Veracini, Settler Colonialism: A Theoretical Overview, 2010, and ‘Introducing settler colonial studies’, 2011). A colonial society succeeds only if the principle separating coloniser and colonised is retained; a settler project succeeds only when it extinguishes itself, when the settler ceases to be defined as such, becomes a ‘native’, and his/her position is normalised — having emancipated itself from external supervision, established local sovereign forms, terminated substantive indigenous autonomies, and tamed a landscape once perceived as intractably alien. These are dynamic processes concerning the relationships a settler project establishes with its alterities — the external and internal ‘Others’, the land — all envisaging an end point when alterity is resolved. Hence the paradox that settler colonialism is associated with places where it failed (Rhodesia, Algeria) rather than where it succeeded (the Canary Islands, New England); it is easier to detect the “Islands of White” than the continents of white (note 9: Dane Kennedy). Like the dictatorship of the proletariat that would result in the extinction of the state, settler colonialism can be conceptualised as the temporary ‘dictatorship of the settlers’ — except that in the Occupied Palestinian Territories, unlike Israel proper, it did not and cannot happen: “The occupation of the Palestinian Territories remains a powerful manufacturer of illegitimacy, not its opposite.”

Two consequences follow. First, the project of settler colonising the West Bank and the Israeli occupation of the West Bank are not the same thing: the Occupation was meant to be a means to an end, to enable and facilitate settlement, yet while it is the absolute precondition for the settlements’ existence, is designed to reproduce itself and become permanent, and is ostensibly very successful at what it does, it inevitably produces a subjected and external Palestinian collective, not the ‘domestic dependent nation’ that would mark a settler colonial triumph. Citizenship marks the contrast: under colonial conditions citizenship rights for the colonised are denied or indefinitely postponed to disallow native sovereign capacities; under settler colonial conditions elements of settler citizenship are selectively imposed to terminate indigenous sovereign autonomy, and the prospect of integration/assimilation is one of the most powerful weapons for consolidating settler projects. “Settler colonialism is at its strongest when it speaks in universalising terms, when it claims to be ‘closing the gaps’, not when it emphasises or reinforces them”; in the settler colonial situation indigenous subjectivities are physically and/or discursively transferred away, not permanently subjected (note 10, on settler colonialism as Transfer).

Second, colonialism is fundamentally characterised by reciprocal co-constitution in a dialectical process (Veracini’s main text, PDF p.8: “this field of studies, however, has remained characteristically underdeveloped in Israel”; note 11: Memmi, Sartre, and Ella Shohat — Ellah Shohat — remarking on an academic and public sphere “where the “colonial” itself had hardly been thought through in any depth”; note 12 points to David Lloyd’s Memmian analysis in the 2012 special issue). The occupation, its infrastructure, settlements and land appropriation cannot transform an inherently relational rapport: the more infrastructure and settlements are established and land forcibly appropriated, the more the co-constitution of coloniser and colonised progresses. So the ‘irreversible’ occupation does not make the two-state solution ‘impossible’; as it perpetuates the permanent distinction between an indigenous subordinate collective and an exogenous dominant one, it may contribute to making the two-state solution ultimately inevitable. Supporters of the Occupation wish more oppression could make the settler project succeed; opponents fear more intrusion would make settler domination irreversible; both approaches are based on knowing everything about the Occupation except what it probably means.

Before the first Intifada the Occupation could be seen as in process of extinguishing itself — the Green Line was being erased as a meaningful border — while afterwards a comprehensive segregationist regime was gradually imposed and the Green Line acquired renewed meaning for some. In a settler colonial context, indigenous segregation in one set of locales (indigenous reserves) must correspond to the possibility of (unequal) indigenous integration in all others, with assimilatory processes; enforcing segregation everywhere in the West Bank constituted a colonised subjectivity mirroring colonial, not settler colonial, forms. Merely calling settlements ‘neighbourhoods’ or ‘communities’ can never be enough: normalisation can proceed only once these neighbourhoods become fully integrated in their surrounds and the opposition between settler and indigenous collectives is erased or superseded; conversely, in a context where segregation is deemed absolutely necessary, the settlements’ very existence institutes the permanent opposition between coloniser and colonised. Settler practices can be effective only where indigenous integration (‘absorption’ or ‘assimilation’) is at least theoretically available; without it, distanciation cannot establish a settler colonial system — propinquity is a consequence of a colonial system, not the thing itself. Likewise, controlling a constituency while refraining from depending on or exploiting its labour is an effort to supersede a crucial aspect of a colonial system that is bound to fail (note 13: Shir Hever, The Political Economy of Israel’s Occupation: Repression Beyond Exploitation, 2010): ceasing direct exploitation cannot turn colonialism into settler colonialism, and there are non-exploitative colonialisms (note 14: Robert Paine’s ‘Welfare Colonialism’ for the Canadian North; the regime in the Occupied Palestinian Territories, solicitous rather than exploitative yet repressive and more repressive, could be defined as ‘Harmfare Colonialism’).

Settler colonialism to colonialism (PDF p.10-15 / printed p.9-14)

The section heading begins on PDF p.10 and its argument runs to PDF p.15. A focus on Israeli-Palestinian antagonism can mislead where the main opposition is between a settler colonial occupation that wins by erasing itself and a colonial occupation that wins by reproducing itself: the Occupation is essential, and dismantling it would jeopardise the settlements’ viability, yet it erases the very conditions of possibility for an effective settler colonial project — a double bind with no way out from the Zionist settler colonial project’s point of view. Planners thought they could achieve a settler colonial aim via essentially colonial means, pay lip service to the ‘two-state’ solution (especially before international audiences) while operating decisively to erase its possibility, and did not realise that the systematic ‘Matrix of Control’ and consequent separation would constitute a colonised Palestinian subjectivity marking the strategic failure of a settler colonial project (note 15: Jeff Halper on the matrix of control). The relationship is now reversed: the Occupation was established as a means to enable permanent settlements; now the settlements perpetuate the need for permanent occupation (note 16: Eyal Weizman, Hollow Land, 2007). “As a result, failed settler colonialism reverts to colonialism. It is an impasse that even a fully articulated transferist imagination cannot elude.” Note 17: Israeli approaches systematically reject, or are unable to recognise, transfers targeting the indigenous sector by envisaging indigenous individuals’ transformation into assimilated or integrated contributors to the settler polity — in the long term the most viable transfers, not because they include assimilated indigeneity (that is almost never the point) but because they extinguish indigenous qua indigenous claims.

Palestinians under the Occupation, now legally defined as ‘Infiltrators’, are subjected to a punishing regime meant to promote their departure and/or create conditions for their expulsion, turn them into ‘Present Absentees’, and ensure their invisibility; but simultaneous approaches to transfer offset each other. Veracini expressly does not deny that hundreds of thousands of Palestinians have been administratively or otherwise transferred after 1967, nor suggest the Occupation should harmonise its transferist agendas — he argues it cannot. Two further double binds follow. Mobility: a ‘silent transfer’ premised on a desire to leave produced by squeezing and enforced immobility meets a regime obsessively controlling mobility (note 18: 101 different types of permits governing Palestinian movement, Haaretz, 23/12/11); relaxing constraints would undermine the desire itself. Visibility: the Occupation should render Palestinians largely invisible, yet is premised on a panoptical capacity to see all facets of Palestinian life, demands daily humiliation be especially visible, and requires responses to challenges to be predictable, disproportionate and highly visible — a posture that may secure ‘Deterrence’ but defeats the purpose. Hence: “it is exactly because the Occupation is efficient that it is not effective”. The recourse to a ‘Nakbaic conjuncture’ in current Israeli public discourse (note 19: Behar) itself shows the regime is not deemed satisfactory: “is a settler colonial project that must think about catastrophic events (visited on others) to imagine its success doing that well?” The most efficient way to turn the Palestinians of the Occupied Territories into a people of migrants would probably be to give them passports — passports and the sovereignty underpinning them are exactly about the capacity to actualise a right to return — and the most efficient way to make their lives invisible would be to discontinue their direct oppression. Given the impasse, the best the Occupation can do is to maintain rather than supersede itself, and it is not likely to be dismantled by deliberate acts reversing its systematic establishment (especially after 1992).

The exit may be forward: the Palestinian Authority, or a Hamas-led government in Gaza, could inherit the Occupation’s structures and reconstitute themselves into a postcolonial successor polity — both, together with a plethora of western NGOs, can be considered an inherent part of the Occupation in its current configuration. Colonial powers have succeeded before by establishing the colonial state’s institutions that enable decolonisation (though they often deliberately established inherently defective successors to demonstrate their indispensability); Mahmood Mamdani has repeatedly noted decolonised polities and their neo-colonial relations are the colonial state’s direct successors (note 20), so continuity and discontinuity need to be appraised together. The inevitability of a successor Palestinian polity should therefore be seen as a function of Israeli strength, not weakness, and internationally sanctioned Palestinian independence (with neocolonial dependency) in the West Bank and Gaza as the colonial occupation’s logical outcome, not its demise. “The point is that if you colonise, you’ll end negotiating sovereign capacities between (unequal) polities, whereas if you settler colonise, you’ll negotiate within the polity. Thus, colonialism is followed by decolonisation; only settler colonialism remains ‘impervious to regime change’” (the last phrase quoted from Patrick Wolfe, note 21). There is no intermediate solution; colonial and settler colonial forms routinely mix and interpenetrate, yet as they remain antithetical one necessarily prevails — and in the West Bank and Gaza the colonial form has now prevailed. The irony: Zionism achieved remarkable results in difficult circumstances, then after 1967, with unchallenged regional supremacy and unwavering US support, could no longer perform — “the Zionist settlers of old were much more effective settler colonisers than today’s colonial settlers” (they also had a fully developed comparative understanding of their project; note 22: Zachary Lockman 2012; Reichman and Hasson 1984). Pointing to a comprehensive failure to understand the distinction between the formations may help explain the paradox — but the creep of colonial forms also involves Israel proper, where (the sentence completes on PDF p.15) the relative integration of the ‘Israeli Arabs’ is being progressively reversed and the very autonomy of a settler colonial project is being eroded.

Settler colonialism to recolonisation (PDF p.15-21 / printed p.14-20)

The Zionist settlers of old were ultimately and jealously independent of both the imperial agencies they collaborated with or contested, and the organisations of the Jewish Diaspora; if they needed support they understood reliance as temporary. Settler colonial forms are premised on settler autonomy and a substantive localised sovereign capacity that can use metropolitan (or, for Zionism, Diasporic and/or imperial) support but can also dispose of it. Israel in recent decades may have undergone a recolonisation process — Belich’s concept, focused in his analysis on economic dimensions and extended here to political manifestations (note 23: James Belich, Replenishing the Earth, 2009). The need to mobilise the Diaspora (and other supporters — the US Christian Zionists, for example) in order to colonise the West Bank has produced a situation in which the whole settler colonial project depends again on external support. There is a crucial difference between taking advantage of external support and having to rely on it: dependency is entirely natural for a colonial project, whose dependencies are by definition ruled from elsewhere; it is never good news for a settler colonial one. Settler colonists who permanently rely on negotiated accommodations with indigenous sovereigns operate outside a settler colonial system’s boundaries, and settler colonists who permanently rely on exogenous support also operate outside them.

Zionism by definition was about establishing a country of some Jewish people — those who would move there. The recurring prospect of making Israel the country of all Jews produces an inevitable recolonisation effect that subjects Jewish Israelis to the political determination of others. Contests over the ‘state of the Jewish people’ formula structurally replicate the debates over the 13 colonies in the North American revolutionary war: Royalists and Loyalists claimed the colonies were the indivisible property of the whole British nation; the settlers “begged to differ, had a tea party dressed up as Indians and established the most successful settler polity of all” (both contenders denied the ultimate validity of indigenous claims). The patriots fought for their specific rights as freeborn Englishmen and nobody else’s — even though immigrating co-ethnics were necessary, welcome, and seamlessly incorporated on arrival as settlers through alien voting legislation and access to land (note 24: Aziz Rana, The Two Faces of American Freedom, 2010).

Settler colonial formations are inherently premised on elective (and/or selective) forms of belonging (note 25) — Elective Belonging: Thomas Jefferson, who understood the serial establishment of settler republics as his personal duty, knew belonging to the US was “a matter of individual conscience and choice” (note 26); volitional belonging, epitomised by voluntarily moving to America and to the West, is structurally different from ascriptive belonging such as the accident of birth. That recolonisation is also an endogenous Israeli trend with ostensible majority support does not change its inherently anti-settler colonial character: “A successful settler project can only be the project of its settlers – no one else’s. Recolonisation compromises settler colonialism. As it erases the necessary distinction between settler insiders and exogenous outsiders, recolonisation prevents effective settler indigenisation” — and indigenisation is essential to a legitimate settler claim: settlers aim to own the land as indigenous peoples would, the only way of claiming a radical and original title rather than owning it by fraudulent transactions or forcible dispossession, the two most frequently overlapping (note 27: Piterberg on the Canaanites and Ben-Gurion reading the Book of Joshua; Veracini 2010 on indigenisation). Failure to fully indigenise vis-à-vis those who have not yet moved to the settler locale is also rarely good news; conversely failure to indigenise creates the conditions for recolonisation to operate. Recolonisation processes constitute a ‘new old land’, not the ‘old new land’ of settler colonial/Zionist imaginings; in settler traditions it is always settlement that makes a nation, not vice versa.

External supporting constituencies may not have Israel’s settler colonial project at heart: they are more interested in their capacity to shape Israeli actions, in sustaining Israel’s control over all Palestinians, and in using Israeli circumstances as a reference point to galvanise their political rhetoric, and they can be dismissive of attempts to renegotiate the Israeli system of control. Thus American-based Zionist organisations, unlike the majority of the Israeli public, strongly opposed the government’s October 2011 Shalit exchange — in Veracini’s figures, exchanging 100% of the Israeli captives in Palestinian hands for less than 20% of Palestinians held in Israeli captivity (note 28: Burston; Alon Idan on ‘Israel’s racist price index’ — “the price of one Jew equals 1,027 Arabs”). External supporters also resent typically settler colonial attempts to promote immigration to the settler periphery: the swift reaction to the Absorption Ministry’s late November 2011 advertising campaign promoting the re-emigration of Israelis living in the US — by questioning the Jewishness of Jewish life in the Diaspora — prompted the government to backtrack (note 29); the ads targeted not American Jews but Israelis who had voted with their feet out of the settler project, and emphasised retaining a specific definitory character rather than a regenerating lifestyle. The Jewish Agency has likewise shifted from supporting migrants to promoting Diaspora links through temporary visits (note 30: Tauber; Hoffmann’s “new mission: bringing ever-larger circles of young Jews to visit and experience Israel”). This is not how a healthily indigenising settler collective positions itself; colonial agents sent to the metropoles, even from colonies struggling to attract enough or good enough settlers, never endeavoured to organise those who had failed to settle.

These episodes indicate a recolonising trend — difficulties in asserting an ultimate sovereign capacity vis-à-vis indigenous and exogenous alterities. The old Zionist settlers were able to allow the subordinate integration of Palestinians within their settler project’s structures (circumstances may have forced the compromise, but it worked in their favour). Now, incapable of renegotiating its relationship with indigenous constituencies or selectively integrating indigenous people, and unable to autonomously control the separation between the settler collective and exogenous alterities, the settler colonial project loses ultimate control over its population economy while recolonisation proceeds. Interpretations of automatic US support through an organised, well-funded, strategically located pro-Israel lobby are misleading (note 31: Mearsheimer and Walt, The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy, 2008): the lobby is there, well funded and largely redundant — “you cannot improve on automatic, unquestioning and unqualified support” — but its activities should be framed in the context of the recolonisation of Israeli circumstances, not an Israeli ‘colonisation’ of US policy; the two processes can look alike but proceed from different directions. Recolonisation processes should be looked at both ways: David Bromwich’s ‘The Republican Nightmare’ distinguished appealing to Jewish voters from appealing to Jewish donors, noted the Israeli intelligence establishment’s almost unanimous opposition to military adventurism against Iran, and concluded in the block quotation printed on PDF p.21: “So we are at a strange crossroads. The right-wing coalition government of Israel is trying to secure support, with the help of an American party in an election year, for an act of war that it could not hope to accomplish unassisted; while an American opposition party complies with the demand of support by a foreign power, in an election year, to gain financial backing and popular leverage that it could not acquire unassisted.” Veracini: all recolonisation processes rely on a recolonisation party in the settler periphery and a recolonisation lobby in the metropolitan core and their entanglements; “One can be the colony of a diaspora as well as a colony of a particular lobby or a corporate body and its local allies” (note 33: Oudeh Basharat’s call for a break away from the Jewish lobby as a declaration of settler independence; Veracini, commenting on Basharat, writes: “the distinction between an intention to stay and an aspiration to eventually leave is, after all, as good a definition as any of what separates a ‘colonist’ from a ‘settler’”; note 32 collects Chemi Shalev on Israel as a wedge issue in the US presidential race and support that “only exists because Israel can be represented as needing support”). The British Empire’s history is replete with instances of this kind. Making options that could not otherwise be considered is an informal yet incredibly powerful way to shape decision-making: by making a colonial occupation possible, and therefore tempting, and therefore actual, external support ultimately makes successful settler colonisation (let alone ‘democratic’ life) impossible (note 34: Goodman, The Anatomy of Israel’s Survival, 2011 — Israel’s survival as a settler society, not its survival, is at stake; Beinart, The crisis of Zionism, 2012). From a Zionist point of view the problem may not be that the Occupation is not allowed to do what it is meant to do, but that it quite efficiently does what it is not meant to.

Conclusion (PDF p.22-24 / printed p.21-23)

Against Klein: The Shift argues that since 1967 the confrontation has progressively reverted to what it was before 1948, an ethnic conflict. Veracini’s preliminary notes suggest it is since the policy of closure instituted in the early 1990s that Israel-Palestine has turned into what it was before 1948: a locale again primarily informed by a variety of specifically colonial forms (note 35: the forms are always mixed in reality, and colonial forms informed relations between the state’s establishment and the military government’s formal disbandment in 1966; the crucial difference is whether a regime is imagined as permanent or in the process of extinguishing itself — the military government manufactured ‘Israeli Arabs’, while the post-1967 Occupation, especially its post-1992 closures-filled version, “has been a tremendously powerful manufacturer of ‘Palestinians’”). Klein’s shift is integrated, not dismissed: it has produced circumstances in which the confrontation can now be read as an ethnic conflict and a territorial solution has become impracticable, and in a sense the conflict has remained a border conflict — “the border separating a colonial from a settler colonial system of domination”.

Interpretative shift: when thinking about settler colonialism in this conflict, redirect the gaze from the West Bank, where it failed, to other areas in Israel, where it succeeded. What happens in the West Bank may be a consequence of an ‘accidental empire’ (depending on one’s definition of ‘accidental’), but while there are settlers, and while it is an empire, it is not a settler colonial empire (note 36: Gorenberg, The Accidental Empire, 2006). “This is the other shift – an interpretative one. As the ‘one-state’ solution turns out to be the settler colonial solution, the Occupation and its perpetuation should be seen as the colonial solution, a regime that will likely lead to the establishment of two (unequal) polities in the Erez Israel/Greater Palestine area” (“Erez Israel” as printed). That the West Bank’s colonial settlers are failing as settler colonisers, that they and their supporters are damaging the ‘achievements’ of a settler colonial project, and the recolonisation of Israeli life should be emphasised. The post-1967 divergence is one Zionist settler colonial project and two outcomes, one largely successful and the other largely unsuccessful; the simultaneous coexistence of a largely successful settler colonial and a largely successful colonial formation explains why the decolonisation paradigm remains available for the West Bank and Gaza while other frameworks must be available for the Palestinians trapped within, and those trapped without, the area controlled by Israel in 1949 (and their descendants). These considerations matter for debates within the Palestinian national movement: the options available to it are informed by the divergence, the implications of the Palestinian Authority leadership’s pursuit of a ‘two-state’ solution for the Palestinians subjected to a successful settler colonial project must be considered, and “the Palestinian constituencies that remain neglected in the context of the ‘two-state’ solution framework must be allowed to talk about settler colonialism and the way it works (and sometime doesn’t)” (“sometime” as printed).

Key passages

  • “the shift” is “also and especially from a system of relationships that could be understood as settler colonial to one crucially characterised by colonial forms” (PDF p.2 / printed p.1)
  • “neglects settler colonialism as a social formation that is distinct, indeed largely antithetical, from colonialism, fails to understand Zionism as a settler colonial movement” (PDF p.4 / printed p.3)
  • “Approaching the conflict would probably require a suite of solutions.” (PDF p.4 / printed p.3)
  • “Israeli/Zionist settler colonialism was remarkably successful before 1967 and was largely unsuccessful after” (PDF p.5 / printed p.4)
  • “they are both inherently unequal and unjust systems of relationships characterised by exogenous dominance and indigenous subjection” (PDF p.6 / printed p.5)
  • “a settler project is only ultimately successful when it extinguishes itself, when the settler ceases to be defined as such, becomes a ‘native’, and his/her position is normalised” (PDF p.6 / printed p.5)
  • “The occupation of the Palestinian Territories remains a powerful manufacturer of illegitimacy, not its opposite.” (PDF p.7 / printed p.6)
  • “Settler colonialism is at its strongest when it speaks in universalising terms, when it claims to be ‘closing the gaps’, not when it emphasises or reinforces them.” (PDF p.7 / printed p.6)
  • “approaches are based on knowing everything about the Occupation except what it probably means.” (PDF p.9 / printed p.8)
  • “it is exactly because the Occupation is efficient that it is not effective” (PDF p.12 / printed p.11)
  • “As a result, failed settler colonialism reverts to colonialism.” (PDF p.11 / printed p.10)
  • “if you colonise, you’ll end negotiating sovereign capacities between (unequal) polities, whereas if you settler colonise, you’ll negotiate within the polity” (PDF p.14 / printed p.13)
  • “the Zionist settlers of old were much more effective settler colonisers than today’s colonial settlers” (PDF p.14 / printed p.13)
  • “There is a crucial difference between taking advantage of external support and having to rely on it.” (PDF p.15 / printed p.14)
  • “A successful settler project can only be the project of its settlers – no one else’s.” (PDF p.17 / printed p.16)
  • “it is always settlement that makes a nation, not vice versa” (PDF p.18 / printed p.17)
  • “the problem may not be that the Occupation is not allowed to do what it is meant to do, but that it quite efficiently does what it is not meant to” (PDF p.22 / printed p.21)
  • “the border separating a colonial from a settler colonial system of domination” (PDF p.23 / printed p.22)
  • “This is the other shift – an interpretative one.” (PDF p.23 / printed p.22)

Evidence the work relies on

  • The work is a theoretical intervention and says so: it relies on “a growing mass of empirical data deriving from concrete examples” in the literature on the occupation regime familiar to Journal of Palestine Studies readers, and “is by no means meant to stand on its own” (PDF p.3 / printed p.2). Its named exemplary empirical works are Neve Gordon, Israel’s Occupation (2008), and Saree Makdisi, Palestine Inside Out: An Everyday Occupation (2008) (note 4).
  • The comparative settler colonial literature listed in note 3 (PDF p.3): Denoon (1983), Stasiulis and Yuval-Davis (eds) (1995), Wolfe (1999), Pearson (2001), Russell (ed.) (2001), Elkins and Pedersen (eds) (2005), Goldstein and Lubin (eds) (2008), Belich (2009), Banivanua-Mar and Edmonds (eds) (2010), Ford (2010), Edmonds (2010), Bateman and Pilkington (eds) (2011), Veracini’s own works, and the journal settler colonial studies.
  • The Zionism-as-settler-colonialism literature in note 6 (PDF p.5): Rodinson (1973), Kimmerling (1983), Shafir (1989), Veracini, Israel and Settler Society (2006), Salaita (2006), Piterberg (2008), and the Past is present special issue (2012, forthcoming).
  • Veracini’s own theoretical books do the definitional work: Settler Colonialism: A Theoretical Overview (2010) for the supersede/reproduce distinction (note 8), settler colonialism as transfer and its taxonomy (note 10) and indigenisation (note 27); Israel and Settler Society (2006) in note 6; and ‘Introducing settler colonial studies’ (2011) in note 8.
  • The framing texts it answers: Menachem Klein, The Shift (2010) (note 1, and throughout); Moshe Behar, ‘Unparallel Universes’ (2011) for the 1S2S critique (note 5) and the ‘Nakbaic conjuncture’ imaginings (note 19); Jeff Halper on the ‘matrix of control’ (note 15); Eyal Weizman, Hollow Land (2007) (note 16); Shir Hever, The Political Economy of Israel’s Occupation (2010) on non-exploitation (note 13); David Lloyd’s 2012 Memmian analysis (note 12); Patrick Wolfe, ‘Settler Colonialism and the Elimination of the Native’ (2006), p. 402, for ‘impervious to regime change’ (note 21).
  • Historical and comparative supports: Memmi and Sartre on colonial co-constitution, with Shohat on the Hebrew Fanon (note 11); Robert Paine on ‘welfare colonialism’ in the Canadian North (1977) (note 14); Mahmood Mamdani, Citizen and Subject (1996) and When Victims Become Killers (2002), on decolonised polities as colonial-state successors (note 20); James Belich, Replenishing the Earth (2009), for recolonisation (note 23); Aziz Rana, The Two Faces of American Freedom (2010), on alien voting and settler incorporation (note 24); Zachary Lockman (2012) and Reichman and Hasson (1984) on early Zionist comparative awareness (note 22); Gershom Gorenberg, The Accidental Empire (2006) (note 36).
  • Contemporary press items used as evidence of the recolonising trend, all from Haaretz unless noted: Levinson on 101 permit types (23/12/11, note 18); Burston and Idan on the October 2011 Shalit exchange (23/10/11, 28/10/11, note 28); Ravid on the cancelled Absorption Ministry campaign (02/12/11, note 29); Tauber and Hoffmann on the Jewish Agency’s new mission (13/01/12, 20/01/12, note 30); Bromwich, ‘The Republican Nightmare’, The New York Review of Books (09/02/12, note 32, with Shalev, Haaretz, 15/12/11); Basharat (05/02/12, note 33). Mearsheimer and Walt (2008) are cited as the lobby interpretation being reframed (note 31), and Goodman (2011) and Beinart (2012) in note 34.

Analysis

The article’s method is conceptual distinction applied as periodisation. Two ideal types are defined by their success conditions — colonialism reproduces the coloniser/colonised separation; settler colonialism extinguishes itself by normalising the settler as a native and terminating indigenous autonomy — and the Israeli case is then sorted by them: successful settler colonialism in Israel proper before (and, in the conclusion’s framing, through) 1948-1967, failed settler colonialism in the territories occupied in 1967, and, from the closure policy of the early 1990s, a prevailing colonial form there, compounded by a recolonisation of the whole project through dependence on external support. The argument is carried by the definitions and by comparative analogy (Rhodesia and Algeria as failures, New England and the Canary Islands as successes, the American patriots and Jefferson for elective belonging and indigenisation, the Canadian North for non-exploitative colonialism, Mamdani’s Africa for postcolonial succession), not by new empirical research: the author states at the outset that the piece relies on the empirical occupation literature and does not stand alone, and calls it “preliminary notes” at the end. Its perspective is internal to the settler colonial project’s own criteria in a deliberate way — success, failure, effectiveness and legitimacy are assessed as the project itself would need them assessed (“from the Zionist settler colonial project’s point of view, there is no way out”), while the normative judgement is stated once and plainly: both forms are “inherently unequal and unjust systems of relationships”. Its internal strengths are the distinctions it can generate from one premise: the Occupation/settlement relation inverts (means become ends), exploitation’s cessation cannot convert colonialism into settler colonialism, integration’s theoretical availability becomes the test separating the forms, and dependence — natural for a colony — becomes a diagnostic of recolonisation for a settler project. Its limits follow from the same design: the success of pre-1967 settler colonialism is asserted rather than examined here (the ‘Israeli Arabs’ appear mainly as a constituency the two-state paradigm neglects and as a product the military government manufactured); the post-1992 dating of the colonial shift rests on the closure policy and segregation, with the pre-Intifada Green Line erasure offered as a contrast rather than documented; several contemporary episodes (the Shalit exchange, the Absorption Ministry ads, the Jewish Agency’s mission change, the Bromwich/Shalev exchange) are asked to bear the whole weight of the recolonisation thesis as “episodes” that are “indicative”; and the predicted forward exit — a successor Palestinian polity as the colonial occupation’s logical outcome — is presented as structural inference from Mamdani, not as evidence about the Palestinian Authority or Hamas. The 100% / less-than-20% figures for the Shalit exchange are the author’s framing in the text, and note 28’s proportion and price-index discussion is recorded under Open questions.

People, organizations, places and events

Lorenzo Veracini, Menachem Klein, Moshe Behar, Meron Benvenisti, Oren Yiftachel, Robert Paine, James Belich, Mahmood Mamdani, Aziz Rana, Patrick Wolfe, Jeff Halper, Eyal Weizman, Shir Hever, David Lloyd, Albert Memmi, Ellah Shohat, Zachary Lockman, Gabriel Piterberg, Gershon Shafir, Baruch Kimmerling, Maxime Rodinson, Institute for Palestine Studies, Jewish Agency, Palestinian Authority, Hamas, First Intifada, Shalit Case, West Bank, Gaza, Israel, Green Line, Separation wall

Concepts

Settler Colonialism, Recolonisation, Indigenisation, Elective Belonging, Transfer, Matrix of Control, Harmfare Colonialism, Welfare Colonialism, Closure system, Present Absentees, Infiltrators, Two-state solution, One-state solution, Decolonisation, Deterrence, Christian Zionism, Zionism, Logic of Elimination, Indigeneity

How it relates to other sources

  • Veracini is the framework’s theorist appearing in person, after a run of the 2012 settler colonial studies special issue: the editors’ introduction (Past is Present: Settler Colonialism in Palestine) and the articles by Purchase by Other Means: The Palestine Nakba and Zionism’s Conquest of Economics, Shtetl Colonialism: First and Last Impressions of Indigeneity by Colonised Colonisers, Land, Labor and the Logic of Zionism: A Critical Engagement with Gershon Shafir, Settler Colonialism and the State of Exception: The Example of Palestine/Israel, Settler Colonialism and Conflict: The Israeli State and its Palestinian Subjects, The Ongoing Judaisation of the Naqab and the Struggle for Recognising the Indigenous Rights of the Arab Bedouin People and Exploitation of Palestinian Labour in Contemporary Zionist Colonialism. This 2013 Journal of Palestine Studies article (the journal of the Institute for Palestine Studies) cites that special issue as forthcoming in note 6 and cites Lloyd’s article from it in note 12, and it converts the issue’s shared premise — Zionism as settler colonialism — into a distinction the issue’s authors mostly do not draw: between settler colonialism and colonialism as antithetical forms with opposite success conditions. Where the editors hold the Nakba as a continuing structure across the Green Line, Veracini holds continuity of intent but a post-1967 divergence of form and outcome, and directs the settler colonial gaze away from the West Bank to where the project succeeded.
  • On Wolfe: Veracini takes Wolfe’s ‘impervious to regime change’ (2006) as the mark of settler colonialism proper and Wolfe’s transfer taxonomy (via his own 2010 book) as the mechanism, and agrees with Wolfe’s Palestine article that assimilation’s refusal is central — Veracini’s test is precisely that transfers envisaging indigenous individuals’ transformation into assimilated contributors are the most viable settler transfers, and that Israeli approaches systematically reject them (note 17). Wolfe’s elimination is a sustained institutional tendency; Veracini adds the temporal corollary that a tendency that cannot extinguish itself reverts in form.
  • On Lloyd: Lloyd, citing Naomi Klein’s The Shock Doctrine / Gordon laboratory line through his own governmentality account, reads the post-1967 order as a settler colonial structure moving from incorporation of a subordinated labouring population to enclosure and displacement; Veracini cites Lloyd’s Memmian co-constitution point and reaches the cognate conclusion in a different register — enclosure and segregation constitute a colonised subjectivity, which is the signature of colonial, not settler colonial, relations. The two accounts are kept, attributed, on the Settler Colonialism page, where they differ over what to call the present form.
  • On Hever: Hever’s 2012 essay documented the 1990s separation turn in labour — closures, permits, replacement by labour immigrants and aid — and read it as separation chosen over exploitation within Zionist colonialism; Veracini cites Hever’s book for exactly that non-exploitation point and draws the formal conclusion Hever does not: ceasing to exploit a colonised collective cannot turn colonialism into settler colonialism (PDF p.10 / printed p.9). Veracini’s dating of the colonial shift to the closure policy of the early 1990s matches Hever’s dating of the separation policies to the 1990s.
  • On Lockman: note 22 cites Lockman’s critical engagement with Shafir as evidence of the early Zionists’ fully developed comparative understanding of their project — the capacity Veracini says today’s colonial settlers lack. Lockman’s own argument that Shafir’s settler-colonial models understate the Yishuv’s dependence and the role of the Diaspora and imperial support anticipates, in the pre-1948 case, the dependence Veracini theorises as recolonisation for the post-1967 case.
  • On the two-state paradigm: the editors, Falk and others in the wiki treat a Palestinian state in the West Bank and Gaza as, at best, a partial decolonisation that leaves the 1948 Palestinians and refugees outside; Veracini gives that critique a structural form — a successor polity is what colonial occupations produce, so its availability for the West Bank and Gaza confirms rather than contradicts the colonial reading, while the Palestinians subjected to the successful settler colonial project need other frameworks. His ‘suite of solutions’ (PDF p.4) is the programmatic counterpart of the editors’ restored decolonisation imperative, and differs from it in refusing a single paradigm for all constituencies.
  • On Klein and fragmentation: the five-constituency control system is Klein’s (with Benvenisti and Yiftachel on fragmentation in note 2); Makdisi’s Palestine Inside Out — cited in note 4 as exemplary empirical work — documents the same differentiated regime from inside Palestinian daily life, and Shihade and Nasasra document two of its constituencies (the 1948 Palestinians; the Bedouin of the Naqab) in detail. Veracini supplies the form-level claim those documentations are made to support: differentiated permanent subjection is colonial reproduction, not settler extinguishment.

Open questions

  • Title variants in the file itself: the Swinburne cover page (PDF p.1) cites the work as “The other shift: settler colonialism, Israel, and the occupation”, while the article’s own title (PDF p.2) is “The Other Shift: Settler Colonial Studies and the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict”. The published pagination 26-42 appears only on the cover; the author’s version is paginated printed p.1-23. The unit label delivered with the file uses the cover title.
  • The Shalit proportion in note 28: note 28 states that the deal “confirmed that Palestinian captives are proportionally worth five times their Israeli counterparts”. That proportion follows from the text’s own framing (PDF p.18 / printed p.17) of the October 2011 exchange as 100% of the Israeli captives in Palestinian hands for less than 20% of the Palestinians held in Israeli captivity (100 ÷ 20 = 5, computed from the text’s percentages, PDF p.18), and the note sets it against Alon Idan’s 1,027-to-1 ‘racist price index’ quoted in the same note. The two figures measure different things — a proportion of the captives held on each side, and a per-captive price — and are not a conflict in the work.
  • Note 10 (PDF p.8) reads “See also n. 10 below” — a self-reference by its own number as printed; presumably a cross-reference intended for a later note (the transfer discussion at note 17), but the file does not say so.
  • Printed slips kept as printed: “Creeping Apatheid” for Yiftachel’s article title (note 2, PDF p.2); “occurrings” (PDF p.3); “Palrgrave Macmillan” in notes 10 and 27 (PDF p.8, p.17); “available to of consolidating” (PDF p.7); “ultimate inevitable” (PDF p.8); “non-exploitive” and “solicitous rather than exploitive” variants against “exploitative” elsewhere (PDF p.10, note 14); “Autochtonous” in the Piterberg chapter title (note 27); “a specific definitory character” (PDF p.19); “Haartez” for Haaretz in note 33 (PDF p.22); “Zionsit constituencies” in note 34 (PDF p.22); “yet alone” for “let alone” (PDF p.22); “closures-filled” (note 35); “Erez Israel” (PDF p.23); “the way it works (and sometime doesn’t)” (PDF p.24). Quotation wording is never corrected silently; each is noted in the reading notes at its page.
  • The article’s central periodisation — settler colonial success before 1967, failure after, colonial prevalence from the early-1990s closure policy — is stated without a separate treatment of the 1948-1966 military government over the Palestinians inside Israel, which enters only through note 35’s manufacturing formulation (‘Israeli Arabs’ manufactured by the military government; ‘Palestinians’ manufactured by the post-1992 Occupation). How the distinction applies year by year inside Israel proper, beyond the progressive reversal of ‘Israeli Arab’ integration asserted on PDF p.14-15, is not developed in the work.
  • The work does not name which western NGOs it counts as “an inherent part of the Occupation in its current configuration” (PDF p.13), nor specify the institutions of the Occupation that a successor Palestinian polity would inherit.

Coverage

PDF p.1-24 of 24, read in full

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