Purchase by Other Means: The Palestine Nakba and Zionism's Conquest of Economics

Summary

Patrick Wolfe argues that the Palestine Nakba was a consolidation rather than a point of origin: between late 1947 and early 1949 some three quarters of a million Palestinians were driven into exile and the Jewish share rose from 26% of the population owning around 7% of the land to 80% of the population holding 77% of the land, but that lightning dispossession rested on over half a century of structural preconditions (Purchase by Other Means: The Palestine Nakba and Zionism’s Conquest of Economics, PDF p.1-2 / printed p.133-134). Those preconditions are named by his new concept Preaccumulation — the economic, technological, military, cultural and moral endowment, the cumulative outcome of centuries of Eurocolonial history, that settlers imported ready-made before they set foot in Palestine. In the Zionist case the decisive imported resource was capital that, Baron Rothschild possibly excepted, was not conditional on a return of profit: freed from the discipline of the bottom line, and combining that unconditional funding with the ethnically exclusive Conquest of Labour, Zionists subverted market rationality in an all-encompassing Conquest of Economics, prioritising that labour be Hebrew over that it be productive, and built a contiguous, irreversibly Jewish zone of land on which to fashion an ethnocratic state-in-waiting under first Ottoman and then British imperial protection. Land was acquired before 1948 in at least notional conformity with the local power’s laws — the second of Wolfe’s two claimed differences from Australia and the United States, the first being Zionism’s diffuse transnational metropole, Maxime Rodinson’s “collective mother country” — but purchase worked at the level of usufruct, converting overlapping Ottoman entitlements into consolidated exclusive Jewish ownership, clearing fellaheen cultivators, and attaching usufruct to title by the ruses, debt mechanisms and state-land reclassifications the article documents. The Nakba, adapting Clausewitz, was therefore a continuation of purchase by other means: it “simply accelerated, very radically, the slow-motion means” to unchanged ends that had been the only means available while Zionists were still building their colonial state, and “the conquest of economics was a Nakba-in-waiting” (PDF p.27-28 / printed p.159-160).

What the file is

• The file is Patrick Wolfe’s article in settler colonial studies 2, 1 (2012), the special issue Past is Present: Settler Colonialism in Palestine, ISSN 1838-0743; printed pages 133-171, PDF p.1 carrying printed p.133 and PDF p.39 carrying printed p.171, so printed page = PDF page + 132 throughout.
• The byline is Patrick Wolfe, La Trobe University (PDF p.1). The Biographical Note (PDF p.29) describes him as a freelance historian associated with La Trobe University who lives and works in Wurundjeri country and has written, taught and lectured on race, colonialism, Aboriginal histories, genocide, theories of imperialism and the history of anthropology.
• Structure: Abstract (PDF p.1); untitled introduction on the Nakba as watershed (PDF p.1-2); sections headed SETTLER COLONIALISM (PDF p.2-4), PREACCUMULATION (PDF p.4-8), OTTOMAN ORIGINS (PDF p.8-11), UNDER THE MANDATE (PDF p.11-18), THE CONQUEST OF LABOUR (PDF p.18-21), LAND PURCHASES (PDF p.22-27) and BEYOND THE WATERSHED (PDF p.27-29); Acknowledgements and Biographical Note (PDF p.29); Notes 1-101 (PDF p.29-39). The Notes are substantive: several carry long documentary discussions, notably note 1 (Nakba figures and settlement on absentee property), note 31 (the drafting history of the Balfour Declaration and Mandate wording) and note 64 (Ussishkin on force, governmental coercion or purchase).
• Acknowledgements (PDF p.29): an earlier version was presented as an address to the University of London’s School of Oriental and African Studies Palestine Society’s 2011 annual conference “Past Is Present: Settler Colonialism in Palestine”; thanks to the organisers, to Gershon Shafir for comments, and to Omar Jabary Salamanca and Lorenzo Veracini for the prodding; research was enabled by an Australian Research Council fellowship held in the History Programme at La Trobe University. This is the article in the same special issue whose Editors’ Introduction is ingested as Past is Present: Settler Colonialism in Palestine, where the editors summarise it in advance.
• 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-wolfe-purchase-by-other-means.txt) is clean and complete for all 39 pages, with PDF page markers at the head of each page, and about 16,300 words in the copy as delivered (about 16,548 words as stated with delivery). Figure 1 (PDF p.20 / printed p.152), a 1938 Jewish National Fund poster of the New Jew, is present in the PDF as an image; the text copy carries only its caption (“Figure 1”, with note 61 supplying its description and provenance), so the poster itself was read from the caption and note, not from the image. A handful of slips in the text copy and in the printed notes are recorded under Open questions; none affects an argument or a figure relied on.

Section by section

Introduction: the Nakba and the problem of watersheds (PDF p.1-2 / printed p.133-134)

The bare statistics are given at the head: between late 1947 and early 1949, Jewish militias, subsequently regularised as the Israeli Defence Forces, forcibly expelled many thousands of Palestinians and prevented others who had fled the fighting from returning; some three quarters of a million were driven into exile, their homes destroyed or expropriated by Jewish immigrants; by the 1949 Armistice the Jewish population, which two years earlier had constituted 26% of the population of Mandate Palestine and owned around 7% of the total land, had seized 77% of the land and come to constitute 80% of the population (note 1). As settler takeovers go, this dwarfs even the late-1830s seizure of Australia’s Port Phillip grasslands or the postbellum invasion of the US Plains (note 2). In Palestinian memory the “Great Catastrophe”, in Zionist memory the “War of Independence”, the events are a watershed on which there is no disagreement. The historian’s problem with watersheds is that they obscure preconditions, continuities and the deep groundwork of historical possibility: the Nakba figures as a point of origin as if it had no preconditions apart, perhaps, from the Nazi Holocaust, itself a watershed (note 3), but just as the Holocaust presupposed a preceding history of European antisemitism, so the Nakba rested on a well-established legacy of Zionist settler colonisation in Palestine. The article seeks the structural preconditions that enabled the event, revealing it as a consolidation rather than a point of origin.

Settler colonialism (PDF p.2-4 / printed p.134-136)

Settler colonialism’s essential feature, Wolfe restates from his earlier work, is “a sustained institutional tendency to supplant the indigenous population”, a cultural Logic of Elimination that “reconciles a range of historical practices that might otherwise seem distinct” (note 4, PDF p.2 / printed p.134). In Australia those practices include homicide, spatial expulsion and/or confinement, various forms of assimilation, and a representational discourse he terms repressive authenticity; in the United States the list overlaps, augmented by features flowing from the acknowledgement of Indian sovereignty, in particular allotment and tribal termination (note 5). This does not reduce particular histories to a single determinant — Paul Kramer’s observation is quoted, that national histories are unique but unexceptional (note 6, PDF p.3) — and the analytical task is to map the particular histories sustaining settler colonialism in any locale, distinguishing the contingent from the systematic and the autochthonous from the transnational. The primacy of the logic of elimination is political and perspectival as well: it prioritises the outcome for conquered Native peoples, first enabling a distinction between being eliminated and being exploited for one’s labour, a difference monolithic categories such as colonialism or imperialism tend to elide (note 7), and second placing the logic prior to features distinguishing settler societies among themselves, whether monarchical or republican, Christian or Jewish, Black or White, communist or democratic, Asian or European (note 8). Scholarly resistance to that priority represents a settler perspective (note 9). The techniques of dispossession in Palestine differ significantly from the relatively uniform practices in Australia and North America, but the eliminatory outcome has been consistent, giving an opportunity to explore settler colonialism’s strategic versatility. Two salient differences organise the article: Zionism originated as an international movement that consciously avoided confinement to a single metropole in favour of a supportive transnational umbrella that Maxime Rodinson termed the “collective mother country” (note 10, PDF p.4 / printed p.136); and, prior to the end of 1947, Zionism was conspicuous for purchasing Native land in at least notional conformity with the domestic laws of the current local power. In both respects Zionist policy differed strikingly from — in the case of purchase, reversed — settler policies in Australia or the United States, yet it constituted an intensification of, rather than a departure from, settler colonialism: Zionism rigorously refused, as it continues to refuse, any suggestion of Native assimilation, a more exclusive exercise of the logic of elimination than the Australian and US examples.

Preaccumulation (PDF p.4-8 / printed p.136-140)

The basic link between the diffuse metropole and Jewish land purchases is that the former financed the latter. The old joke that Zionism meant one Jew using another Jew’s money to send a third Jew to Palestine is read as displacement: there was nothing particular to Zionism about metropolitan funding, the frontier was led from behind typically by speculators not limited by nationality (note 11), and antisemitism furnished a lexicon for capitalism to talk about itself. The Zionist case lets general features be seen with enhanced clarity because it is an unparalleled example of deliberate, explicit planning: “No campaign of territorial dispossession was ever waged more thoughtfully” (PDF p.5 / printed p.137). Starting before the frontier — before the Bilu settlers landed in 1882 — the article defines Preaccumulation as the aggregate historical endowment settlers brought with them: economic, technological, military, cultural and moral attributes, the combined outcome of centuries of Eurocolonial history. Its global reach endowed the settler project with an effectively unlimited capacity to reproduce itself, opposed to the relative fixity of the Native stock: demographically there were always more settlers where the first came from, augmentable by cognate settlers and by coerced subordinates imported from outside; economically Native societies were reduced to subsistence from an ever-shrinking repository, subject even in unconquered territory to an advance guard of frontier irregulars, imported livestock and exotic predators; and settlers inherited Europe’s technological and military capacities and acquired immunity to the diseases they imported, though advantages occasionally changed hands, as when Plains Indians acquired horses and guns or Maori thrived on the introduced potato (note 12). Preaccumulation was forged through colonial expansion and class struggle within Europe together — Manchester’s cotton sourced from unfree labour in Egypt, India and the Deep South — and is cultural as well as material, an endowment of consciousness: Barbara Fields is quoted on colonial Virginia, that English servants entered the ring in company with the generations who had preceded them while Africans and Afro-West Indians entered alone (note 13, PDF p.6 / printed p.138). Natives did not enter alone, but their competencies were not tailored to the unequal confrontation settlers’ endless renewability set in train; limited local stock was no match for capital’s global elasticity, and that was the metropolitan advantage. Preaccumulation differs from primitive accumulation in Marxist historiography (note 14): apart from that narrative’s Eurocentrism, when Europe was piecing together its hegemony there was no prior Europe riding on its back, rival conglomerates such as the Islamic world proving no match once the Atlantic became a West-European sea (note 15). Marx’s observation that capitalism in the Americas was of the purest historical type (note 16) expressed that Eurocolonial society arrived in Native country ex nihilo (or ex machina) and ready-made, condensing the power and violence of the long run; this pre-formedness, a plenitude independent of local determinations, is preaccumulation’s central characteristic (PDF p.7 / printed p.139). It is initially a metropolitan inheritance; once on Native soil settlers confront Natives endowed with different plenitudes, so outcomes cannot be predicted — Native American dependency could extend back centuries (note 17) — and Palestinian Natives were already incorporated in, and to that extent protected by, extensive if moribund empires, Ottoman then British, and marginally articulated into global capitalism. Settler ascendancy in each instance rests on a particular contextual mobilisation of Europe’s preaccumulated resources. In Palestine the particular resource is identified at PDF p.8 / printed p.140: with the possible and early exception of Baron Rothschild, the capital Zionists garnered, as Barbara Smith pointed out, was not conditional on the return of a financial profit (note 18). Donors differed from the speculators who financed expansion in Australia and North America; unencumbered by the requirement to return a profit, subsidised settlers enjoyed the easiest of imported advantages, a confounding of capitalist rationality that overwhelmed the limited Native stock.

Ottoman origins (PDF p.8-11 / printed p.140-143)

The colonising programme’s strikingly simple plan is stated in one sentence: ostensibly operating within established imperial frameworks but always with an eye to eventually supplanting them, Zionists secured international support, from regnant imperial powers and private sources, to convert an ever-expanding contiguous wedge of Palestine from Native ownership into an irreversibly Jewish endowment, and to procure the import from overseas of funding and Jewish personnel sufficient to maintain the continued expansion of this ethnocratically consolidated zone by whatever means should prove available and viable (note 19, for Oren Yiftachel’s coinage Ethnocracy). It has been pursued with a sleepless organisational tenacity still apparent in Israel’s ongoing disinclination to specify its borders. The Bilu group, landing in the early 1880s, can hardly have had an exclusively Jewish nation-state in mind, and unlike its Second-Aliya successors it did not object to employing local Palestinian labour on the agricultural co-operatives it established, after a false start, with Rothschild funding (note 20). The Second Aliya repudiated reliance on Native collaboration and devoted its energies, again with diasporan financial support, to Jewish-only enclaves, initially the moshav collectives and ultimately the rigorously ethnocratic kibbutzim. By naming itself Second Aliya, retrospectively dubbing Bilu the “First Aliya”, it established both continuity — the colonial entity termed the “new yishuv”, held to differ fundamentally from the earlier, emphatically religious Ashkenazi in-migrations, which became the disparaged, orientalised “old yishuv” — and rupture, which Yehouda Shenhav is quoted as calling “an epistemological break, a point of discontinuity, which ma[de] possible the separation between the ethno-religious past and the ethno-national present” (note 21, PDF p.9 / printed p.141). Zionism was organic to the nineteenth century, a European secular-colonial-nationalist movement. The tiny new yishuv was constrained and protected by the Sublime Porte. Natives recognised the territorial agenda very early: the earliest Palestinian protest, in 1891, was a telegram asking the Grand Vizir to stop further immigration to and land purchases in Palestine by Russian Jews, which Neville Mandel noted “was lodged less than a decade after modern Jewish immigration into Palestine began and several years before the Zionist Movement was founded” (note 22); opposition gathered among Palestinian and other Arabs up to World War I (note 23). The Porte was sensitive for three reasons given: enmity with Russia, the pogrom-plagued source of most immigration; unwillingness to encourage Europeans entitled under the capitulations to special privileges including tax exemptions (note 24, PDF p.10 / printed p.142); and unwillingness to incubate another nationalist problem, which prompted a selective ban on Jewish immigration into Palestine (note 25). Zionist strategic responses exploited a badly co-ordinated Ottoman administration: regulations inconsistently applied, pilgrimage visas routinely used to enter and then vanish or bribe officials, and capitulation-based consular support; and, for land, resident Ottoman-citizen Jews and even occasionally non-Jewish Arabs used as buyers on the newcomers’ behalf (note 26). In 1901, under a concession granted under an Ottoman land code dating from 1867, the Jewish Colonization Association acquired a very large tract in Tiberias from the Greek-Orthodox Sursuq family of Beirut (note 27), a territorial core around which further purchasing built a contiguous block; Jewish numbers remained a minute proportion of the population, but their rate of expansion, a tenfold increase over two decades, was dramatic (note 28). Acquisition was initially carried out in conformity with the existing legal system, though friction developed once settlers moved onto purchased land, mainly from their disregard for local protocols on access to and use of land (note 29, PDF p.11 / printed p.143) — a sharp contrast with the lawless violence characterising acquisition in Australia and the United States. Lawless violence was not an option for a small group inside a powerful if decadent empire; the conventional technique of violent expropriation only became available in 1948, when ethnic purging heralding national independence occurred in response to metropolitan withdrawal. Until then the yishuv operated within successive imperial umbrellas, which constrained but also protected it, providing a legal system enabling purchase and manipulable immigration regulations; still lacking a colonial state, Zionism did not seek to end imperialism but to harness it, and a major success came in 1917 when the Balfour Declaration anticipated the shift from Ottoman to British rule.

Under the Mandate (PDF p.11-18 / printed p.143-150)

One of the biggest breaks came in 1914, when the Ottomans joined the First World War on the wrong side; Turkey’s empire was dismembered among its victorious European rivals under the League of Nations’ Wilsonian mandate system (note 30, PDF p.11). Britain gained the Palestine Mandate and succeeded in having an extended version of the Balfour Declaration inserted into it, a unique form of mandate providing for the preferential intrusion of a third party into the relationship between a European authority and the local population (note 31; the note traces the Declaration’s drafts, and the Mandate’s shift to “the Jewish national home”). The Declaration of 1917, issued while Allenby advanced on Jerusalem, viewed favourably the “establishment in Palestine of a National Home for the Jewish people”; Article 6 of the 1922 Mandate charged Britain to “facilitate Jewish immigration under suitable conditions and [to] encourage, in co-operation with the Jewish Agency […] close settlement by Jews on the land, including State lands and waste lands not required for public purposes”, and Article 11 gave full power over natural resources and public works and required a land system having regard to “the desirability of promoting the close settlement and intensive cultivation of the land” (PDF p.12 / printed p.144). “Thus did John Locke become an unlikely champion of Judaeocracy”: “development” and “intensive cultivation” invoke the classic liberal formula linking agricultural efficiency to population increase, and the repetition of “close settlement” leaves no doubt which population was scheduled to increase. The wording was a triumph for Zionist lobbying in Britain and the United States — Felix Frankfurter and Louis D. Brandeis secured Wilson’s endorsement, and the Declaration resulted in large part from Chaim Weizmann’s influence on Arthur Balfour, David Lloyd George and Winston Churchill, “Christian statesmen whose distaste for Jews was matched by their fondness for Zionism” (note 32). The absence of a delegated governmental structure did not weaken yishuv influence on Whitehall; the absence of a formal metropolitan relationship enhanced its capacity to mobilise a transatlantic network relatively independent of colonial rivalries, and between the wars the Mandate provided an incubator for assembling the demographic and territorial prerequisites for a European settler state. The agenda was personified in Arthur Ruppin, whose pragmatism informed central planners including David Ben-Gurion and key removal planner Yosef Weitz. The harmony with Britain reflected a convergence of interests (note 33): the yishuv needed an imperial protector against the resentment its intrusions provoked among the Native majority; United States support was effectively informal; Britain had the requisite administrative capacity without long-standing local affiliations, and Zionists had high-level connections in the British government (note 34). Palestine’s position at the eastern Mediterranean, and the Suez Canal’s importance for traffic to India and beyond, made a Jewish state a reliable regional ally without overcoming French resistance (note 35, PDF p.13-14 / printed p.145-146). The convergence reached back to the war: British support was intended to encourage Jews in the United States and post-Czarist Russia to influence their governments to back Britain against the Ottomans and Germany (note 36); a Jewish Palestine might buffer British interests in Egypt, an option Weizmann promoted as an “Asiatic Belgium” (note 37), and might link the Mediterranean and Persian Gulf by rail. Once the Mandate was established, Britain devoted, in Kenneth Stein’s phrase, an “overwhelming predominance” of administrative expenditure to strategic purposes while only small amounts ameliorated either community’s economic and social conditions — an allocation that advantaged the community already receiving international contributions (note 38); the yishuv gained from the metropole’s neglect as much as from its support (note 39). The Mandate preamble’s safeguard for the rights of “existing non-Jewish communities” is analysed for the transience implied in “existing” and the designation of 91 per cent of the population as “non-Jewish”. “National home” adopted the Declaration’s term: heimstatte originated as a Zionist codeword for the exclusively Jewish state actually desired, Max Nordau having suggested a formula that could “deceive by its mildness” while there was need to “dissimulate our real aim” (note 40, PDF p.14-15 / printed p.146-147); as a statement the national home was, in Stein’s words, “a statement of right” and the safeguards “a statement of sufferance” (note 41). The duality was justified by the pledge to encourage immigration to the extent that “the economy”, significantly singular, could absorb it — a formula that overlooked and strengthened Zionist efforts to separate two conflicting economies, the policy Ruppin termed “economic segregation” (note 42). The administration treated the Jewish economy’s absorptive capacity as Palestine’s, ignoring the zero-sum relationship in which Jewish growth took place at the Indigenous sector’s expense (note 43); even in global recession, settler expansion, especially construction in Tel Aviv, let the sheltered Jewish economy grow while the predominantly agrarian Native economy was strained (note 44), and the Mandate’s conditions enabled world Zionism to build a state “that would ultimately exist instead of, rather than in, Palestine” (note 45, PDF p.15 / printed p.147). Preferential treatment did not pass unopposed: resistance inside Britain to betraying the Arab population; prominent Jewish figures under Edwin Montagu opposing Zionism’s alliance with antisemitism to encourage emigration from Europe; and Herbert Samuel, first High Commissioner, frustrating leading Zionists with ostensibly even-handed policies (note 46). In 1921 Britain created the Amirate of Transjordan in the two thirds of what was to become Mandate Palestine east of the Jordan, a concession to Arab expectations with major unresolved implications continuing into the present (note 47); it prompted Vladimir Jabotinsky’s formation of Revisionist Zionism, committed to reincorporating the “partitioned” section (note 48, PDF p.16 / printed p.148). Official concern at a sub-proletarianised class of Natives rendered landless by Zionist purchases led in the 1930s to measures restraining land transfer; as World War II loomed, British anxiety that Arabs not side with Germany produced concessions including restrictions on Jewish immigration that the 1937 Peel Commission recommended despite the ascendancy of Nazism; and Native resistance, recurrently peaking in violent opposition, prompted policy shifts away from the generally pro-Zionist norm (note 49). Typically, however, Zionist influence in Whitehall changed or frustrated the restrictive provisions. The case in point is the Shaw Commission and Hope Simpson reports of 1930: after homicidal street-fighting that started around the Western Wall over access to holy places, Shaw reported that the religious issue symptomatised wider Arab political and economic grievances stemming from implementation of the Mandate’s commitment, recommended restricting Jewish immigration, and called for “a scientific enquiry should be held into land cultivation and settlement possibilities” (note 50), pending which eviction of peasant cultivators — further Jewish land purchases — was to be checked. John Hope Simpson asserted the Mandate’s objectives required close settlement and intensive cultivation to apply to Arabs as well as Jews and, to Zionist consternation, recommended summarily curtailing Jewish immigration so Arab Natives could maintain their existing standard of living (PDF p.16-17 / printed p.148-149). The recommendations entered the Passfield White Paper, presented by Colonial Secretary Baron Passfield (Sidney Webb). Zionist objections exposed the dual economy: against Hope Simpson on Arab health, more Jewish doctors could only alleviate the problem, denying bifurcation; against him on Arab unemployment and absorptive capacity, Jewish immigrants joined the industrial sector and would not affect the Arab agricultural sector, relying on separation (note 51). Argument did not win the day. Labour Zionism under Ben-Gurion secured dominance of yishuv politics as British Labour gained government by a slender majority; the Histadrut’s London representative Dov Hos lobbied Trades Union Congress leader Ernest Bevin, and Weizmann’s meeting with Prime Minister Ramsay MacDonald and his son Malcolm produced the memorandum Palestinian Arabs dubbed “the Black Letter”, penned by Malcolm, signed by Ramsay and addressed, Balfour-style, to Weizmann, which “clarified” the Passfield White Paper out of meaningful existence (note 52). Tom Segev is quoted: “The Passfield White Paper never went into effect; indeed, it is notable only because the Zionist movement was able to get it revoked” (note 53, PDF p.17-18 / printed p.149-150). The section concludes that the absence of a formal hierarchy meant more metropole rather than less: the transnational network secured sponsorship without reciprocal commitment and drew on multiple sources, and within the Mandate Zionists’ capacity to influence British policy was hardly less than that of colonial administrations elsewhere; Britain provided the military protection for world Zionism to co-ordinate the importation of international finance and east-European immigrants, marshalling its preaccumulated capital, culture and labour with unparalleled effectiveness. As imagined in Zionism the Jewish nation was a relationship between people and land realising both; the yishuv was not so much a state-in-waiting as an agenda. Random purchasing of as much land as possible would have scattered islands of Jewish ownership across a multicultural Palestine and forced participation in the local economy; to become a nation the Jews in Palestine had first to be (in)gathered together, dictating contiguous land holdings (note 54). In that obsession with contiguity the strategic combination of metropolitan funding and purchase made possible the Conquest of Labour — Hebrew Labour, avoda Ivrit — the thoroughgoing system of ethnoracial exclusion on which the Jewish nation was to be built (PDF p.18 / printed p.150).

The Conquest of Labour (PDF p.18-21 / printed p.150-153)

Following Gershon Shafir, the settlements were modelled on European colonial experiments, initially French colonisation of Algeria and subsequently Bismarck’s Germanisation of East Prussia (note 55, PDF p.19 / printed p.151). Rothschild’s aid to the failing First Aliya instituted an Algerian colon-style system in which Jewish settlers relied on a predominantly Native labour force, mainly for grapevines; when viable returns remained unforthcoming he precipitately withdrew, leaving a crisis the Second Aliya, arriving after the Kishinev pogroms, did not at first resolve: it sought to compete with Natives on their own terms at the subsistence level of surrounding fellaheen and was defeated by what Shafir calls “the contradiction between market-based colonisation and Jewish national aspirations” (note 56). In 1905 the Jewish workers’ organisation Hapoel Hatzair resolved to abandon market rationality for a Jewish-only isolate rejecting any labour that was not Jewish (note 57); thus began the Conquest of Labour. It made no pretence of competing on the open market; it depended on a closed, protected and autonomously reproduced circuit of production, consumption and exchange — an exclusive, preferentially subsidised economy — and “in a kind of wishful corpus nullius, its proponents sought to conduct their affairs as if nobody else was around” (note 58). The World Zionist Organization took it up, inspired in large part by Ruppin’s admiration for Bismarck’s East Prussia scheme, under which the government bought up failed Junker estates and broke them into private allotments for subsidised sale to exclusively German smallholders to rid the region of Poles. The WZO funded Jewish-only initiatives through the Jewish National Fund, established in 1901 to extend Jewish ownership of land in Palestine. Ideologically the Conquest was sustained by the figure of the New Jew, whose iconography bore the marks of Europe’s emerging extreme nationalisms (Fig. 1, PDF p.20 / printed p.152): the ideal required incoming Zionists to remake themselves through the Conquest, clearing Natives from the land and boycotting Native labour and produce, progressively depriving those others of their means of subsistence (note 59; note 59 quotes clause 23 of the JNF lease, requiring lessees to “execute all works connected with cultivation of the holding, only with Jewish labour”). The campaign produced the Kibbutz, a totally insulated Jewish-only capsule that really did conduct its affairs, at least its non-military ones, as if nobody else was around, an exclusiveness exceeding that attained in Australia or the United States (note 60; note 60 records the tension with Shafir’s insistence that the doctrine was born on the ground rather than derived from European productivisation, and Wolfe’s dialectical reply). The capital imports enabling the yishuv to evade market realities were central to dispossession: relieved of the requirement to generate a surplus — the JNF was able to run up large debts (note 62) — the yishuv could prioritise ethnicity over efficiency (PDF p.20-21 / printed p.152-153). Foreign capital was Zionism’s principal preaccumulation (PDF p.21 / printed p.153, sentence split by the running head in the text copy): in this no different from other settler projects, but freedom from the discipline of the bottom line set Zionism apart; without it there could have been no Conquest of Labour, no kibbutzim and ultimately no Jewish state. The premise that it was more important that labour be Hebrew than that it be productive was the centrepiece of an all-encompassing Conquest of Economics enabled by the diffusely integrated metropole. Economics did not remove the need for military support: land acquisition bound to provoke Native hostility, and military force was never far away, in British colonial policing or in local unofficial Zionist militias, the Haganah, forerunner to the Israeli Defence Forces, being formed by Jabotinsky in 1920 (note 63). In contrast to Australia and North America, violence was deployed to secure territorial gains already made by other means rather than to gain territory in the first place — until 1948, when it became a viable way to gain territory and was used as such. The relative restraint of the Ottoman and Mandate periods did not mean the goal of replacing Palestinians was yet to be formulated; it was pragmatic, “the eventual Nakba, to adapt Carl von Clausewitz, being a continuation of purchase by other means” (note 64, which also quotes Menachem Ussishkin that Palestine must belong to the Jewish people by force, governmental coercion or purchase, force being what Zionism did not yet have). Purchases were prerequisite to attaining those other means: a disciplined population with a territorial base and an adequately funded state apparatus with military resources and a hierarchy of command, none possible without the strategic co-ordination of human and capital imports that secured a contiguous base populated with Ashkenazi immigrants. Observing this disciplined programme, “the complementarity between the creation of the Jewish state and the ethnic cleansing of Palestine emerges with particular clarity, the two being inseparable features of a unified programme” (PDF p.21-22 / printed p.153-154).

Land purchases (PDF p.22-27 / printed p.154-159)

Planners deliberated ceaselessly over tailoring immigration to transferring Palestinian land into exclusively and irreversibly Jewish ownership, building a fully formed ethnocratic parallel to the existing apparatus of government, and modulating demographics to take maximum advantage of the Palestinian-owned land that became available (PDF p.22 / printed p.154). They did not acquire wherever land could be bought, nor limit purchasing to agriculturally valuable land; they sought unbroken expanses. Crucially, ownership was collective, not individual: once transferred, parcels ceased to be commodities in the general-alienability sense, the purchasing organisations imposing conditions preventing land from ever returning to gentile ownership before leasing it to Jewish tenants (note 65). Every inch acquired would become forever Jewish; which Jews took it over, efficiently, inefficiently or indifferently, was not the point. Conceptually this diametrically reversed the United States ideology of private property, which demonised Native ownership for its collective nature; practically it shared characteristics with US Indian policy, where the collectivity — the US government — acquired Native land and transferred it into ethnically non-Indian hands. The acquiring had to be effected within an imperial legal system that could not be swept aside as Indigenous systems were in the USA or Australia. That system rested on the Ottoman tanzimat land reforms of the mid-nineteenth century, largely inherited and maintained by the British and even, to a significant extent, by the post-Nakba Israeli state (PDF p.23 / printed p.155). Operating within it, Zionist purchasers sought to convert nexuses of overlapping entitlements — a Levantine analogue to E.P. Thompson’s “messy complexities of coincident use-right” (note 66) — into exclusive ownership compressing discontinuous rights into consolidated units of Jewish property (note 67: typically converting masha’a, collectively held land allocated in rotation, into mafruz, individual allotments). For fellaheen “tenants” what mattered was not ultimate title but the scope of ownership: in general, large-scale effendi landowners under tanzimat, often resident elsewhere, owned, bought and sold subject to the continuing use-rights of fellaheen, whose rent or tribute was the return on the effendi’s investment; Ottoman transactions were comparable to capitalist business takeovers, which do not generally involve the replacement of employees. Much has been made of the absentee landowners Zionists characterised as unscrupulous orientals bearing responsibility for their humbler countrymen’s misfortunes (note 70); in some cases the Zionists had a point, in others landowners had only become absentees because their homes were separated from their holdings in the post-war Anglo-French carve-up (note 71). Regardless, the crucial factor was the attachment of usufruct to title: “Settler colonialism takes place at the level of usufruct. Buying and selling between landlords, absent or present, does not change systems. Rulers can come and go. Laws change. Dispossession takes place – Natives become replaced – at the level of usufruct” (PDF p.23 / printed p.155). The methods used to attach usufruct to title, so vendors could sell a consolidated right not otherwise theirs to sell, exploited the variety of social relationships constituting property under the Mandate. Walter Lehn’s account of shifting JNF acquisition policy is followed (notes 72-77, PDF p.24 / printed p.156): large holdings the consistent preference; absentee landowners initially targeted as relatively immune from local pressure not to sell; when British policy grew more restrictive in response to Native insurgency in the later 1930s, “it became JNF policy to buy any land from any owner, large or small, who was willing or could be persuaded or forced (e.g. through mortgage foreclosure) to sell” (note 74). Effendis who had enlarged holdings informally under the Ottomans were hamstrung by British regulations and often willing to sell; absentees unable to collect rent during the war were responsive to cash; after World War I smallholding cultivators plagued by debt pledged land for loans they could not service, forfeiting it to moneylenders who amassed holdings sellable to Zionist purchasers. Under a Ruppin plan that Mandate assistant treasurer Michel Abcarius termed “a vile use to which money can be put”, Zionists bought land before there were enough Jewish immigrants to cultivate it, expelling the fellaheen and keeping it in reserve unused — the “dead hand” of mortmain — until Jewish tenants became available (note 78); British regulations restraining such practices were circumvented (note 79), by proxy buyers or sales into a future time (note 80), and widespread under-registering to avoid taxation and conscription enabled much larger parcels to change hands than deeds indicated, purchasers also paying less tax (note 81). The crucial factor was not the sale itself but the prior clearing of cultivators (PDF p.24-25 / printed p.156-157). Given collusion between a Native landlord and a Jewish purchaser: the tenants’ right of first refusal could be evaded by public auction in satisfaction of mortgage debts “collusively arrived-at” (note 82); tenants could be moved around, the targeted portion let to incoming tenants who let it on as the landlord’s agents, tenants of tenants not being protected against eviction (note 83); landlords could apply duress to induce undertakings that tenants did not wish to purchase and had been adequately compensated elsewhere (note 84). Zionist organisations protected the anonymity of Native vendors, who could also be leaders of the emergent Palestine national movement. Stein’s summary of contrived debts and court orders is quoted: “this entire process was pre-planned so that the Jewish National Fund would obtain the land, the prestige of the seller would be protected, the rights of cultivators would be summarily circumvented, and the seller would obtain a price for the land well above the price set by the court” (note 85). A further component was the assimilation of public land to state land, reflecting the British state’s deeper penetration of property compared with its Ottoman predecessor (note 86, PDF p.25 / printed p.157). Under the reformed Ottoman system tenure mixed private and public categories (note 87): mulk, private dwellings and plots, inheritable; waqf, set aside for religious purposes, revenue to Muslim institutions; metruke, public in the widest sense — rivers, lakes, roads, public grazing; and most land miri, ownership vested in the state with usufruct assigned to fellaheen, reverting to the state if not tilled for five years, for redistribution to other fellaheen. By introducing “state land”, not an Ottoman classification, the British provided for land not assigned to particular owners — common pasturage, hunting and wood-collecting grounds, land unregistered in the post-Ottoman confusion — to be treated as unclaimed (note 88): “In effect, land that was everybody’s became land that was nobody’s, which meant that it reverted to the state” (PDF p.26 / printed p.158). Under the Mandate provision encouraging close Jewish settlement of “state land and waste land not needed for public purposes”, such land could be sold or indefinitely leased to Zionist purchasers (note 89); its wide distribution made it suitable for filling strategic gaps in a programme premised on contiguity, and state land purchased elsewhere could compensate fellaheen displaced from land contiguous with Zionist holdings (note 90), consolidating the yishuv and further fragmenting Palestinian communities. The continuing effects did not end with the Mandate (PDF p.26-27 / printed p.158-159): tanzimat reforms survived the Nakba to provide ongoing pretexts for Israel’s expropriation — the preponderance of non-private ownership became susceptible to interpretation as state ownership, meaning collective Jewish ownership after 1948 (note 91); the five-year reversion rule meant Palestinians driven from their land in 1948 could be made subject to forfeiture for failing to cultivate it; and the 1858 obligation to register, more thoroughly bureaucratised by the British, had been disincentivised by liability to taxation and the much-feared military conscription, encouraging fellaheen to avoid registration or register in fictional or absentee names (note 92), to resort to urban moneylenders to compensate for tax burden and labour lost to conscription, and, falling behind, to lose land to moneylenders who sold it to Zionist purchasers, as in the Sursuq family’s large sale (note 93). The chaotically disordered record left numerous fellaheen unable to establish entitlement under the more demanding British requirements and subsequently under the punitive conditions of the Israeli legal system. “It is a litany of dispossession” (note 94 collects the land-rights literature).

Beyond the watershed (PDF p.27-29 / printed p.159-161)

It may seem perverse to offer a narrative of Palestinian dispossession dwelling so obliquely on the Nakba; the intention is not to understate the repeated enormities the nascent Jewish state perpetrated in it, but to situate it in the ongoing — in Saree Makdisi’s term, “slow-motion” — enormity that Zionists, with imperial and comprador connivance, had been conducting incrementally, day by day, for over half a century before the Nakba (note 95, PDF p.27 / printed p.159). Without that context the Nakba would make no sense; one might even agree with Benny Morris that ethnic cleansing was a spontaneous aberration in the heat of warfare (note 96). In the context of Zionism’s conquest of economics, “There was no change of ends. The Nakba simply accelerated, very radically, the slow-motion means to those ends that had been the only means available to Zionists while they were still building their colonial state.” If in the 1930s Palestinians had fled their homes instead of rising up, there would not have been enough Jews to fill them; and the dream of “Transfer”, the Zionist euphemism for removing the Natives, had before World War II been no more than talk under the practical exigencies of the mid-Mandate years (note 97). The Nakba was therefore Zionism’s first opportunity, seized with devastating effectiveness as both testament to and legacy of its preparedness; the creation of the Jewish state and the ethnic cleansing of Palestine were two sides of the same coin. “The conquest of economics was a Nakba-in-waiting” (PDF p.28 / printed p.160). Historians should record events at face value and look behind them to enabling contexts, because structures can be traced forwards as well as backwards: Israel Shahak is quoted on refraining from discussing the April 1948 Deir Yassin massacre (the suburb since renamed Kfar Sha’ul) because “Accurate and detailed knowledge of Zionist thought as expressed by its leaders led to many incidents like Dayr Yasin [sic] and, more importantly, can yet again lead to similar or worse events” (note 98). Accuracy is a duty, not a virtue — the retort attributed in the main text to “Ted Carr” against G. R. Elton (note 99 gives E.H. Carr, What is History?; see Open questions). Details speak in context: four decades after the Nakba, Israeli economist Ira Sharkansky was astounded that government expenditure exceeded gross national product, discovering revenues not emanating from productive activity and not counted for GNP purposes: “grants from overseas governments and private contributors, plus loans from overseas and domestic sources” (note 100). Aware of the historical background to Israel’s diasporan funding, Wolfe writes, we should not be surprised. As he writes in February 2012, Israeli authorities are forcibly evicting Palestinian residents from Wadi Hilweh (Silwan) in occupied al-Quds (East Jerusalem), where 50,000 Palestinians live, on the pretext of a highly dubious archaeology according to which King David built a Jewish city there in the third millennium BCE (note 101, PDF p.29 / printed p.161); the City of David Archaeological Park replacing the homes is financed by, among others, Ron Lauder, who currently chairs the Jewish National Fund. Lauder is one of numerous plutocrats supporting this contemporary exercise in ethnic cleansing. “We should not be surprised. It is no random event.”

Notes (PDF p.29-39 / printed p.161-171)

The 101 notes are recorded chunk by chunk in the reading notes. Their load-bearing contents are folded into the sections above; the rest are the article’s scholarly apparatus: note 1’s settlement figures from Don Peretz (of 370 new Jewish settlements established 1948 to early 1953, 350 were on absentee property; in 1954 more than a third of Israel’s Jewish population lived on absentee property and nearly a third of new immigrants, 250,000 people, settled in urban areas abandoned by Arabs); note 3’s discussion of “watershed” and “miracle” in Israeli discourse, including Weizmann’s description of the Nakba, quoted from Lustick, as “a miraculous simplification of Israel’s tasks”; note 28’s settler numbers quoted from Mandel (perhaps 500-1,000 in the mid-1880s, a fraction over 2,000 in nine colonies in 1893, over 4,000 in eighteen colonies in 1898, about 10,000 in twenty-six colonies in 1908); note 40’s Lloyd George testimony to the Peel Commission that, had the Jews become a definite majority, “Palestine would thus become a Jewish Commonwealth”; note 47’s Husayn-McMahon correspondence and the 1921 crowning of Abdullah in Transjordan and Faysal in Iraq; note 65’s Hope Simpson wording that JNF purchase left land “exta-territorialised” [as printed], in mort-main and inalienable, set against Leviticus 25:23; note 69’s vendor figures (Ruppin to Shaw: 90% of vendors absentees; Granott: absentee share falling from 86% in 1923-1927 to 14.9% in 1933-36, with not less than 90.6% of acquisitions from large landowners and only 9.4% from fellaheen); note 85’s Hyamson observation that when transfer took place the land was consequently empty, all parties satisfied permanently except the tenants, satisfied only for a short time; note 91’s Granott passage on the new state inheriting Mandatory Government property, its precise size never clearly defined; and note 96’s Ben-Gurion, quoted from Flapan, that Palestinian return “must be prevented […] at all costs”.

Key passages

• “a sustained institutional tendency to supplant the indigenous population” (PDF p.2 / printed p.134, Wolfe restating his definition of settler colonialism).
• “No campaign of territorial dispossession was ever waged more thoughtfully.” (PDF p.5 / printed p.137)
• “Thus did John Locke become an unlikely champion of Judaeocracy” (PDF p.12 / printed p.144).
• “a state that would ultimately exist instead of, rather than in, Palestine” (PDF p.15 / printed p.147; adapted from Victor Kattan, see note 45).
• “in a kind of wishful corpus nullius, its proponents sought to conduct their affairs as if nobody else was around” (PDF p.19 / printed p.151, of the Conquest of Labour).
• “the eventual Nakba, to adapt Carl von Clausewitz, being a continuation of purchase by other means” (PDF p.21 / printed p.153).
• “Settler colonialism takes place at the level of usufruct.” (PDF p.23 / printed p.155)
• “In effect, land that was everybody’s became land that was nobody’s, which meant that it reverted to the state.” (PDF p.26 / printed p.158)
• “It is a litany of dispossession.” (PDF p.27 / printed p.159)
• “There was no change of ends. The Nakba simply accelerated, very radically, the slow-motion means to those ends that had been the only means available to Zionists while they were still building their colonial state.” (PDF p.27 / printed p.159)
• “The conquest of economics was a Nakba-in-waiting.” (PDF p.28 / printed p.160)
• “We should not be surprised. It is no random event.” (PDF p.29 / printed p.161, of the Silwan evictions)

Evidence the work relies on

• The Nakba’s statistics and the literature of record for them, as cited in note 1: Benny Morris, The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem Revisited (2004) and Righteous Victims (2001); Ilan Pappe, The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine (2006) and A History of Modern Palestine (2006); Walid Khalidi (ed.), All That Remains (1992); Salman Abu-Sitta, Atlas of Palestine 1948 (2004); Baruch Kimmerling, Zionism and Territory (1983), for official Israeli estimates that over 85% of Palestinian villages were “abandoned” and 218 villages listed as destroyed, and for land-acquisition statistics; Don Peretz, Israel and the Palestine Arabs (1958), for the Custodian of Absentee Property figures on settlement on absentee property; and Janet Abu-Lughod’s demography in Ibrahim Abu-Lughod (ed.), The Transformation of Palestine (1971).
• Wolfe’s own earlier work for the framework: “Nation and MiscegeNation”, Social Analysis 36 (1994), for the logic of elimination; “After the Frontier”, Settler Colonial Studies 1, 1 (2011), for US Indian policy, metropolitan speculation and the trust doctrine; and “Corpus Nullius”, Postcolonial Studies 10 (2007).
• Barbara Smith, The Roots of Separatism in Palestine: British Economic Policy, 1920-1929 (1993), for the article’s pivotal economic claims: capital usable without prime regard to the profit motive (p.11, note 18), the dual economy and absorptive capacity (pp.66-85), recession-era growth of the sheltered Jewish economy (pp.77-81), the Mandate’s strategic expenditure pattern (pp.135-158), and land-purchase circumvention (p.94).
• Kenneth Stein, The Land Question in Palestine, 1917-1939 (1984), “Legal Protection and Circumvention of Rights for Cultivators in Mandatory Palestine” (1980) and “The Jewish National Fund: Land Purchase Methods and Priorities, 1924-1939” (1984), for the land-transfer machinery: vendor and acquisition figures, contrived debts and court-ordered sales, tenant-circumvention devices, under-registration, and the “statement of right” / “statement of sufferance” formulation (note 41).
• Walter Lehn, The Jewish National Fund (1988), for JNF acquisition policy and its shifts (pp.69-79), mortmain and deficit financing (pp.54, 72-73), and the state-land discussion (pp.76-77).
• Gershon Shafir, Land, Labor and the Origins of the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict, 1882-1914 (1996) and his SOAS conference talk of 5 March 2011, for the Algerian and East Prussian models, the First and Second Aliya record, the contradiction between market-based colonisation and Jewish national aspirations, and the origins of the Conquest of Labour; Wolfe also thanks Shafir for comments on the article.
• Neville J. Mandel, The Arabs and Zionism before World War I (1976) and “Ottoman Policy and Restrictions on Jewish Settlement in Palestine: 1881-1908” (1974), for the 1891 protest telegram, Ottoman restrictions and their evasion, and the early settler numbers the article disputes as understated (note 28).
• The Mandate documents themselves as quoted: the Balfour Declaration (1917), Articles 6 and 11 of the 1922 Mandate, the Shaw Commission report, the Hope Simpson report and the Passfield White Paper and “Black Letter” episode, the last through Tom Segev, One Palestine, Complete (1999), and Scott Atran, “The Surrogate Colonization of Palestine, 1917-1939” (1989).
• M.F. Abcarius, Palestine: Through the Fog of Propaganda (1946), a Mandate official’s account, for the JNF lease’s Jewish-labour clause (p.131), Ruppin’s reserve-land plan as “a vile use to which money can be put” (p.156), and the mortmain corporation-tax point (p.137).
• A. Granott, The Land System in Palestine (1952) and Agrarian Reform and the Record of Israel (1956), a JNF-side authority, for vendor and acquisition percentages (note 69), the “miracles” justification (note 3) and the state-inheritance argument (note 91).
• For the closing sections: Saree Makdisi, Palestine Inside Out (2008) p.212, for “slow-motion”; Benny Morris on transfer and on preventing return, with Simha Flapan and Nur Masalha’s Expulsion of the Palestinians (1992) in notes 96-97; Israel Shahak, A History of the Concept of “Transfer” in Zionism (1989), for the Deir Yasin passage; Ira Sharkansky, The Political Economy of Israel (1987) p.24, for expenditure exceeding GNP; and the City of David website (accessed 21/02/12) for the Silwan case (note 101).

Analysis

Wolfe’s method is structural and comparative: an event — the Nakba — is explained by the preconditions that made it possible, identified by comparing Palestine with Australia and the United States under a single analytical priority, the outcome for Native peoples. The article is explicit that this priority is perspectival as well as analytical, and that resistance to it is itself a settler perspective; readers who do not grant the priority will not grant the conclusions that follow from it, in particular that Zionism’s two apparent departures from the settler-colonial pattern, purchase and the diffuse metropole, are on inspection an intensification of it. The argument’s original contributions are the concepts it coins or sharpens: Preaccumulation, which relocates explanatory weight from the frontier encounter to the imported endowment; the Conquest of Economics, which generalises the Conquest of Labour from a labour policy to a subversion of market rationality made possible by non-profit capital; and the usufruct test — dispossession happens where use-rights are extinguished, not where title changes hands — which converts the familiar defence that land was legally bought into the article’s central evidence, since the legality is precisely the mechanism documented. The evidence for the mechanism is second-hand but densely sourced: the land chapters rest on Stein, Lehn, Smith, Shafir and Mandel, and on Mandate-era insiders (Abcarius) and JNF-side authorities (Granott, Ruppin’s testimony) whose admissions run against their own side’s interest, which is the article’s strongest evidentiary pattern. Its limits are the obverse of its design: it is a synthesis, not an archive study, so figures are taken from the cited literature (the Nakba totals from note 1’s standard references, vendor percentages from Ruppin and Granott as printed) rather than independently established; the comparative frame is asserted from Wolfe’s earlier Australian and US work rather than re-argued; and the closing move from structure to present event — Silwan in February 2012 — is presented as pattern recognition (“It is no random event”) rather than as a separately evidenced case. Within the wiki the article is the fullest single statement of the framework that the special issue’s Editors’ Introduction announces, and it supplies the mechanism — purchase, usufruct, non-profit capital — that the introduction’s programmatic claims presuppose.

People, organizations, places and events

Patrick Wolfe, Arthur Ruppin, Barbara Smith, Kenneth Stein, Walter Lehn, Gershon Shafir, Maxime Rodinson, Chaim Weizmann, David Ben-Gurion, Joseph Weitz, Theodor Herzl, Max Nordau, Vladimir Jabotinsky, Herbert Samuel, Ernest Bevin, Tom Segev, Benny Morris, Israel Shahak, Saree Makdisi, Louis D. Brandeis, World Zionist Organization, Jewish National Fund, Jewish Agency, Jewish Colonization Association, Hapoel Hatzair, Histadrut, Haganah, Kibbutz, Balfour Declaration, Peel Commission, Shaw Commission, Tiberias, Silwan, Transjordan, Deir Yassin, Sursuq family

Concepts

Preaccumulation, Conquest of Economics, Conquest of Labour, Logic of Elimination, Settler Colonialism, Ethnocracy, New Jew, Nakba, Transfer, Zionism, Jewish Labour Only

How it relates to other sources

• It is the article the Editors’ Introduction to the same issue previews: Salamanca, Qato, Rabie and Samour summarise Wolfe as arguing that Zionism constitutes an intensification of, rather than a departure from, settler colonialism and as comparing the Zionist colonisation of Palestine with Australia and the United States on the historical and material conditions underpinning the project (Past is Present: Settler Colonialism in Palestine, PDF p.6). Wolfe’s article delivers that argument in full and confirms the summary; it also names two of the introduction’s authors’ framing devices as its own sources — Makdisi’s “slow-motion” and the editors’ Transfer discussion track the same Masalha literature (notes 95-97).
• With The Arab Worker under the Palestine Mandate: the same special issue reprints Mansour’s 1937 evidence, and Wolfe supplies its long-run frame. Mansour documents the Conquest of Labour as practised in 1934-1935 — picketing, the Tel Aviv Labour Council’s Jewish-stone campaign, the Majdal Yaba quarries, the Labour Schedules filling vacancies the picketing created. Wolfe traces the same policy to its 1905 Hapoel Hatzair resolution, its WZO/JNF institutionalisation and its East Prussian model, and generalises it into the conquest of economics. The accounts agree on the policy’s exclusionary character; they are kept side by side on the Conquest of Labour page.
• With Zionist Colonialism in Palestine: Sayegh, also reprinted in the issue, already distinguished Zionist colonisation by racial self-segregation and rejection of assimilation; Wolfe’s refusal-of-assimilation point and “more exclusive exercise of the settler logic of elimination” restate that distinction inside his comparative framework, and both treat 1882 as the starting point and the British alliance as the enabling condition.
• With The 1936-39 Revolt in Palestine: Kanafani argues the principal military and economic foundations of the Zionist entity were established in 1936-1939, so the conditions for the 1948 victory were created during the revolt. Wolfe’s longer arc — foundations laid from 1882, consolidated under the Mandate, the Nakba as first opportunity rather than creation — is compatible in direction and broader in span; neither work cites the other in the ranges read.
• With The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine: Wolfe takes his Nakba figures and the transfer genealogy from Pappe and Morris as the standard references (note 1), quotes Ussishkin through Pappe’s “Zionism as Colonialism”, and uses Said’s source Walter Lehn at greater length — Said relied on Lehn for the JNF’s trust structure and its 936,000 dunams by statehood (The Question of Palestine, PDF p.118-119). Wolfe’s disagreement is not with Pappe’s account of 1948 but with any account, Morris’s included, that would make the cleansing a spontaneous aberration of warfare (PDF p.27, note 96).
• With The Political Economy of Israeli Occupation: What is Colonial about It?: Farsakh distinguishes Israel’s variant by its seeking land without the people and not relying on indigenous labour; Wolfe gives that distinctiveness its pre-1948 economic history — the deliberate, subsidised refusal of Native labour from 1905 — and cites Shafir, as Farsakh does, from the opposite side of the Oslo question (see the Gershon Shafir page for Farsakh’s disagreement with Shafir, which Wolfe does not enter).
• With Palestine: A Socialist Introduction: Chapter 4 of that work uses Wolfe’s logic of elimination alongside Shafir’s pure settlement form to analyse the settler-colonial working class; this article is the logic’s Palestine-specific statement by its author, including Wolfe’s note of superficial tension with Shafir on whether the Conquest was imported or born on the ground (note 60).

Open questions

• The main text (PDF p.28 / printed p.160) credits the “Accuracy is a duty, not a virtue” retort to “Ted Carr” replying to G. R. Elton; note 99 (PDF p.39) cites E.H. Carr, What is History? (1987) p.11 and says Carr properly credited A.E. Housman with the remark. “Ted Carr” in the text and E.H. Carr in the note are left as printed.
• Note 40 (PDF p.34) cites the Peel Commission Report as “Cmd. 5479” and note 65 (PDF p.36) cites the Hope Simpson Report as “(Cmd. 5479), 1, p. 54”; the same command-paper number is given for both reports as printed, and note 50 cites the Peel report without a number. Left as printed.
• Slips as printed in the text copy, kept without silent correction: “Israel, State and Zociety” for Israel, State and Society in note 3 (PDF p.31); “Ellen Meiskins Wood” for Ellen Meiksins Wood in note 14 (PDF p.31); “county” printed for country inside the Kattan quotation in note 36 (PDF p.34); “exta-territorialised” in the Hope Simpson quotation in note 65 (PDF p.36); “Circumvention or Rights” for “Circumvention of Rights” in note 83 (PDF p.37); and “Polk, ‘Existing Non-Jewish Communities’” as the short title in note 93 (PDF p.38), where note 27 gives Polk’s chapter as “The Arabs and Palestine”.
• Figure 1 (PDF p.20) is a 1938 JNF poster, “The New Jew”, calling for Zionist colonisation of the Galilee (note 61: Central Zionist Archives, reproduced in Segev, One Palestine, Complete, facing p.374). The text copy carries only the caption; the poster’s own wording beyond the note’s description was not read.
• Wolfe gives the Jewish population’s 1947 land ownership as “around 7%” and population share as 26% (PDF p.1-2), citing note 1’s standard references generally rather than a specific table; the wiki’s other sources give varying pre-1948 figures, each kept with its own source on the Nakba page.
• The article states the Haganah was “formed by Jabotinsky in 1920” (PDF p.21, citing Morris, Righteous Victims, pp.96-97 in note 63). No other ingested source in the ranges read assigns the Haganah’s formation to Jabotinsky; the attribution is Wolfe’s, kept as his.
• Whether “Ted Carr” is a slip for E.H. Carr or a distinct reference cannot be resolved from the file.
• Note 46 (note marker in the main text at PDF p.15; the note itself at PDF p.35) says Samuel “presided over the shift to a British civilian administration in 1920 and the imposition of the Mandate in 1923”; the main text at PDF p.12 refers to “Article 6 of the 1922 Mandate”. The two dates, 1923 for the Mandate’s imposition and 1922 for the Mandate text, are left as printed in each place.

Coverage

PDF p.1-39 of 39, read in full