In recent years there has been a powerful resurgence of settler colonialism as an interpretive framework through which to understand the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Attached to the burgeoning field of settler colonial studies, this so-called ‘turn’ to settler colonialism has seen Israel-Palestine increasingly compared alongside New World white settler societies like Australia, Canada and the United States. In seeking to undercut the lens of exceptionalism through which the conflict has conventionally been viewed, the settler colonial paradigm has some important counter-hegemonic implications (...) for reframing Israel-Palestine, not least of which is its prescription for decolonization. However, it is paradoxically in the context of decolonization that the limits of the settler colonial paradigm become most apparent. I argue that these limitations are connected to the dominance of Patrick Wolfe’s structural account of settler colonialism, which leaves very little room for transformation, and to the particular connotations settler colonial studies has acquired from the New World contexts in which it is most often articulated. This is particularly the case in Israel-Palestine, where these connotations preclude engagement with the national aspects of the conflict and leave under-examined the unique resonances of the settler/native distinction, which need reckoning with in any serious account of decolonization. (shrink)

Normal 0 false false false EN-US X-NONE X-NONE MicrosoftInternetExplorer4 This article explores the contemporary politics of global violence through an examination of the particular challenges and possibilities facing Palestinians who seek to defend their communities against an ongoing settler-colonial project (Zionism) that is approaching a crisis point. As the colonial dynamic in Israel/Palestine returns to its most elemental level – land, trees, homes – it also continues to be a laboratory for new forms of accelerated violence whose global impact is (...) hard to overestimate. In such a context, Palestinians and international solidarity activists find themselves confronting a quintessential 21 st century activist dilemma: how to craft a strategy of what Paul Virilio calls “popular defense” at a time when everyone seems to be implicated in the machinery of global violence? I argue that while this dilemma represents a formidable challenge for Palestinians, it also helps explain why the Palestinian struggle is increasingly able to build bridges with wider struggles for global justice, ecological sustainability, and indigenous rights. (shrink)

This paper is an attempt to implement Gilles Deleuze's theory of the series and the event, and the related function of the empty square (as formulated primarily in The Logic of Sense), in relation to the geopolitical regime comprising ‘Israel proper’ and the system of occupation in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip. The purpose of this exercise is to help establish a practical access to Deleuze's philosophies, and to offer a clinical account of the Israeli occupation of the (...) Palestinian territories. (shrink)

This article articulates a sociological conception of settler colonial remembering as a tool of legitimation. Theories of memory in the context of settler colonialism generally center counter-memories by the subaltern or colonized, or official hegemonizing representations at the level of state institutions. Underexamined is the dialectical nature of memory and discursive representations that help reproduce settler colonial processes of accumulation and displacement at the micro-level. The article draws on archival data from avowedly socialist-leftist Zionist colonies to explicate patterned representations of (...) Palestinian villages that Zionist forces gradually displaced prior to and during the 1948 War/Nakba. I demonstrate how the colonial settlers attributed political meaning through five representational modes: contrasting the indigenous as backward and primitive and settlers as progressive and developed; denying an indigenous connection to the land; emphasizing amiable relations through the promotion of cultural progress and settler superiority; asymmetrically assessing settler and indigenous belongings to national collectives; and legitimizing land purchases that dispossessed indigenous cultivators, despite the settlers’ socialist ideology, while reducing conflict to the issue of economic compensation. I theorize a form of settler colonial memory based not merely on erasure, but on recognition and disavowal. Finally, I argue that local memory is a significant site of production in which the conceptual tools to both trace the historical processes of supremacy and subvert asymmetrical sociality lie. (shrink)

This article extends critical trends of citizenship studies and the theory of accumulation by dispossession to articulate how settler colonial citizenship is instantiated through the active accrual of land and resources and how the emerging settler colonial citizenship entrenches both structural subjugation and resistance. The article then examines the reformation of the boundaries of citizenship through indigenous agency. I do so through examining the Palestinian citizens in Israel, specifically centering the Internally Displaced Persons—Palestinians who received Israeli citizenship even as they (...) were displaced from their places of origin. I conclude by asserting citizenship’s double paradox in settler colonial contexts: It regulates certain rights and mobilities but simultaneously entraps the indigenous in a structure in which recursive accumulation is constitutive, thus entrenching dispossession and the further loss of collective rights and other claims. (shrink)

Shir Hever’s book examines the underlying economic dynamics of Israel’s occupation. Hever’s analysis brings out several overlooked mechanisms that function to make the Occupation profitable to Israeli state and corporate interests, but he also argues that for Israeli society, the costs of Occupation far outweigh the benefits. Hever is highly critical of Marxist accounts that, he claims, misunderstand the political economy of the Occupation, but this review argues that Hever’s critique is mistaken. It attempts to show how Hever’s analysis of (...) the Occupation and account of Palestinian resistance would have benefited from a more careful engagement with materialist work on Israel and Palestine. (shrink)

This article is concerned with how the idea of anachronism can interfere with our thinking about social justice, peace, and human liberation. In the case of Israel/Palestine the idea of anachronism is deployed among liberals, progressives and radical theorists, and activists seeking peace and social justice who express animosity toward religiously motivated settlers and their settlement project. One of the ways in which they differentiate themselves from these settlers is by suggesting that settler actions belong to the past. They also (...) pity Palestinians conceived of as stuck in an oppressive system of settler colonialism that also belongs to the past, preventing them from moving forward. Both perceptions of anachronism limit the ways we can think about human liberation and peace. This article sheds light on a conundrum about who or what belongs to the past, and how thinking in such terms can contribute to the production of a particular moral collective and to the production of enmity. Both perceptions of anachronism frame history as a kind of progress in which peoples or groups might be ranked according to their levels of civilizational attainment, an idea we abandoned long ago as an analytical tool, but seem to have retained as a matter of practical political sympathy and judgment. This temporal conditioning can interfere with the thinking of even some of the most progressive social theorists, and mimics a colonial impulse. (shrink)