Tracing Settler Colonialism: A Genealogy of a Paradigm in the Sociology of Knowledge Production in Israel

The Settler Colonial Paradigm in the Israeli-Palestinian Context

The settler colonial paradigm is not an orderly or monolithic theory. Rather, it is an interpretative framework of cumulative historical analogies, one that enables the examination of a series of societies that have been shaped as settler societies from the early modern period until today. These include but are not limited to the United States, Australia, Canada, New Zealand, and Algeria. While specific settler colonial practices differ from society to society and in different historical constellations, the outcomes of the settler colonial processes are commensurable because of their similarities, especially given the focus on land expropriation as the central dynamic.

The “reemergence” of this paradigm does not amount to a simple return to original usage. The frameworks that address colonialism and related varieties of colonial studies have a long history, but the reemergence in question here is that of, specifically, settler colonial studies, a framework crafted to explore the inner logics of multiple cases of settler colonialism (e.g., New Zealand, the United States, Canada, and Australia). Thus the reemergence of settler colonialism does not imply a simple homology between this paradigm and the previous incarnations. Whatever the differences between earlier and current versions, all applications of the paradigm share, as a common denominator, the attempt to compensate for (but not to replace) the often overly broad use of the undifferentiated term “colonialism,” with its connotations of plantation and other exploitative labor economies, by emphasizing the discrete characteristics of the processes of colonization, predicated on not only relations of settler domination but also the dispossession and replacement of indigenous peoples by a colonizing population. ⁸

In the processes of settler colonization, settlers, typically backed by a metropolitan country, appropriate space inhabited by an indigenous people. The demographic balance between the settler population and the indigenous population gradually favors the former as a result of methods of dispossession, expulsion, or extermination. Whereas colonial studies focus first and foremost on the relationship between the metropole and the colonial periphery, the settler colonial paradigm focuses on processes of transformation within settler colonial societies. The latter focus is on the dynamics of settler relations with the local inhabitants, on processes of creating settler colonial states, and the institutionalization of settlers’ privileges vis-à-vis the “native” in the settler colony ⁹ —all characteristics that imperial and national historiographies often fail to identify or analyze. ¹⁰

In contrast to administrative colonialism or franchise colonialism, which entailed the political or economic subjugation of indigenous populations, settler colonialism involves the permanent appropriation of land and other essential resources by the settler group. ¹¹ One of the central pillars of settler colonialism, according to Patrick Wolfe, is the “logic of elimination,” which aims to replace the natives and to appropriate their land. Although labor exploitation is often part of the process of settler colonial projects, the central goal is permanent settlement. As Wolfe articulates it, “Settler colonizers come to stay: invasion is a structure not an event.” ¹²

At its inception, the Zionist movement used the terminology of colonization, and permanent settlement was a core goal of the movement’s founders. A salient example of this terminology can be found in the writings of Theodore Herzl, the father of political Zionism, who in 1902 demanded that Cecil Rhodes, the empire builder of British South Africa, support Zionist settlement in Palestine:

You are being invited to help make history. That cannot frighten you, nor will you laugh at it. It is not in your accustomed line; it doesn’t involve Africa, but a piece of Asia Minor, not Englishmen but Jews. But had this been on your path, you would have done it by now. How, then, do I happen to turn to you, since this is an out-of-the-way matter for you? How indeed? Because it is something colonial. ¹³

The colonial component can be further discerned in the names the Zionist movement gave to its institutions. Its first bank was called the Colonial Trust Company, its department of settlement the Department of Colonization. ¹⁴ According to Fayez Sayegh—the first to use the concept of settler colonialism in 1965 and the first to frame the conflict in Palestine as a settler colonial one—in the 1970s the movement turned to use the terminology of national liberation. ¹⁵ But altering the national framework does not negate the colonial component of Zionism; rather, as Sayegh argues, “colonization would be the instrument of nation-building, not the by-product of an already-fulfilled nationalism.” ¹⁶

Over the next few decades, popular and academic Zionist thought offered two main arguments against conceptualizing Zionism within a settler colonial framework: first, that the Zionist movement did not intend to exploit local labor and thus was not a colonial movement; and second, that Zionism had no metropolitan base. ¹⁷ In this regard, it is important to emphasize that it is the appropriation of key resources and the displacement of the local population—rather than its exploitation—that define settler colonial societies, whether they have a metropolitan center or not. Researchers who applied the settler colonial paradigm to the Zionist case identified two functional alternatives to a metropolitan center: the Zionist movement outside Israel, including associated economic institutions and private donors, and the contemporary empires (British, French, American) as political sponsors of the project. ¹⁸

The settler colonial paradigm generates concepts and analytical tools that can enrich our understanding of the Israeli-Palestinian case. The Zionist project involved the movement of a group of settlers from Europe to a space already populated by natives, the appropriation of the natives’ lands, and the marginalization of the natives themselves. In its early stages, the project was based on the acquisition of land, a process that was accelerated by the conquest of Palestine by the British Empire in 1917 and the imposition of new legal arrangements. This violent process encountered Palestinian resistance; the settlers were repeatedly compelled to use force to expel the Palestinians from the land, either with the assistance of the British authorities or on their own. ¹⁹ The Zionist project was shaped by the nature of the Palestinian resistance; the project and the resistance evolved with dialectical intensities. ²⁰ However, since the process of acquiring land under the terms enforced by the British Mandate required that compensation should be given to the natives who lived on the land and that their consent to their evacuation should be obtained through purchase, the takeover was gradual. Nevertheless, around seventy Palestinian villages disappeared before 1948 as a result of the Zionist colonial process. ²¹

By 1948 the Zionist movement had managed to acquire just 7 percent of the territory of Mandatory Palestine. ²² But the 1948 war provided the opportunity for the establishment of Jewish sovereignty over a large part of the territory and the expulsion of the Palestinian population from it. Warfare, expulsion, and the use of state sovereignty to transform the legal regime and to enact land expropriation laws completed what the previous acquisition practices had begun.

After the establishment of the State of Israel, military rule was imposed on the Palestinian population until 1966. Its operation was put in service of the goals of the settler colonial project, ensuring Zionist control over most of the land and preventing the return of internally displaced refugees to their villages and cities, as well as the return of refugees to their homeland. At the same time, the indigenous Palestinians who remained within the State of Israel were granted citizenship and limited political rights, creating a pattern of settler colonial citizenship, largely defined during the period of military government. ²³ Thus, even though it granted citizenship, the state did not recognize the natives as an indigenous national collective but rather viewed their existence on the land and in their own homeland as an obstacle to the realization of the goals of the Zionist project. ²⁴ During the 1960s, the Zionist project witnessed a state of relative stability, at least in comparison to the period that preceded the inception of the Israeli state—even though within the state’s “borders” several areas “remained” wherein Zionist settlement and the expulsion of the Palestinians from the land were incomplete.

The occupation of the West Bank, the Gaza Strip, and East Jerusalem in 1967 accelerated and transformed the settler colonial process through the occupation of new territories, a further round of expulsion of the indigenous population, the prevention of their return, and the settlement of Israelis (who were henceforth called mitnakhlim, “colonial settlers”) in the 1967 Occupied Palestinian Territories. This time, the process was conducted under the auspices of the State of Israel, which became akin to a “mother state” promoting colonial settlement in its newly acquired territories. ²⁵ Unlike the territories occupied in 1948, which received international recognition under the 1947 UN Partition Plan (even though during the war Israel seized additional territories that had not been allotted to it in the Partition Plan, including a large section of the Galilee), the territories occupied by Israel in 1967 were each classified as an “Occupied Palestinian Territory,” the official name under international law. ²⁶

As the foregoing overview clearly demonstrates, the settler colonial paradigm challenges the conventional perception of relations between Israelis and Palestinians as merely a conflict between two colliding national movements; it offers a long-term and comparative historical perspective that transcends the focus on the constitutive events of 1948 or 1967. According to the settler colonial paradigm, the “Yishuv,” the new Jewish settlement that dates back to the late nineteenth century, is the “colony.” Thus the settler colonial paradigm does not negate the national component of the conflict but rather seeks to explore the ways in which it is interwoven with diverse settler colonial processes. At the same time, this national component represents the other distinctive feature of the Palestine/Israel case vis-à-vis most other instances of settler colonialism.

The Israeli case provokes additional questions about the interactions between analytical categories. In addition to investigating the various forms of control exercised by the Zionist project over different Palestinian groups, scholars working with the settler colonial paradigm in this context must analyze the composition of the settler colonial society itself and consider its internal fissures. Here, the contribution of the theme of “internal colonialism” becomes even more evident, since it reminds us that not only have colonial forms of control been applied externally but that the state’s racialized apparatus has also been applied, internally, to various ethnic groups, especially the Mizrahim, Jewish immigrant-settlers who came from Arab or Muslim countries who have faced persistent discrimination. ²⁷ Instead of seeing themselves as agents or participants in a settler colonial project, Mizrahim generally perceive themselves rather as second-class citizens and victims of the Israeli state—an example of the kind of ethnic/racial/class discrimination that persists in many nonsettler colonial societies, further complicating the settler-native hierarchy in Israel.

In 1979, Elia Zureik introduced his pioneering work on the paradigm of internal colonialism in his book that analyzed Israeli policies toward the Palestinians in Israel. ²⁸ Zureik offered “internal colonialism” as a new way of interpreting the relationship between a settler state and the Palestinian minority within it, with a critical examination of the axioms of state practices against its own citizens. Although Zureik’s work was widely received into sociology in Israel and frequently used and taught, this early work seemed to view internal colonialism as distinct from settler colonialism. While he used the binary of indigenous and settler, his analysis closely followed a Marxist class critique of inequality without delving into the systematic apparatus of replacement that shapes the settler colonial project. He highlighted the newly established domestic borders in their formation as an indigenous national group and marginalized the interconnection of Palestinians in Israel with other Palestinians, both those living under the 1967 occupation and refugees. Seemingly, his work did not destabilize official conceptions of Israeli state sovereignty, but it was crucial in setting the scene for scholars in Israel to produce critical scholarship on the subordination of Palestinians. And it is worth mentioning that Zureik has recently articulated the settler colonial paradigm more pointedly. ²⁹

While Israeli academia tended to emphasize Zureik’s discussion of internal inequality vis-à-vis the Palestinians, several concurrent prominent theories of settler colonialism were largely occluded in Israel. As early as the 1960s and 1970s, Palestinian scholars began using the term “settler colonialism” to analyze the conflict. ³⁰ In the 1960s, the paradigm was discussed in different intellectual milieus, including by prominent critical Middle East researchers such as Maxime Rodinson and among left-wing non-Zionist circles in Israel. ³¹ Although these debates were largely absent from Israeli academic discourses for many years, since the early 2000s some researchers from the West have attempted to compare the settler colonialisms of North America (the United States and Canada), Australia, and Rhodesia with the Israeli-Palestinian case. ³² However, in the following discussion, I focus on the works of Israeli and Palestinian scholars, asking what their research can teach us about the sociology of knowledge production in Israel and about new directions within the framework of the settler colonial paradigm.

Zionism, Colonialism, and Settler Colonialism in Research by Jewish Israelis

Prior to the establishment of the State of Israel and for the first four decades thereafter, the humanities and social sciences in Israel were recruited to consolidate the Zionist project. It is no wonder, then, that discussions of the colonial character of Zionism that took place among non-Zionist leftist circles were largely absent from academia. Sociology perceived itself as part of the Israeli establishment, contributing to state building and nation formation. ³³ It was closely tied to the colonizing project and to the exercise of control over the indigenous people and resources. ³⁴ From a Zionist perspective, Israel was an emancipatory project aimed at the salvation of the Jews who had survived the horrors of the Holocaust and antisemitism in their former European countries of residence. The Nakba of 1948 was represented both as a “war of independence” from the British Mandate and a defensive war of the Yishuv in Palestine against aggression waged by the surrounding Arab countries. The pre-1948 foundational settler colonial practices and the related violence of the Zionist project were depicted either as peaceful settlements achieved through land purchases or as peaceful attempts to coexist with the local Arab population in the promised Jewish homeland. ³⁵ After 1948, with the expulsion of much of the indigenous population, the Palestinians who remained in their homeland became “Israeli Arabs” or “the Arab minority in Israel.” The first designation went hand in hand with Israeli attempts to erase the name “Palestine” from the map, meant to disconnect the Palestinians who remained on what became known as Israel from Palestinian populations elsewhere.

Only in the late 1980s and beginning of the 1990s did Israeli scholars—most of whom had not personally participated in the events of 1948—begin to challenge Israel’s hegemonic political myths. ³⁶ The important work of such scholars, dubbed the post-Zionists or the “new historians,” played a critical role in debunking some of the state’s foundational myths among Israelis and scholars in the “West.” However, such studies, and the debates that they aroused, generally remained embedded within the confines of Zionist hegemony (perhaps with the exception of the later works of Ilan Pappé). ³⁷ Despite a tendency to reify (or “freeze”) the events of 1948 as an exception, the post-Zionists/new historians embarked on a process of self-examination, learning about their own history; yet they generally managed to reject foundational myths without diverging from the course of an exclusivist Jewish state. Furthermore, most did not question the settler colonial origins of the Israeli state or Israeli society. Again, the widely adopted analytical framework viewed the State of Israel as the progeny of a conflict between two national movements competing for the same piece of land, assuming a symmetry between “both sides” of the conflict.

This perspective also treats 1948 and 1967 as separate events, sustaining an epistemological division between the 1948 war and the 1967 occupation, ignoring the way both were shaped by a core structure of invasion. This act of scholarly bifurcation allowed the settler colonial character of the State of Israel to be obscured or forgotten. The processes through which the indigenous population was replaced by a settler colonial society, including the subjection of the natives who remained within Israel’s borders, were normalized. Yehouda Shenhav claimed that this bifurcation was produced by the Israeli left, who, by employing the 1967 paradigm and the two-state solution, contributed to an erasure of the question of 1948 and of the ethnic cleansing committed by the Israeli military forces. ³⁸ Opposing this conceptualization, Pappé and Gadi Algazi linked the 1948 and 1967 occupations, treating them as two moments of a single process. ³⁹ Pappé showed that by moving control from the areas occupied in 1948 to the areas controlled in 1967, the state accomplished two major components of the Zionist project: controlling more land and decreasing the number of Palestinians living on it. Algazi described the refugee questions of 1948 and 1967 as a single continuum and argued that the 1967 expulsion complemented, to a large extent, the 1948 expulsion, which, from the perspective of Zionist leaders, had not been completed.

In recent years, several Israeli researchers have deployed the settler colonial paradigm against the backdrop of the decline of the Zionist left and the expansion of the colonial project. ⁴⁰ Within the Green Line, that expansion has included the enactment of new colonial-style laws and the denial of full political rights to Palestinian citizens in Israel, plus the establishment of new settlements for Israeli Jews through the forced uprooting of Palestinian Bedouins in the Naqab (Negev). Beyond the Green Line, it entails the continuing aggressive expansion of Jewish settlements, coupled with the continuation of neocolonialist and neoliberal policies of the state and its political elites, resulting in the strengthening of control of over 80 percent of historic Palestine. ⁴¹

However, such critical studies remain exceptional. To understand how and why, we must go back and briefly examine shifts within the Israeli academy, specifically in sociology, and more generally in critical theory (including postcolonial theory). As we shall see, most seemingly critical trends have failed to grasp the full extent of the settler colonial project of Zionism.

The Development of the Settler Colonial Paradigm in Research by Palestinians

Although the case of Palestine/Israel bears similarities to other cases of settler colonialism, until recently many Palestinian researchers avoided drawing such comparisons, possibly because in other cases, groups of settlers allegedly “succeeded” in eliminating the vast majority of indigenous peoples. Usually, remaining indigenous groups became (over the course of centuries) dependent sovereigns with distinct polities and (limited) rights to self-determination. Their sovereignties were confined to specific reservation geographies rather than to entire homelands framed by national expression, statist models, and recognition as separate nation-states. ⁶⁸ Yasser Arafat bluntly expressed this perception in a famous interview carried out in June 1987: “It’s impossible to wipe out five million Palestinians. We are not Indians.” ⁶⁹ The hegemonic Palestinian discourse thus has been entrapped within a Western nationalist model that politically subordinates indigenous peoples.

It is a fact that Palestinians resisted, clung to their land, and succeeded in constituting a national group in line with the hegemonic modern form of nationalist framing. They saw national liberation as a more forward-looking and ongoing articulation of this ideology, which might have contributed to a lack of attention to the settler colonial paradigm as a possible prism through which to analyze the Palestinian case. The Palestinian sociologist Hilal has proposed, further, that the adoption of the two-state solution model by the Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO) and the signing of the Oslo Accords indirectly led to the recognition of “the Zionist movement as it presents itself, as a liberation movement and not a settler colonial movement.” ⁷⁰ Although the claim concerning the indirect recognition of Zionism as a liberation movement is exaggerated, there is no doubt that the signing of the Oslo Accords led to the recognition of Zionism as a national movement and to a perception of the conflict as between two such movements rather than between a settler-colonial national movement and an indigenous national movement.

However, the events of recent years have brought the settler colonial paradigm back to the forefront. In addition to its growing visibility in the international sphere and its impact locally, the application of this paradigm in the Palestinian arena has been an intellectual development responsive to political and social change. Recourse to the settler colonial paradigm was associated with several interrelated factors: the failure of the Oslo Accords, the revival of the PLO’s status following the establishment of the Palestinian National Authority, the decline of the Palestinian nationalist and socialist political movements in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, the rising power of Hamas (the Islamic Jihad movement), the absence of a comprehensive national Palestinian project capable of challenging Israel, and the associated increase in the importance of Palestinian citizens of Israel in the resurgent dialogue between all parts of the Palestinian people (including the refugees and the diaspora).

The late 1990s witnessed a shift in Palestinian society in Israel. During the military rule and until nearly the mid-1990s, memories of the Nakba among Palestinians were suppressed, but through symbolic marches and the arts, the remembrance of the Nakba developed gradually into a public display of traumatic affect, leading to an eventual “return of history” in anticolonial political discourse, with a social movement demanding a state for all citizens. Following a period of ongoing struggle, the Nakba conception became a major force in the contemporary national and collective cultural consciousness among Palestinians in Israel, as well as in their political activism. The “return of history” of the Nakba to the public sphere and the tradition of the Nakba march that began in 1998, along with the loss of hope for an overall political settlement, brought back to the Palestinian national awareness the depth of the conflict and the perception of the Zionist movement and of Israel itself as a settler colonial project, a perception that had been widespread among the Palestinian community prior to 1948. ⁷¹ The perception became prominent in formulations of the “future vision documents” published by various Palestinian groups in Israel between 2006 and 2007 under the auspices of the National Committee and civil society. ⁷²

This revitalized consciousness also gained a footing among Palestinian researchers and academics in Israel, whose knowledge of Jewish society and culture and command of Hebrew enabled them to address the Zionist project in its own terms. ⁷³ Palestinian scholars of the second and third generations of the Nakba are playing a central role in theorizing and promoting the settler colonial paradigm among Palestinian students in Israeli universities and research centers, as well as in Palestinian academic circles in the West Bank. As the works of Ghanim, Mustafa and Ghanem, Sabbagh-Khoury, Nasasra, Abu-Saad, Shalhoub-Kevorkian, Amara, Tatour, Rouhana, Shihade, Saadi, Zreik, Jamal, Abu-Rabia-Queder, Nashif, and others illustrate, these are not merely individual efforts but rather constitute a collective endeavor, exploring these issues across research groups, seminars, and conferences. ⁷⁴

The first research group on settler colonialism inside Israel was launched in 2015 by Mada al-Carmel, the Arab Center for Applied Social Research in Haifa, ⁷⁵ bringing Palestinian graduate students from Israel and the West Bank together with prominent researchers in the field. A further initiative led also by a Palestinian scholar was based in the Humanities Center of Tel Aviv University. ⁷⁶ These initiatives are reshaping patterns of collaboration with academic institutions and Jewish researchers and are redirecting the flow of knowledge production. Seminars and workshops—formerly almost always conducted in Israeli institutions and in Hebrew—are now also conducted in Palestinian research centers in Arabic or English.

Although the number of Palestinian researchers who focus on the paradigm remains small (and the number of Palestinians in Israeli universities’ social science and humanities departments is still very limited), their presence in the Israeli academy is significantly more noticeable today than in previous years, and these collaborations are producing new forms of knowledge. Such developments represent a paradigmatic shift, accompanied by changes in methodology, corpuses of testimonies, and thematic emphases. Oral history methodologies are gaining increasing recognition: the process of listening to the stories of displaced Palestinians has increased the perception of the Zionist endeavor as a settler colonial project and added a countermemory to the hegemonic historical narrative. At the same time, new archival materials are being exposed and classified in relation to these stories (although the optimism of the 1990s turned out to be unfounded). ⁷⁷ Unlike previous Palestinian research, which has mostly been concerned with responses to the Zionist narrative, the new inquiries offer in-depth analyses of the history and reality of Palestine and the Palestinians, based on the voices of the subjugated and on the work of researchers who have shattered Zionist myths.

This work accentuates the settler colonial component, probing Zionist practices and developing theoretical frameworks that simultaneously address settlers and the indigenous Israelis and the Palestinians. It also unpacks the ways Palestinians navigated ongoing settler colonial processes over the last century, and rather than merely focusing on Zionist ideology, it centers on the phenomenon of indigenous resistance and the critique of Zionism and Zionist practices. Through their involvement in the struggle, and bringing their own experiences of oppression to bear, these scholars are introducing grounded spheres of indigenous knowledge into the settler colonial paradigm. In so doing, they concretely demonstrate that the Nakba, the Palestinian catastrophe, is an ongoing process rather than an exceptional event relegated to the past.

These developments are not unique to knowledge production in Israel. The Third World/Global South perspective has resulted in critical theorization in various research fields around the world; for example, in the past three decades, native/indigenous scholars in North America have argued that the history of genocide and extermination continues to constitute a major feature of the country and are making renewed claims for sovereignty or tribal sovereignty. ⁷⁸ Indeed, it could be argued that the use of the settler colonial paradigm in the Israeli context was enabled not only by changes in Palestinian society but also by analyses of the Israeli-Palestinian case carried out by prominent researchers in the West. Although the settler colonial paradigm influenced some of the work carried out by Palestinian and Arab scholars before the current phase, that earlier work was largely occluded from the canon in Israel and ignored by Western academia. As is often the case, colonial power relations were reproduced in the intellectual and academic field, as the work of Israeli and other Western scholars, particularly Ashkenazi or white ones, has been disseminated more broadly—even when that work reproduces analyses published by Palestinian scholars. ⁷⁹ That trend reflects the colonial (Zionist supremacist) and racial (white supremacist) dimensions of the hierarchization of Israeli academic knowledge, along with a touch of Eurocentrism and masculinity. Even among critical work, the hegemonic paradigm is often reflected in discussions of Israeli political structures, shaping who speaks for whom, by what means, for which audiences, and to what reception. These questions are all pertinent to the sociology of knowledge production. Said’s notion of “permission to narrate” articulates precisely what is at stake politically through the relationship between power and knowledge. ⁸⁰ Still, it would be difficult to trace the development of settler colonial studies had this theorizing not been adopted by Western theoreticians such as Patrick Wolfe, Caroline Elkins and Susan Pederson, Lorenzo Veracini, and others.

The Paradigm in Its Local Context: Relevance, Complexity, and Challenges

Among the new debates provoked by the settler colonial paradigm, questions about the character of popular struggle and its goals may be the most challenging. The national-Zionist narrative analyzes 1948 as a war between two national movements, obscuring the violent practices and colonization that preceded 1948, and limiting, if at all, any colonialist character to the Zionist occupation of Palestinian territories in 1967. ⁸¹ By contrast, the settler colonial paradigm brings the discussion back within the “borders” of the Green Line, reexamining the historical and continuing practices of Zionist settlement and the varied forms of resistance by the indigenous people. It brings attention to the organizing principle of the Zionist project, namely, the persistent desire to acquire and occupy land and to displace the indigenous population and replace it with Jewish settlers. Even those who allegedly adhered to a socialist and binationalist ideology were party to the forcible displacement of Palestinians, whether directly or indirectly. ⁸²

Examining the conflict through the lens of settler colonialism, Gadi Algazi argues, allows one to comprehend it as “a process and not an event,” an idea that he proposes to complement Wolfe’s well-known formula, “invasion is a structure, not an event.” ⁸³ This perspective, according to Sabbagh-Khoury, ⁸⁴ enables seeing the Nakba as a cumulative and ongoing process of displacement of the indigenous Palestinian population that began long before 1948, as opposed to viewing 1948 as the methodological “zero point.” The phrasing “a process and not an event,” I would argue, enables simultaneous tracing of both settlement practices and resistance by the indigenous—or what J. Kēhaulani Kauanui terms “enduring indigeneity” ⁸⁵ —incorporating the dynamism of social processes and restoring the place of the indigenous to history, two components that are not central in Wolfe’s account. The shift enables a view in which “the Nakba is ongoing” (al-nakba al-mustamirra), a political assertion now prevalent in Palestinian political discourse and in scholarly Arab writings.

Thus, while recognizing Zionism’s consistent logic regarding elimination and replacement of the indigenous, this perspective acknowledges that the implementation by Israel has shifted according to different and overlapping geographies or temporalities, for two fundamental reasons. First, there is no single overarching settler Zionist ideology. Despite the coherent and powerful organization of Zionism, there is some variation between the ideologies that prevailed in the Zionist colony before 1948, those during the 1948 war and after, those at play in 1967 occupation, and those in the post-1967 era. Current versions are generally dominated by a religious logic of colonization, a significant change from past iterations of Zionist thought. These dynamics within Zionism, together with the inception of Israeli sovereignty in 1948, arguably transformed the settler colonial structure(s). Second, and dialectically, changes have occurred in the historical and conceptual relations of the indigenous Palestinians to colonization, in their location on the land, and in their modes of resistance and their expressions of sovereignty through time. While the reconfigurations of Zionism may be incorporated within the sustained violence of the structure of settler colonialism, Palestinian resistance and survival disrupts this structure and shapes its transformation.

This dialectical process highlights one aspect of the Israeli-Palestinian case that is perhaps less explicit in most examples of settler colonialism—the rejection of assimilation of the natives. While the Israeli state demands loyalty from the indigenous Palestinian citizens of Israel, it does not aim to embrace them within the Jewish-Israeli framework of the nation, as its unifying factor is not Israeliness but Jewishness (which, in itself, has also undergone a major transformation). A further characteristic of the Zionist project is its reliance on religion and the connection of the Jewish people to Eretz Yisrael (the “Land of Israel”). ⁸⁶ However, the religious perception of Jews as “returnees” to a “promised land” does not detract from the settler colonial nature of the project, since its problematic aspect lies not in the “return” of the Jews or the constitution of the Jews as a ethno-national group but rather in their settling in (as opposed to immigrating to) a homeland that was and is inhabited by Palestinians. The Palestinians, as Rashid Khalidi shows in his study of the articulation of Palestinian identity during the Ottoman period (1908–14), ⁸⁷ were not opposed to the presence of Jews in Palestine but rather to the settler colonial features of Zionism and to its objective of establishing a national homeland for Jews in their own, that is, the Palestinian, homeland.

Another distinctive characteristic of the Israeli-Palestinian instance is, again, the specific and changing contours of Zionism and its successor, the State of Israel, and the extent to which they were profoundly shaped by their interaction with the indigenous people, through the political struggles of the latter and the various sub-Palestinian groups into which they were divided. Each group had its own struggle, but all were united in reclaiming either a part of the homeland (Palestinians in the 1967 Occupied Palestinian Territories) or recovering the entire homeland (primarily the Palestinians in Israel and the refugees). No other case of settler colonialism involves a convoluted situation of this kind, in which a section of the indigenous population became refugees, claiming the right to return to their homeland, while a considerable indigenous minority population became citizens, challenging the definition of the nation-state as exclusively for the settlers, as in the case of the Palestinians in Israel. Notwithstanding the major differences between the platforms of the political parties that represent them, they share the demand for egalitarian citizenship and the dismantling of ethnically prioritized Jewish privileges, and their decolonial struggles are distinguished by a resistance to war and militarism.

In some cases of setter colonialism, including Canada or the United States, federally recognized tribal nations exercise limited self-determination over their own citizens on their respective reservations. By contrast, Palestinian citizens in Israel challenge the very foundation of Israel as a Jewish state and demand a complete rearticulation of sovereignty over the entire homeland colonized in 1948 (which is not to argue that indigenous peoples elsewhere do not also contest settler sovereignty). ⁸⁸ This particular feature may be attributable to the fact that the Zionist movement emerged at a later stage than did other settler colonial projects; to the entanglement of the colonial project in the process of nation formation; and to the resistance of the indigenous people at a time when both the Palestinians and the Zionists were evolving as national groups. Further, unlike other cases of settler colonialism, Palestine was already tightly integrated into the capitalist world system. Whereas elsewhere the settler colonization process was concurrent with the establishment of modern state power, private property in land, and export-oriented commodity production, Palestine had already been incorporated into those structures when the Zionist movement launched its accumulation project in Palestine.

Although Zionist aspirations of establishing a homeland for the Jews predated the Holocaust, the genocide of European Jewry is yet another distinctive feature of the settler colonial project in Palestine. ⁸⁹ There are other cases of settlers who experienced persecution and discrimination, but in no other case had the settlers themselves experienced genocide. ⁹⁰ Importantly, the Zionist solution to the “Jewish question” had not always been the hegemonic position among world Jewry; but the Holocaust largely rendered alternative political options insignificant. Sympathy for the Jewish case within the international community generated by the persecution of the European Jews also increased international backing for the partition of Palestine between Palestinians (the majority of the population at the time) and Jews (then a minority). In parallel, antisemitism and the lack of welcome for Jewish immigration in North America, in addition to the previous waves of European colonization, inspired the Zionists to aspire to settle a separate territory and establish a sovereign state that would realize Jewish collective rights. Although independent settler nations would eventually develop in other cases of settler colonialism, the Zionist case is distinctive in that the settler colonial project was based on an aspiration for national self-determination that stemmed from the social and political persecution the settlers faced in their countries of prior residence. According to Elkins and Pederson, among settler colonial cases, the Zionist case is “the only case of successful settler nation building.” ⁹¹

Another unusual characteristic of the case is that the Zionist national narrative ignores the imperial matrix and instead emphasizes the context of anti-imperialism. ⁹² Paradoxically, Jewish-Israeli scholars discussing Jewish-Israeli society rarely draw on the ample research on empires and colonialism, including work done by Israeli academics. By contrast, analyzing the conflict from within the settler colonial paradigm highlights the Zionist movement’s relationship with metropolitan centers, particularly Britain, under whose auspices the Zionist project became viable—a reality generally denied in Zionist narratives, despite the 1917 Balfour Declaration and the significant support that ensued. Some settlers regarded themselves as natives, and a few groups even perceived themselves to be living under the control of a foreign imperial power. In this well-known narrative, the establishment of the state in 1948 is viewed as a process of gaining independence from British rule (the 1948 war was coined the “War of Independence”). However, this supposedly anticolonial aspect is another essential marker of settler colonialism, which according to Veracini is characterized by two core elements: the significance attributed by settlers to their autonomy from external settler agents (i.e., the metropolite or mother country) and the subordination of the natives. ⁹³ In order to determine that the British Empire is a critical component of the “theory of adequate causation and objective possibility” (in Weber’s terms), it is sufficient to ask, What would have happened if the Zionist movement had not received the support of the British Empire during the essential phases of the Mandate, and if the empire had not prevented the development of Palestinian proto-sovereign institutions while eroding the power of the Palestinian community during the Arab Revolt of 1936–39?

An earlier Arab and Palestinian tradition of analysis, which can be called “imperial,” ⁹⁴ indeed recognized the vital role of the empire’s support to the success of the Zionist movement. However, it often examined the conflict solely through the lens of imperial interests. From that perspective, local conflicts lose their importance. Conversely, the settler colonial paradigm emphasizes the Jewish settlers’ relative autonomy on the frontier in comparison with the British Empire. For Palestinians, analyzing the conflict in the framework of the settler colonial paradigm helps in understanding the defeat of 1948. The addition of the metropolitan factor, in conjunction with the role played by the League of Nations, underscores the fact that the Zionist project acquired much of its power from the dispersed metropole(s), which provided the political auspices for and much of the wealth behind the colonization enterprise.

These distinctions raise a series of questions, the most important of which is the future development of Palestinian liberation in light of the history of Zionist settler colonialism and the need for decolonization. On the one hand is the supposed “defeat” of the colonized as seen in the model of the United States, Australia, or Canada (which should not be viewed as absolute or final given the ongoing struggles of the indigenous peoples). On the other hand is the Algerian model, which saw the defeat of the colonizers and their return to their metropolitan sphere.

The Algerian case has been an important point of reference in the Israeli-Palestinian political context, as Palestinians have historically looked to Algeria as a successful model of the struggle for liberation and decolonization, which notably included the training the PLO received from Algerian nationalists during the 1970s. Yet scholars are ambivalent about including French Algeria in the settler colonial framework, mainly for two reasons. First, Wolfe’s framing of “invasion is a structure” assumes that settlers come to stay, whereas in French Algeria defeated settlers returned to France, with Algeria subsequently becoming a postcolonial nation. Second, the French settlers did not aim to replace the Algerians entirely, as they did in most other cases of setter colonialism. ⁹⁵ As an illuminating special issue of the journal Settler Colonial Studies titled “Settler Colonialism and French Algeria” argues, while there is good reason to include this instance in the settler colonial framework, connecting Algeria to ongoing scholarship on settler colonialism will require more labor.

For the Israeli context, at least for some, the Algerian model raises at least two pertinent questions. The first is whether the decolonization of Eretz Yisrael (historic Palestine) might mean the defeat of the settlers through violent liberation, potentially entailing the return of the Jewish Israelis to their countries of origin. The second relates to those who reflect on the 1967 paradigm, cautioning that mass armed resistance might be employed by Palestinians to end the occupation, resembling the violence of the Algerian war of independence (1954–62).

However, arguably, most Israelis see no resemblance between the two cases, since most Zionists do not perceive of themselves as colonial settlers. Others may reject the comparison with French Algeria because of its prior status as a colony across the sea from the colonial metropolis (France) rather than an ancestral land where the French lived before the Algerians, as Zionists understand the case of Jewish (re)settlement in Palestine. Furthermore, the French do not claim sacred places in the land of Algeria, a major difference with the Zionist movement (and subsequently Israel), which claims a historic-religious connection with the “land of Israel.”

Thus, the case of Palestine/Israel poses a challenge: since one cannot credibly speak of the “defeat” of the indigenous peoples (as the Palestinians continue to resist and demand to reconfigure the Israeli mode of sovereignty) or of the return of the Jewish immigrant-settlers to their countries of origin, a third model must be developed that comprehends the coexistence of these two groups. This context raises questions regarding alternative structures based not on Jewish privilege and Palestinian subjugation (whether under the Jewish state or under military occupation), and regarding processes of decolonization that might safeguard the national rights of both Israeli Jews and Palestinians. A theoretical model of this sort is currently growing in the hands of Palestinian researchers and political activists who are citizens of Israel, as well as among a few radical academic groups.

Another case study that might be brought into the discussion is that of settler colonialism and apartheid in South Africa, particularly regarding future outcomes of settler and indigenous relations. The settlers came to stay in South Africa, as they did in the case of Algeria, aiming not to entirely remove the indigenous but to exploit their workforce. Such juxtapositions between historical cases highlight the divergent qualities in settler colonialism as a land-centered project. The South African case needs to be further elaborated, first for the manner in which settler colonialism morphed into a new national entity, for the apartheid mechanisms of segregation and confinement of indigenous communities to enclaves, and for the mechanism of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) that is claimed to have continued the transition with relatively little violence, although such structure must also be critically evaluated. Apartheid has been probed from a comparative perspective in the Palestinian case primarily by Palestinian scholars (not necessarily in the framework of the settler colonial paradigm) and is popular among Palestinian activists. ⁹⁶ However, mechanisms of decolonization have not yet been thoroughly excavated. ⁹⁷ The comparison to apartheid has been made beyond juridical stances, through both sociological and anticolonial means. The generative works of both Ran Greenstein and Mona Younis are pertinent in this regard. ⁹⁸ Greenstein relates to the structures of class, identity, and state formation, arguing that South Africa’s political case emerged through an incorporationist (though fractured) manner, while in the case of Israel/Palestine the historical formations became more exclusionary. Younis draws on the comparison between the Palestinian national liberation movement and the African National Congress in South Africa, examining the commensurable tools used by each liberation group (boycotts, popular committees, etc.) and identifying the relative failures of the PLO and the PA (Palestinian Authority) when compared to South Africa. Both analyses are useful with regard to the comparative study of settler colonial and indigenous societies, wherein they center on state processes and structural conditions of racial hierarchy, as well as on popular mobilizations and practices of resistance.

Transnational political support should be articulated alongside intellectual trends by drawing on decolonial contexts, although they may be distinct. Palestinians have garnered inspiration from the struggle against apartheid in South Africa, which is partly reflected in the goals of the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) movement: “Inspired by the South African anti-apartheid movement, the BDS call urges action to pressure Israel to comply with international law.” ⁹⁹ Still, the enduring settler colonialism in the case of Palestine may be prohibiting the development of similar “resolution” tactics (such as a TRC) as in the case of South Africa. Scholars also must be attentive to the residues of colonial domination that continue to structure, or reconfigure, South African inequality. ¹⁰⁰ Notably, the South African TRC’s process and impact had real limitations and did not deal with, for example, reparations. Nevertheless, the comparison might be useful in the framework of a developing decolonization literature, to explore new trajectories for resistance and to animate possible future solutions, even as it may not be a model given South Africa’s deficiencies in truly redressing colonization.

Despite the settler colonial structure and the enduring hostility, which is especially explicit during times of crisis, Palestinian and Jewish societies in Israel have nonetheless developed close human connections. A phenomenological analysis of the encounter between the two societies unveils the complexity of their relationship, which is interwoven with multiple contradictions, and also outlines theoretical possibilities for decolonization. In other words, the development of the settler colonial paradigm is crucial not only in reflecting the political reality but also in considering possibilities that are not bound to the existing research and to political hegemony. Since settler colonialism captures both the settlers and the natives (including the researchers) in their hierarchical relationships, the sociology of knowledge I have described thus far—and the phenomenology presented below—offer possibilities for the deconstruction of such relationships, while illuminating alternatives for coexistence.

By an indigenous approach I mean one that incorporates the critical work of indigenous scholars whose conceptual work and intellectual labor inform activism and sociopolitical discourse and challenge epistemic violence. An indigenous approach makes visible the ongoing structure of settler colonialism and reflects on what Kauanui calls the “enduring indigeneity” of the colonized, not merely to ensure that the colonized voices are raised within academic analyses but rather to decolonize and dismantle settler colonialism and build a just political situation.

Sociology as an intellectual practice is not disconnected from the wider political arena; knowledge production is bound up with power. ¹⁰¹ My articulation as such is inspired by, although it extends, Marxist analysis in the following two ways. First, Marx and Engels argue that ruling ideas are simply an “ideal expression” of the regnant material relationships. ¹⁰² We must keep this in mind to understand the formation of hegemonic knowledge. Settler colonialism, after all, allows the settler to dominate material (not solely class in a capitalist sense), cultural, and ideological resources. Yet, and second, Louis Althusser’s intervention adds the impetus of revolution/resistance: that philosophy is an inherently political tool for class struggle, which we can extend to academic knowledge in general and to other struggles. He writes, “In scientific and philosophical reasoning, the words (concepts, categories) are ‘instruments’ of knowledge. But in political, ideological and philosophical struggle, the words are also weapons, explosives or tranquillizers and poisons.” ¹⁰³ In this way, knowledge production is an indispensable tool for struggle. Althusser accentuates that the intellectuals of the proletariat must perform a radical revolution in their thoughts in order to ideate for the working class. As settler colonialism is a struggle of materialism, I argue in a parallel way that critical intellectuals, especially indigenous scholars, must carry out a radical theorizing, especially if disruptive to the colonial apparatus. Just as “Marxist-Leninist philosophy is therefore one of the two theoretical weapons indispensable to the class struggle of the proletariat,” ¹⁰⁴ so too is the critical settler colonial paradigm indispensable to the indigenous struggle of liberation and decolonization. If we ponder Marx, Engels, and Althusser together, we can better comprehend the indispensability of seemingly esoteric trends and trajectories of intellectual knowledge production that are predicated on subaltern sociopolitical positions and experiences. While it is the political praxis (including the “return of history” and international solidarity) that allows for the intellectual change, it is the scholar’s role (beside the activists’) to propel thoughts into political actions and contribute to the articulation of just political projects. As Yara Hawari, Sharri Plonski, and Elian Weizman argue, the settler colonial framework is a necessary tool in anticolonial liberation praxis and decolonization. ¹⁰⁵

The intellectual, thereby, is implicated as a subject with great responsibility. In this sense, Antonio Gramsci articulates the role of the “organic intellectual” in countering hegemony (while for him it will always be the mass who can precipitate revolution), and Said sees a powerful role for the intellectual as someone who can contest conventions and institutions, and be wholly invested in critique, for a public. ¹⁰⁶ Here, too, feminist thought and theory becomes crucial, as its analytical innovation has been its implications for transforming the public space and for its articulation of a feminist liberation project. In the tradition of feminist thought, scholarship works toward identifying structural conditions and social constructions of gender, critiquing masculinist power and patriarchy and centering the subjectivity that has been poignantly absent from much intellectual criticism. ¹⁰⁷ This certainly is not a departure from struggling over material conditions but a way of reflecting on additional frames that structure society: gender, sexuality, and race, which are contingent formations that interact and intersect divergently across geographies and temporalities. ¹⁰⁸ As Raewyn Connell has exemplified in her work on feminism, the circulation of knowledge is political; education is often the most crucial tool in contesting hegemony. ¹⁰⁹ In a similar vein, we must recognize how the circulation of the settler colonial paradigm not only contributes to an indictment of power structures but counters with a different way of being in the world, a model of relations and sociality predicated on the disposal of colonial privileges and the envisioning of a just future for all.

A Decolonizing Lens: Toward a Phenomenology of Relations between Palestinian Citizens in Israel and Israeli Society

Military rule and the associated restrictions on movement that were imposed on the Palestinian citizens in Israel often hindered the development of direct relationships between Palestinians and Jews in Israel. Such relationships slowly began to develop during the 1960s, with the gradual and partial decrease of supervision, among colleagues and in workplaces, trade, universities, hospitals, etc. These relations are more common between Palestinians and Israelis who live in what are known as “mixed cities.” Although interactions remain limited in scope, Palestinians in Israel have developed both an external and an internal standpoint—socially, culturally, and politically—toward Jewish Israelis, through personal, professional, and familial relationships and by being part of the social and political fabric in Israel. The engagement of Palestinians in Israel’s political system contributed significantly to shaping their comprehension of the community of the “other,” a community whose language and culture they know far better than Jewish citizens of Israel know the language and culture of the Palestinian community.

The encounter between Palestinians in Israel and Jewish Israelis is markedly different from that between Jewish Israelis and Palestinians in the 1967 Occupied Palestinian Territories, as the latter is based on military occupation. The latter is an encounter that usually takes place in checkpoints, blockades, and prisons and in confrontations with soldiers and settlers. From the standpoint of Palestinians in those locations, Jewish citizens/settlers are first and foremost the enemy and the colonizer. However, the situation is more complicated for Palestinians in Israel, for whom members of the Jewish community may be colleagues, clients, patients, therapists, doctors, students, or teachers with whom they interact daily.

The experience of Palestinians in Israel is also profoundly different from that of Palestinian refugees in the diaspora, for whom Israeli Jews are the invaders who appropriated their homes and homeland. From the standpoint of many Palestinian refugees, time remains frozen in 1948. In a study conducted by Yasir Suleiman, when Palestinians from the diaspora were asked to describe how they envision Palestine and their exile, their answers imagined Palestine without a Jewish presence. ¹¹⁰ Although they regard Israeli Jews as invaders and occupiers, when they envision Palestine, the Jewish daily existence does not form part of their consciousness. Asking Palestinians in Israel the same questions would likely yield different results. The perception of time and space for the Palestinians in Israel has been shaped in part by their interactions with the Israeli Jews, in a Palestinian space that has undergone a deep and yet partial transformative process of erasure and destruction.

In light of this, we can understand why Palestinians in Israel were among the first Palestinians to advance visions of binationalism, which they did in the late-1990s. ¹¹¹ They proposed an intellectual debate about the possibility of transforming the settlers into natives and using the framework of decolonization to articulate historical options of reconciliation, with the binational state model as a moral and practical framework. ¹¹² I would argue that those propositions reflect the political positionality of Palestinians in Israel as a relatively privileged group in comparison with those who live under the 1967 Occupation or as refugees; they also reflect the fact that Palestinians in Israel are able to contemplate the position of the colonizers and their future, despite the oppressive apparatus of the state toward them and the involvement of Jewish citizens in that apparatus. ¹¹³

Furthermore, Palestinians in Israel arguably have the strongest investment in a civil resistance, especially compared to other Palestinian communities, whether in the occupied territories or the refugee population. Palestinians in Israel, as a minority population, have a structural interest in abolishing the settler colonial apparatus while retaining the economic and professional advantages they have acquired as citizens.

In the Palestinian National Charter of the PLO, the Jews in Palestine were perceived as a religious community rather than a national group. In contrast, a number of Palestinian researchers in Israel are currently promoting the settler colonial paradigm, while simultaneously raising a debate on the need to recognize the Jewish Israeli community as a national group within the framework of decolonization and the necessary relinquishment by Jewish Israelis of some of their privileges. Within this discussion, the researchers distinguish between the recognition of Zionism and the recognition of its products. Their arguments have gained some traction within Israel and among Palestinians in the West Bank and the diaspora. However, these positions, which are also expressed in future vision documents published by Palestinian organizations in Israel discussing the collective rights of Israeli Jews, are often received with understandable criticism from Palestinians living under occupation in the West Bank. ¹¹⁴

In Bordieuan terms, the Palestinian citizens in Israel have developed cultural and social capital, which they can use to study Israel and Zionism. Many of the Palestinians (in general) who are studying Israel and Zionism are Palestinians in Israel who know Israeli culture and the Hebrew language well, and who enjoy relative ease of access to Israeli archives. They are not only engaged in research and academic projects in Israel, but also in projects in the 1967 Occupied Palestinian Territories, such as those of MADAR (the Palestinian Forum for Israeli Studies in Ramallah), Masarat, the Palestinian Center for Policy Research and Strategic Studies in Ramallah, the Institute for Palestinian Studies in Ramallah, and the Israeli Studies Master’s Degree Program at Birzeit University.

There is virtually no comparable process in Jewish-Israeli society, even in the academic field. Most Jews perceive themselves as the owners of the homeland, which they regard as exclusively their own. They do not view themselves as colonizers and do not recognize the indigeneity of Palestinians, or even the collective rights of Palestinians in Israel as a national group; at best, they see Palestinians in Israel as strangers with Israeli citizenship who are granted liberal political rights within the Jewish state.

What would change if the settler colonial paradigm became more widely adopted across Israeli society? I am not arguing for an essentialist approach here but rather for an epistemological one: there are specific conditions in which the colonizers might deviate from their position, give up their colonial position and privileges, and initiate an egalitarian dialogue. Knowledge of Arabic as one of the languages of the shared space would encourage or accelerate the process of decolonization.

Conclusion

Post-Zionism, critical sociology, postcolonialism, and the settler colonial paradigm constitute diverging yet intersecting approaches to the study of Palestine/Israel. The first three approaches originated in the settler colonial society itself. The fourth, conversely, was shaped by a unique position: on the margins of but also within the settler society. Within the current, renewed phase of the settler colonial paradigm in Israel, scholars ponder ways to incorporate indigenous theory into historical and sociological research in challenging the roots of the settler colonial project. The knowledge and power alliance is inescapable; the cross-fertilization between an indigenous-led anticolonial theory and political praxis addressing the settler colonial paradigm can be an avenue toward redress.

However, the settler colonial paradigm is still in its infancy, and much more work remains to be done to establish and consolidate it. One of the justified criticisms that has been leveled against the paradigm lies in its focus on the theorization of settlers and their colonial practices, which in turn reproduces the marginalization of the indigenous and fixates on a binary of settler and native. Critics argue for a greater focus to be placed on indigenous studies, in order to shed light on the history of indigenous peoples, their experiences, their resistance, and their knowledge production, rather than on their elimination or on the “structure” itself. In this regard, Barakat, Warrior, Kauanui, and other indigenous scholars argue that settler colonialism as a structure alone does not provide a way to address the generations-long dynamic of anticolonial survival and resistance. Each argues that settler colonial studies should not substitute for indigenous studies, as it has sometimes been taken up in North American scholarship. ¹¹⁵

Another important criticism is that the institutionalization of the paradigm as a distinct subfield forecloses connections with other fields of study such as imperialism and social formations. ¹¹⁶ The settler colonial paradigm should not come at the expense of indigenous/native studies, but rather should supplement such work by identifying settler practices and the apparatuses that allow settler colonialism to operate materially and culturally. In a similar vein, the academicization of the “question of Palestine,” without a coherent liberation project, risks presenting settler colonialism as a merely conceptual debate, that Palestine and Palestinians might become simply objects to think and theorize about. In the light of the decline of the political movements along with the fracture of Palestinian leadership in the 1967 Occupied Palestinian Territories, scholarship should be accompanied by—or itself produced as—a liberation praxis for all Palestinians.

While the settler colonial paradigm encompasses a variety of standpoints, the lifting up of indigenous lenses might particularly change the way we understand the case of Israel/Palestine and the perspectives of different actors. Palestinian scholarship might reshape the debate by redirecting critique to center on both subjectivities and structures. For the Palestinian citizens in Israel, Jewish Israelis are both consociates—those with whom they maintain shared spaces and interactions—and contemporaries: those more distant who are not encountered every day. ¹¹⁷ Citizenship is a realm of shared political space, albeit asymmetrical. Palestinian citizens, therefore, have a particular “second sight,” enabled through their own “double consciousness,” deserving of epistemic privileging. ¹¹⁸ It is through this second sight that Palestinians, and other indigenous subjects, approach scholarship. This is not a call for an entrenched identity politics, but rather a comment on what indigenous knowledge reveals—through not merely identity but also subject position. Subject position is relational and contingent, and the subjectivity, as in scholarship writ large, inflects knowledge production. It is through encounters with settler colonizers and the apparatus of the state that the Palestinians in Israel are situated to theorize settler colonialism critically and work toward its dismantling. Just as Du Bois derived a microanalysis of subjectivity and macroanalysis of colonialism and capitalism from his situatedness in those exact formations, so too do Palestinian scholars draw on their phenomenological relations and ontological presence as a point of departure. It is the circulation of knowledge between and among global intellectual communities that will consolidate the analysis of Israeli and Palestinian societies through the settler colonial paradigm.

It is too early to predict whether the settler colonial paradigm possesses the power to adequately challenge Zionist hegemony in the various fields of research. However, historical and political transformations in the Israeli-Palestinian context have made it difficult to continue to disregard or dismiss it. First, the rise of the paradigm and its incorporation into the Palestinian consciousness are linked to the transformation of the political relations between Palestinian citizens in Israel and the State of Israel. Second, the current academic landscape is different from that which prevailed during the era of the post-Zionists/new historians, critical sociology, and postcolonial studies. Then, discussions about 1948, the Nakba, and the memory of expulsion were not part of a political project; today, the labor of Palestinian scholars and students in Israel, like the Palestinian collective political presence itself, is becoming more visible.

For now, the settler colonial paradigm is the work of a relatively small group of scholars, but their numbers are increasing rapidly, in part because it is becoming a project of collective study carried out in cooperation with international scholars, not the theoretical occupation of few isolated individuals. The arguments discussed in this article crucially could have come about only in this current political moment: they would not have been received as seriously in past decades. The “return of history,” a distinctly contingent occurrence, has allowed Palestinians to articulate their imbrication in settler colonial structures politically. Palestinians are in a relatively new position to decolonize knowledge, and that position reflects the research agenda, priorities, and reception. Despite the growing restrictions and political limitations placed on academic freedom in Israel, Palestinian and Israeli scholars continue to challenge the Zionist narrative.

One of the challenges facing these scholars is to counteract the localization and exceptionalism of the existing research on Palestine/Israel. This would require further explorations of (in)commensurabilities to other settler colonial cases and the generation of forms of knowledge relevant to other formations paired with indigenous studies. Palestine instantiates a crucible for different domains of oppression, domination, and resistance, as well as for the formation of national groups. Could the settler colonial paradigm illuminate the study of the colonized, similar to the work and influence of anticolonial intellectuals like Frantz Fanon, W.E.B. Du Bois, and Aimé Césaire, for example, wherein intellectual production has been used to challenge existing hegemonic paradigms and generate new theoretical modes of inquiry? What the settler colonial paradigm allows for is a recognition that despite the distinctiveness of settler colonial cases, each maintains trans-state and transhistorical linkages between the role of imperialism and colonialism in forming much of our global political structures.

It is the role of the (public) sociologist to identify commonalities and differences, to comprehend how destructive settler colonial governmentality operates, to draw commensurabilities transcending their colonized contexts, and to articulate collective struggles for liberation. A critical dialogue between social-political theory and the settler colonial paradigm could generate a new epistemological terrain, not only to break epistemic violence but to engender alternative paths and facilitate political venues for decolonization. Paired with indigenous theory, the settler colonial paradigm could form the basis of a different politics. This different politics is not a social justice–oriented project but one that shakes up settler privileges and innocence, assuages indigenous being, and seeks redress. ¹¹⁹ The settler colonial paradigm could renew impetus for a project of emancipation for both Palestinians from their colonial existence and the Israelis from their colonial subjectivity and privileged positionality, recognizing incommensurabilities in how the latter have materially benefited. It is an unsettling approach to the core logics subtending the enduring colonization—material conditions, such as replacement and land dispossession, rather than merely ethnic, religious, or national realms: that is, both an epistemological and a material project. I argue for the possibility for knowledge to transform material existences, recognizing the deep limitations of ideas to change material conditions. The settler colonial paradigm carries the possibility for theorizing what a future just society and decolonized infrastructure must entail.