Israel-Palestine and the Settler Colonial ‘Turn’: From Interpretation to Decolonization

Abstract

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.

Keywords

colonialism decolonization Israel Palestine

There is yet no language of decolonisation pertaining to settler colonial contexts: when the focus is on decolonisation, settler colonialism remains off the radar; when settler colonialism as a specific colonial form is acknowledged, it is decolonisation that is excised from the interpretive picture. (Veracini, 2007)

Recent years have witnessed the consolidation of settler colonial studies as its own field of scholarly inquiry. Centrally grounded on Patrick Wolfe’s (1999) highly influential account of settler colonialism, which leverages from the premise that in settler societies ‘invasion is a structure, not an event’, settler colonial studies conceives of settler colonialism as a ‘global and transnational phenomenon’ that is ‘as much a thing of the past as a thing of the present’ (Cavanagh and Veracini, 2013: 1). According to the framework, the key distinction between colonialism and settler colonialism is that the former is organized around a logic of exploitation while the latter is characterized by a logic of elimination. In contrast to the colonizer who seeks the labour of the colonized, the settler colonizer instead seeks their land, with the elimination of the native part and parcel of the settler’s attempt to replace them. The recent boom in settler colonial studies, including a proliferation of publications and the establishment of a dedicated journal, has seen settler colonialism emerge as a key theoretical framework with which to engage contemporary colonial legacies, and has invited a variety of comparative projects seeking to explore the dynamics of settler domination and indigenous subjugation in various contexts, most commonly Australia, Canada, the United States and New Zealand.

One of the most interesting developments in this academic trend is the current groundswell in the application of the settler colonial paradigm to the conflict in Israel-Palestine. While settler colonialism is by no means a new modality of interpreting the conflict, having figured in Palestinian, anti-Zionist and Marxist analyses since at least the 1920s (see Pappe, 2015), the recent ‘settler colonial turn’ (Collins, 2011) is characterized by a number of distinctive features, not least of which is the ways in which it brings Israel and its relationship to the Palestinians into direct comparative focus alongside New World white settler states. This turn, the article suggests, cannot be read outside of the growing internationalization of the Palestinian cause, by which I mean the slow but steady overturning of the default sympathy traditionally granted to Israel in favour of an increasing identification with the Palestinians. The burgeoning popularity of the settler colonial paradigm is both reflective of and instrumental in this shift, which has seen the Palestinian struggle gain an unprecedented legitimacy in progressive circles, especially in the West.

This article argues that settler colonialism as an interpretive paradigm holds powerful conceptual and pedagogical implications for reframing understandings of the conflict in Israel-Palestine, which have been typically fragmented and frequently mythologized in the international arena. Not only does it provide a coherent and legible frame with which to make sense of Israeli-Palestinian relations, but it also offers a far more accurate portrayal of the conflict than the picture of Palestinian criminality and Israeli victimhood that has conventionally been painted. Ilan Pappe (2012: 40–1) suggests that settler colonialism remains the most useful paradigmatic perspective on Israel-Palestine to date. I would add that it is also the most potentially productive because it suggests that conventional models of conflict resolution are ill equipped to deal with the conflict’s colonial dimensions, proposing instead that any ‘solution’ be framed by a project of decolonization.

Yet, it is precisely in its prescription for decolonization that the settler colonial model encounters its theoretical partialities and normative limitations in Israel-Palestine. This is due, I argue, to the dominance of Wolfe’s structural account of settler colonialism and the specific meanings the paradigm has come to acquire by virtue of the particular contexts in which it is typically articulated: New World white settler societies with small indigenous populations. On the one hand, Wolfe’s vision of settler colonialism is effectively zero-sum, leaving little room for transformation beyond opposition – a critique that has been mounted against settler colonial studies more generally (e.g. Rowse, 2014; Snelgrove et al., 2014; Svirsky, 2014). On the other hand, the deep distaste for settler nationalism and commitment to preserve the settler/native binary in settler colonial studies – both of which make a great deal of sense in New World settings – leave certain issues under-examined in the Israeli-Palestinian context. In particular, they gloss over the national dimensions of the conflict, which prompt difficult questions of Israeli rights to self-determination as a settler collective, and hinder reflection on the political implications of the settler/native distinction as applied to Israelis and Palestinians, which are not as straightforward as they may be in other locations. If the settler colonial paradigm is to deliver on its most counter-hegemonic promises in Israel-Palestine, I argue, scholars must be willing to engage issues that uncomfortably sit on the edge of its typical parameters.

The article begins by mapping the re-emergence of the settler colonial paradigm. Section Two engages the transnational implications of the settler colonial turn, focusing on the ways in which the reframing of the conflict promotes sympathy for and solidarity with the Palestinian cause. Section Three explores the prescription for decolonization implicit to the settler colonial paradigm, which is politically powerful in the context of Israel-Palestine yet rendered theoretically dubious by a faithful adherence to the framework. Section Four considers what Wolfe and Veracini, as the emblematic figures in settler colonial studies, have to say with regard to possible ‘solutions’ to the conflict. While they present very different depictions of the possibilities of decolonization in Israel-Palestine, I suggest that both are bounded by certain presumptions that flow from New World contexts, which are reductive of the peculiar nationalist dimensions of Zionism and fail to fully address the political resonances of the distinction between settler and native in that context.

Israel-Palestine and the Settler Colonial ‘Turn’

‘The characterisation of Zionism as a colonial project’, Uri Ram (1993: 327) writes, ‘is probably as old as the Zionist movement’ itself. Since well before the establishment of the State of Israel in 1948, Palestinians have regarded Zionism as a colonial settler ideology that has sought to expel them from their land, with the expansionist aim to claim all of historic Palestine as a Jewish state (e.g. Hilal, 1976; Said, 1979; Sayegh, 2012 [1965]). Drawing attention to the ways in which Zionism is historically and ideologically legitimated by European colonialism, as well as its close ties to British imperialism in the Arab world, Palestinians have emphasized Zionism’s unique status as a settler colonialism sans metropole driven by diasporic nationalism and a desire for racial exclusivity – a desire which has been enacted violently and with disastrous consequences for Palestinian society. The notion that Zionism is settler colonialist and Israel a colonial implant in the Middle East became widely accepted in western radical circles in the 1960s and 1970s (e.g. Rodinson, 1973). While some peripheral groups in Israel had deemed Zionism a colonial and imperial enterprise, most notably the revolutionary socialist organization Matzpen (see Bober, 1972), it was not until the wake of the Six Day War in 1967 and subsequent settlement project in the occupied territories that Israelis came in any substantive way to tussle with the colonial aspects of the state. The so-called ‘colonization perspective’ – often associated with the New Historians (e.g. Morris, 1988; Pappe, 1992) – emerged in the 1980s and received some legitimacy in the 1990s for its framing of Israel as a colonial-settler society and its willingness to examine the colonial character of Zionist settlement in historic Palestine (see Ram, 1993). In contrast to the ‘Jewish bubble’ (Ehrlich, 1987) of conventional Israeli scholarship, scholars working within the colonization perspective sought to bring to the fore the Israeli-Palestinian relation as constitutive of Israeli society, variously driving patterns of land acquisition (Kimmerling, 1983) and labour market relations (Shafir, 1989).

The description of Israel as a settler colonial society, and Zionism as a settler colonial project, thus has a long heritage in the context of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, as has the notion that the achievement of the Zionist national project has been predicated on the destruction of the Palestinian one (e.g. Abdo and Yuval-Davis, 1995). The particular value accorded to land in Zionist colonization, as opposed to the creation of surplus value from native labour, has similarly been noted as integral to Jewish settlement in Palestine (e.g. Hilal, 1976). What is peculiar, however, to the current resurgence of settler colonialism in scholarship on Israel-Palestine is its connections to the rapid institutionalization of settler colonial studies, which has seen settler colonialism accrue particular meanings as a phenomenon structurally distinct from (but still entangled with) colonialism. For Lorenzo Veracini (2010: 2–15), settler colonialism must be distinguished as a form of migration distinct from colonial or imperial migrations, insofar as settlers carry their sovereignty with them and assert it in a new land made by conquest. As a ‘global and genuinely transnational phenomenon’ with a ‘pan-European’ disposition (Veracini, 2010: 2), settler colonialism has a number of unique characteristics which are connected to its (striving for) permanent exogenous domination of native populations, including certain mythologies concerning settler/indigenous difference, an ambivalent relationship to the metropole, the settler need to craft an ‘indigenized’ identity and a preoccupation with violence and militarism.

It is Wolfe’s work, however, that constitutes the cornerstone of settler colonial studies, and is particularly revealing of new trajectories in theorizing settler colonialism in the Israeli-Palestinian context. For Wolfe (1994: 93), settler colonialism is not a question of origins but the ‘primary structural characteristic of settler society’; that is to say, the moment of invasion sets in place a historically continuous structure ‘predicated on displacing indigenes from (or replacing them on) the land’. While there is a complex interplay of race, gender, religion, ethnicity and civilizational discourse in settler colonial practices and ideologies, it is thus territory that is ‘settler colonialism’s specific, irreducible element’ (2006: 388). The drive for access to territory initiates a structure governed by a logic of elimination, which is ‘a sustained institutional tendency to eliminate the indigenous population [and] informs a range of historical practices that might otherwise appear distinct’ (1999: 163). The logic of elimination is absolutely central to Wolfe’s account, laying out a structurality he himself contrasts with the emphasis on European imperialism in Maxime Rodinson’s (1973) Israel: A Colonial Settler State? (2012: 286). On the one hand, the logic of elimination is omnipresent in settler colonial societies, and does not simply manifest in the physical eradication of indigenous bodies but undergoes strategic transformations, driving ostensibly diverse settler colonial strategies like segregation, miscegenation, religious conversion, incarceration and assimilation, as well as the construction of various racial regimes and racialized categories (see Wolfe, 2011). On the other hand, it institutes a ‘fundamental polarity’ wherein relations between settler and native are entrapped by the ‘binary logic of the frontier’, rendering the two identities categorically distinct (1994: 98). As opposed to scholarship concerned with mapping different typologies of settler-indigenous encounters and identities, then, Wolfe’s (2012: 135) account seeks to prioritize the ‘totality of dispossession’ for native peoples in settler colonial contexts – thus the primacy of the logic of elimination.

The analytical and political appeal of settler colonial studies for scholarship on Israel-Palestine is evident, given its grounding on an enriched and revitalized reworking of older accounts of settler colonialism. There has been great excitement within Palestine studies in particular as to the possibilities presented by the settler colonial paradigm, with recent years witnessing a veritable boom in publications, panels and conferences adopting settler colonialism as the defining framework. Omar Salamanca et al. (2012) note that the structural emphasis of settler colonial studies has particular significance in the Palestinian context. Given the various phases of the conflict and subsequent splintering of the Palestinian populace (West Bankers, Jerusalemites, Gazans, citizens of Israel, refugees and diaspora), the settler colonial paradigm offers a holistic perspective that brings to the forefront the systematic pattern of Zionist colonization vis-à-vis the Palestinians. Importantly, it presents al-Nakba (the catastrophe), in which some 750,000 Palestinians were forcibly displaced following the establishment of the Israeli state, as both a continuation of the colonization that preceded it and an ongoing reality shaping Palestinian society and Israeli-Palestinian relations.

Scholars have employed the settler colonial paradigm to engage and illuminate different aspects of the conflict, ranging from contradictions in Zionist discourse (Lloyd, 2012) to the steady support offered to Israel by its international settler colonial counterparts like the United States and Australia (Chomsky and Pappe, 2015). There have even been efforts to interpret ancient Israel in settler colonial terms, reading the settler colonialist drive towards violence and genocide into the biblical texts legitimating the Zionist project in Eretz Yisrael (Pitkänen, 2014). The paradigm has garnered particular interest from scholars working on Palestinians citizens of Israel, who have sought to document the unique forms of settler colonial control the Israeli state adopts in relation to its Arab populations and the rising centrality of al-Nakba in Palestinian citizenship struggles (e.g. Jamal, 2011; Rouhana and Sabbagh-Khoury, 2014), as well as the particular circumstances of Bedouin battling the Judaization of the Naqab/Negev desert in southern Israel (e.g. Nasasra, 2012). Significantly, much of this scholarship has been published in the Settler Colonial Studies journal, which has had three special issues dedicated to Israel-Palestine since Veracini first (co-) founded it in 2011.¹

Comparative analysis has, however, been the defining characteristic of this new wave of scholarship, with comparison widely heralded as an indispensable means with which to undo the discourse of exceptionality that has long framed the conflict (Lloyd, 2012; Piterberg, 2013). As much as earlier literature also drew parallels between Israel’s treatment of the Palestinians and societies with settler colonial dimensions like Australia and apartheid South Africa (Ram, 1993), with the latter in particular inspiring significant scholarship engaging the parallels between the legal-political regimes of separatism and theologically inspired racial superiority in the two countries (e.g. Akenson, 1992), scholarship mounted within the settler colonial paradigm has sought to substantively bring Israel into direct comparison with places where indigenous peoples have been violently dispossessed and incorporated into settler states. While, in theory, settler colonial studies is open to broad sites of comparison – Wolfe (2012: 86) claims that he aspires to a ‘general account of settler colonialism … able to include relationships such as those between Chinese and Tibetans, Tswana and Khoi-San, Russians and Chechens and Indonesians and Papuans [as well as] the Irish, Basque or Sami peoples’ – in practice there is a particularly strong emphasis on white European settler colonialisms in Australasia and the Americas where the logic of elimination – as opposed to the logic of exploitation – features most heavily.² This tendency is similarly evident in comparative work on Israel-Palestine. Notwithstanding comparisons with the Basel Mission in West Africa and pre-Zionist Christian colonization in Palestine (Pappe, 2008), the vast majority of contemporary comparative analysis has centred on three sites: Australia, Canada and the United States. Australia and Israel, for example, have been compared with regard to their mutual disavowal of the founding violence constitutive of their respective states (Veracini, 2003; Farid, 2010) and the militarization of their respective nationalisms (Sahhar, 2015). The similarities in the gendered, racialized and sexualized aspects of the settler colonial projects in Israel and Canada have been analysed, with a focus on the dynamics of (queer and non-queer) native struggles (Krebs and Olwan, 2012; Morgensen, 2012). The ideology of manifest destiny so crucial to the mythology of Northern American settlement has been brought into comparison with the biblical justifications of Zionism, as have the affective connections between Palestinians and Native Americans by virtue of their mutual dispossession (Mikdashi, 2012; Salaita, 2006; Waziyatawin, 2012). And with a special forum in American Quarterly, the paradigm has even been stretched to compare the situation of Palestinians with Chicano/a incorporated into the US Southwest following the American victory in the 1848 Mexican-American war (see Lloyd and Pulido, 2010; also Lubin, 2008; Sánchez and Pita, 2014).

(Re)framing the Conflict

If the settler colonial paradigm has done much to bring back and crystallize settler colonialism as a key interpretive framework in Palestinian and Israeli scholarship (Salamanca et al., 2012: 2), its main significance arguably lies in the broader arena of the international. While the 1960s and 1970s saw a reasonable amount of international solidarity for the Palestinian cause as an anti-colonial struggle, particularly in relation to the Third World movement, it is nevertheless Israel that has historically commanded greater support and had most influence on discourse concerning the conflict (Said, 1979). The accusation of colonialism leveraged against Zionism has generally been received with great repugnance by Jewish Israelis (save for a minority of scholars and activists), and is often portrayed as either an attack on the legitimacy of the State of Israel or evidence of anti-Semitism. This manoeuvre – commonly employed in Israeli public diplomacy (hasbara) efforts and by pro-Israel advocates – has been relatively successful in keeping the colonial question out of the international arena. The World Trade Center terrorist attacks in 2001 also augmented the strong documented western media bias against the Palestinians, wherein the Israelis are portrayed as peaceful and willing to compromise and the Palestinians as unreasonable and belligerent (Finkelstein, 2003). With Israel negotiating the violence of the second Intifada around the same time as the ‘War on Terror’ was mounted, the Palestinian cause was easily aligned with Islamic terrorism in the western media, with Israel in turn portrayed as on the frontlines of the supposed ‘clash of civilizations’.

In this regard, the settler colonial paradigm offers a radically different framing of the conflict than what has come to be fairly standard in the international arena. Framing, in social movement theory, is not about ideas ‘but ways of packaging and presenting ideas that generate shared beliefs, motivate collective action and define appropriate strategies of action’ (Merry, 2006: 41). As a repackaging of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, the settler colonial paradigm is incredibly important as an alternative vocabulary that not just reduces its exceptionality but is also comprehensible and legible to an international audience, particularly those already engaged in indigenous or anti-colonial politics. It additionally provides a means for scholars and activists (especially those living in settler societies themselves) to make sense of the conflict based on their own experiences and understandings. From this perspective, the comparative bent of settler colonial studies is remarkably crucial, and it is apparent that many such contributions are written with as much pedagogical intent as they are scholarly. Michael Brull (2014), for example, frames his essay by emphasizing that ‘Australians should be well equipped to understanding the Israel-Palestinian conflict’. Others have utilized comparison to make broader reflections on how ‘particular sites of state and imperial rule [are] constitutive of larger global systems and circuits of power’, as a means to both illuminate the conflict in Israel-Palestine and detail the complicity of the international community in its continuance (Lubin, 2008: 684).

On this point, it is salient to note that Israel-Palestine has increasingly come to play an important role in the transnational aspirations of settler colonial studies, which has had significant normalizing effects in that the conflict itself is often regarded as exemplary of ‘settler colonialism as a global historical structural force’ (Collins, 2011: 30). John Collins (2011), for instance, has accorded Palestine a prophetic role in the global struggle against colonialism and imperialism. If Palestine is being globalized, he contends, the globe is simultaneously being ‘Palestinianized’, as Israel exports military techniques and mechanisms of surveillance and social control developed in the occupied territories to the international marketplace (see also Halper, 2015). Similarly, Ghassan Hage (2014: 7–9) suggests that Israel is emblematic of what he calls ‘the globalization of the late modern settler colonial condition’, which designates a transnational imaginary characterized by an aggressive monoculturalism and an attempt to shore up society against the perceived barbarism of an enemy other. In Hage’s (2014: 9) account, it is the West that is being ‘Israelized’, as Israel becomes a model of ‘what dominant forces in the West, at least subliminally, [aspire] to be’ and the ‘Israeli ethos of a besieged white colonial settler society’ has taken ‘hold in the generalisation of the Western conception of the self’.

Frames ‘assign meaning to and interpret relevant events and conditions in ways that are intended to mobilize potential adherents and constituents, to garner bystander support, and to demobilize antagonists’ (Snow and Benford, 1998: 198). The settler colonial paradigm is crucial in opening up space for new transnational alliances and political solidarities because it increases the readability and accessibility of the Palestinian struggle in sympathetic terms. Whereas earlier comparisons with South Africa brought apartheid into the critical lexicons of Palestinian solidarity and activism, thus underscoring the primacy of racism in Zionist ideology (Machover, 2004), the settler colonial paradigm reorients the structural relationship between Palestinians and Israelis away from adversaries (or, at the furthest end of the hasbara scale, perpetrators/victims) to that of native/settler. This is a powerful, if not decisive, discursive overturning of presumed power relations, given the implications of ‘fragility’ that define indigenous peoples in relation to their settler colonizers (Veracini, 2011) and the moral and international legitimacy it gives the Palestinian struggle. Many newly emerging transnational alliances with Palestine have indeed coalesced around the idea of native solidarity (e.g. Krebs and Olwan, 2012; Waziyatawin, 2012). Queer struggles have similarly isolated Palestine as a point of solidarity, largely in response to Israel’s ‘pinkwashing’ of itself as a LGBTI haven and the increased mobilization of indigenous queers (Morgensen, 2012). While the political identity of ‘settler’ is one that has yet to be taken up in any significant way inside Israel as a source of solidarity with Palestinians, notwithstanding marginal organizations like Zochrot, which aims to draw Jewish attention to al-Nakba,³ it is increasingly becoming important for Jewish Left organizing in the diaspora (e.g. Brull, 2014).

From Two States to Decolonization

In order to be relevant, discursive frames must have resonance with existing social and political conditions. The solidarity and sympathy for the Palestinian cause stimulated by the settler colonial paradigm must also be read as entangled with the mounting disenchantment in international politics and media with Israeli intransigence concerning a two-state solution (e.g. Lustick, 2013). While the two-state solution does, broadly speaking, remain hegemonic in mainstream discussion and debate, it has increasingly been brought into doubt by the tenaciousness of Israeli settlement building in the West Bank. With one in four individuals in the West Bank now an Israeli settler (Hilal, 2015: 354), and persistent calls in the Knesset to annex large swathes of occupied territory into Israel (see Lazaroff, 2014), the so-called ‘facts on the ground’ are now widely considered to render any form of two-state solution exceedingly challenging (e.g. Bashir, 2015). As such, recent years have seen an explosion of work from scholars seeking to illuminate alternatives to the two-state model, with the one-state solution – which advocates for a single democratic state for Jewish Israelis and Palestinians – emerging as particularly influential amongst critical Left interlocutors (see Faris, 2013).

The structural perspective offered by the settler colonial paradigm has proven particularly powerful in this context. On the one hand, its reintroduction of the colonial question portends to do much to revitalize the Palestinian struggle which has been dulled by the two-state hegemon, especially since the establishment of the Palestinian Authority in 1994 (Hilal, 2015). On the other hand, it is revealing of the partiality of the focus on 1967 as per the two-state solution, highlighting as central to the conflict the creation of the Israeli state and the Zionist project more broadly. By bringing the Palestinians into collective focus as a whole, the settler colonial framework analytically facilitates the leap from a two-state paradigm – ostensibly concerned with Gazans and West Bankers – to a one-state paradigm that includes other Palestinian constituencies, most notably Palestinians in Israel who have been sidelined by conflict resolution efforts, rendering once again salient wider issues like land, the return of refugees and – importantly – the identity of the Israeli state (Jamal, 2011: 5). From a settler colonial perspective, the state-building framework of the two-state solution, and its stated goal of establishing an Arab Palestinian state alongside a Jewish one, is necessarily incomplete because it leaves intact the exclusivist structures of Zionism. As such, the settler colonial paradigm speaks against the entire notion of the ‘peace process’ as it has come to be understood in Israel-Palestine, which is not only regarded as fraudulent but suggestive of a parity between parties that does not exist, underlining instead ‘the need to develop a praxis that brings back decolonisation and liberation as the imperative goal’ (Salamanca et al., 2012: 4). After all, if colonialism is the diagnosis, the prescription can only be decolonization. As Pappe (2013: 350) urges, ‘it is time to adopt a new dictionary that views Israel as a settler colonial state and the Palestinians as leading an anti-colonial struggle. Decolonisation is more relevant [than] a “peace process” for the torn land of Palestine and Israel’.

The prescription for decolonization – that is, a normative project committed to the liberation of the colonized and the overturning of colonial relationships of power (Kohn and McBride, 2011: 3) – is indeed one of the most counter-hegemonic implications of the settler colonial paradigm as applied to Israel-Palestine, potentially shifting it from a diagnostic frame to a prognostic one which offers a ‘proposed solution to the problem, or at least a plan of attack’ (Benford and Snow, 2000: 616). What, however, does the settler colonial paradigm offer by way of envisioning decolonization? As Veracini (2007) notes, while settler colonial studies scholars have sought to address the lack of attention paid to the experiences of indigenous peoples in conventional historiographical accounts of decolonization (which have mostly focused on settler independence and the loosening of ties to the ‘motherland’), there is nevertheless a ‘narrative deficit’ when it comes to imagining settler decolonization. While Veracini (2007) relates this deficit to a matter of conceptualization, it is apparent that the structural perspective of the paradigm in many ways closes down possibilities of imagining the type of social and political transformation to which the notion of decolonization aspires. In this regard, there is a worrying tendency (if not tautological discrepancy) in settler colonial studies, where the only solution to settler colonialism is decolonization – which a faithful adherence to the paradigm renders largely unachievable, if not impossible.

To understand why this is the case, it is necessary to return to Wolfe’s (2013a: 257) account of settler colonialism as guided by a ‘zero-sum logic whereby settler societies, for all their internal complexities, uniformly require the elimination of Native alternatives’. The structuralism of this account has immense power as a means of mapping forms of injustice and indignity as well as strategies of resistance and refusal, and Wolfe is careful to show how transmutations of the logic of elimination are complex, variable, discontinuous and uneven. Yet, in seeking to elucidate the logic of elimination as the overarching historical force guiding settler-native relations there is an operational weakness in the theory, whereby such a logic is simply there, omnipresent and manifest even when (and perhaps especially when) it appears not to be; the settler colonial studies scholar need only read it into a situation or context. It thus hurtles from the past to the present into the future, never to be fully extinguished until the native is, or until history itself ends. There is thus a powerful ontological (if not metaphysical) dimension to Wolfe’s account, where there is such thing as a ‘settler will’ that inherently desires the elimination of the native and the distinction between the settler and the native can only ever be categorical, founded as it is on the ‘primal binarism of the frontier’ (2013a: 258). It is here that the differences between earlier settler colonial scholarship on Israel-Palestine and the recent settler colonial turn come into clearest view. While Jamal Hilal’s (1976) Marxist account of the conflict, for instance, engaged Palestinians and Jewish Israelis in terms of their relations to the means of production, Wolfe’s account brings its own ontology: the bourgeoisie/proletariat distinction becomes that of settler/native, and the class struggle the struggle between settler, who seeks to destroy and replace the native, and native, who can only ever push back. Indeed, if the settler colonial paradigm views history in similar teleological terms to the Marxist framework, it does not offer the same hopeful vision of a liberated future. After all, settler colonialism has only one story to tell – ‘either total victory or total failure’ (Veracini, 2007).

Veracini’s attempt to disaggregate different forms of settler decolonization is revealing of the difficulties that come along with this zero-sum perspective. It is significant to note that beyond settler evacuation (which may decolonize territory, he cautions, but not necessarily relationships) the picture he paints is a relatively bleak one. For Veracini (2011: 5), claims for decolonization from indigenous peoples in settler societies can take two broad forms: an ‘anti-colonial rhetoric expressing a demand for indigenous sovereign independence and self-determination … and an “ultra”-colonial one that seeks a reconstituted partnership with the [settler state] and advocates a return to a relatively more respectful middle ground and “treaty” conditions’. While both, he suggests, are tempting strategies in the struggle for change, though ‘ultimately ineffective against settler colonial structures of domination’ (2011: 5), it is the latter strategy that invites Veracini’s most scathing assessment. As he writes,

under settler colonial conditions the independent polity is the settler polity and sanctioning the equal rights of indigenous peoples has historically been used as a powerful weapon in the denial of indigenous entitlement and in the enactment of various forms of coercive assimilation. This decolonisation actually enhances the subjection of indigenous peoples … it is at best irrelevant and at worst detrimental to indigenous peoples in settler societies. (2011: 6–7)

The ‘primal binarism of the frontier’ plays a particularly ambivalent role in Veracini’s (2011: 6) formulation, where the categorical distinction between settler and native obstructs the ‘possibility of a genuinely decolonized relationship’ (by virtue of its lopsidedness) yet is a necessary political strategy to guard against the absorption of indigenous people into the settler fold, which would represent settler colonialism’s final victory. The battle here is between a ‘settler colonialism [that] is designed to produce a fundamental discontinuity as its “logic of elimination” runs its course until it actually extinguishes the settler colonial relation’ and an anti-colonial struggle that ‘must aim to keep the settler-indigenous relationship going’ (2011: 7). In other words, the categorical distinction produced by the frontier must be maintained in order to struggle against its effects. Given the lack of options presented to indigenous peoples by Veracini (2014: 315), his conclusion that settler decolonization demands a ‘radical, post-settler colonial passage’ is perhaps not surprising – although he has ‘no suggestion as to how this may be achieved and [is] pessimistic about its feasibility’.

Scholars have long reckoned with the ambivalence of the settler colonial situation, which is simultaneously colonial and postcolonial, colonizing and decolonizing (Curthoys, 1999: 288). Given the generally dreadful Fourth World circumstances facing many indigenous peoples in settler societies, it could be argued that there is good reason for such pessimism. The settler colonial paradigm, in this sense, offers an important caution against celebratory narratives of progress. Wolfe (1994), it must be recalled, wrote the original articulation of his thesis precisely against the idea of ‘historical rupture’ that dominated in Australia post-Mabo, and was thus as much a scholarly intervention as it was a political challenge to the idea of Australia having broken with its colonial past. Nonetheless, the fatalism of the settler colonial paradigm – whereby decolonization is by and large put beyond the realms of possibility – has seen it come under considerable critique for reifying settler colonialism as a transhistorical meta-structure where colonial relations of domination are inevitable (Macoun and Strakosch, 2013: 435 ; Snelgrove et al., 2014: 9). Not only does Wolfe’s ontology erase contingency, heterogeneity and (crucially) agency (Merlan, 1997; Rowse, 2014), but its polarized framework effectively ‘puts politics to death’ (Svirsky, 2014: 327). In response to such critiques, Wolfe (2013a: 213) suggests that ‘the repudiation of binarism’ may just represent a ‘settler perspective’. However, as Elizabeth Povinelli (1997: 22) has astutely shown, it is in this regard that the totalizing logic of Wolfe’s structure of invasion rests on a disciplinary gesture where ‘any discussion which does not insist on the polarity of the [settler] colonial project’ is assimilationist, worse still, genocidal in effect if not intent. Any attempt to ‘explore the dialogical or hybrid nature of colonial subjectivity’ – which would entail working beyond the bounds of absolute polarity – is disciplined as complicit in the settler colonial project itself, leaving ‘the only nonassimilationist position one that adheres strictly and solely to a critique of [settler] state discourse’. This gesture not only disallows the possibility of counter-publics and strategic alliances (even limited ones), but also comes dangerously close to ‘resistance as acquiescence’ insofar as the settler colonial studies scholar may malign the structures set in play by settler colonialism, but only from a safe distance unsullied by the messy ambivalences and contradictions of settler and native subjectivities and relations. Opposition is thus left as our only option, but, as we know from critical anti-colonial and postcolonial scholarship, opposition in itself is not decolonization.

Decolonizing Israel-Palestine?

In his defense of settler colonial studies against criticisms that it is unable to account for political action, Veracini (2014: 312) has maintained that settler colonialism is an interpretive paradigm, not a transformative one: ‘settler colonial studies’, he writes, ‘is only ultimately accountable for the way it is effective in explaining things’. Yet, as I have already noted, this is not precisely the case in the context of Israel-Palestine. Not only is the settler colonial paradigm increasingly associated with particular normative projects, namely a critique of the two-state solution and advocacy for a single democratic state (e.g. Collins, 2011), but both Veracini and Wolfe have ventured into the question of ‘solutions’ in their respective accounts of the dynamics of Zionist settler colonialism. While they are quite divergent in their readings of what it would mean to decolonize Israel-Palestine, I suggest that they are nevertheless indicative of the limitations of the settler colonial paradigm’s structural perspective, which flattens manifestations of settler colonialism and lends itself to certain parameters. These parameters neglect important differences between Israel-Palestine and its typical sites of comparison – not least of which is the relative ‘completeness’ of settler ethnic cleansing efforts and the political geographies and modes of legal governance they produce (Gordon and Ram, 2016) – which have important implications for any project of decolonization. After all, if there is there is no one-size-fits-all model of colonialism, there is no route to decolonization appropriate to all contexts (see Kohn and McBride, 2011). In this last section, I want to engage Veracini's and Wolfe’s accounts as a means to trace some of these areas of neglect, and, in so doing, gesture towards issues in need of serious reckoning in the settler-colonial paradigm’s prescription for decolonization.

For Veracini (2013: 26), the conflict is best understood in terms of how the Zionist settler colonial project to establish a Jewish-majority state in historic Palestine is complicated and compromised by the ongoing occupation. If success is a matter of perceived legitimacy, Veracini takes 1967 as marking a decline in the success of Israeli settler colonial practice and suggests that the occupation itself is an instance of failed settler colonialism, insofar as Israel has largely failed in having its West Bank settlements recognized as part of the settler colonial state (p. 30). When settler colonialism fails in its attempt to extinguish the colonial relation, he asserts, it reverts to colonialism where the colonial relation is underscored. This explains both the permanency of the occupation – if ‘the Occupation was established as a means to enable permanent settlements, now it is the settlements that perpetuate the need for permanent occupation’ – and the radical turn to the Right inside Israel, which has seen ‘the integration of Israeli Arabs … progressively reversed’ and the ‘autonomy of the settler colonial project eroded’ by an increasing reliance on external support from international allies and the Jewish diaspora (pp. 32–3). This ‘simultaneous coexistence of successful and failed settler colonialisms’ (p. 39) means that ‘approaching the conflict would probably require a suite of solutions’ (p. 27). Nevertheless, Veracini is rather coy about what these may be. On the one hand, he emphasizes that the ‘decolonization paradigm’ is only really available to the West Bank and Gaza Strip, and that other frameworks must be made available to Palestinians inside Israel and those in the diaspora who, by virtue of the success of the Israeli settler project inside Israel, have effectively had decolonization taken off the table (p. 40). On the other hand, he seems to suggest that any solution will nonetheless be unable to escape the colonial conditions that have shaped it. If two-states is a ‘colonial solution’, because ‘internationally sanctioned Palestinian independence (and associated forms of neo-colonial dependency) … should be seen as the colonial occupation’s logical outcome, not its demise’, one-state ‘turns out to be the settler colonial solution’ because it signals the permanency of the settler polity (pp. 33, 39).

Wolfe (2012), in contrast, is far more direct about his preference for a single democratic and secular state in Israel-Palestine. The two-state solution, he suggests, is not only ‘liberal subterfuge’, but an oxymoron, because of its inability to reckon with the ways in which the ‘New Jew’ Zionism has sought to construct needs the contrapuntal presence of the Palestinians to come into being – without the Palestinians, Israel would fracture under the weight of its own internal diversity (pp. 319–20). Wolfe is especially troubled by the religious/secular division that plagues Zionism as an ostensibly secular national movement framed around the notion of Jewish return, and which has become more politically salient with the religious-national settlement movement that has taken hold in Israeli politics since the late 1970s. The ‘ascendancy of [this] religious element’ is of particular concern, loading the settler will to eliminate the native with an additional theological dimension; should Israel ‘be finally cleansed of its Natives’, he warns, it would only be ‘left with a choice between theocracy and implosion’ (p. 318). Thus the appeal of a single state solution: not only does it deal with the tricky questions of territory and sovereignty in one fell swoop, but it also does away with this risk of theocracy. Additionally, it dissolves the ‘irreducible contradictions between Zionism’s twin goals of territorial expansion and ethno-racial exclusiveness’: ‘in a secular state … that exists for its citizens rather than co-religionists this intractable problem disappears’ (p. 321). The desire for ethnic purity that has characterized Zionism to date becomes its greatest asset in this regard, namely because it does not allow for the assimilation of Palestinians. Thus, for Wolfe,

[r]ather than absorbing the colonised population into the ranks of the colonisers, and thereby eliminating that population, a secular democracy does not require the elimination of either – or, better, any – of its constituent ethnicities. That is the whole point. (p. 321)

In this sense, ‘a unified state not only dismantles Zionism. In the process, it dismantles settler colonialism’ (p. 321).

If Veracini offers a seemingly impossible vision of decolonization in Israel-Palestine, where any solution would be compromised by the colonial conditions preceding it, Wolfe’s vision seems in comparison impossibly easy: not only can Zionism be dismantled, but so too can settler colonialism. This is in stark (and surprising) contrast to his generally fatalistic take on structural transformation in settler colonial societies. It is, however, particularly revealing of the tendency in settler colonial scholarship to regard Zionism as purely settler colonial and the conflict akin to any other settler colonial context (e.g. Collins, 2011). Both Veracini and Wolfe are guilty of this, even as they are otherwise attentive to many of the particularities of the conflict. Wolfe (2013b: 9), for instance, identifies ‘Zionism as settler colonialism pure and simple’, if not a particularly voracious form stuck at the frontier stage. Likewise, Veracini (2015: 1–2) suggests that the ‘settlement, nothing else, [is] the absolute core of Zionist practice’, going so far as to claim that ‘what is in front of us is not a conflict situation, it is actually a postconflict’ (‘postconflicts’, he notes, ‘are rarely peaceful’). Tim Rowse (2014) has argued the tendency towards ahistorical and decontextualized analysis in settler colonial studies means that it misses much about the variety of geographical and regional forms settler colonialism takes.

It is equally important, however, to recognize that the settler colonial frame itself is by no means ahistorical or decontextualized. To the contrary, settler colonial studies is very much an Antipodean perspective, having emerged primarily within an Australian context, and it is fair to say that this is evidenced in its main preoccupation with white settler societies. While all transnational frames have to be developed somewhere, the structural emphasis of the settler colonial paradigm not only obfuscates this local heritage but means that its vernacularization is often replication, which is where the ‘imported institution remains largely unchanged from its transnational prototype [and] the adaptation is superficial and primarily decorative’ (Merry, 2006: 44). This can be evidenced in Wolfe and Veracini’s respective accounts of decolonizing Israel-Palestine, which leave the national dimensions of the conflict under-examined and fail to address the unique affective and socio-political resonances of the native/settler distinction in the Israeli-Palestinian context.

As Wolfe (2012: 287) points out, the circumstances and intentions of settler colonizers is inconsequential from a native point of view, and both he and Veracini perhaps quite rightly prioritize the historical outcomes of Zionism (namely, the displacement of the Palestinians) over all other meanings attached to it. Nevertheless, it is important to recognize that there is a strong nationalist aspect to Zionism, which is after all a national movement geared towards Jewish self-determination. This marks it as a particularly unique – although not singular – form of settler colonialism. In contrast to settler colonies like Australia where the drive for a settler identity separate from the metropole only emerged much later, the impetus towards an exclusive form of settler self-determination has shaped almost all aspects of the conflict in Israel-Palestine since at least the second aliyah that reached Palestine between 1904 and 1914 (see Shafir, 1989). Of course, Zionism is not the only colonialist project to be carried out in the name of ostensibly nationalist ideals – the French colonization of Algeria is widely cited as a case in point (Pappe, 2008: 612–13). Yet, it does mean that understanding Zionism’s nationalist impulse is crucial to understandings its political strengths and continued affective resonance; ‘a simple dismissal of Zionism’, Jacqueline Rose (2005: 13) appeals, ‘fatally undermines the case it is intended to promote’. Moreover, as Pappe (2008: 613) stresses, ‘labelling Zionism as nationalist or national [by no means] absolve[s] it from the accusations of dispossession and occupation’ (my emphasis). Nor does it lessen its crimes against the Palestinian people. While the Palestinian anti-colonialism has historically been entangled with a broader pan-Arabism, it is similarly impossible to understand it outside of a nationalist vocabulary and the struggle for national self-determination (Said, 1979).

Given that the settler paradigm is nominally able to incorporate the Palestinian struggle for national self-determination under the rubric of decolonization, it is striking that neither Wolfe nor Veracini reckon in any rigorous way with implications of Palestinian nationalism in their respective accounts.⁴ Wolfe’s (2012: 231) one-state, for instance, ‘does not require the elimination of its constituent ethnicities’, neglecting not only that the affirmation of those ethnicities is also a powerful political driver in the ongoing conflict, but that the affirmation of identity for colonized peoples has been a defining feature of decolonizing projects in general (Fanon, 1967). Veracini’s (2013) efforts at disentangling the colonial from the settler colonial would similarly seem to reinforce the Green Line’s fragmentation of the Palestinian polity into those in the ‘territories’ and those inside ‘Israel proper’, thus undermining the paradigm’s potential to aid Palestinian nation-building efforts.

The lack of attention paid to the Jewish drive for ethno-national self-determination, however, is not surprising. From the perspective of settler colonial studies, the question of settler self-determination is an especially fraught one: not only is it seen as a particular historical relic (loosening ties to the ‘motherland’), but settler colonial scholarship has concerned itself precisely with critiquing how the notion of settler self-determination legitimizes continued dominance over indigenous peoples. Additionally, in the context of contemporary white settler societies like Australia, Canada and the United States, the claim for ethno-national self-determination simply does not make sense (save for a few at the very periphery of politics) given that the shape of the polity is more civic than ethnic. Indeed, it is the settler colonial polity’s ability to subsume indigenous alterity that is regarded as most troubling in the settler colonial paradigm; assimilation is, after all, the final stage in the logic of elimination (Wolfe, 1994). It is from this perspective that we can make sense of Veracini’s insistence that the one-state is the settler colonial solution. Yet, as Wolfe makes clear, Zionism has little capacity to assimilate Palestinians: the lines of identity, driven as they are by a dichotomy of Jew/non-Jew determined by a tribal notion of maternal blood-lineage, are simply too firm for serious parallels to be made between Israel and the white settler societies with which it is typically compared. While Wolfe’s (2012: 320) account is more sensitive to these dynamics, his vision of a secular, civic, inclusive and plural united state (which he interestingly addresses to European Ashkenazi Jews) would nevertheless seem to leave aside the ways in which such plurality is fiercely charged in the Israeli-Palestinian context – and is, most certainly, also characterized by a religious dimension for Israelis and Palestinians alike.

In this regard, Wolfe replicates much debate on the one-state solution, which presumes that Jews would be incorporated into a single state as a neutral and repentant collectivity (Farsakh, 2011: 70 ). If even a one-state solution would have to reckon with the reality that the very presence of Israeli Jews as a settler collective is grounded on a history of dispossession and occupation, then surely dismantling Zionism – as per Wolfe’s wish – is not enough to dismantle settler colonialism. Perhaps the question is less one of dismantling Zionism than it is of decolonizing Jewish Israeli identity and its settler colonial privileges which, as Theodora Todorova (2015) argues, are most powerfully connected to the Jewish right to return – a right in turn denied to the Palestinians. This is something missed by Veracini, who takes the intimate connections between Israel and the Jewish diaspora as a sign of weakness in the settler colonial project, when this complicated entanglement with diaspora is in fact constitutive of Zionist settler colonialism.

If Wolfe and Veracini fail to fully engage the conflict’s nationalist dimensions, they are also strangely silent on the resonances and implications of the settler/native distinction in the Israeli-Palestinian context. Indeed, one of the weaknesses of the settler colonial paradigm as a whole is its inability to fully reckon with indigenous and settler identities as interactive, mutable and contingent processes of social signification. For Wolfe, the native/settler distinction is only socially constructed insofar as it is forged at the moment the settler decides she wants to stay; yet, as Francesca Merlan (2009) has argued, ‘indigeneity’ as a transnational category cannot be understood outside of the historical processes which brought it into being, nor can it be considered inherently oppositional. Counter to most white settler nations where the settler/native distinction has been largely normalized into politics and culture (the settler may seek to ‘indigenize’, but they are under no illusions that they are ‘indigenous’ per se), it is important to recognize that the identities of settler and indigene are not only constructed but also vehemently contested in Israel-Palestine. Rightfully or not, the notion of Jewish return inherent to Zionism means that Israel could be nothing if not ‘native’, to paraphrase Edward Said (1979: 88). As much as the state is consciously engaged in an active process of indigenizing its Jewish population through forging an imagined geography of exclusive Jewish ownership (Abu El-Haj, 2003), this could not have claimed so much success without the pervasiveness of the narrative that ‘we were here first’.

The identity of settler is equally loaded in the Israeli context. This means that it has quite different connotations than in white settler societies, where it is more an affective category connected to feelings of historical guilt or nation-building processes that reckon with past injustice – which are often about seeking retroactive legitimacy for the settler state, and thus require a relatively established and secure polity. While there is no doubt that the settler identity resonates with the ‘dormant codes of the immigrant settler political culture’ that characterized Zionism pre-1948 (Kimmerling, 2005: 232), the meanings attached to ‘settler’ are nevertheless complicated by the active settlement project in the territories. This is something of which the ultranationalist settler constituency has sought to take advantage, pointing to the inconsistencies in the liberal Zionist insistence on seeing West Bank settlement as illegitimate while glossing over the settlement history of Tel Aviv, for instance (Lustick, 2015). Certainly, the long-held existential fear of being ‘driven into the sea’ explains the aversion of many Israelis to the implications of illegitimacy contained within the ‘settler’ category; perhaps more sinisterly, the observation that settler states require relatively complete ethnic cleansing in order to normalize (Gordon and Ram, 2016) may only serve to push the Israeli public further to the right.

Most significant, however, is the lack of attention Wolfe and Veracini pay to how the status of the Palestinians as an indigenous people might legitimately frame their struggle. Certainly, for a paradigm that purports to prioritize native experience, settler colonial studies in general tends towards an affective focus on the settler which pushes actual indigenous struggles to the side (Snelgrove et al., 2014: 10). On the one hand, Wolfe’s (2012) unified state dissolves the settler/native distinction along with settler colonialism, leaving aside the question whether such a flattened inclusivity is necessarily just considering the kind of historical injustice the Palestinians have experienced. Veracini (2013), on the other hand, leaves his main discussion of indigeneity to the failure of Israelis to indigenize, employing indigenous as a mere descriptive category in the context of the Palestinians. The indigeneity framework, to quote Amal Jamal (2011: 5), is ‘particularly pertinent for Palestinian citizens of Israel because it provides a vocabulary beyond conventional liberal citizenship rights with which they can articulate their demands’. These political resonances credibly explain the ease with which Palestinians inside Israel have taken up the settler colonial frame. What, however, may the settler colonial paradigm and an indigenous rights platform offer in the context of ongoing colonial occupation in the West Bank, and in the context of constant siege in the Gaza Strip? These are, of course, questions yet to be answered, and better answered by Palestinians themselves. Nevertheless, without serious engagement with such questions, the settler colonial paradigm not only risks turning ‘native’ into an affective category emptied of wider political content, but once again redrawing the Green Line between Palestinian citizens of Israel and those in the territories.

Conclusion

In his assessment of the dire state of contemporary Palestinian politics, Hilal (2015: 360) yearns for ‘an investment in cultural and … social capital, through informal and formal associations, the social media and cross-border interaction and collaborative efforts, to keep Palestine alive as a symbol of emancipation, freedom and justice’. As I have sought to show, the settler colonial paradigm may indeed be facilitating this: not only does it provide international audiences a far more readable and cohesive frame with which to understand the conflict, but it comes with a built-in solidarity. Additionally, and most vitally, it promises to rejuvenate the Palestinian struggle under the prescriptive banner of decolonization, opening up new debates and alternatives outside of an evidently failing two-state paradigm. Yet, as I have also argued, this is where the most strident limitations of the settler colonial paradigm paradoxically come into view, due to, at best, under-developed reflection on the possibilities and practicalities of decolonization and, at worst, connotations deriving from its contextual point of origin flattening out important local historical and socio-political specificities. I highlight these limitations not to challenge the paradigm’s applicability to Israel-Palestine, but to appeal for greater rigour and attentiveness to particularity. I have sought to gesture towards some of these particularities – namely, the role of nationalism and the peculiar resonances of the settler/native distinction.

By way of conclusion, however, I would like to point towards the challenges of the settler colonial paradigm’s insistence on an ontology of absolute polarity of settler and native for the types of political mobilizations and struggles it could inaugurate. To be sure, there are immense difficulties in reckoning with heterogeneity in seemingly permanent structures of settler colonialism which all too easily assimilate nuance into legitimation; these difficulties are only amplified in the context of long-term intractable conflict like that in Israel-Palestine. Yet, as Joyce Dalsheim (2013) has argued in the context of Israeli settlers, the entrenchment of polarized discourse means that we often miss alternative models of political community that may better serve the project of decolonization. It would certainly be a shame for the paradigm’s inconsistencies regarding a decolonization effectively rendered impossible to stand against its broader resonance, just as it would the disciplinary dimensions of the settler colonial ontology to shut down debate – or, indeed, joint mobilization – between those broadly on the same page concerning Palestine. In his work on joint Arab-Jewish activism, Marcelo Svirsky (2014: 328) maintains that what settler colonial studies needs ‘is a corrective ontology and an affective change of heart’. I thus end with the caution that without this affective change in heart the settler colonial paradigm may continue to facilitate transnational solidarity and international sympathy, but may ultimately fail to extend beyond a politics of moral outrage.

Footnotes

Acknowledgements

My sincere appreciation goes to the four reviewers and editors at Theory, Culture and Society, who provided me with incredibly helpful and insightful feedback. Peter Chambers and Jillian Kestler-D'Amours read earlier versions of this article and I am very grateful for their comments. Raul Sanchez Urribari has offered me invaluable critique and encouragement since its very first permutation.

Notes

Rachel Busbridge is an Honorary Research Associate of the Thesis Eleven Centre for Cultural Sociology, La Trobe University, Melbourne, Australia. Previously she was an Alexander von Humboldt Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the Institut für Islamwissenschaft, Freie Universität Berlin, Germany. She is the author of Multicultural Politics of Recognition and Postcolonial Citizenship: Rethinking the Nation (Routledge, forthcoming 2017).

References

Abdo N and Yuval-Davis N (1995) Palestine, Israel and the Zionist settler project. In: Stasiulis D and Yuval-Davis N (eds) Unsettling settler societies: Articulations of gender, race, ethnicity and class. London: SAGE, pp. 291–322.

Abu El-Haj

(2003) Reflections on archaeology and Israeli settler-nationhood. Radical History Review 86: 149–163.

Akenson

(1992) God’s Peoples: Covenant and Land in South Africa, Israel and Ulster, Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.

Bashir

(2015) On citizenship and citizenship education: A Levantine approach and reimagining Israel/Palestine. Citizenship Studies 19(6–7): 802–819.

Benford

Snow

(2000) Framing processes and social movements: An overview and assessment. Annual Review of Sociology 26: 611–639.

Bober

(1972) The Other Israel: The Radical Case Against Zionism, New York: Doubleday Anchor.

Brull M (2014) A tale of two settler colonies. Overland 217. Available at: https://overland.org.au/previous-issues/issue-217/feature-michael-brull/ (accessed June 2015).

Cavanagh E and Veracini L (2013) Editors’ statement, Settler Colonial Studies 3(1): 1.

Collins

(2011) Global Palestine, Oxford: Oxford University Press.

10.

Curthoys

(1999) An uneasy conversation: Multicultural and indigenous discourses. In: Hage

Couch

(eds) The Future of Australian Multiculturalism, Sydney: The University of Sydney Press, pp. 277–93.

11.

Dalsheim

(2013) Anachronism and morality: Israeli settlement, Palestinian nationalism, and human liberation. Theory, Culture & Society 30(3): 29–60.

12.

Ehrlich

(1987) Israel: Conflict, war and social change. In: Crighton

Shaw

(eds) The Sociology of War and Peace, London: Macmillan, pp. 121–142.

13.

Fanon F (1967) The Wretched of the Earth, trans. Farrington C. London: Penguin.

14.

Farid

(2010) Terror at the beach: Arab bodies and the somatic violence of white cartographic anxiety in Australia and Palestine/Israel. Social Semiotics 19(1): 59–78.

15.

Faris H (ed.) (2013) The Failure of the Two-State Solution: The Prospects of One State in the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict. New York: IB Tauris.

16.

Farsakh L (2011) The one-state solution and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict: Palestinian challenges and prospects. Middle East Journal 65(1): 55–71.

17.

Finkelstein

(2003) Image and Reality of the Israel-Palestine Conflict, 2nd edn. London: Verso.

18.

Gordon

Ram

(2016) Ethnic cleansing and the formation of settler colonial geographies. Political Geography 53: 20–29.

19.

Hage

(2014) Alter-Politics: Critical Anthropology and the Radical Imagination, Carlton: Melbourne University Press.

20.

Halper

(2015) War Against the People: Israel, the Palestinians and Global Pacification, London: Pluto Press.

21.

Hilal

(1976) Imperialism and settler colonialism in West Asia: Israel and the Arab Palestinian struggle. Utafi 1(1): 51–70.

22.

Hilal

(2015) Rethinking Palestine: Settler-colonialism, neo-liberalism and the individualism in the West Bank and Gaza Strip. Contemporary Arab Affairs 8(3): 351–362.

23.

Jamal

(2011) Arab Minority Nationalism in Israel: The Politics of Indigeneity, New York: Routledge.

24.

Kimmerling

(1983) Zionism and Territory: The Socio-territorial Dimensions of Zionist Politics, Berkeley: University of California Press.

25.

Kimmerling

(2005) The Invention and Decline of Israeliness: State, Society and the Military, Berkeley: University of California Press.

26.

Kohn

McBride

(2011) Political Theories of Decolonization: Postcolonialism and the Problem of Foundations, Oxford: Oxford University Press.

27.

Krebs

Olwan

(2013) ‘From Jerusalem to the Grand River, our struggles are one': Challenging Canadian and Israeli settler colonialism. Settler Colonial Studies 2(2): 138–164.

28.

Lazaroff

(2014) Bennett: We’ll annex Area C and offer the Palestinians autonomy on steroids. Jerusalem Post. 29 April. Available at: http://www.jpost.com/Diplomacy-and-Politics/Bennett-Well-annex-Area-C-and-offer-the-Palestinians-autonomy-on-steroids-350790 (accessed June 2015).

29.

Lloyd

(2012) Settler colonialism and the state of exception: The example of Palestine/Israel. Settler Colonial Studies 2(1): 59–80.

30.

Lloyd

Pulido

(2010) In the long shadow of the settler: On Israeli and US colonialisms. American Quarterly 62(4): 795–809.

31.

Lubin

(2008) ‘We are all Israelis’: The politics of colonial comparisons. South Atlantic Quarterly 107(4): 671–690.

32.

Lustick I (2013) Two-state illusion. The New York Times, 14 September. Available at: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/09/15/opinion/sunday/two-state-illusion.html (accessed June 2015).

33.

Lustick I (2015) Making sense of the Nakba: Ari Shavit, Baruch Marzel, and Zionist claims to territory. Journal of Palestine Studies 44(2). Available at: http://www.palestine-studies.org/jps/fulltext/188325 (accessed January 2016).

34.

Machover M (2004) Is it apartheid?, 10 November. Available at: https://www.marxists.org/history/etol/writers/machover/2004/11/apartheid.html (accessed 24 August 2016).

35.

Macoun A and Strakosch E (2013) The ethical demands of settler colonial theory. Settler Colonial Studies 3(3–4): 426–443.

36.

Merlan

(1997) Reply to Patrick Wolfe. Social Analysis 41(2): 10–19.

37.

Merlan

(2009) Indigeneity: Global and local. Current Anthropology 50(3): 303–333.

38.

Merry

(2006) Transnational human rights and local activism: Mapping the middle. American Anthropologist 108(1): 38–51.

39.

Mikdashi

(2013) What is settler colonialism? (for Leo Delano Ames Jr.). American Indian Culture and Research Journal 37(2): 23–34.

40.

Morgensen

(2012) Queer settler colonialism in Canada and Israel: Articulating two-spirit and Palestinian queer critiques. Settler Colonial Studies 2(2): 167–190.

41.

Morris

(1988) The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem, 1947–1949, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

42.

Nasasra

(2012) The ongoing Judaisation of the Naqab and the struggle for recognising the indigenous rights of the Arab Bedouin people. Settler Colonial Studies 2(1): 81–107.

43.

Pappe

(1992) The Making of the Arab-Israeli Conflict, 1947–1951, London: I.B. Tauris.

44.

Pappe

(2008) Zionism as colonialism: A comparative view of diluted colonialism in Asia and Africa. South Atlantic Quarterly 107(4): 611–633.

45.

Pappe

(2012) Shtetel colonialism: First and last impressions of indigeneity by colonized colonizers. Settler Colonial Studies 2(1): 39–58.

46.

Pappe

(2013) Revisiting 1967: The false paradigm of peace, partition and parity. Settler Colonial Studies 3(3–4): 341–351.

47.

Pappe

(2015) The framing of the question of Palestine by the early Palestinian press: Zionist settler-colonialism and the newspaper Filastin, 1912–1922. Journal of Holy Land and Palestine Studies 14(1): 59–81.

48.

Pappe

Chomsky

(2015) On Palestine, Chicago: Haywire Books.

49.

Piterberg

(2013) Deconstructing the Zionist settler narrative and constructing an alternative. In: Faris

(ed.) The Failure of the Two-State Solution: The Prospects of One State in the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict, New York: IB Tauris, pp. 113–129.

50.

Pitkänen

(2014) Ancient Israel and settler colonialism. Settler Colonial Studies 4(1): 64–81.

51.

Ram

(1993) The colonization perspective in Israeli sociology: Internal and external comparisons. Journal of Historical Sociology 6(3): 327–350.

52.

Rodinson M (1973) Israel: A Colonial-Settler State?, trans. Thorstat D. London: Pathfinder Press.

53.

Rose

(2005) The Question of Zion, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

54.

Rouhana

Sabbagh-Khoury

(2014) Settler-colonial citizenship: Conceptualizing the relationship between Israel and its Palestinian citizens. Settler Colonial Studies 5(3): 205–225.

55.

Rowse

(2014) Indigenous heterogeneity. Australian Historical Studies 45(3): 297–310.

56.

Sahhar

(2015) An alliance of forgetting: National narratives of legitimacy on the occasion of Israel-Australia’s joint stamp issue commemorating the Battle of Beersheba. In: Burla

Lawrence

(eds) Australia and Israel: A Diasporic, Cultural and Political Relationship, Eastbourne: Sussex University Press, pp. 175–191.

57.

Said

(1979) The Question of Palestine, London: Routledge.

58.

Salaita

(2006) The Holy Land in Transit: Colonialism and the Quest for Canan, New York: Syracuse University Press.

59.

Salamanca

Qato

Rabie

Samour

(2012) Past is present: Settler colonialism in Palestine. Settler Colonial Studies 2(1): 1–8.

60.

Sánchez

Pita

(2014) Rethinking settler colonialism. American Quarterly 66(4): 1039–1055.

61.

Sayegh

(2012) Zionist colonialism in Palestine (1965). Settler Colonial Studies 2(1): 206–225.

62.

Shafir

(1989) Land, Labor, and the Origins of the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict 1882–1914, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

63.

Snelgrove

Dhamoon

Corntassel

(2014) Unsettling settler colonialism: The discourse and politics of settlers, and solidarity with indigenous nations. Decolonization: Indigeneity, Education & Society 3(2): 1–32.

64.

Snow

Benford

(1988) Ideology, frame resonance and participant mobilization. International Social Movement Research 1(1): 197–217.

65.

Svirsky

(2014) The collaborative struggle and the impermeability of settler colonialism. Settler Colonial Studies 4(4): 327–333.

66.

Todorova

(2015) Reframing bi-nationalism in Israel-Palestine as a process of settler decolonization. Antipode 47(5): 1367–1387.

67.

Veracini

(2003) The evolution of historical redescription in Israel and Australia: The question of the ‘founding violence’. Australian Historical Studies 34(122): 326–345.

68.

Veracini

(2007) Settler colonialism and decolonization. borderlands e-journal 6(2).

69.

Veracini

(2010) Settler Colonialism: A Theoretical Overview, London: Palgrave Macmillan.

70.

Veracini

(2011) Introducing. Settler Colonial Studies 1(1): 1–12.

71.

Veracini

(2013) The other shift: Settler colonialism, Israel and the Occupation. Journal of Palestine Studies 42(2): 26–42.

72.

Veracini

(2014) Defending settler colonial studies. Australian Historical Studies 45(3): 311–316.

73.

Waziyatawin (2012) Malice enough in their hearts and courage enough in ours: Reflections on US indigenous and Palestinian experiences under occupation. Settler Colonial Studies 2(1): 172–189.

74.

Wolfe

(1994) Nation and miscegeNation: Discursive continuity in the post-Mabo era. Social Analysis 36: 93–152.

75.

Wolfe

(1999) Settler Colonialism and the Transformation of Anthropology: The Politics and Poetics of an Ethnographic Event, London: Cassel.

76.

Wolfe

(2006) Settler colonialism and the elimination of the native. Journal of Genocide Research 8(4): 387–409.

77.

Wolfe

(2011) Race and the trace of history: For Henry Reynolds. In: Bateman

Pilkington

(eds) Studies in Settler Colonialism: Politics, Identity and Culture, London: Palgrave Macmillan, pp. 272–298.

78.

Wolfe

(2012) New Jews for old: Settler state formation and the impossibility of Zionism: In memory of Edward W. Said. Arena Journal 37/38: 285–321.

79.

Wolfe

(2013a) Introduction: Recuperating binarism: A heretical approach. Settler Colonial Studies 3(3–4): 257–279.

80.

Wolfe

(2013b) The settler complex: An introduction. American Indian Culture and Research Journal 37(2): 1–22.