Colonizing Palestine
Award Winner
2024: ASA Global and Transnational Sociology Section Best Scholarly Book Award
Honorable Mention for the 2024 ASA Global and Transnational Sociology Section Best Scholarly Book Award, sponsored by the American Sociological Association (ASA) - Global and Transnational Sociology Section.
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Among the most progressive of Zionist settlement movements, Hashomer Hatzair proclaimed a brotherly stance on Zionist-Palestinian relations. Until the tumultuous end of the British Mandate, movement settlers voiced support for a binational Jewish-Arab state and officially opposed mass displacement of Palestinians. But, Hashomer Hatzair colonies were also active participants in the process that ultimately transformed large portions of Palestine into sovereign Jewish territory. Areej Sabbagh-Khoury investigates this ostensible dissonance, tracing how three colonies gained control of land and their engagement with Palestinian inhabitants on the edges of the Jezreel Valley/Marj Ibn 'Amer.
Based on extensive empirical research in local colony and national archives, Colonizing Palestine offers a microhistory of frontier interactions between Zionist settlers and indigenous Palestinians within the British imperial field. Even as left-wing kibbutzim of Hashomer Hatzair helped lay the groundwork for settler colonial Jewish sovereignty, its settlers did not conceal the prior existence of the Palestinian villages and their displacement, which became the subject of enduring debate in the kibbutzim. Juxtaposing history and memory, examining events in their actual time and as they were later remembered, Sabbagh-Khoury demonstrates that the dispossession and replacement of the Palestinians in 1948 was not a singular catastrophe, but rather a protracted process instituted over decades. Colonizing Palestine traces social and political mechanisms by which forms of hierarchy, violence, and supremacy that endure into the present were gradually created.
"Colonizing Palestine guides us with great precision and acumen through the memory lanes of Israelis and Palestinians. Those who think they have read it all about the Nakba and its impact on our present realities will need to consult this impressive and crucial addition to the literature on settler colonialism and Palestine."—Ilan Pappé, University of Exeter
"In Colonizing Palestine, Areej Sabbagh-Khoury peels back the cover of Zionist history. Her mix of meticulous archival research and rigorous theorizing is powerful, profound, and upending. She has offered a new touchstone from which all future research should begin."—David N. Myers, University of California, Los Angeles
"Sabbagh-Khoury offers a conclusive answer to the question of whether a socialist ideology could be reconciled with settler colonialism."—Marc Martorell Junyent, The New Arab
"In this timely and crucial work, which adds to the corpus on Mandatory Palestine, Sabbagh-Khoury reviews the development of the kibbutzim and the relationship between the Zionist settlers who inhabited them and their new Palestinian Arab neighbors, including both Muslims and Christians.... Recommended."—S. J. Stillwell Jr., CHOICE
"With exquisite craftsmanship and a many-layered style, [Sabbagh-Khoury] has gone beyond an impressive archive of primary sources to inhale a massive number of books. This is without doubt a signal intervention that is an emotionally honest reckoning, impressively learned, and with a splendidly original analysis."—Alan Wald, Against the Current
"Colonizing Palestine is a groundbreaking book that scholars of Israel and Palestine, political and historical sociology, and sociology and anthropology of colonialism and memory should read. This remarkable resource will provide readers with an exceptional grasp of the nuances of settler colonialism, Zionism, and the history of the Nakba, as both a past event and an ongoing process in Palestine. I will continue to read and teach this book for many years to come."—Atef Said, Spectre
