Table of Contents for Colonizing Palestine
Introduction:
The introduction overviews the main arguments and contributions of this historical sociology of rural socialist-Zionist settler colonization during the British Mandate. It delineates the history of the leftmost flank of the Zionist settlement movement, and specifically the Hashomer Hatzair movement, in relation to European modernity and the Palestinian frontier. The chapter theoretically outlines the settler colonial frontier. It then situates the Zionist left within a broader history of replacement and dispossession of the native Palestinians and notes the book's inductive attempt to consider the mechanisms of settler colonization without assuming an inevitable eliminatory end. The chapter further depicts how the 1948 Nakba was the continuation of a process of colonization and violence that long preceded the tumultuous months around the departure of the British Empire from Palestine. The methodological approach and complexities of working with archives produced by the settler colonizer are detailed.
1.People, Land, and Property: Settler Colonial Process in Bilad al-Ruha
This chapter introduces the context in which Zionist settler colonialism became feasible, particularly at the Jezreel Valley's western margins, a geography highly cultivated by the indigenous and marked as valuable by Zionist institutions and settlers because of its strategic location and fertileness. It reviews shifting modes of land tenure and control, explaining how Ottoman reforms and British land law enabled the gradual penetration of the rural frontier by European settler colonizers following the privatization of large estates in the hands of Arab absentee property holders. Such transformations accelerated the displacement of agricultural tenants whose usufruct had previously remained implicit. The chapter centers the Jezreel Valley as a space of particular intensity by way of privatization, sale, and colonization. The history of the establishment of three kibbutz colonies of Hashomer Hatzair—Hazorea, Mishmar ha-Emek, and Ein Hashofet—and their encroachment or appropriation of neighboring Palestinian village lands is enumerated.
2.Colonialism by Purchase: Possession, Expulsion, and Replacement
This chapter examines the first mechanism by which Zionist institutions and settler colonial groups, under British auspices, attempted to secure contiguous territorial sovereignty in historic Palestine: purchase. Theorizing purchase as a means of coerced territorial redistribution, the chapter details the practices of institutions like the Jewish National Fund and Palestine Land Development Company before turning to the purchase and takeover in the Jezreel Valley that engendered the displacement of Palestinian agricultural tenants before 1948. Using archival sources, the chapter reconstructs Kibbutz Hazorea's takeover of Qira wa Qamun—from initial colonization to fencing-in operations, colony expansion to warfare—and Kibbutz Ein Hashofet's takeover of Joara. This chapter poses settler colonial land purchase and conquest in Palestine as a social field—the struggle over material, symbolic, and political (sovereign) capitals is nested within a broader imperial field of power that organizes social life according to a shifting coloniality-indigeneity matrix.
3.Encounters on the Settler Colonial Frontier: Kibbutz Relations with Neighboring Palestinian Villages
Rejecting depictions of Palestinian relations with neighboring settler colonizers as collaboration or national betrayal, this chapter deciphers the socioeconomic interactions between three kibbutz-colonies and their neighboring Palestinian villages. So-called Arab experts, a small group of leftist settlers who trained in Arabic language and culture, facilitated network brokerage between the colonies and villages alongside reconnaissance operations, often in coordination with the Haganah paramilitary. The nature of the colonies' incursions, paired with the disruptions to social and economic patterns of rural Palestinian communal life, quickly determined the kinds of relations between the two groups. The exchange of goods, technologies, services, and knowledge between colonies were somewhat commonplace; archival material evidences numerous children's encounters and weddings, too. However, land disputes and petty crimes—some of which I classify as acts of Palestinian resistance against encroachment—proliferated. The 1936 Great Arab Revolt transformed relations of tolerance to greater, albeit asymmetrical, violence.
4.From Purchase to Warfare: Relations between Kibbutz Settlers and Neighboring Palestinians during the 1948 Events
Although early encounters between kibbutz settlers and Palestinian villagers were marked by asymmetrical relations, the 1948 events marked the violent and traumatic cessation of village life and villagers' displacement. This chapter traces the gradated shift from the mechanism of purchase to that of warfare in the intensification of Zionist colonization in the rural frontier. Detailing the actions of the settlers from the November 1947 partition decision through the formation of the State of Israel in May 1948, the chapter uses synchronically produced documents held in the archives to chronologically detail confrontations, counterinsurgency measures, and violent coercion and force by which the kibbutzim and Zionist paramilitaries permanently displaced the Palestinian refugees. Displacement enabled the kibbutz colonies to expand territorial holdings and appropriate property. Even so, as the chapter depicts, the settlers both legitimated violence and iteratively assessed the consequences of their actions.
5.Settler Colonial Memory: Between Recognizing and Disavowing
Colony-village relations did not subside from kibbutz consciousness upon the disappearance of the Palestinian villagers. This chapter shifts the focus from what happened to how the kibbutz settlers looked back on their relations with the indigenous. Drawing on a large corpus of kibbutz publications and internal interviews, the chapter interrogates how the settlers thought about and recalled the indigenous people they dispossessed—and whose lands and property they seized. The chapter poses five modes of representation used to disavow Palestinians' right to their home/land: (1) contrasting the indigenous as backward and primitive from the ostensibly progressive Zionist settlers, (2) denying Palestinian connections to land, (3) emphasizing amiable relations through the promotion of cultural and civilizational progress, (4) asymmetrically assessing Jewish and Palestinian belonging to national collectives, and (5) reducing conflict to the issue of economic compensation.
6.Representations of 1948: From Official Representation to Controversial Memory
This chapter narrows in on kibbutz settler representations of the 1948 events, those produced soon after direct warfare subsided and through the latter decades of the twentieth century and preserved in the archives. It differentiates between the official representations of the past produced by the kibbutz colonies as institutions and the memory production of individual settler colonizers in interviews, memoirs, and other archival documents. Whereas the former toes the Zionist line touted by the new Israeli state, occluding settler complicity in violence and justifying the dispossession and accumulation of property and displacement of onetime neighbors, the latter expresses the moral equivocations and admissions of participation (or putative lack thereof) in violence that haunted some of the settlers. Theorizing memory as a practice central to the maintenance of settler colonial sovereignty and hegemony, the chapter illuminates the strategic functions of signification and representation but also the fissures inherent to meaning making.
Conclusion
The conclusion recounts the colonization practices of Hashomer Hatzair in the rural frontier while also expanding out to commensurabilities across the field of settler colonization in historic Palestine. It begins with two contemporary instantiations of the indeterminacy of the history of Palestine's colonization. The chapter then assesses the ways the Zionist settler colonizers, shaped at every step by British support and indigenous action, transformed the categories of presence, ownership, and sovereignty. The chapter concludes with notes of caution—highlighting the continuation of settler violence in Palestine—and aspirational thoughts on the steadfastness of indigeneity and potentials for a decolonized society.