To help advance an understanding of settler colonial studies beyond its main axes of development for Australia, New Zealand, the US and Canada, the 1998 ethnography entitled The Object of Memory, awarded MESA’s Albert Hourani and the Chicago Folklore book prizes, is reconsidered sixteen years after its publication. The book recounts a signature achievement of Marcel Janco, an artist and a founder of the Dada movement in Europe, in establishing in 1950s Israel a Jewish Israeli artist colony: Ein Hod occupied the spaces of ‘Ayn Hawd, a depopulated Palestinian Arab village, replacing an agriculturally based Arab village without the complete physical destruction of its traditional Palestinian stone houses, unlike the fate of more than five hundred destroyed Palestinian villages within the 1948 borders of Israel. ‘Ayn Hawd was both destroyed and preserved. There are many ways to make the Palestinian Arab native disappear and therefore, one compelling cultural studies inquiry is to trace those elements of settler colonizing ideology that define spaces currently inhabited by Jewish Israeli settlers seeking to forget the original settler colonial displacement. This approach to questions about space, land, ownership, and indigeneity in Israel/Palestine investigates varied re-fashionings in the arts that serve to designate Jewish Israelis as natural occupants. By focusing on this 1998 ethnography about the decade of the 1950s during which specific settler ideologies of ownership emerged in Israel after the establishment of the state in 1948, this presentation also charts the importance of settler colonial studies to the Palestine/Israel conflict.

Post-1967 East Jerusalem is a unique case in the history of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Whereas Israel has made only partial sovereign claims in the occupied Palestinian territory, East Jerusalem was officially annexed to the state, its Palestinian residents subject to Israeli civil law. Furthermore, since 1967, the Israeli political elite produced plans to withdraw from the majority of the territories or to create a form of Palestinian autonomy within them. In contrast, East Jerusalem was increasingly imagined as an organic part of the state and even as the center of the entire Jewish nation. This paper considers the (until recently) unequivocal Israeli claim to sovereignty in East Jerusalem as a settler-colonial claim. Since 1967, the Israeli settler-colonial project in Jerusalem, explicitly referred to as “Judaization,” is accompanied by a covert process of de-indigenizing its Palestinian population. Judaization refers to a set of symbolic and practical tools undertaken by the State of Israel to transform the Palestinian landscape into a Zionist Jewish one. “De-indigenization” refers to a systematic process of turning the Palestinians into strangers and outlaws in their homes. My paper will detail the policies of Judaizing and de-indigenizing in four different yet interconnected categories: Demographic: By adopting a supremacist national development plan, the Israeli Government settled Jewish civilians in East Jerusalem. At the same time, Israel enacted municipal-level policies with Palestinian emigration in-mind. Symbolic: The harnessing of Israeli cultural producers to reshape the historical landscape of East Jerusalem and imbue it with a Zionized biblical character. These same processes also symbolically emptied East Jerusalem, often depicting the territory as barren, “awaiting for someone to revive it and bring it back to life,” and constructing Palestinian Jerusalemites as passive place-holders for the returning Jews. Legal: The presence of Jerusalemites is sanctioned by “temporal” and “incidental” grounds as “permanent residents” versus Israeli Jews who are “citizens.” This means that any legal integration of Palestinian Jerusalemites into the Israeli political system is excluded and they face discrimination. Security-physical component: The Israeli security discourse, originating from the state and cultural elite, constantly reconstitutes the Palestinians in Jerusalem as a threat and an undesired type of the “citizen.” Consequently, Palestinians are subjected to an implicit yet permanent threat of deportation or removal from “the eternal capital of the Jewish people.”

This paper analyzes a settler-colonial situation by expanding on Foucault’s theoretical literature on sovereignty that calls for replacing the juridical discourse with the discourse of war. According to Foucault, the law and any political agreement are imbued with violence: modern “achievements” of establishing governmental political institutions only serve to obscure the continuous infrastructure of war. Critical historiography that focused on the 1948 ethnic cleansing of Palestine used this year as a “zero point” to duplicate the juridical perception of sovereignty. Thus, Israelis could argue that “in war as in war,” meaning expulsions and massacres happened in the context of battles between enemy forces. The establishment of the State of Israel replaced the war discourse with a post-1948 legal framework. Based on archival material documenting the expulsions of Palestinians from 1936 to mid-1950s and the process of Zionist land accumulation, I will show that 1948 was neither the beginning nor the end of a process of settler-colonial expropriation. Instead I claim that the mid-1930s signaled an intensified process to expel Palestinian sharecroppers, which culminated in the Nakba. The establishment of a settler-state enabled warfare to be augmented by "law-fare," e.g., the Law of Absentees' Property crucial for looting land and property. The paper discusses Marj Iban ‘Amer (Jezreel Valley), a region where the Zionist movement bought the largest amount of land. It will argue that land purchase from absentee landlords alone did not guarantee the right nor secure the possibility for settlement because “evacuating” the land of its indigenous people was forbidden by Mandatory law unless the sharecroppers consented to move and were compensated. Zionist settlement did however utilized forceful practices, perpetrated here by Hashomer Hatzair, self-described as a socialist, bi-national movement to vacate the land of its Palestinian inhabitants. In addition, the paper will argue that the actual role of landed property in establishing Zionist sovereignty, as Kenneth Stein argues, is only partially correct because Jews owned merely 20% of the arable land of Mandate Palestine by 1947. This alone would never have been sufficient to establish Jewish sovereignty. Both “Tokhnit Dalet” and archival material demonstrate that the Zionist use of military force between the years 1947-49 played a crucial role in acquiring lands and establishing Jewish sovereignty in Palestine. Even before 1948, as I will demonstrate, Zionist settler-colonialism was practiced through the use of force.

Zionism’s fulfillment in the creation of the state of Israel was premised on the British withdrawal and the forceful uprooting of the majority of the Palestinians that fell within the state’s borders. Thus, Zionism in 1948 is very similar to other settler movements that detached from direct imperial rule, established sovereign control over the target territory, and depopulated that territory from the majority of its indigenous population. Nevertheless, it would be a gross anachronism to ascribe the results of the 1948 War to a decades-old, clear, consistent and consensual Zionist plan. Recent scholarship has successfully proven that non-statist and bi-national Zionism, though ultimately unfulfilled and thoroughly marginalized, was authentic, and, before the 1930s, even dominant. This paper will examine intellectuals, politicians and organizations that espoused various bi-national and non-statist Zionist programs during the pre-1948 era. Specifically, the paper will focus on seminal Zionist texts that came from diverse ideological camps but all hold in common a vision of shared sovereignty and fundamental political equality between Palestinian-Arabs and Jews within Palestine. These also include academic texts, belle letters, and bodily practices that imagined an ethnic and cultural proximity between Jews and Palestinians. Whereas it is simple to grasp how statist and chauvinist forms of Zionism are settler-colonial in their nature, this paper claims that even those “softer” Zionist programs are fully congruent with the structures of settler-colonialism as a global historical phenomenon. Juxtaposing Zionism against other settler-colonial movements suggests that the early Zionist settlers were, comparatively speaking, rather frail vis-à-vis the indigenous Palestinian population. This frailty, and not a particular Jewish morality imbedded within Zionism, was at the base of the early Zionist drive for shared sovereignty with the Palestinians. I then will show that should these egalitarian programs and ideals have been implemented, the result – as envisioned by the Zionists themselves – would have been the annulment of an autonomous Palestinian sovereign capacity. From a more cultural standpoint, I also claim, egalitarian and assimilationist Zionist tendencies served the purpose of endowing settlers with indigenous traits. To conclude my paper, I will question whether “anti-Zionism” is the most apt term to use for current political agendas that promote a one democratic state shared by Jews and Palestinians.