Perspective 83. Is Israel a Settler Colonial State?
There is nothing new in the assertion that Zionism is a form of colonialism. More recently, some academic analysts have settled on the definition of Israel, more specifically, as a “settler colonial” state. Early Zionists in Palestine were undeniably settlers, at the peak of the colonial era. Is the label therefore justified?
No. But let’s begin by recognizing that such debates are essentially semantic. We need to begin with a definition of settler colonialism, and then determine whether Israel fits the definition. It is similar to the endless debate over whether Israel is a democracy, which depends on how democracy is defined. (In that regard, by the definitions used in all of the broad comparative ratings of states by political scientists, Israel has been ranked as a democracy -- sometimes a flawed democracy, but more democratic than not.)
In perspective, early Zionist settlers did refer to themselves as colonists, a word that did not then carry such negative weight. They were establishing new settlements as part of an organized movement to establish a new national home for the Jewish people in Palestine, something that had not existed since antiquity (despite an existing Jewish population).
It is fair to characterize this settlement as colonization, in the broad sense of establishing settlements in a previously foreign territory. But does it qualify as “settler colonialism”?
Definitions of “colonialism,” as a general concept, usually revolve around the control of one people over another, for economic gain or to impose their culture or religion on the colonized people. There are two important elements to this relationship. The first is the metropole, the mother country of which the colonists are the agents, a sponsor whose economic, cultural, or religious interests are being advanced by the implantation of their own people on foreign soil. The second is the subject population, which is in some respect related to the basic motivation of the colonization.
Prevailing definitions of “settler colonialism” add to this the further implication of an intention to replace, or even eliminate, the indigenous people and/or culture.
Zionism does not fit this model. There was no metropole, no mother country of which the settlers were an extension. Jews who came to Palestine, first from Ruissia and later from elsewhere, generally fit the accepted definition of refugees who were escaping persecution (at least 80 percent of them by my calculation). In no sense (despite Turkish suspicions) did they represent Russian interests. They sought rather to leave their Diaspora baggage behind and build a new society based on ancient Middle Eastern roots, including a revived Semitic language.
Secondly, unlike the classical colonialist powers, Jewish settlers did not include the existing population in their basic design, except as incidental beneficiaries. The presence of another people was first and foremost a major inconvenience, which the early Zionists tried their best to ignore and minimalize, not to dominate or reshape. They did not recognize the Arab population of Palestine as another people with their own collective claims, arguing that as individuals Arabs would benefit from the progress that Jewish settlement would bring.
There were occasional voices for “transfer” of Arabs from areas of Jewish settlement, but they were isolated. Far more typical was the response of Theodore Herzl, Zionism’s founding father, who in his famous letter to Arab notable Yusuf Zia al-Khalidi wrote “Who would think of sending [Palestinian Arabs] away? It is their well-being, their individual wealth that we would increase in bringing our own.”
Finally, Jewish "colonists" were not entering a terra incognita to which they had no historical connection. Whatever weight one assigns to ancient ties, they were seeking to restore to this space the same language, religion, culture, and ethnicity that had prevailed there 2000 to 3000 years earlier.
None of this is said to excuse the indifference of early (or contemporary) Zionists to the existence of another people, with their own valid historical ties, in the same territory. Nor does it justify injustices inflicted on Palestinians in the past or the present. But this was not "settler colonialism" as usually defined.
“Israel's relationship to the Palestinians is like Australia's relationship to the Aborigines. In both cases, European intruders strove to dispossess indigenous people and replace them on their land. The name for this relationship is settler-colonialism” (Wolfe, 2007, p. 314).
It turns out that what Wolfe wrote in 2007 was on the mind of one observer 70 years earlier. That observer, when asked about the situation in Palestine, brought up Australia and North America. This general statement in defense of settler colonialism in general, and of settler colonialism in Palestine in particular, seems relevant: “I do not admit for instance, that a great wrong has been done to the Red Indians of America or the black people of Australia. I do not admit that a wrong has been done to these people by the fact that a stronger race, a higher-grade race, a more worldly-wise race to put it that way, has come in and taken their place”. The statement was presented by Winston Churchill, in evidence before the Royal Commission for Palestine (the Peel Commission) in 1937 (quoted in Gilbert, 2007, p. 120).
Where did Churchill get such ideas?
What do we call the process through which a territory acquires a new political identity, and the indigenous population loses all political power, the way it happened in Australia, New Zealand, or North America? How to best describe what has been happening in Palestine since the nineteenth century? What to call the process of radical transformation which changed the composition of the population and the identity of the regime?
Under the system of settler colonialism, the native population is removed to make room for foreign settlers and their new society. “Whatever settlers may say—and they generally have a lot to say—the primary motive for elimination is not race (or religion, ethnicity, grade of civilization, etc.) but access to territory. Territoriality is settler colonialism’s specific, irreducible element” (Wolfe, 2006, p. 388).
Only the framework of settler colonialism can account for the complete transformation of Palestine between 1900 and 1950. The actual creation of the settler state, together with the displacement of the indigenes, took place between 1922 and 1950. An aboriginal population was being colonized and replaced by foreign settlers as Palestine became Israel. The process was not a mystery or an accident; neither was it natural. It took design and a deliberate struggle (Lustick, 1993; Piterberg, 2008; Shafir, 1996).
The native population is removed, to make room for settlers and their new society. In addition to territorial conquest, there is an attempt to transform geography, economy, and demography by bringing in a new population to replace the indigenous one. Creating a new society and a new landscape requires empty space, and so the aborigines are defined as a surplus population, a problem for disposal.
It is true that Zionism did not seek to dominate the natives. It simply wanted to displace them and replace them with settlers. This is the simplest and most accurate description of the situation on the ground and enumerates the Who and the Whom in this story.
As Ben-Gurion put it in 1915: “We are not interested in Palestine in order to control the native Arabs, and we are not looking for a market to sell the products of the Jewish Diaspora economy. We are seeking in Palestine a homeland.” (Ben-Gurion, 1915/1933, p. 4).
Any questions about a mother country are answered here: "The idea of planting a minority of outsiders upon an indigenous majority population, without consulting it, was not calculated to horrify men who had worked with Cecil Rhodes or promoted European settlement in Kenya" (Talmon, 1965, p. 250). The phrasing could not be more explicit. Those who deny the settler colonial context and basic structure of Israel, would have us believe that the total transformation of Palestine in the twentieth century was some kind of a miracle, but what made it possible was an organized effort supported by European powers.
The logic of British support for Zionism was spelled out by Winston Churchill, then a Conservative Cabinet minister: “[A] Jewish state under the protection of the British Crown… would from every point of view be beneficial and would be especially in harmony with the truest interests of the British Empire”’ (Churchill, 1920, p. 5). T.E. Lawrence wrote in 1920 that “…any laying out of foundations of empire in Western Asia…to a very large extent must stand or fall by the course of the Zionist effort…"(quoted in Mack, 1976, p. 253).
This was put even more clearly by the first British Military Governor of Jerusalem, Sir Ronald Storrs, who wrote in his autobiography that "Enough [Jews] could return, if not to form a Jewish state ... at least to prove that the enterprise was one which blessed him that gave as well as him that took, by forming for England ‘a little loyal Jewish Ulster’ in a sea of potentially hostile Arabism." (Storrs, 1937, p. 345).
References:
Churchill, W. (1920). Zionism versus Bolshevism. Illustrated Sunday Herald, February 8, p. 5.
Gilbert, M. (2007). Churchill and the Jews: A Lifelong Friendship. New York: Henry Holt and Co.
Lustick, I. (1993). Unsettled States, Disputed Lands: Britain and Ireland, France and Algeria, Israel and the West Bank/Gaza. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.
Mack, J.E. (1976). A Prince of Our Disorder: The Life of T.E. Lawrence. Boston: Liittle, Brown & Co.
Piterberg, G. (2008). The Returns of Zionism: Myths, Politics and Scholarship in Israel. Verso: London and New York.
Shafir, G. (1996). Land, Labor and the Origins of the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict, 1882-1914. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.
Storrs, R. (1937). Orientations: The Memories of Sir Ronald Storrs. London: Nicholson and Watson.
Talmon, J.L. (1965). The Unique and the Universal. London: Secker & Warburg.
Wolfe, P. (2006). Settler colonialism and the elimination of the native. Journal of Genocide Research, 8, 387-409.
Wolfe, P. (2007). Palestine, Project Europe and the (un-)making of the New Jew: In memory of Edward W. Said. In N. Curthoys, G. Debjani (eds.). Edward Said: The Legacy of a Public Intellectual. (pp. 313-337) Carlton, Vic.: Melbourne University Press.