Memory for forgetfulness: Conceptualizing a memory practice of settler colonial disavowal

Settler colonialism and the archives of apprehension

“…Prior to Israel’s founding in 1948, Zionist colonial nuclei in the populated frontier prepared for land purchase by gathering detailed information about Palestinian villages – geography, topography, demography, political activity, customs, and culture – a strategy that enabled the Zionist movement’s, albeit minimal, initial foothold in late-Ottoman and Mandatory Palestine. The Zionist colonies – among them those of Hashomer Hatzair – came to constitute pockets of semi-sovereign rule nested within British imperial rule (Sabbagh-Khoury, in press). The numerous archives – many of them first transferred from Europe – created by Zionist organizations constituted a key piece of the developing semi-sovereignties, even before a national sovereignty was contentiously attained.…”

“…The archival institutions and ethnographic practices of apprehension that appeared throughout the Zionist movement contributed to a colonial informational ‘field’ used to entrench surveillance and control (Steinmetz, 2008). The goal was to ascertain territorial irreversibility in the rural frontier, and to consolidate contiguous presence outside urban centers (Sabbagh-Khoury, in press). These AA, then, would merge the history of the settler colonizer and the indigenous as dialectically intertwined, especially on the constitutive violence enacted against the indigenous population in practices of land control and resistance to replacement.…”

“…The file and folder classifications indicate the consciousness woven into these AA and that of the Zionist left (and others) in Palestine at the time, documenting and attributing political opportunity or threat to an unfolding series of contentious events. Elsewhere (Sabbagh-Khoury, n.d. ), I explain the following three constituent factors in this consciousness: (1) colonial informational capital was transferred with a specifically Jewish practice of archiving from Europe to Palestine; (2) the oppression of European Jewry, and their exclusion from historiographic institutions, prompted meticulous archival practices; and (3) classification struggles among Zionist factions over whose labor most realized Jewish nationalism.…”

“…Terming Arabs ‘neighbors’ placed the settlers – who professed a belief in the ‘brotherhood of all peoples’ – on equal terms with a population they would expel, with the backing of Zionist militias and British officials. The diligent record of land purchases/sales represents the level of detail used to justify colonization by purchase (Sabbagh-Khoury, in press). Such examples underscore the informational processes constituted by patterned dispositions and practices in a movement attempting to make contentious territorial claims.…”

“…I came across the regional map of the Marj Ibn Amir (Jezreel Valley) of Northern Palestine in which the colony was established (Image 1) on a research visit to the site’s archive in 2011. The colony was settled by members of Hashomer Hatzair [the Young Guard], the avowedly socialist-leftist Zionist movement that established more than 70 colonies across Palestine in the first half of the 20th century, most in close proximity to, or composed of, neighboring Palestinian villages (Sabbagh-Khoury, in press). On the map lie the names of the neighboring Palestinian villages, all of which were later displaced and depopulated prior to or during the establishment of the Israeli state in 1948.…”