Tracing Settler Colonialism: A Genealogy of a Paradigm in the Sociology of Knowledge Production in Israel

Abstract

Knowledge is inextricably bound to power in the context of settler colonialism where apprehension of the Other is a tool of domination. Tracing the development of the “settler colonial” paradigm, this article deconstructs Zionist and Israeli dispossession of Palestinian land and sovereignty, applying the sociology of knowledge production to the study of the Israeli-Palestinian case. The settler colonial paradigm, linked to Israeli critical sociology, post-Zionism, and postcolonialism, reemerged following changes in the political landscape from the mid-1990s that reframed the history of the Nakba as enduring, challenged the Jewish definition of the state, and legitimated Palestinians as agents of history. Palestinian scholars in Israel lead the paradigm’s reformulation. This article offers a phenomenology of Palestinian positionality, a critical potential for decolonizing the settler colonial structure and exclusive Jewish sovereignty, to consolidate a field of study that shapes not only research into the Israeli-Palestinian case but approaches to decolonization and liberation.

Citizenship as Accumulation by Dispossession: The Paradox of Settler Colonial Citizenship

“…Settler colonialism has been studied in cases ranging from Israel/Palestine, South Africa, Algeria, and Rhodesia/Zimbabwe to North America, Australia, New Zealand/Aotearoa, and elsewhere. No case operates the same, and debates abound surrounding what unites cases of settler colonization (Sabbagh-Khoury 2022). Likewise, citizenship does not operate in homologous forms across settler colonial societies, precisely because of diverging settler attributions of indigenous threat to a colony’s territorial viability and permanence.…”

“…The Zionist movement entailed the migration of European Jewish settlers to a territory populated by Palestinians, the appropriation of indigenous lands through myriad tactics (land purchase, coercion, expropriation, force), and the marginalization of the indigenous people (Abdo and Yuval-Davis 1995; Sabbagh-Khoury 2022). In its early stages, the project was based on the acquisition of land, a process that accelerated with the conquest of Palestine by the British Empire and the imposition of new legal land-tenure configurations.…”

Making Their Lives Miserable: Structural Violence and State Racism towards Asylum Seekers from Sudan and Eritrea in Israel

“…In addition, the nation-building process was also characterized by internal hierarchical politics of membership. Colonial racism advanced European cultures and ideas as preferable and superior, accompanied by essentializing views of non-Western cultures (Said 1978;Hall 1992;Césaire 2000; see also Abdo and Yuval-Davis 1995;Lentin 2018;Sabbagh-Khoury 2021).…”

“…Social relations and inequality in Israel have been traced to colonial and postcolonial notions in studies of Mizrahi Jews and Palestinians (Kedar 2003;Kimmerling 2004;Shenhav 2006;Sabbagh-Khoury 2021). To a lesser extent, such explanations have also been applied to the treatment of Jewish citizens of Ethiopian descent (Tannenbaum-Domanovitz 2013;Yacobi 2016;Abu-Rabia-Queder 2019).…”

Self‐Surveillance in a Settler‐Colonial Context: CCTV and Tribal Authority in the Bedouin Town of Hura

“…The Zionist movement has conspicuous features of settler colonialism: it is a case in which a group of immigrants entered a territory populated by indigenous people, and applied mechanisms of expulsion and eradication to tilt the demographic balance in their favour (Abu‐Lughod 2020; Penslar 2007; Sabbagh‐Khoury 2022; Veracini 2013). Unlike classical colonialism based on exploitation of the native population for economic purposes, in settler colonialism the emphasis is on appropriation of land and other vital resources (Lloyd 2012), attempting to displace or “eliminate” (Wolfe 1999) the indigenous group and replace it with the settlers who become the new masters of the land.…”