The Israeli elephant in the settler-colonial room

ABSTRACT

This article presents a rationale to expand settler-colonial studies so as to conceptually fuse in the same proposition the question of settler-colonial permanence with that of the settler subject. Arguments are elaborated based on one particular case study, Palestine. This gap in the research in relation to Palestine not only has left unresolved the problem of how to explain the continuation of the Israeli settler regime beyond its unequivocal overt and superior mechanisms of legal and brute power but has also kept the concrete perpetrators in the shadows, away from public accountability. The article also lays out a number of potential dimensions to lead research into the conceptual nexus suggested here, for the specific case of Palestine. These dimensions, which I suggest form the emotional economy of Israeli settler-colonial subjectivity, comprise (1) the compensatory distributions of settler-colonial capture, (2) the historical formation of strata of subjectivation, (3) the avenues of socialization that cement the commitment to a militarized society, and (4) the ways by which settler learning and settler practice are conjoined in everyday training.

KEYWORDS:

• Settler-colonial studies
• Palestine
• Israel
• settler subject
• subjectivity

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 Marcelo Svirsky, ‘On the Study of Collaborative Struggles in Settler Societies’, Settler Colonial Studies, 4(4), 2014, pp 434–449; Emily Lewsen, ‘Reeled In: The Settlement Project and the Evacuation of an Israeli Fishing Village from Gaza’, Settler Colonial Studies, 5(1), 2015, pp 66–83; Mikki Stelder, ‘From the Closet into the Knesset: Zionist Sexual Politics and the Formation of Settler Subjectivity’, Settler Colonial Studies, 8(4), 2018, pp 442–463; Esther Alloun, ‘That’s the Beauty of It, It’s Very Simple! Animal Rights and Settler Colonialism in Palestine–Israel’, Settler Colonial Studies, 8(4), 2018, pp 559–574; Yara Hawari, Sharri Plonski and Elian Weizman, ‘Settlers and Citizens: A Critical View of Israeli Society, Settler Colonial Studies, 9(1), 2019, pp 1–5; Shir Hever, ‘The Night Watchman Becomes a Mercenary’, Settler Colonial Studies, 9(1), 2019, pp 78–95.

2 Tom Clark, Ravi de Costa and Sarah Maddison, The Limits of Settler Colonial Reconciliation: Non-Indigenous People and the Responsibility to Engage, Singapore: Springer, 2016.

3 Anne Bishop, Becoming and Ally, London: Zed Books, 2002; Lynne Davis (Ed.), Alliances – Re/Envisioning Indigenous-Non-Indigenous Relationships, Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2010; Clare Land, Decolonizing Solidarity – Dilemmas and Directions for Supporters of Indigenous Struggles, London: Zed Books, 2015; Lynne Davis, Chris Hiller, Cherylanne James, Kristen Lloyd, Tessa Nasca and Sara Taylor, ‘Complicated Pathways: Settler Canadians Learning to Re/Frame Themselves and Their Relationships with Indigenous Peoples’, Settler Colonial Studies, 7(4), 2017, pp 398–414; Katie Boudreau Morris, ‘Decolonizing Solidarity: Cultivating Relationships of Discomfort’, Settler Colonial Studies, 7(4), 2017, pp 456–473; Avril Bell, Billie Lythberg, Chris Woods and Rose Yukich (eds), ‘Enacting Settler Responsibilities towards Decolonisation’, Ethnicities, published online 21 December 2021.

4 Judy Rohrer, Haoles in Hawaii, Honolulu, HI: University of Hawaii Press, 2010; Aileen Moreton-Robinson, The White Possessive – Property, Power, and Indigenous Sovereignty, Minneapolis: Minnesota University Press, 2015; Sherene Razack, Dying from Improvement Inquests and Inquiries into Indigenous Deaths in Custody, Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2015.

5 Scott Lauria Morgensen, Spaces Between Us – Queer Settler /Colonialism and Indigenous Decolonization, Minneapolis: Minnesota University Press, 2011.

6 The term alludes to a thorny desert plant, known in English as prickly pear, with a thick skin that conceals a sweet, softer interior. This works as an allusion to Israelis who are supposedly tough on the outside, but delicate and sweet on the inside.

7 According to this definition, ‘Holding Jews Collectively Responsible for Actions of the State of Israel’ is Anti-Semitic. See: https://holocaustremembrance.com/resources/working-definitions-charters/working-definition-antisemitism (accessed 14 May 2022).

8 Panagiotis Sotiris, ‘Gramsci and the Challenges for the Left: The Historical Bloc as a Strategic Concept’, Science & Society, 82(1), 2018, pp 94–119.

9 Marcelo Svirsky and Ronnen Ben-Arie, From Shared Life to Co-Resistance in Historic Palestine, London: Rowman & Littlefield International, 2017, pp 159–160.

10 See for instance the latest report from Human Rights Watch, A Threshold Crossed – Israeli Authorities and the Crimes of Apartheid and Persecution, USA: Human Rights Watch, 2021; and that of B’Tselem, ‘A regime of Jewish supremacy from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea: This is Apartheid’, 12 January 2021, https://www.btselem.org/publications/fulltext/202101_this_is_apartheid (accessed 17 December 2021).

11 Marcelo Svirsky, ‘The Reproduction of Settler Colonialism in Palestine’, Journal of Perpetrator Research, 4(1), 2021, pp 1–36.

12 According to social reproduction feminists (SRFs), the familial and communitarian work invested in feeding, caring for, loving, educating, and entertaining people produces and sustains workers whose labour reproduces capital and society as a whole. See: Tithi Bhattacharya (ed), Social Reproduction Theory: Remapping Class, Recentering Oppression, London: Pluto Press, 2017; Lise Vogel, Marxism and the Oppression of Women: Towards a Unitary Theory, New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1983; Silvia Federici, Revolution at Point Zero: Housework, Reproduction, and Feminist Struggle, Oakland, CA: PM Press, 2012.

13 Karl Marx, Capital: A Critique of Political Economy Vol 1, Ben Fowkes (trans), New York: Penguin Books, 1976, p 110.

14 While the seizing of Palestinian land and the expulsion of its Indigenous inhabitants is a constant in Zionist politics, this historical dynamic increasingly intertwines with practices of exploiting Palestinian labour and Palestinian resources, particularly since 1967 and the occupation of the West Bank, the Gaza Strip, and East Jerusalem.

15 ‘Mizrahim’ is used today in the Jewish world for a number of Jewish communities that have in common a relation to Arab culture, Arab spaces, and Arab history in their historical formation. These include the Sephardic Jews (Iberian descent), Maghrebi Jews (North African descent), and a range of Jewish communities from the Middle East. Other denotations used for Mizrahim are ‘Oriental Jews’ and ‘Arab-Jews’. On the other pole of this divide are the white Ashkenazi Jewish communities from Western, Central, and Eastern Europe, who show no historical positive affinity with the Orient and were detached from the Oriental Jewish communities in the Middle East until their encounter in Palestine (late nineteenth century). See: Moshe Behar and Zvi Ben-Dor Benite (eds), Modern Middle Eastern Jewish Thought – Writings on Identity, Politics, & Culture, 1893–1958, Waltham, MA: Brandeis University Press, 2013; Hannan Hever, Yehouda Shenhav and Pnina Motzafi-Haller (eds), Mizrahim in Israel: A Critical Observation of Israel’s Ethnicity, Jerusalem: Van Leer Institute Press and Hakibbutz Hameuchad, 2002 [Hebrew].

16 Deborah Bernstein and Shlomo Swirski, ‘The Rapid Economic Development of Israel and the Emergence of the Ethnic Division of Labour’, British Journal of Sociology, 33(1), 1982, pp 64–85; Yehouda Shenhav, The Arab-Jews: A Postcolonial Reading of Nationalism, Religion, and Ethnicity, Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press, 2006; Ella Shohat, ‘Sephardim in Israel: Zionism from the Standpoint of Its Jewish Victims’, Social Text, 19/20, 1988, pp 1–35; ‘The invention of the Mizrahim’, Journal of Palestine Studies, 29(1), 1999, pp 5–20; Shlomo Swirski, Not Backward but Made Backward: Mizrahim and Ashkenazim in Israel – A Sociological Analysis and Conversations with Activists, Haifa: Mahbarot Lemehkar Uvikoret, 1981 [Hebrew].

17 According to Félix Guattari, ‘the production of subjectivity is the raw material for any and all production’. See: Félix Guattari and Suely Rolnik, Molecular Revolution in Brazil, Los Angeles, CA: Semiotext(e), 2008, p 38.

18 Marcelo Svirsky, After Israel: Towards Cultural Transformation, London: Bloomsbury-Zed Books, 2014.

19 Mark Rifkin, Settler Common Sense: Queerness and Everyday Colonialism in the American Renaissance, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2014.

20 Félix Guattari, The Guattari Reader, Gary Genosko (ed), Oxford: Blackwell, 1996.

21 As Salman Abu-Sitta explains, ‘[t]he abandoned Palestinian fields, orchards, vineyards, homes, shops, factories and businesses provided housing for many of the 684,000 Jewish immigrants who settled in the country from […] 1948 to […] 1951 and provided employment and economic sustenance for them'. See: Salman Abu-Sitta, Atlas of Palestine: 1917–1966, London: Palestine Land Society, 2010, pp 130–133. Hadawi and Kubursi estimated the total value of Palestinian land and properties seized by the state of Israel as an outcome of the 1948–49 war to almost £1.2 billion (1948 prices); cited in Abu-Sitta, Atlas of Palestine, Table 4.9, p 135.

22 See: Ghazi Falah, ‘Israeli “Judaisation” Policy in the Galilee’, Journal of Palestinian Studies, 20(4), 1991, pp 69–85; Oren Yiftachel, Ethnocracy – Land and Identity Politics in Israel/Palestine, Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2006.

23 Oren Yiftachel and Naomi Carmon, ‘Socio-Spatial Mix and Inter-Ethnic Attitudes: Jewish Newcomers and Arab Jewish Issues in the Galilee’, European Planning Studies, 5(2), p 220.

24 Marcelo Svirsky, Arab-Jewish Activism in Israeli-Palestine, London: Routledge, pp 94–109.

25 Today the number of Israeli settlers in East Jerusalem and the West-Bank is close to 700,000 people.

26 Dani Gutwein, ‘Notes on the Class Foundations of the Occupation’, Theory and Criticism, 24, 2004, pp 203–211 [Hebrew].

27 Gadi Algazi, ‘Matrix in Bill’in: A Story on Colonial Capitalism in Israel’, Theory and Criticism, 29, 2006, pp 173–193 [Hebrew].

28 Who Profits?, ‘Settlement Enterprise’, https://www.whoprofits.org/involvement/ (accessed 14 May 2022); Gabriel Schivone, ‘Gaza Laboratory Boosts Profits of Israel’s War Industry’, The Electronic Intifada, 5 October 2018, https://electronicintifada.net/content/gaza-laboratory-boosts-profits-israels-war-industry/25636 (accessed 14 May 2020); The Lab, Yotam Feldman (dir), Gum Films, 2013; Eyal Weizman, ‘Military Options as Human Planning’, interview with Philipp Misselwitz, in Eduardo Cadava and Aaron Levy (ed), Cities without Citizens, Philadelphia, PA: Slought Books, 2003, p 195.

29 Leila Farsakh, ‘The Political Economy of Israeli Occupation: What Is Colonial About It?’, in Leila Farsakh (ed), Commemorating the Naksa, Evoking the Nakba, The MIT Electronic Journal of Middle East Studies, 8, 2008, pp 41–58; Mandy Turner and Omar Shweiki (eds), Decolonizing Palestinian Economy – De-development and Beyond, London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014; Who Profits?, ‘Palestinian Captive Market’, https://www.whoprofits.org/involvement/palestinian-captive-market/ (accessed 14 May 2020).

30 Who Profits?, ‘Exploitation of Labour’, https://www.whoprofits.org/involvement/exploitation-of-labor/ (accessed 14 May 2020); International Labour Conference, The Situation of Workers of the Occupied Arab Territories, Geneva: International Labour Office, 2018, https://www.ilo.org/global/publications/lang--en/index.html (accessed 14 May 2020); Yehezkel Lein, Builders of Zion: Human Rights Violations of Palestinians from the Occupied Territories Working in Israel and the Settlements, Zvi Shulman (trans), Jerusalem: B’Tselem, 1999, https://www.btselem.org/sites/default/file/sites/default/files2/builders_of_zion.pdf (accessed 14 May 2020).

31 Clemens Messerschmid, ‘Hydro-Apartheid and Water Access in Israel-Palestine: Challenging the Myths of Cooperation and Scarcity’, in Turner and Shweiki, Decolonizing Palestinian Political Economy, pp 53–76; Who Profits?, ‘Exploitation of Occupied Production and Resources’, https://www.whoprofits.org/involvement/exploitation-of-occupied-production-and-resources/ (accessed 14 May 2020).

32 Meir Yaish and Limor Gabay-Egozi, ‘Cumulative Disadvantage Dynamics for Palestinian Israeli Arabs in Israel’s Economy’, Sociology, published online 31 January 2021; Vered Kraus and Yuval Yonay, Facing Barriers – Palestinian Women in a Jewish-Dominated Labor Market, Cambridge: Cambrdige University Press, 2018.

33 By ‘overcoding' I mean the operations of the state through which it marks the continuity of the regime and at the same time it reinscribes and reorders some dimensions with more projecting significance. See Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, Brian Massumi (trans), Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987, p 41.

34 See: Dani Gutwein, ‘The Rule of Loyalty: The Settlements and the Institutionalisation of the Anti-Democratic Logic of the Regime of Privatisation in Israel’, Theory and Criticism, 47, 2016, pp 225–247 [Hebrew].

35 Amendment no.40 to the Budgets Foundations Law (1985) – Reducing Budget or Support for Activity Contrary to the Principles of the State (new Section 3b).

36 The ethnic cleansing of close to 800,000 Palestinians during 1948–49 perpetrated by Jewish forces.

37 Law Preventing Harm to the State of Israel by Means of Boycott – 2011, Knesset.

38 ‘Basic Law: Israel – The Nation State of the Jewish People’, passed on 19 July 2018, Knesset, http://knesset.gov.il/laws/special/eng/BasicLawNationState.pdf (accessed 18 January 2020).

39 More specifically, budgets and support will be cut when institutions deny the existence of the State of Israel as a Jewish and democratic state; incite to racism, violence, and terrorism; express support for an armed struggle or an act of terrorism by an enemy state or by a terrorist organisation against the State of Israel; mark Independence Day or the day of the establishment of the state as a day of mourning; and support acts of vandalism or physical contempt that infringe on the dignity of the state flag or national emblem.

40 Gershon Shafir, Land, Labor and the Origins of the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict 1882–1914, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989, pp 58–90.

41 Shafir, Land, Labor, pp 146–186.

42 Marcelo Svirsky and Ronnen Ben-Arie, From Shared Life to Co-Resistance in Historic Palestine, London: Rowman and Littlefield International, 2017.

43 As Behar explains, ‘[w]hat contemporary scholars of modern Israel generally recognize as post-1970 ethnic Mizrahi-Ashkenazi controversies are better conceptualized as outgrowths of an assertive Mizrahi intellectual formation which pre-dated by decades the post-1949 mass arrival of Arabized Jews to Israel’. See: Moshe Behar, ‘1911: The Birth of the Mizrahi–Ashkenazi Controversy’, Journal of Modern Jewish Studies 16, 2017, p 329. See also Ella Shohat, On the Arab-Jew, Palestine, and Other Displacements, London: Pluto Press, 2017.

44 Svirsky and Ben-Arie, From Shared Life to Co-Resistance.

45 Deborah Bernstein and Shlomo Swirski, ‘The Rapid Economic Development of Israel’; Shenhav, The Arab-Jews; Shohat, ‘Sephardim in Israel’; ‘The invention of the Mizrahim’; Swirski, Not Backward but Made Backward.

46 For an analysis of ‘social resonance' see: Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, p 97; and also: Constantin V. Boundas, ‘Resonance and the Reversal of Platonism’, Parallax, 18(1), 2012, pp 4–18.

47 Israeli historian Adam Raz exposed the extent of the pillaging of Palestinian property during the Nakba and the widespread participation in it, including by soldiers, civilians, and senior and junior figures in the establishment. According to Raz, the fact that the looting was openly tolerated by the political leadership played a role in turning the looters into people with a vested interest in preventing the Palestinians from returning; see: Adam Raz, Looting of Arab Property During Israel’s War of Independence, Jerusalem: Carmel, 2020 [Hebrew].

48 Grotesque desires subtend the will of too many Israeli women to give birth in segregated maternity wards, away from Palestinian women. Although there is no official policy, Israeli hospitals segregate between Israeli and Palestinian expecting women. That is the case with Hadassah Ein-Kerem and Hadassah Har-Hatzofim in Jerusalem, Ichilov hospital in Tel-Aviv, the Meir hospital in Kfar Saba, the Galilee Medical Centre in Nahariya, and the Hillel Jaffe hospital in Hadera.

49 Rela Mazali. ‘Recruited parenthood’, in Hagit Gor (ed), Militarism in Education, Tel Aviv: Babel, 2005 [Hebrew]; Svirsky, After Israel, pp 131–173.

50 Cynthia Enloe, Manoeuvres: The International Politics of Militarizing Women’s Lives, Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000.

51 Svirsky, After Israel, pp 43–89.

52 See: Nurit Peled-Elhanan, Palestine in Israeli School Books: Ideology and Propaganda in Education, London: I. B. Tauris, 2012; Ariella Azoulay and Adi Ophir, The One State Condition: Occupation and Democracy in Israel/Palestine, Redwood City, CA: Stanford University Press, 2012.

53 This activity is called ‘Gadna' and has been mandatory (General-Manager Ordinance 2007-8/3c), and financed and accounted for in the annual state budget approved by the Knesset.

54 Since 2012, the Ministry of Education pays schools financial incentives according to a conscription index that identifies schools in terms of their conscription percentages, particularly to combatant units.

55 Svirsky, After Israel, pp 90–130.

56 In addition to the works cited in this section, see also: Uri Ben-Eliezer, The Making of Militarism in Israel, Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1998; Noa Harel and Edna Lomsly-Feder, ‘Bargaining over Citizenship: Premilitary Preparatory Activities in the Service of the Dominant Groups’, in Hanan Alexander, Halleli Pinson and Yossi Yonah (eds), Citizenship Education and Social Conflict, New York, NY: Routledge, 2011, pp 187–198; Sara Helman, ‘Militarism and the Construction of Community’, Journal of Political and Military Sociology, 25, 1997, pp 305–332; ‘From Soldiering and Motherhood to Citizenship: A Study of Four Israeli Peace Protest Movements’, Social Politics, 6, 1999, pp 292–313; Ruth Hiller, ‘As Natural as Mother’s Milk: Impregnating Society with Militarism’, New Profile, 2001, www.newprofile.org/english/node/215 (accessed 22 November 2021); and Baruch Kimmerling, ‘Militarism in Israeli society’, Theory and Criticism, 4, 1993, pp 123–140 [Hebrew].

57 Hagar Kotef, The Colonizing Self – Or, Home and Homelessness in Israel/Palestine, Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2020.

58 Kotef, The Colonizing Self, p 30.

59 Cited in Browning, Ordinary Men, p 167.

60 Kotef, The Colonizing Self, p 30.

61 Ann Laura Stoler, Along the Archival Grain: Epistemic Anxieties and Colonial Common Sense, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2009, p 68; cited in Kotef, The Colonizing Self, p 4.

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Marcelo Svirsky

Marcelo Svirsky studies settler-colonial societies particularly Israel, and focuses on questions of social transformation and decolonisation.