Abstract
In recent years, the use of settler colonialism as an analytical framework to understand the Zionist-Palestinian conflict has become prevalent. Spurred by the works of such scholars as Patrick Wolfe and Lorenzo Veracini, critical scholarship has argued that Israel as a settler-colonial society sought to eliminate the indigenous Palestinians in a bid to create a Jewish settler nation-state. The grounds for understanding the Zionist-Palestinian conflict through the settler-colonial prism have been laid by the seminal work of Gershon Shafir. His work’s relation to the reality of Palestine/Israel is the focal point of this essay. By constructively critiquing his book Land, Labor and the Origins of the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict, 1882–1914, the essay demonstrates Shafir’s relative discounting of important processes of capitalist development within the settler-colonial divide he so masterfully describes.
Acknowledgments
I want to thank Csaba Nikolenyi and Jennifer Solomon for allowing me the time and space to rethink settler colonialism. I also want to thank Meir Amor for teaching me to rethink.
Notes
1 Comparable critiques to the one voiced in the text above can be found in Greenstein (Citation2017).
2 See, e.g., Weinstock (Citation1973, 49–63), Haddad (Citation1974, 97–113), and Khalidi (Citation1993, 30–47).
3 Aliyah is Hebrew for “ascent” and, in Zionist jargon, the name for each wave of Jewish immigration to Palestine/Israel.
4 For Ruppin’s biography and his interest in German völkisch-style race theories, see Piterberg (Citation2008, 81–8).
5 For the development of the WZO’s pure settlement theories, see Shafir (Citation1989, 154–60).
6 Palestine was officially a mandate to “guide” into independence given to the British by the League of Nations. However, in practice they ran the country as a Crown Colony directly governed from London. “Ertz-Israel was, generally, ran [sic] in the legal and organizational framework of a British Crown Colony” (Gross Citation1982, 154).
7 See Piterberg (Citation2015) and Shafir (Citation1996b).
8 See also Fieldhouse (Citation1961) and Stokes (Citation1969).
9 See Al-Ittihad, 27 August 1944.