Rethinking Settler Colonialism: A Marxist Critique of Gershon Shafir

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.

Key Words:

• Capitalism
• Class
• Colonialism
• Marxism
• Palestine/Israel

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 (2017).

2 See, e.g., Weinstock (1973, 49–63), Haddad (1974, 97–113), and Khalidi (1993, 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 (2008, 81–8).

5 For the development of the WZO’s pure settlement theories, see Shafir (1989, 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 1982, 154).

7 See Piterberg (2015) and Shafir (1996b).

8 See also Fieldhouse (1961) and Stokes (1969).

9 See Al-Ittihad, 27 August 1944.