Settler Colonialism and the Logic of Double Elimination^†

† This essay is an excerpt of the main arguments presented in our book, From Shared Life to Co-Resistance in Historic Palestine (London: Rowman & Littlefield International, 2017).

Abstract

According to the logic of elimination that subtends settler colonial projects, native populations are displaced in order to replace their systems of life, a process that structures invasion in its initial stages as in the present. By looking into the case of modern Palestine in an integrative fashion, in this essay we suggest that settler colonialism targets native populations along with social formations – established ways of life – that nurture native life in various ways. We define this settler specificity as the “logic of double elimination.” Our story shows that in Palestine, Zionism developed and the Israeli state was eventually established by means of (a) the continuing elimination of the Arab-Palestinians and their sovereignty, and (b) the destruction of the social infrastructure and identities that fostered Arab–Jewish shared life and forms of cooperation as they flourished in Ottoman times, and the prevention of these forms as they survived into the British Mandate era. These operations of erasure cannot be understood, as Patrick Wolfe persuasively suggested, but as mediated by race. By expanding the conceptualization of the settler logic of elimination we aim at contributing to a broader understanding of the settler colonial phenomena and of decolonization.

• Arab-Jewish
• logic of double elimination
• Palestine
• settler colonialism

ORCID

Marcelo Svirsky http://orcid.org/0000-0001-9811-3887

Notes

† This essay is an excerpt of the main arguments presented in our book, From Shared Life to Co-Resistance in Historic Palestine (London: Rowman & Littlefield International, 2017).

1 We use the term “Oriental Jews” to refer to an array of different Jewish communities that in their historical formation have in common a relation (yet not the same relation) to Arab culture, Arab spaces, and Arab history – in the Oriental world. The common denominator of Jewish Oriental communities is their affinities with, and a sense of belonging to, the Middle East, or Orient, its peoples and cultures. See Behar and Benite (2013, xxiii, xxviii); Shohat (1998); Shenhav (2006).