Abstract
In the meticulously researched Colonizing Palestine: The Zionist Left and the Making of the Palestinian Nakba, Areej Sabbagh-Khoury, a Palestinian sociologist, centers the Hashomer Hatzair, literally “Young Guard,” a social movement formed in elite European circles who saw themselves as progressive, socialist, and Zionist. This was a group that refused to endorse the Biltmore Program that was introduced in New York City and laid out a vision for Palestine becoming a “Jewish Commonwealth.” Many of its members instead espoused a vision of a binational state, where Arab and Jewish workers could labor side by side.
Sabbagh-Khoury writes against the grain of Israeli scholarship that largely overlooks the settler-colonialism inherent to these “progressive” Zionist groups. Scouring the archives of three kibbutzim—Mishmar HaEmek, Hazorea, and Ein Hashofet—she gathers first-hand accounts of how these settlers saw their relationship with Palestinian fellahin (farmers). She prioritizes what settlers’ records reveal about the dispossession of Palestinians from their land and then attends to the ideology and narrative that the settlers used to make sense of what they were doing.
Sabbagh-Khoury shows that the progressivism professed by the residents of these kibbutzim belied the fact that these were inherently settler-colonial projects whose goal was to dispossess indigenous Palestinians from their land, by extracting and accumulating it. While kibbutz members saw themselves as engaging in a “legal” process of purchasing Palestinian land, this was, as Sabbagh-Khoury puts it, “colonialism by purchase.” Eventually, that land acquisition would create the conditions for colonialism by massacre. The kibbutz members, like other Zionists, dehumanized Palestinians, describing them as backward, devoid of their own national projects or aspirations, and lacking indigenous rights to the land. Sabbagh-Khoury emphasizes that while the settler-colonial project in the United States envisioned the western frontier as free of people (a fiction, of course), in Palestine this was never the imaginary: land was densely populated and expensive. It had to be acquired.
While some of the residents of the kibbutzim expressed sadness and remorse over the violence that the paramilitary group, the Haganah, enacted on Palestinians, others joined in their scouting missions. And though the archives made clear that Palestinians did not initiate any attacks on Jewish settlers (even when provoked), the settlers ultimately saw violence against Palestinians enacted by the Haganah as necessary for the founding of the Israeli state. This perspective became stronger, she shows, after the Nakba, or the forced removal of 75 percent of Palestinians from their ancestral land, and the massacre of hundreds of thousands of people.
The professed progressivism of these kibbutzim did not materially benefit the Palestinians. Instead, it obfuscated the violence that enabled their dispossession. These kibbutzim are the origins of the modern, internationally condemned settler movement that continues to violently expel Palestinians from their land today through unjust legal frameworks. In other words, while the Hashomer Hatzair saw themselves as holding a higher moral ground than others within the Zionist project, they were in fact leaders in its deeply racist agenda.
Sabbagh-Khoury uses a series of conceptual and theoretical building blocks in drawing out this account. Particularly interesting for the study of settler-colonialism, and for historical sociology as a whole, is the way she addresses the teleological threat inherent to making sense of a historical process after its conclusion. Sabbagh-Khoury avoids this by taking an events-based and relational approach, dividing these big processes of “settler-colonialism” and Israeli state’s “sovereignty” into their contingent parts, or what she calls their “submovements.” She also attends to the interactions between Jewish settlers, indigenous Palestinians, and British imperialists.
The density of Sabbagh-Khoury’s account begins in the 1930s with the Great Arab Revolt against the restrictions placed by British imperialists, and those imperialists’ support for increasing Jewish immigration and Palestinian land dispossession. The Nakba, she argues, is not the beginning or end of the project of Zionist dispossession, but an event in a chain of events that did not have to turn out the way they did. Similarly, the establishment of Israeli sovereignty also begins with “semi-sovereignty” under the British mandate. Her account continues into the 1950s with its consolidation.
If I had one critique of this book, it is one that Sabbagh-Khoury herself openly recognizes: her reliance on the first-hand accounts of colonizers, and the limited representation of the voices of the colonized. While she does interview Palestinians, she does not include them in this write-up. Sabbagh-Khoury explains that while the settlers kept an extensive record of their doings—seeing themselves as part of a deliberate political project—indigenous Palestinians did not do the same. What’s more, fellahin were less likely to be literate, and Palestinian archives are longtime targets of Israeli erasure.
There’s an incredible power to the account that Sabbagh-Khoury does offer; it is a rare study where an indigenous woman selects her colonizers as her subjects. She reads their material in their language and sits with their self-understandings and the ideologies they weaponized to begin a campaign of structural violence against her people. This perspective is unique in sociological analyses and powerful for what it reflects of the ongoing discourse around “liberal Zionism,” Palestinian dispossession, and the expansion of settlements on indigenous land. Though Colonizing Palestine can be dense in parts, as Sabbagh-Khoury plunges us into decades of archival material and her own intricate theoretical analysis, it is worth the investment for anyone interested in how this ongoing settler-colonial project began and how it is unfolding.