Labor Zionism and Settler Colonialism
A Review of Areej Sabbagh-Khoury’s Colonizing Palestine
May 1, 2024
“A land without a people for a people without a land”: so early Zionist leaders described Palestine before their scramble for its land. But when European Jews arrived in Palestine, they did not find a vacant land; they found a land that had been inhabited by Palestinian Arabs for centuries. These were Muslims, Christians, and native Jews as well. The lands of the region of Palestine had been under Ottoman rule for centuries, before being controlled by the British on a de facto basis from 1917 until 1922.
This is when the League of Nations granted the British mandate power over the area. During the twenty-five years of the Palestine Mandate, from 1922 to 1947, large-scale Jewish immigration from outside the region, mainly from Eastern Europe, started to settle in the land of Palestine. These newcomers used many strategies, from purchasing to violently seizing the lands and property of Palestinians. Many of the European Jews were attracted to this land by Zionist ideologies, as well as pushed by antisemitic persecution in Europe.
The conflict between Zionist settlers and Palestinian natives, then, developed in a land that was controlled by the British, who were in favor of the establishment of a Jewish national homeland in Palestine. While the State of Israel was established on May 15, 1948, and admitted to the United Nations, a Palestinian state was not established. Palestinians were never considered to have the right of self-determination.
The remaining territories of pre–1948 Palestine, the West Bank (including East Jerusalem) and Gaza Strip, were administered from 1948 to 1967 by Jordan and Egypt, respectively. Years of wars and bloodshed, uprisings and massacres, and expansions of settlements took place on this land, which is described as one of the world’s longest-continuing conflicts, a conflict in which compromise has proven elusive.
One of the most notorious dates in the conflict is 1948. In that year, more than seven hundred thousand Palestinian Arabs—about half of prewar Mandatory Palestine’s Arab population—fled their homes or were expelled by Zionist militias and, later, during the 1948 Palestine war following the UN’s Partition Plan, many fled from the Israeli army. The Partition Plan was rejected by Palestinians, who saw it as a top-down decision imposed by the UN and rewarding Zionists for the theft of their lands.
The mass displacement and dispossession of Palestinians during 1948 is described as the Nakba, which means “catastrophe” in Arabic. However, when scholars and observers discuss Israeli settlements, they refer mostly to the post–1967 settlements. But the removal of Palestinians and seizure of their homes started in this earlier period, at least from 1948.
In addition to beginning with recent history, many analyses of the conflict provide a macro-history of the conflict. We rarely encounter research that focuses on the micro-level dynamics of settler colonialism—at least not without losing sight of the larger project. One of the most important exceptions to this trend is Colonizing Palestine by Areej Sabbagh-Khoury, an incomparable historical account of how early Zionist settlers thought about and dealt with Palestinian natives.
Labor Zionism as a Settler Colonial Project
A decade in the making, Colonizing Palestine is based on extensive empirical research in local colonial and national archives in Israel. Sabbagh-Khoury examines closely three colonies, which were founded by the Zionist movement Hoshomer Hartzair, a left-wing and labor movement that was part of larger labor Zionism. The book is based on an important methodological emblem: “disaggregating Zionism into its constituent movements illuminates the patterned process of settler colonialism at the microlevel without losing sight of how discrete actions coalesced into the larger [Zionist] project.”1Areej Sabbagh-Khoury, Colonizing Palestine: The Zionist Left and the Making of the Palestinian Nakba (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2023), 8.
How did settlers within a movement that was based on liberation and socialist utopia make sense of the forced removal of Palestinians?
Political Zionism is a polyvalent term, as Sabbagh-Khoury emphasizes. Hoshomer Hartzair, the movement she examines in depth, is based on an ideology of “Zionism, socialism, and the brotherhood/fraternity of peoples.”2Ibid., 7. How did settlers within a movement that was based on liberation and socialist utopia make sense of the forced removal of Palestinians? Sabbagh-Khoury examines the contradictory nature of the early settlers’ ideology, which made them advocate for a binational Jewish/Arab state, while at the same time participating in the processes of mass removal of Palestinians from their land.
Colonizing Palestine is divided into six chapters, plus an introduction and conclusion. Chapters One to Four are about the processes of settlement before, during, and after the 1948 events of the Nakba; chapters Five and Six are about memory.
It includes a commanding blend of the history of Palestine, Israel, and the politics of the conflict, bringing together sociology of colonialism and empire, and cultural sociology (especially of memory) with a mastery of historical sociology. Sabbagh-Khoury, a Palestinian who carries Israeli citizenship and teaches sociology at an Israeli university, emphasizes that she “inhabit[s] a world of parallel times and spaces,” in which absolute binaries fail to capture the complexities of everyday life.
Sabbagh-Khoury made a wise but very challenging decision to rely on the archives of the settler. These archives carried an “abundance of the victor’s recounting” and seem to “forfeit subaltern knowledge,” yet they helped provide a thick historical account of the tragedy of displacement.3Ibid., xv. The archives are themselves a constitutive technology of governance, she emphasizes.
The author describes herself as “oscillating between milieus that have undoubtedly shaped her material circumstances and epistemological orientation.”4Ibid., xiii. Her meticulous work provides us with a historical treasure trove of settler colonialism, early Zionist movements, and the Nakba and its memorialization. In the following, I will highlight some of the strengths of the book followed by a minor criticism.
Zionism and Imperialism
Colonizing Palestine is a masterpiece for teaching and learning about political Zionism and settler colonialism. As the author states, “I use settler colonialism as a framework that opens the possibility of considering the assemblages, contradictions, ambivalences, and contingencies through which the past has been shaped by various competing social and political actors.”5Ibid., 18. Political Zionism embodied two key two features since its inception, Sabbagh-Khoury argues. “First, a social closure [that] led some European Jews to seek out a national-colonial solution to their social exclusion and, especially in the Russian Empire, violent oppression, and second, a national–colonial habitus emerged in Europe and shaped Zionist thinkers and actors.”6Ibid., 18.
As a clever political and historical sociologist, Sabbagh-Khoury does not treat Zionism solely as a stagnant thing born in Europe. The Zionism of the early settlers grew into a project of displacing Palestinians, and it was “developed dialectically through the interaction with the indigenous within the framework of the British imperial field.”7Ibid., 18. She adds, “The juridical features of the Mandate period disabled indigenous sovereignty by empowering Zionist settlers.”8Ibid., 87.
Through these chapters, Sabbagh-Khoury provides readers with different varieties of Zionisms. She includes accounts of utopian socialist ideologies, settlers’ ambivalence about the Indigenous population, various revisionist factions and how they thought about land acquisition, Palestinians, the question of organization, and much more. She teaches us that the settler colonial project is more than a settlement in a land. It also requires resolving pragmatic issues of violence for security and dealing with the native population.
Even though the land that was purchased by early Zionists before 1948 constituted only 7 percent of the land area of Mandate Palestine, the purchase was not based on consent. It was part of their colonial strategy.
Chapters Three and Four examine how the methods of Zionist settler colonialism in Palestine changed from time to time: how early settlers navigated the encounter with the native population, and how they started purchasing lands until joining the warfare against Palestinians in 1948. Even though the land that was purchased by early Zionists before 1948 constituted only 7 percent of the land area of Mandate Palestine (as most of the land was seized later during the war), Sabbagh-Khoury explains, purchase was not based on consent.
The Nakba
Colonizing Palestine includes a wealth of primary sources drawn from colonial and Zionist archives. The author was able to access Israeli archives and scholarship and read them in Hebrew, as well as draw on a large body of Palestinian scholarship written in Arabic. In navigating this material, she presents a thick account of many important events, such as the Nakba as well as many massacres, annexations, and the like. Sabbagh-Khoury suggests that at every step, events could have gone differently.
In recounting how settlers made sense of their place in the wider context of expanding Zionist semi-sovereignty and the establishment of the Jewish state, I have been interested in what could have been and more attuned to the historical circumstances that informed their conceptualization of their roles. Despite the settlers’ assertions of an ethics of peace, a common paradigm emerged in which some of them (mostly evidently at Hazorea) believed from the beginning that at least some Arab villages would have to be emptied for the security of their kibbutz.9Ibid., 190.
Sabbagh-Khoury examines the Nakba as it was described by the settlers and their documents, and discusses how settlers had difficulty dealing with the events, moving between denial and endorsement. She treats the Nakba itself as an event with an enduring outcome, but also as an ongoing process of impact and memorialization.
One example of the author’s mastery of historical sociology is her analysis of the events of 1948 as a sequence of occurrences, a significant historical event in William Sewell’s sense.10Editors’ Note: See William H. Sewell, Jr., “Historical Events as Transformations of Structures: Inventing Revolution at the Bastille,” Theory and Society 25, no. 6 (1996): 841–81. Treating 1948 (or 1967 for that matter) as ground zero of the conflict is a myth that should be questioned.
It should also be noted that Israel issued a law in 2011 (under the heading of Fundamentals of Finance—Amendment No. 40) called “the Nakba Law.” With this law, Israel limited freedom of speech pertaining to events of the Nakba, as they touch upon the founding of Israel. The law affects organizations which are funded, in whole or in part, by the government. It authorizes Israel’s finance minister to revoke funding from institutions that reject Israel’s character as a “Jewish state” and that address the massacres of 1948. Rigorously analyzing these events in their historical context is not only a great scholarly endeavor but a brave act as well.
Finally, this book is a fine example of research interweaving political sociology, political theory, and the sociology of colonialism and empire. To do justice to this important, thorny, and historical research, Sabbagh-Khoury had to synthesize key theoretical and analytical concepts and vocabulary, such as the theory of the colonial frontier (the idea of a free land available for settlement), expanding work on state colonialism as a field to the British imperial context via an examination of varieties of settler colonialism and theories of collective memory and trauma, as well as by analyzing sovereignty as a question of gradation and temporal life. As Sabbagh-Khoury writes, “I consider multiple institutional meanings of sovereignty—such as settler colonial semisovereignty nested within British imperial rule—thereby viewing sovereignty as partial and crosscutting.”11Sabbagh-Khoury, Colonizing Palestine, 15.
Notwithstanding all of these strengths, the average reader might experience some difficulty in navigating the many names and the sequence of events. I wished that the author added at least two things to her book: a short timeline of major annexations and developments of the three colonies examined closely in the book; and a glossary of the names that appear in the book. Because the book is based on rich materials in English, Hebrew, and Arabic, it would have been useful to list names of villages (before and after settlements), Zionist writers, and settlers.
In conclusion, Colonizing Palestine is a groundbreaking book that scholars of Israel and Palestine, political and historical sociology, and sociology and anthropology of colonialism and memory should read. This remarkable resource will provide readers with an exceptional grasp of the nuances of settler colonialism, Zionism, and the history of the Nakba, as both a past event and an ongoing process in Palestine. I will continue to read and teach this book for many years to come. ×
Notes & References
- Areej Sabbagh-Khoury, Colonizing Palestine: The Zionist Left and the Making of the Palestinian Nakba (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2023), 8.
- Ibid., 7.
- Ibid., xv.
- Ibid., xiii.
- Ibid., 18.
- Ibid., 18.
- Ibid., 18.
- Ibid., 87.
- Ibid., 190.
- Editors’ Note: See William H. Sewell, Jr., “Historical Events as Transformations of Structures: Inventing Revolution at the Bastille,” Theory and Society 25, no. 6 (1996): 841–81.
- Sabbagh-Khoury, Colonizing Palestine, 15.