Palestinians are indigenes: Ilan Pappe, ‘Indigeneity as Cultural Resistance: Notes on the Palestinian Struggle within Twenty-First-Century Israel’, South Atlantic Quarterly, 117, 1, pp. 157-178. | settler colonial studies blog

Palestinians are indigenes: Ilan Pappe, ‘Indigeneity as Cultural Resistance: Notes on the Palestinian Struggle within Twenty-First-Century Israel’, South Atlantic Quarterly, 117, 1, pp. 157-178.

28Feb18

Abstract: This article examines closely the Palestinian cultural resistance in the Galilee as an antidote to the Israeli claim of Jewish indigeneity and policies of oppression. It begins by discussing the application of the term indigenous. to the Palestinians in Israel, an application that is to this very day contested by scholars who prefer to see the Palestinian community as a national group engaged with other Palestinian groups in a national liberation struggle. The article focuses on various projects and highlights in particular projects that reconstruct pre-1948 Palestine as means both to commemorate the Nakba and to accentuate and reaffirm Palestinian indigeneity. It concludes by arguing that this kind of cultural struggle complements, rather than demotes, the national struggle. Indeed, at times and on the face of it, this kind of struggle has a chance of prevailing given the lack of interest or ignorance of the settler-colonial state and its project of Judaization of the Galilee and the rest of Palestine.

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