« The critical psyche against settler colonialism: Lee-Anne Broadhead, Christine Gwynn, Sean Howard, ‘he Critical Psyche: Jung, Marcuse and the Aesthetics of Social Change in an Era of Indigenous Resurgence’, International Journal of Jungian Studies, 2026
Settlers come to stay: Tin Pham Nguyen, ‘Rooted in the ‘lucky country’: settler permanence, emigration ambivalence, and national identity in Australia, National Identities, 2026 »

Really JICH? Amir Goldstein, Elad Nahshon, ‘From Partnership to Revolt: The Dialectics of SettlerColonial Consciousness in the Zionist Right’, Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History, 2026

20Mar26

Abstract: This article offers a historically grounded contribution to the debate on the relationship between Zionism and settler colonialism. Rather than determining whether Zionism should be defined as a settler-colonial project, the study employs settler colonialism as an analytical lens to examine how Zionist actors – specifically the Irgun (Hebrew: Etzel, National Military Organisation) – experienced and conceptualised their position within the colonial environment of Mandatory Palestine. Focusing on a key transitional moment in the 1930s – 1940s, this article trace the shifting consciousness of the Zionist Right as it moved from reliance on the British Empire to an increasingly confrontational stance, culminating in the Irgun’s anti-British revolt under Menachem Begin. This study utilises Irgun and Revisionist leaflets, circulars, pamphlets, and internal directives to reconstruct the organisation’s evolving self perception. The findings challenge narratives that portray Zionist actors as denying the settler-colonial dimension of their enterprise. Instead, an explicit adoption of colonial discourse, including comparisons with British settler societies and the positioning of Jews as ‘European settlers’, is revealed in the Revisionist and early Irgun phases. At the same time, these sources expose a fluid identity spectrum between ‘settler’ and ‘native’, shaped by contemporary colonial classifications and claims of historical rootedness. The article’s central contribution lies in demonstrating that the Irgun’s shift from cooperation with Britain to anti-imperial struggle was not a rupture but a gradual, dialectical transformation in settler colonial consciousness. Beyond the Zionist case, the study proposes a refined model for understanding how settler societies negotiate tensions between dependence on the metropole and the development of independent identity, highlighting how highly different modes of self-understanding can coexist within the same political movement, it thus invites reconsideration of the temporal and ideological dynamics that shape settler-colonial identity formation.


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