Settler colonialism and genocide: Jacob Blau, Legal frameworks, intent, and the reality of its victims: examining process of genocide in Palestine through settler-colonialism, MA dissertation, Northeastern University, 2026 | settler colonial studies blog

Settler colonialism and genocide: Jacob Blau, Legal frameworks, intent, and the reality of its victims: examining process of genocide in Palestine through settler-colonialism, MA dissertation, Northeastern University, 2026

24May26

Abstract: Rigid legal frameworks of genocide have threatened the concept’s applicability to protracted forms of violence. This had led many historians and sociologists to avoid scholarly discussions regarding the nuances of the definition (intent, consequences, types of violence) that would allow more states to be held culpable for genocide. However, historical and sociological approaches into genocide, explored closely in this thesis, offer fluid understandings of the term that should inform the legal definitions. I apply this approach to Palestine and argue that Zionism’s goal to establish a majority Jewish state in an inhabited region exhibits an instance where the “slow violence” of settler-colonialism fits into a larger process of genocide. In doing, genocide’s origins are examined closely through the term’s architect, Raphael Lemkin, and how his neologism sought to include cultural and political forms of violence. While these types of violence should have been included in genocide’s definition, western powers lobbied to restrict the United Nations Genocide Convention (UNCG) to physical forms of violence so to remain blameless for past and future crimes against indigenous populations. I confront these exclusive definitions in legal and non-legal contexts by tracing the intentional dispossession, displacement, and removal of the Palestinian population first explicated by Zionist leader Theodor Herzl in 1895. In analyzing diaries, policies, and rhetoric of Zionist leaders, I examine intent in how the indigenous population was percieved as lesser- unable to cultivate or make use of their land, which later justified settler colonial violence. I look at how leaders advertised and lobbied Zionism and demonstrate that the ideology is laden with myths and falsehoods, and that it was driven by the tragic reality of antisemitism creating the notion that Jewish security through statehood was required regardless of the consequences. I provide a historical overview of this reality for Palestinians where Zionists displaced and dispossessed Palestinians through legal means- capitalizing on Ottoman legal reforms, an absentee land-owner class, and its alliance with the British Mandate, and violent means- coercion, fencing, and militancy. To be clear, Zionists enacted settler colonial expansion often illegally to undercut laws, often half-measures in the case of the Mandate, that aimed to restrict their territorial expansion. The settler colonial reality also saw the British-Zionist hegemony reject Palestinians their rights to self-determination through policy, exclusionary legal categorizations, attacks against political leaders, which facilitated the replacement of Palestinians with a Jewish population. While this hegemony ignored a Palestinian political future, resistance movements against Zionist settler colonialism and the British mandate were present throughout the process of genocide.

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