Abstract: The paper investigates the ideological and historical roots of the Zionist-Israeli policy and practice of ethnic cleansing of the indigenous Palestinians to build an exclusivist ethnocratic Jewish state in Palestine. The ongoing Israeli military invasion of Gaza, since October 7th, 2023, shows that the Jewish state of Israel and its political leaders do not conceal their genocidal intent towards the Palestinian population of both Gaza and the West Bank. The intention of Israel in its war against Gaza is to empty or purify this area of its Palestinian residents and replace them with Jewish settlers, building and expanding Israeli settlements in Gaza like Israel has been doing in the West Bank since 1967. Therefore, our study seeks to answer the following question: Why from its inception has ethnic cleansing of the indigenous Palestinians been a consistent and coherent goal and policy of Zionism? To answer this question, we need to put the so-called Israeli-Palestinian conflict in historical context by critically examining the historical roots and ideological foundations of the Zionist settler colonial enterprise aimed at displacing Palestinians to make room for the Jewish state of Israel. Employing the critical discourse analysis of Michel Foucault and the concept of cultural reproduction of Pierre Bourdieu we will critically analyze discourses about population transfer promoted by early Zionist leaders in the pre-state period. In addition, we deploy the concepts of settler colonialism to understand colonial and expansionist character of the Zionist movement and the state of Israel. Having critically analyzed relevant literature and closely examined historical and political discourses underpinning Zionism, we have revealed the continuities of the Zionist strategy of the elimination and erasure of the indigenous Palestinian people and building an exclusivist ethnocratic Jewish state in Palestine. From its inception the Zionist movement and ideology has been colonial and eliminationist in its essence aimed at the removal of the indigenous population and replacement of Palestinians with the exogenous colonial settler population from Europe.

Burgis writes in Jabobin that arguments ‘over whether Israelis or Palestinians count as “really indigenous” are beside the point’ (Ben Burgis, ‘No One’s Rights Should Depend on Where Their Ancestors Lived’, Jacobin, 07/03/24; available at: https://jacobin.com/2024/03/rights-ancestors-land-israel-palestine). In the following paragraphs I unpack Burgis’s rhetorical sleight of hand and argue that indigeneity matters. It matters because settler colonialism does.

All tricks begin with trust building exercises. Burgis first assumes what is an ostensibly sensible position. It is an acrimonious debate, but he is trustworthy, someone who is committed to opposing all outlandish approaches. Exhibit 1: Republican congresswomen Claudia Tenney. She lives on ‘stolen land’ (i.e., upstate New York) and represents the settlers who live there (the inverted commas around ‘stolen land’ are in Burgis’s original, but I wonder whether they are needed, since the land was actually stolen). Tenney has recently introduced the ‘RECOGNIZING Judea and Samaria Act’, Burgis notes, demanding that ‘US government documents stop referring to the Israeli-occupied West Bank as the “West Bank” and start calling it “Judea and Samaria”’. Burgis: ‘She claims that “the term ‘West Bank’” is “used to delegitimize Israel’s historical claim to this land.” The idea seems to be that, because ancient Jewish kingdoms were located there thousands of years ago, and Israeli Jews are descendants of the people who lived in those kingdoms, Palestinian rights are irrelevant. It’s a bit like an extremely high-stakes diplomatic land acknowledgment. Tenney is far from the only one on the Right thinking this way as Israel rains death and destruction on the civilian population of Gaza and pogroms by Israeli settlers terrorize Palestinians in the West Bank’. Tenney is reproachable. Fact.

Enter Exhibit 2: ‘There’s also a misguided — and, I hope, relatively small — segment of Palestine solidarity activists who take the mirror image of this position. They’re rightly horrified by the denial of democratic rights to the Palestinians, and especially by the mass starvation and indiscriminate bombing in Gaza, where the Israeli military has displaced at least 85 percent of the population from their homes since October. This anger leads them to indulge in ugly rhetoric about how the entire population of seven million or so Israeli Jews, the great majority of whom were born in the country, are “settlers” and “colonizers”‘.

The activists are ‘misguided’, they ‘indulge’, their rhetoric is ‘ugly’. Lucky that we have Burgis in the level-headed middle! And then his conclusion: ‘no one’s human rights should depend on their ethnicity or religion or where their ancestors come from’. It sounds plausible. But – wait a second! – I see what he has done there … nice try.

First: being ‘indigenous’ is not only defined by the presumed location of one’s ancestors. Burgis assumes that this is common sense but is misinformed. ‘Indigenous person’ and ‘settler’ come into existence in the context of an unequal relation, a relationship that relies on a logic of elimination and is defined by political structures of domination designed to replace one collective with another. It is called settler colonialism. Burgis uses the scare quotes around ‘settlers’ and ‘colonisers’, but I wonder whether they should be used: one is a settler whether he is personally born in a place or whether he has moved to it, because he is engaging in a specific relationship of domination. Speculating how long it may take before a settler turns into a native is like wondering how long a captain of industry must exploit factory workers before he turns into a proletarian. Settlers are made by movement and conquest. Indigeneity is a consequence of exogenous domination (even the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples agrees). Burgis defines indigeneity without reference to settler colonialism, which is like defining, say, ‘husband’ and ‘wife’ (which are also categories brought into existence in the context of a relationship) without referring to patriarchy, or defining ‘proletarians’ and ‘capitalists’ without reference to a particular mode of domination: capitalism. I could go on, but the main point is that it sounds dodgy. Is it deliberate?

Secondly, and in relation to everyone’s ‘human rights’, surreptitiously introduced in the analytical mix even if the ‘activists’ are definitely not saying that ‘settlers’ do not have human rights, let me ask: do they make sense without reference to domination? Does a call to uphold ‘everyone’s’ human rights in the context of genocide seem timely or appropriate? The rhetoric of Indigenous rights is not about ‘historic’ rights to land, it is not even about history; it is about a dehumanising system of domination, and it is about the present – a system and a present that disappear with Burgis’s sleight of hand. So much for being ‘beside the point’: indigeneity is the inevitable outcome of a settler colonial system of relationships. And settler colonialism is the very point of Zionism – replacing a collective on the land with another.

Burgis is happy to critique Zionism, but only if the critique is not about settler colonialism, which is like critiquing ‘capitalists’, provided that no reference is made to the way they accumulate capital: ‘The problem with Zionism is that it’s obscene for anyone’s status or rights in the area where they live to depend on their ethnicity or religion or where their ancestors lived. Zionism should be rejected not because we think Palestinians have a better claim than Israeli Jews to a blood-and-soil connection to the land, but on the basis of the universalist principles that have always formed the rock-solid normative basis of the socialist movement and, before that, were proclaimed by the French Revolutionaries in 1789’.

Again, nice try: true, the socialists and the ‘Revolutionaries’ proclaimed the principles, but they knew that their revolutions had to be victorious before they could be given social meaning. Avoiding a critique of settler colonialism as a mode of domination and then proclaiming that the principles ‘still’ stand when in reality they do not yet stand is a cop out. It is dodgy. Is it deliberate?

Then we get back to Burgis in the middle: ‘Zionism should be rejected because ethnostates are wrong in principle. No nation-state should be a state ‘of’ a specific ethnic or religious subset of its residents, and the most just solution would be a single secular democratic state with equal rights for everyone. People who insist that Palestinians are “indigenous” and Israelis are not, and who think this is what makes the struggle for Palestinian rights legitimate, are embracing the logic of reactionaries […] while reversing the implication. The problem with the Right’s claim that Israel is justified in denying basic rights to millions of people because of historical Jewish claims to “Judea and Samaria” is not that the right-wingers are misidentifying who counts as “truly” indigenous. The wildly reactionary premise is that this is even a relevant question’.

But one sure way of ensuring that the question remains irrelevant is to avoid a sound definition of what ‘indigenous’ means, or an analysis of a specific mode of domination. Settler colonialism is what Zionism set out to do, what it did, and wat it does. It is its achievement. It may stop in the future, and at that point, but only then, the meaning of ‘indigenous’ and ‘settler’ will be reconfigured, as the relationship that constitutes both will be dissolved. I look forward to that time. Does Burgis?

Abstract: Between 1950 and 1985, a period now referred to as the “Sixties Scoop”, over 24,000 Indigenous and Inuit children were removed from their families and placed into primarily non-Indigenous foster and adoptive homes across Canada. Whereas the Residential school system was explicitly racist and genocidal in its orientation, the Sixties Scoop racism was cloaked in accusations of neglect and child-saving rhetoric. Drawing on Hacking’s concept of looping effects, we examine how social workers classify their work and the Indigenous children they removed from their homes. We analyse sixteen interviews with social workers working in child welfare during the Sixties Scoop who were involved with the removal of Indigenous children. This article links broader systems that are fraught with racism, to the rank-and-file individuals tasked with carrying out child protection policies, and it probes the interpretations and classifications used both then and now to understand Indigenous child removal.

Abstract: This chapter explores this conjunction of politics and heritage using the passing of the Kosciuszko Wild Horse Heritage Act (2018), and the heritage framing of the feral horses of Australia’s Alpine region, as a case study. Examining the ongoing political machinations surrounding the Kosciuszko Wild Horse Heritage Act (2018), from the realm of legislature and governance to the identity politics that underpin it, I argue that the heritage status ascribed to the brumbies can be simultaneously located within Laurajane Smith’s (2006) construction of an Authorised Heritage Discourse (AHD), and the ongoing practice of settler-colonialism in Australia. The case study of the brumby-as-heritage presented in this chapter demonstrates how successful appeals to heritage seemingly grounded at the community level are, on closer examination, aligned with the dominant cultural hegemony of the AHD, while illustrating the growing tension between popular and scholarly understandings of heritage. This points to a broader issue for the field, as legislative instruments increasingly reflect populist rather than critical scholarly views. The brumby example—where the significance of the horse is positioned entirely within settler-colonial culture and constructions of feral horses as culturally significant refer specifically to a rural, white, Anglo-European identity—demonstrates how government processes can be co-opted by populist discourses, and the interests of the few can be protected at the expense of the many, under the rubric of community heritage.

Abstract: This research project explores early settler relationships to place, land, and the environment in Dunedin from the mid to late 1800s. The project aims to provide a new perspective by looking at the affective responses of settlers to the environment/nature and how they helped create a sense of belonging. This project has drawn on various ephemera from the Hocken Collection, primarily settler letters and diaries, to analyze the emotional connections and/or disconnections being formed. The project highlights the individual relationships to place through these personal accounts. Themes reflected on in the project also include the idea of utopia and the physical ‘improvement’ of the landscape. Key questions have been asked, such as, how do we feel like we belong in place? Did the physical transformation help to make settlers feel at home? How do we (pākehā) belong to a place that is not ours, but constructed to be ours? Ultimately, this research project aims to understand the affective dimension of belonging by exploring the early settlers’ emotional responses to place/environment in Dunedin.

Descritption: This book considers the ethics and politics of state apologies made to Indigenous peoples. The prevalent tendency to treat an apology as a speech act has maintained the focus on the state leader making the apology and not on the victims’ claims. This book demonstrates the inherent shortcomings of this approach through an examination of apologies delivered to Indigenous peoples in Australia and Canada. Contrasting the texts of different apologies with the responses of Indigenous peoples to them, the book considers how they are shaped by state norms regarding might be accepted as a wrong. In response, the book develops an understanding of apology as a relational process, which involves engaging Indigenous peoples in a dialogue to address past injustices. Stressing the importance of Indigenous perspectives in fulfilling the transformative promise of ‘never again’, which an apology represents, the book concludes by considering this process in relation to key proposals currently being pursued by Indigenous peoples in Australia and Canada. This book will be of considerable interest to scholars and students in the fields of Law, Indigenous studies; forgiveness studies; transitional justice; politics and postcolonialism.

Abstract: Colonialism can be seen as a historical process, or an ideology. As this article demonstrates, for Canadian Doukhobors, it is also a lived experience. Canadian Doukhobors, or Spirit Wrestlers, are a group of pacifist religious dissenters of mixed ethnic origins who immigrated to Canada from the Russian Empire in 1899. The worldview of the Doukhobors was radically different from the principles on which the colonial government was founded. The goal of this article is to describe the colonial policies directed towards the Doukhobors, their anticolonial struggles, and to consider the implications of the Doukhobor history for contemporary anti-colonial thought in Canada and worldwide. The government subjected Doukhobors to a range of discriminatory actions including cancellation of earlier granted land registries in Saskatchewan, incarcerations for refusal of military service (despite an existing legal exemption), taking away children of some Doukhobors and placing them in a juvenile detention center to force the assimilation. While considering the significance of the Doukhobor struggles against colonialism, the article proposes a new term, ‘colonial privilege.’ This article is reflexive and sheds a new light on the earlier recorded facts.

Abstract: Why do post-colonial states engage in population resettlement in their frontier territories? In this paper, we shift away from the motivations for resettlement by advancing a cost-centric theory for resettlement. We contend that states may use the resettlement policy because they inherit the infrastructural capital to do so from settlers of former colonial powers seeking to consolidate their frontiers. We test the observable implications of the theory using a unique geo-coded archival dataset and in Manchuria, a northeastern border region of China. We find that areas that received more Japanese settlers during the colonial period (1931-45) are associated with greater proximity to Chinese settlers in the post-colonial era (1945-). We also show that, contrary to existing findings on settlement and growth, Japanese settlements led to slower economic development. By focusing on cost our paper expands our understanding of resettlement policies and uncovers an alternative relationship between settlement and economic development.

Abstract: This dissertation examines the interaction between Euro-American settlers and miners and the unique environment of central Idaho from 1863 to 1964, highlighting how cultural and social frameworks imported by these settlers led to recurrent disasters. The settlers’ adaptation to these disasters, in turn, reshaped their cultural values and land-use practices. Focusing on the cultural impact of recurring small-scale disasters, or ‘chronic traumas,’ this work explores how Euro-Americans’ settlement and early industrial activities in central Idaho led to a cycle of disaster and adaptation, including significant shifts in their collective identity and practices. The dissertation contends that vulnerability in relation to disasters is a dynamic, long-term process that reshapes communities beyond any recovery phase. Focusing on central Idaho, the thesis explores how a century of ‘chronic traumas’ influenced the evolving collective perception of disaster, beginning with a sense of necessary hardship, but later shifting to apathy and resignation. This dissertation also traces the interplay between culture and nature in central Idaho, revealing how their cultural imprints and the natural world’s demands co-constructed the historical landscape and perceptions of wilderness. The research outlines how modernity’s push on boundaries and the resulting disasters influenced the Euro-Americans’ relationship with central Idaho’s wilderness, culminating in a changed perception of disaster and use of the land over time.

Last month Harvard Law School professor Noah Feldman published in Time an authoritative outline of the evolution of antisemitic thought and addressed settler colonial studies as part of its contemporary instantiations (Noah Feldman, ‘The New Antisemitism’, Time, 27/02/24). Time is a very important outlet. Antisemitism is a very serious charge. Feldman’s intervention warrants a response.

After summarising the history and main features of medieval and nineteenth century antisemitisms, Feldman focuses on the ‘new’ antisemitism: ‘The core of this new antisemitism lies in the idea that Jews are not a historically oppressed people seeking self-preservation but instead oppressors: imperialists, colonialists, and even white supremacists. This view preserves vestiges of the trope that Jews exercise vast power. It creatively updates that narrative to contemporary circumstances and current cultural preoccupations with the nature of power and injustice. […] The theory of settler-colonial white supremacy was developed as a critical account of countries like Australia and the U.S., in which, according to the theory, the colonialists’ aim was to displace the local population, not to extract value from its labor. The application of these categories to Israel is a secondary development’.

I have been involved in this secondary development for a couple of decades now, and still fail to understand why it is categorically impossible to simultaneously think of Jews as an historically oppressed diaspora and of some Jews (i.e., the current inhabitants of Israel) as oppressors – this is what an historical understanding of developing relations is meant to offer, and this is what an understanding of the history of Zionism in Palestine offers: it registers the successes of Zionism as a settler colonial movement and observes their consequences for its victims.

These ‘borrowed categories do not fit Israel’s specificity very well’, Feldman argues. And yet: the reasons he lists to demonstrate a lack of fit are either about something else or actually confirm a remarkable fit – they may be borrowed but retain purchase. Here are Feldman’s reasons: ‘Israel is a regional Middle Eastern power with a tiny footprint, not a global or continental empire designed to extract resources and labor’, Feldman notes, even if being a regional power rather than a continental one has nothing to do with an ability to monopolise control over Indigenous lands for the purpose of replacing the Indigenous population. Feldman: Israel ‘was brought into existence by a 1947 United Nations resolution that would have created two states side by side, one Jewish and one Palestinian. Its purpose, as conceived by the U.N.’s member countries, was to house displaced Jews after 6 million were killed in the Holocaust. The Palestinian catastrophe, or nakba, of 1948 was that when the Arab invasion of Israel failed to destroy the nascent Jewish state, many Palestinians who had fled or been forced out of their homes by Israeli troops were unable to return. Those Palestinians became permanent refugees in neighboring countries. Instead of ending up in an independent Palestine as proposed by the U.N., those who had stayed in their homes found themselves living either in Israel or under Egyptian and Jordanian rule. Then, in the 1967 war, the West Bank and Gaza were conquered by Israel. Palestinians in those places came under what Israel itself defines as an occupation. They have lived in that precarious legal status ever since despite the 1993–2001 peace process’.

I quote at length because, again, this history, as represented here, is entirely consistent with an ability to monopolise control over Indigenous lands for the purpose of replacing the Indigenous population. Nothing in this summary is negating the operation of settler colonialism as a specific mode of domination in Israel-Palestine. (Feldman also mentions ‘white supremacy’, adding that it also does not apply because, even if ‘Jewish prejudice and discrimination’ do occur, Jews are not white, or were not, which is not a compelling counter argument, as the problem in ‘white supremacy’ is not the ‘white’ bit but ‘supremacy’).

Then Feldman continues on the question of settler colonialism: ‘The upshot is that while a well-meaning person, free of antisemitism, could describe Israel as colonialist, the narrative of Israel as a settler-colonial oppressor on par with or worse than the U.S., Canada, and Australia is fundamentally misleading. Those who advance it run the risk of perpetuating antisemitism by condemning the Jewish state despite its basic differences from these other global examples—most important, Israel’s status as the only homeland for a historically oppressed people who have nowhere else to call their own’.

‘Misleading’ and ‘antisemitic’ are key here. But there is no condemnation for being Jewish in any of the analyses of Israeli settler colonialism I have read, and they never lead to suggestions that settlers should depart en masse. There is no such misleading. (Besides, the US is also America’s only historic homeland, so is Australia for the Australians, and all settlers also have nowhere else to call home (and interestingly, the Puritans went to Massachusetts because they were ‘persecuted’ elsewhere, while the Australians ended up building a nation out of a widespread system of offshore detention, a significant form of oppression). The problem these analyses focus on is an oppressive occupation – which can be discontinued without mass departure. If anything, these analyses contribute to the task of finding possible solutions to the conflict.

These works argue that Israel can be Jewish without also necessarily oppressing Indigenous Palestinians – these works argue for ending a settler colonial project and reorganising the political life of the polity in accordance with democratic norms (Feldman has just finished explaining how historic antisemitism presumed paranoically that Jews were bent on domination – but his consideration of the question of settler colonialism and his dismissal assume Israel must be, or else it cannot be ‘Jewish’, which is a very antisemitic thing to imply). Feldman then adds:

To emphasize the narrative of Jews as oppressors, the new antisemitism must also somehow sidestep not only two millennia of Jewish oppression, but also the Holocaust, the largest organized, institutionalized murder of any ethnic group in human history. On the right, antisemites either deny the Holocaust ever happened or claim its scope has been overstated. On the left, one line is that Jews are weaponizing the Holocaust to legitimize the oppression of Palestinians.

On the contrary: no sidestepping. Having been oppressed for two millennia, an unavoidable fact, has nothing to do with a recent and current ability to monopolise control over Indigenous lands for the purpose of replacing the Indigenous population. It is the history of Zionism and was its ambition all along: turning the endangered and persecuted into a sovereign collective – and the oppression of Palestinians was always understood as a necessary corollary of its operation. It is an ability to monopolise control over Indigenous lands for the purpose of replacing the Indigenous population – settler colonialism – that did the transubstantiation. And the Holocaust is not sidestepped either: it is actually a crucial element in this story. The Shoah happens in one location (Europe) and at one time, and some of its consequences reverberate later in another (Palestine). These consequences included an ability to monopolise control over Indigenous lands for the purpose of replacing the Indigenous population. Feldman story is told as if Zionism had not been able to create a powerful polity, which is a remarkable sidestepping indeed.

These accusations are easily refuted. But Feldman’s conclusion does not ultimately depend on an observable historical reality: ‘The new narrative of Jews as oppressors is, in the end, far too close for comfort to the antisemitic tradition’. He admits the current oppression of Palestinians, he even considers the recent charges of genocide in Gaza as worthy of consideration – except that they do not apply in his opinion because of intent. ‘The genocide charge depends on intent’, and ‘Israel, as a state, is not fighting the Gaza War with the intent to destroy the Palestinian people’, he contends. Feldman is legal scholar and should do better, even if it is a very difficult defense. Who is doing the killing, not an arm of the Israeli State? Are the bombings not deliberate? Are Gazans not Palestinians? Are they not being indiscriminately destroyed? Can a determination to render Gaza unliveable not be discerned? As for mass starvation, is it not a deliberate policy? In relation to the last question in particular, we have heard similar arguments about unintended consequences in comparable circumstances, and it is not becoming. Finally, are not the Israeli politicians uttering clearly recognisable genocidal statements not currently serving in cabinet positions (a point Feldman readily admits, as if it made little difference)? These are genuine questions, but what is most telling, is that Feldman ultimately worries about what is ‘too close for comfort’ and what is not. He dismisses the matter of genocide on a technicality. And he does not consider an observable and ongoing ability to monopolise control over Indigenous lands for the purpose of replacing the Indigenous population – settler colonialism. Seeking comfort in the face of genocide. And unsupported accusations.