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A Century of Settler Colonialism in Palestine: Zionism's

Entangled Project

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A Century of Settler
Colonialism in Palestine:
Zionism’s Entangled Project
Tariq Dana Ali Jarbawi
Director of the Center for Professor of Political Science
Development Studies
Birzeit University Birzeit University

Throughout the past century, the Zionist movement constructed the most
sophisticated settler-colonial project of our age: the State of Israel. The violent
birth of Israel in 1948 and the subsequent colonization of the entirety of the
land of Palestine after the 1967 war are indeed reflections of Zionism’s successes
in fulfilling its settler-colonial ambitions in Palestine. Yet, while this settler- 1
colonial project continues unabated, it is an entangled one, unable to reach the
ultimate point of Jewish exclusivity in the land. Zionist settler colonialism, as
its historical precedents suggest, is fundamentally based on the operative logic
of “eliminating the native” and failing to utterly marginalize and “minoritize”
him. The vibrant Palestinian presence in the land, the everyday resistance to the
colonial order, and the robust Palestinian adherence to their rights all stand as
structural obstacles to the ultimate realization of the “Zionist dream.”1 Despite
Israel’s relentless colonial power and domination, Palestinian steadfastness means
that this project will remain impeded and incomplete, a matter that may lead
to its future demise.

Tariq Dana is Director of the Center for Development Studies at Birzeit University. He is a senior esearch
fellow at Ibrahim Abu-Lughod Institute of International Studies and a policy advisor for Al-Shabaka, The
Palestinian Policy Network.

Ali Jarbawi is Professor of Political Science at Birzeit University. He is the former Minister of Planning and
Administrative Development and the former Minister of Higher Education of the Palestinian Authority.
He has held a variety of senior posts at Birzeit University, including Director of the Ibrahim Abu Loghod
Institute for International Studies.
Copyright © 2017 by the Brown Journal of World Affairs

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 Tariq Dana and Ali Jarbawi
Unmasking Zionism

Those who seek to grasp the present-day complexity of the so-called Israeli-
Palestinian conflict must begin by uncovering its geopolitical roots. This means
understanding the nature of the Israeli state, society, and economy as a byprod-
uct of a larger settler-colonial movement, distinguished by a combination of a
hybrid form of nationalism with a sophisticated colonial model. This merger lies
at the core of the Israeli state’s ideology; it systemically guided the decades-long
policies of forceful dispossession of the Palestinian people to build an ethnically
exclusivist Jewish state.
The Zionist movement emerged in the second half of the nineteenth
century in Eastern and Central Europe and was initially formed “as a national
revival movement, prompted by the growing pressure on Jews in those regions
to assimilate totally or risk continuing persecution.”2 Although political Zionism
is a homegrown European movement, nurtured and shaped by the continent’s
sociopolitical development, it has induced far-reaching consequences on distant
regions of the world. Indeed, Palestine—as a land, people, and history—is a
prime victim of Europe’s collusion in exporting its homegrown problems.
Thus, any discussion of the nature and dynamic of the Zionist colonization
2 of Palestine must be anchored in the triple dynamics that constituted the essence
of nineteenth-century Europe: nationalism, colonialism, and anti-Semitism.
Although the distinctly European interplay between nationalism and colonial-
ism is a defining feature of political Zionism, the movement developed peculiar
characteristics that make it particularly problematic.
It is transnational: In sharp contrast to conventional nationhood—revolving
around common linguistic, cultural, and historical ties within a shared territo-
rial space—the Zionist nationalistic doctrine invented a transnational ethnic
identity that sought to bring together the culturally, socially, and ethnically
heterogeneous world Jewry to establish a nation-state.
It is mythological: Zionism placed the Hebrew biblical mythology as the
primary source of national identity formation. In his seminal work The Inven-
tion of the Jewish People, the Israeli scholar Shlomo Sand deconstructs the official
Zionist historiography by challenging the claim that the Jewish people constitute
a national group with a shared tie to the land of Palestine, and concludes that the
Jews should be seen as a religious community. He rightly points to the fact that
“In the modern world, membership of a religious community does not provide
ownership rights to a territory, whereas an ‘ethnic’ people always have a land
they can claim as their ancestral heritage.”3 Furthermore, Sand contends that

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 A Century of Settler-Colonialism in Palestine
“In the eyes of the first Zionist historians, the Bible ceased to be an impressive
theological text and became a book of secular history.”4 Against this backdrop,
one can infer that Zionism manipulated Judaism as a religion to reinterpret
history and redefine Jewishness in terms of ethnic belonging. Paradoxically,
whereas the Zionist nationalist paradigm relied heavily on religious texts and
traditions to justify its very existence, the Zionist body of thought was primarily
constructed along secular principles, with its founding fathers—such as Theodor
Herzl, Max Nordau, David Ben-Gurion, and Chaim Weizmann, among oth-
ers—maintaining a staunchly secular worldview.
It is monopolistic: Zionists framed their claim to the land of Palestine by
a monopoly right of nationhood granted by divine will. This is particularly
underscored in the strategic way that early Zionist thinkers deployed terms of
biblical origin such as “chosen people” and “the promised land” to to reinvent
Jews as an ethnonationalistic group in search of political self-determination and
invent a territorial space where Jewish “emancipation” could materialize in the
form of monopoly over the land and nation-state.
It is exclusionist: Early Zionist leaders envisioned the Jewish state as part and
parcel of European colonialism. The Zionist movement deliberately disregarded
the presence of the people of the land and constructed an exclusionary view
3
grounded in blind supremacy. “A land without a people for a people without a
land” was a baseless phrase widely employed by early Zionists to induce European
Jewry to emigrate to Palestine. At best, Palestine was viewed as inhabited by
some religious minorities or by nomadic tribes who had no political claim over
the land. It was deceptively depicted as an abandoned, deserted area to justify
Jewish immigration to “make the desert bloom.”5
It is ahistorical: The Zionist proclamation that the land of Palestine belongs
to the Jewish nation is grounded in ahistorical connections between the ancient
Israelites (1050 and 930 BCE) and modern Israelis. Such a proclamation dis-
regards substantial historical phases that shaped the region’s rich civilizational
background and cultural and social formations, including the Canaanites, the
Philistines, the Greeks, the Romans, the Israelites, and Arabs. Critical accounts
of the Israeli “archeological practices” in recreating modern Israel’s “origin
myth” have tended to demonstrate the myriad historical discontinuities and
inconsistencies of the Zionist historical narrative.6 Commenting on the early
history of Israel, the leading Israeli archeologist Israel Finkelstein asserts that
“The Bible presents a ‘fictional but functional’ origin myth.”7
In truth, today’s Palestinians are the “the people of the land” who inhabited
the area between the Mediterranean Sea and the Jordan River for hundreds of

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 Tariq Dana and Ali Jarbawi
centuries. The term “people of the land” does not refer to ethnic and religious
continuity, but it is instead a story of continuous presence on the land.8 Before
the Zionist invasion, the land of Palestine had historically been a site of coexis-
tence and harmonic social and cultural interactions among the diverse religious
groups that collectively
The term “people of the land” does not formed the people of the
refer to ethnic and religious continuity, land. Further, depicting
the Palestinians as “the
but it is instead a stor y of continuous people of the land” not
presence on the land. only signifies their deep-
rooted existence on the
land of Palestine, but it also asserts the dynamic cultural, economic, social,
associational, and architectural life that characterized the Arab-Palestinian com-
munity long before the establishment of Israel.9
While Palestine was historically, politically, and administratively part of
former empires, the Palestinians have been and remain possessed of the un-
mitigated right to self-determination and independence. Like other formerly
colonized nations, the Palestinians began to realize and develop their distinct
Arab-Palestinian identity following the dissolution of the Ottoman Empire
4 and the subsequent incorporation of the region into the British colonial sphere
of influence. The Palestinians believed that their national identity and political
self-determination were inalienable rights, echoed in their fierce struggle against
both the British colonial mandate and the Zionist movement in the first half
of the twentieth century.
It is dependent on Western imperialism: In the words of the foremost leader
of the Zionist movement, Theodor Herzl, the Jewish state ought to be “a portion
of the rampart of Europe against Asia, an outpost of civilization as opposed to
barbarism.”10 Early Zionist leaders were aware that the objective of establishing
a Jewish state could only be achieved with the backing and support of the Eu-
ropean powers. Unlike former European colonial ventures, the Zionist project
lacked a supporting colonial metropole, a gap that could be filled by securing
the backing of imperial powers.11 Thus, positioning itself with imperial powers
served the Zionist movement on two levels. First, by aligning with British im-
perialism, and later with its North American successor, the Zionist movement
ensured a power position necessary to pursue its colonization project. Second,
this also helped the Zionist movement assert itself as a strategic extension of
Western geopolitical interests in the region. In other words, Western imperialism
filled the power vacuum erected by the absence of a mother country to sustain

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 A Century of Settler-Colonialism in Palestine
the Zionist colonial project.
It is manipulative: Both anti-Semitism as an epidemic phenomenon and
the abuse of anti-Semitism as a political tool have boosted Zionist aspirations.
Though political Zionism marketed itself as the savior of Jewish communities
suffering brutal injustices in Europe, it manipulated Jewish suffering to inflict
violent dispossession and structural racism against another group of people.
Past and present, anti-Semitism has been misused as a powerful pretext to at-
tain a wide range of objectives.12 Zionism was insignificant among European
Jews before World War II.13 It was the Holocaust that upgraded the status and
salience of Zionism, making it powerfully appealing to world Jewry and result-
ing in the unprecedented intensification of Jewish immigration to Palestine.
Simultaneously, various Western governments, driven by sympathy or anti-
Semitic sentiments, supported Zionist state-building in Palestine while block-
ing immigration to their own countries, ostensibly to resolve the long-standing
Jewish question in Europe.
These problematic characteristics constitute the basis of the Zionist ideology
that continues to fuel the settler-colonial project in Palestine to the present day.
With the dominance of far-right Messianic trends over the Israeli government
and society at large, these ideological characteristics became more pronounced
5
and evident in Israel’s domestic and foreign policies to assert the uniqueness and
supremacy of Jewish nationhood over the Palestinian native population—that is,
to legitimize structural racism, discrimination, and violent dispossession under
the name of a Divine promise.

Conflicting Narratives

“History, as the saying goes, is written by the victor, and since 1948, Israel has
been the victor.”14 As a consequence, the material, political, and military power
of political Zionism is reflected in its own narrative, which despite containing
numerous inconsistencies and unsubstantiated claims has largely suppressed the
Palestinian narrative for decades.15 This is typical in situations of unjust power
asymmetries, where narrative is used to manipulate the truth and to justify
oppression.
The Zionist colonization of Palestine began during the last phase of the
Ottoman rule and flourished under the British Mandate. Colonial intentions
began to be felt in the post–WWI division of the Arab Levant into spheres
of influence under British and French hegemony, as envisioned by the 1916
Sykes-Picot agreement.16 Palestine became part of the British-controlled areas,

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 Tariq Dana and Ali Jarbawi
and this offered a golden opportunity for the Zionist movement’s diplomatic
maneuvering. In 1917, the British government issued the Balfour Declaration,
which committed the British Empire to favoring “the establishment in Palestine
of a national home for the Jewish people.”17 In addition to garnering Jewish
support for the allies, the British saw the establishment of a client Zionist state
in Palestine as a post-war geopolitical and strategic goal that would maintain
British hegemony over crucial territories connecting Egypt and India. The Bal-
four Declaration marked the first substantial triumph for political Zionism, as
it ensured political backing by a major world power. Zionist efforts to intensify
mass Jewish immigration, acquire lands, and build institutions and military
capabilities in Palestine have since then become the mainstay of the movement’s
colonial activities. As a major source of historical injustice inflicted on millions
of Palestinians to the present day, the Balfour Declaration disregarded the pres-
ence of the people of the land, referring to them as merely the “non-Jewish
communities in Palestine,” thus discursively transforming them into a minority.
The demographic reality suggests a drastically different picture. By the time of
the Ottoman Empire’s dissolution, the Arab population in Palestine numbered
729,873, of whom 7,143 were Jews.18
In 1922, Palestine was formally declared a British mandate by the League
6 of Nations. The British governed Palestine through the Colonial Office, which
translated the Balfour Declaration into official policy. In order to legitimize
and boost Zionist activities in Palestine, the British government appointed as
high commissioner a pro-Zionist figure, Sir Herbert Samuel, who “would try
to make a success of the Zionist programme.”19
During the 1920s and 1930s, the British mandate adopted a double stan-
dard toward Zionist Jews and Palestinian Arabs. Whereas the British administra-
tion granted Zionists protection and facilitated Jewish immigration, institution
building, the formation of paramilitary groups, and the acquisition of lands, it
excluded and brutally suppressed the Palestinians and their demands for self-
determination. From their side, the Palestinians took a rejectionist stance against
the British mandate and Zionist colonization, which was particularly evident
in a series of revolts. Culminating in the Great Arab Revolt (1936–1939), the
mounting Palestinian pressure on the British administration, coupled with
the looming of World War II, pushed the mandate to readjust its policies to
assure some stability in the region. These changes were articulated by the Brit-
ish government in the White Paper of 1939. The White Paper outlined three
measures: restrictions on Jewish immigration to Palestine, restrictions on land
sales and transfer to Jewish ownership, and the promise of Palestinian indepen-

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 A Century of Settler-Colonialism in Palestine
dence within a 10-year timeframe. Zionist groups rejected the White Paper and
waged a series of attacks throughout the 1940s on the British authorities and
Palestinian civilians and properties.
For reasons related to the British inability to control the situation and its
desire to end its mandate, the UN passed Resolution 181 in November 1947,
widely known as the Partition Plan, which called for the establishment of two
separate states in mandatory Palestine. Although the demographic balance was
overwhelmingly in favor of the Palestinians, with the Jewish community con-
stituting only one-third of the population, the resolution envisioned a Jewish
state covering 53 percent of the land (499,000 Jews versus 438,000 Palestinians),
while the Palestinian state would cover 47 percent (818,000 Palestinians and
fewer than 10,000 Jews).20 The Partition Plan was tactically accepted with some
reservations by the Jewish Agency in Palestine, while the Palestinians rejected the
plan, arguing that it “deprive[d] the majority of the people of Palestine of their
territory and transfer[ed] it to the exclusive use of a minority in the country.”21
Tensions between Zionists and the Palestinians escalated, leading to war
in 1948. The Zionists were determined to establish their state over a majority
of lands with a minority of Palestinians—an unachievable objective without
embarking on systematic policies of extermination and violent dispossession of
7
Palestinian inhabitants. The 1948 confrontation between Zionist terror groups
(as designated by the UN) and the Palestinian resistance characterized a study
in military power asymmetries.22 Whereas Zionist terror groups were highly
organized and well-equipped with advanced weaponry and trained fighters,
Palestinian resistance groups were poorly armed and disorganized.
Zionist military campaigns culminated in what is widely acknowledged
as “the ethnic cleansing of Palestine”: a series of systematic, organized, and pre-
planned terror campaigns conducted in 1947 and 1948 in order to uproot and
expel as much of the Palestinian population as possible in most major urban
and rural areas.23 Various pro- and anti-Zionist historians have documented this
tragic event, including the Israeli “new historians,” who benefited from access
to Israeli archival documents. According to Israeli historian Ilan Pappe:

On a cold Wednesday afternoon, 10 March 1948, a group of eleven

men, veteran Zionist leaders together with young military Jewish
officers, put the final touches to a plan for the ethnic cleansing of
Palestine. That same evening, military orders were dispatched to the
units on the ground to prepare for the systematic expulsion of the
Palestinians from vast areas of the country.24

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 Tariq Dana and Ali Jarbawi
The Zionist terror campaigns resulted in the widespread destruction
of Palestinian society. Over 750,000 Palestinians were expelled from their
homeland and became refugees in surrounding countries and in the diaspora;
hundreds of cities and
This Zionist worldview became the villages were destroyed
guiding principle of the Israeli settler- and depopulated; and a
colonial project. fifth of the 150,000 Pal-
estinians remaining in
Israel became internally displaced. When British forces departed from Palestine
25

on 14 May 1948, five Arab armies joined the fight against the Zionist groups
but were handily defeated. The 1948 defeat of the Palestinians and the Arab
forces resulted in the occupation of 77 percent of mandatory Palestine.26 The
birth of the State of Israel was declared. The year 1948 stands as a seminal one
in the modern history of Palestine, as it precipitated two diametrically opposed
realities and narratives: the Palestinian catastrophe (commemorated annually
as Nakba day) and the establishment of the State of Israel (celebrated annually
as the day of independence).27
With the establishment of the Israeli state in 1948, the ideological charac-
teristics of Zionism became the foundational underpinning and the source of
8 continuity of the Israeli nationhood. Most importantly, this Zionist worldview
became the guiding principle of the Israeli settler-colonial project, which framed
the state-society relations in a broad consensus around the nationalistic/mes-
sianic mission towards constructing a Jewish exclusivity.

Institutionalizing Settler-Colonialism in the Israeli State

The twenty-year period between the major Arab-Israeli wars (1948–1967)

witnessed concentrated efforts to consolidate the nascent Israeli State. The
settler-colonial paradigm became codified into the state’s legal and institutional
structures and was translated into aggressive policies against the remaining Pal-
estinian communities and surrounding countries. This resulted in a wide range
of practices that primarily aimed at fostering the Jewish character of the state
and ensuring superiority and deterrent capability at the regional level.
First, in order to consolidate its grip on a wide swath of the land, the Israeli
authorities embarked on the “legal dispossession” of Palestinians by creating a
new land regime that primarily aimed “to seize, retain, expropriate, reallocate,
and reclassify the Arab lands appropriated by the state.”28 Most importantly, with
the passing of the “absentee property law” by the Knesset in 1950, the Israeli

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 A Century of Settler-Colonialism in Palestine
state captured 90 percent of the land.
The absentee property law designated as “absentee” every Palestinian or
resident of Palestine who had left his or her usual place of residence due to the
partition brought about by the United Nations Palestine Resolution in 1947.
Even people who remained within the eventual borders of the Israeli state and
eventually became Israeli citizens were classified as “present absentees.”29
Second, while hundreds of thousands of Palestinian refugees who were
expelled from their homeland were denied the right to return to their lands and
properties, Jews worldwide were granted the right to live in Israel and acquire
citizenship. The Law of Return of 1950 and the Citizenship Law of 1952 were
designed to attract Jewish immigration without preconditions; being of Jewish
decent was the principal requirement that could guarantee automatic citizen-
ship. This set of laws constituted the cornerstone for consolidating the Jewish
character of the state by maintaining a privileged Jewish majority.
Third, Palestinian residents were subjected to institutional discrimination
and exclusion. This was done through the legal military regime that governed
areas inhabited by the Palestinians. Israel formed a military government (1948–
1966) to perform a variety of roles pertaining to monitoring, controlling, and
constraining the Palestinian residents of Israel. They were effectively rendered
9
second-class citizens of the state.30 Those areas were subjected to the Emergency
Regulations inherited from the British mandate and included policies such as
curfews, administrative detention, military trial, banning of political activity,
and imposing of security closure on these areas. Moreover, the Interior Ministry
appointed “minorities officers” to implement policies of segregation among Pal-
estinian communities, turning them into separate security zones and effectively
restricting social and commercial interactions between them.31
Fourth, the construction of a powerful military institution was another sig-
nificant feature of the state, society, and culture. Zionist paramilitary groups that
conducted the ethnic cleansing operations in 1948 were reorganized in a formal
state army. Yet, the Israeli military is not solely an institution concerned with
security, defense, and war. It was designed to play multiple social and economic
functions and promote the culture of militarism. As a result, Israeli society is a
militarized one, where citizens are actively involved in military activities, and the
military is actively involved in non-military activities. For example, the Defense
Service Law of 1948 obliges male Israeli citizens who turn 18 to serve in the
army for 36 months, while women must serve for 24 months. This mandatory
conscription is still ardently upheld today. Following the end of military service,
Israelis remain in a reserve unit and spend one month in the army every year

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 Tariq Dana and Ali Jarbawi
until the age of 40. Additionally, throughout the 1950s and 1960s, the Israeli
state invested heavily in expanding the military workshops that existed before
the foundation of the state, and they introduced new industries that not only
served the military needs of the state, but also proved to be a lucrative export-
oriented industry. While not acknowledged officially, Israel upgraded its status as
a deterrent force by developing a nuclear program in the 1950s, through which
it became the only state possessing nuclear weapons in the Middle East. By the
1960s, Israel completed the development stage of its first nuclear weapon, and
on the eve of the 1967 war, it already had nuclear capability.32
Fifth, Israel sought to weaken and restrict the development of neighboring
Arab countries while projecting itself as a regional power. In 1956, Israel triggered
a conflict with Egypt, joined by an Anglo-French imperial coalition, culminating
in a large-scale offensive war against Egypt in response to the nationalization of
the Suez Canal. While the Suez Canal crisis did not pose a strategic threat to
Israel, it was a “war of choice,” motivated by the desire to weaken Egypt militar-
ily and overthrow the Egyptian President Jamal Abdul-Nasser; to consolidate its
alliance with Western imperial powers; and to enforce a new MENA (Middle
East and North Africa) regional order in which Israel was the superior power. 33

10 Entangled Colonization

After consolidating the settler-colonial state, Israel embarked on a new colonial

venture to expand its boundaries and achieve its dream of a “Greater Israel” of
maximum land with minimum Arabs. For this purpose, Israel waged a lightning
war against its Arab neighbors in 1967, resulting in a swift victory that inaugu-
rated a new chapter in its settler-colonial expansionism. It extended its colonial
order over the remaining parts of Palestine while occupying the Sinai Peninsula
and Golan Heights. Israel’s occupation of the West Bank, East Jerusalem, and
the Gaza Strip was perceived as a fulfillment of the Zionist ambition of greater
Israel over historic Palestine, without which “the Zionist dream would remain
incomplete.”34 Nevertheless, it could hardly be argued that the Zionist dream
was completed following the 1967 occupation. Unlike the demographic real-
ity in the aftermath of the Nakba, which ensured Jewish predominance and
facilitated the establishment of the Israeli state, only 350,000 people fled the
territories occupied in 1967, leaving over 1.5 million Palestinians in a direct
encounter with the Israeli occupation. This reality suggests that Israel’s military
victory of 1967 implied an ideological defeat, whereby its colonial project was
complicated through the multilayered challenges posed by the presence of the

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 A Century of Settler-Colonialism in Palestine
people of the land. This prompted Israel to embark on an even more multidi-
mensional strategy, combining economic, institutional, demographic, military,
psychological, and legal pressures to perpetrate the effective colonization of the
land and to get rid of the Palestinian demographic burden.35
A cornerstone of Israel’s colonial pursuit since 1967 has been land ex-
propriation and the construction of Jewish-only settlements (colonies). Israeli
settlements are heavily subsidized by the state and often supported by non-
governmental, pro-settlement movements. Israel’s successive governments
between right and left have shown slight differences in their positions toward
settlements. While both sides have demonstrated persistent willingness to build
and expand settlements as the overall strategy, they differ on the basis of tactical
motifs, timing, and intensity. From 1967 to 1977, the Labor Party pioneered
in advancing settlement construction.36 The Labor settlement policy was guided
by the Allon Plan, which advocated for the annexation of over half the terri-
tories and the construction of settlements to defend boundaries so as to secure
the Greater Israel. With the right-wing Likud Party assuming power in 1977,
settlement policy became fundamentally driven by ideological factors based
on a Messianic/nationalist credo. Under Likud, settlers’ movements—such as
Gush Emunim and Amanah—flourished and advanced their practical agenda of
11
“settling anywhere and everywhere.”37 Settlement construction across the West
Bank, including in East Jerusalem and around the Gaza Strip, consequently
intensified in number and ferocity. By the time the Oslo Accords were signed
in 1993, there were around 250,000 settlers in the occupied territories.
Settlements are strategically designed to serve a multipurpose objective.
First, they meet the Israeli strategy of creating facts on the ground—a system to
avoid international pressure and create de facto colonization—and altering the
demographic balance. Second, settlements are intentionally constructed around
and between densely populated Palestinian areas, thereby imposing territorial
discontinuity and preventing the natural expansion of Palestinian communi-
ties. Third, because settlements are well-equipped with military technology and
armed, trained residents, they serve as an extension of Israel’s military forma-
tions in the occupied territories. Fourth, settlements are implanted on natural
resource-rich areas to exploit water and arable lands, which facilitates settlement
economic activities and deprives the Palestinians of economic development. Fifth,
East Jerusalem has always served as a staging ground for settlement activity with
the aim of “Judaizing” the city.38 Sixth, settlements are central to the policy of
segregation; whereas settlers are governed by Israel’s civil laws, the Palestinians
are ruled by military orders. Jewish-only settlements are a blatant expression

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 Tariq Dana and Ali Jarbawi
of the brutal nature of Zionist colonization: they are segregated communities
built on illegally expropriated Palestinian lands to ethnically cleanse the native
communities. Additionally, settlers continue to wage violent attacks on neigh-
boring villages to drive the population out of their homes and farms in order
to conquer further lands for expanded settlements.
Israel has legalized the segregation policy by subjecting the population to
military administration since 1967. It enforced military rule that penetrated and
regulated every aspect of Palestinian life; this practice was further institutional-
ized by the establishment of military courts under the command of the Israeli
military.39 The overall objective was to impose effective control over the popula-
tion and stifle national aspirations. The Israeli legal order was translated into
restrictive practices that denied basic political and civil rights and included the
criminalization of any form of expression of Palestinian national identity, political
association, and activism.40 The military order allowed Israeli forces to introduce a
wide range of measures of individual and collective punishment, such as curfews,
home demolitions, arbitrary and administrative detention, the expulsion of local
leaders, and the closure of towns, schools, and civil associations. The military
administration was also

12
The Israeli legal order was translated tasked with issues of
land use, planning, and
into restrictive practices that denied zoning to facilitate land
basic political and civil rights. expropriations for the
benefit of settlers and
the military. In the 1980s, Israel sought to mask its military rule by establishing
the “Civil Administration.” The Civil Administration functioned as the governing
arm of the Israeli Ministry of Defense in the occupied territories and appointed
a military commander in each area to enforce military orders.
Parallel to the settlement project, another pillar of Israel’s colonial structure
has been economic domination. From the outset of the 1967 occupation, military
orders encompassed numerous economic matters aimed at incorporating the
Palestinian economy into Israel’s own economy, thus making its colonial rule
a cheap venture while simultaneously stymying Palestinian economic develop-
ment. Among measures adopted were the closure of Arab financial and monetary
institutions, the imposition of the Israeli currency, the banning of exports and
imports except through Israeli controlled borders, the imposition of high taxes
(customs, income tax, VAT), poor investment in infrastructure, strict licensing
for industrial activities, and control over communications, electricity resources,
water, and natural resources. Israeli policies transformed the Palestinian mar-

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 A Century of Settler-Colonialism in Palestine
ket into a captive one that became a convenient dumping ground for shoddy
Israeli industrial products that could not compete with the manufacturers of
the industrialized countries of Europe and North America.41 This has not only
brought massive profit to the Israeli economy, but it has also formed a new class
of Israeli capitalists whose primary manufacturing activities were designed for
the occupied territories.42
Economic domination was accompanied by economic pacification. For
example, in the immediate aftermath of the occupation in 1967, the Israeli
government adopted a proposal by the minister of defense Moshe Dayan, who
advocated a political-economic strategy widely known as “open bridges.”43 This
strategy was based on the notion of “self-management” and relied on three
principles: non-presence, reducing the presence of the Israeli military forces in
the occupied areas; non-interference, encouraging the population to manage
their daily economic and social activities with minimal interference from the
occupation authorities; and open bridges, allowing the Palestinians to trade
with Jordan and, to a lesser extent, with Egypt. The open bridges endorsed a
limited pattern of modernization of certain sectors to serve the needs of the
Israeli economy. However, Israel failed to implement macroeconomic policies
that could serve the actual needs of the Palestinian economy.44 It also absorbed
13
a large segment of Palestinian labor forces, thereby creating Palestinian labor
dependency on its market.45
While it is true that Dayan’s strategy led to a considerable increase in
the individual income and general socioeconomic well-being in the occupied
territories, it effectively aborted their capacity to build a productive economy
capable of absorbing the labor force and developing technologically. In fact,
while Israel’s policies have led to the doubling of per capita income, they have
also caused a disintegration of the Palestinian economic base and superimposed
a state of structural dependency on the Israeli economy. The open bridges
policy was particularly effective in terms of stabilizing the initial phase of the
colonization process through “redefining the conditions that govern the lives
of Palestinian people.”46 In the words of Dayan, the real aim was to make the
“occupation invisible.”47
Furthermore, among the vital natural resources exploited by Israel is water.
Israel maintained exclusive control of water resources, including the Jordan Val-
ley, the headwaters of the Jordan River, and the West Bank groundwater and
mountain aquifers. The occupation authorities virtually deny the Palestinians
access to new water resources and forbid deep drilling of new wells.48 Israeli
domination over water resources is evident in the stark inequality of water

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 Tariq Dana and Ali Jarbawi
distribution and consumption. For example, Israel and Israeli settlements take
about 80 percent of the aquifer’s flow, leaving the Palestinians with 20 percent.49
According to B’Tselem, “Whereas Israelis enjoy an unlimited supply of running
water all year round, Palestinians are allotted a small fixed amount, resulting
in constant water shortages.”50 Strikingly, figures show that the average water
consumption for domestic, commercial, and industrial use in the West Bank is
approximately 79 liters a day per person, less than the World Health Organiza-
tion recommendation of 100 liters of water per person per day. At the same
time, the average domestic, commercial, and industrial water consumption in
Israel is more than four times that figure, or about 287 liters per person per day.51

Colonialism Reordered

“Facts on the ground” have continued to be Israel’s key policy throughout the
Oslo years, aimed at aborting any possibility for the creation of a Palestinian
state. With the institutionalization of physical, territorial, and demographic
fragmentation, the restriction of the movement of people and goods, and the
imposition of new modes of dispossession and collective punishment, apartheid
became the core feature of Israel’s colonial order in the post-Oslo reality.52 The
14 post-Oslo reality brought about effective mechanisms of control and fragmenta-
tion of Palestinian communities, especially through a rapid Judaization of various
parts of the West Bank, most notably in crucial areas such as Jerusalem, the old
town of Hebron, the Nablus periphery, and the mushroomed settlement blocs.
After almost 25 years since the signing of the Oslo Accords in 1993 be-
tween the Israeli government and the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO),
the “peace process” has proved to be an illusion. While this process was initially
heralded as the beginning of the end of Israel’s occupation of the territories oc-
cupied in 1967 and was supposed to result in two states living side by side in
peace and coexistence, the Oslo process enabled Israel to reinvent its colonial
order by other means. In fact, the Oslo framework was used by Israel as a fig
leaf to cover its continued colonization and to assure unrestricted control over
the occupied territories, all under the banner of peace.
A salient aspect of the reordering of Israel’s settler-colonialism after Oslo
is that its colonial rule came to be mediated by the Palestinian Authority (PA).
The PA was established in 1994 as a self-governing entity without sovereignty
to oversee administrative and civil affairs over densely populated areas. But the
PA has been turned into an effective mechanism through which Israel could
outsource various civil, economic, and security tasks and relieve itself of responsi-

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 A Century of Settler-Colonialism in Palestine
bility for the population. Asymmetric power relations as echoed in the PA-Israel
coordination committees have redefined the relationship between colonizer and
colonized in a way that entrenches Israeli control over Palestinian life.53
Israel used the Oslo framework to deepen territorial fragmentation by
turning the West Bank into a series of separated enclaves, effectively cutting off
spatial and social continuity with the Gaza Strip and East Jerusalem. The West
Bank was divided into Area A (under PA civil and security control and cover-
ing 18 percent of the land), Area B (under the PA civilian and Israeli military
control and covering 20 percent of the land), and Area C (under full Israeli
civilian and military control and covering 62 percent of the land). In order to
ensure effective control, Areas A and B are completely surrounded by Area C.
Settlements have rapidly expanded and been fortified by a set of military
installations, settler-only roads, surveillance technologies, roadblocks, and other
infrastructures. These settlements are mainly located in Area C and absorb
around 42 percent of West Bank territory. Since Oslo, the number of settlers has
more than doubled. As of 2015, there were an estimated 588,000 settlers in the
West Bank (excluding East Jerusalem) residing in 127 government-sanctioned
settlements, compared to 150,000 settlers in 1993. In addition, there are more
than 100 illegal “outposts” implanted throughout the West Bank, unrecognized
15
by the Israeli government despite official assistance to these outposts. The ex-
ponential increase in the number of Israeli settlers since Oslo underscores not
only the fact that Oslo failed to protect the rights to life and self-determination
of the Palestinian people, but also that it further erected the political context
necessary for the Israeli state to obscure, and thus deepen, its colonization of
Palestinian land.54
The post-Oslo years have also been characterized by the imposition of a
severe closure regime, which places restrictions on the movement of people
and goods and enforces a separation between Palestinian communities and the
external world. Moreover, Israel imposes an internal closure that aims to dis-
connect Palestinian towns and villages from each other, and between the West
Bank and Gaza, through the use of military checkpoints, barriers, ditches, and
roadblocks. The construction of the separation wall in 2002 caused a “slow but
cruel suffocation of normalcy that adds challenges to practicing everyday ac-
tivities such as sleeping; eating; going to work, school, or hospital; and visiting
friends and relatives.”55 On the other hand, Israel imposes an external closure
by controlling borders and international crossing points to Jordan and Egypt
as well as preventing the Palestinians from having their own airport or seaport.
The closure regime is solidified by the engineering of a sophisticated permit

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 Tariq Dana and Ali Jarbawi
system, bolstered by multiple types of identification techniques, surveillance,
and mixed IDs, all of which systemically shatter the Palestinian social fabric and
impede social continuity.56
The post-Oslo Palestinian economy was structured by the Paris Economic
Protocol (PER) of 1994. The most important economic ramification of the
PER is that it did not substantially alter the Israeli restrictive regime over the
economic life of the occupied Palestinian territory (oPt). Instead, it led to the
redefinition of the Palestinian-Israeli economic relationship from one subjected
to an enforced structural dependency that existed since 1967 to a consensually
regulated structural dependency based on internationally recognized agree-
ments. While some “cosmetic” economic functions were transferred to the PA
to serve as symbolic trappings of quasi-statehood and help relieve Israel from
the burden of overseeing civil services (e.g., welfare, education, health, and
other social services), Israel maintained sole control of essential pillars of the
economy, such as borders, land, water, natural resources, labor, the movement
of people, trade, fiscal management, industrial zoning, and water resources.57
In this context, the occupied territories remained a captive market for Israel
where local markets were filled with Israeli products and at the same time the
Palestinians were prevented from pursuing independent economic development.
16 In addition, Israeli authorities placed severe restrictions on labor movement,
thus contributing to deteriorating socioeconomic wellbeing and increasing
unemployment to unprecedented levels.
In addition to serious economic restrictions, Israel has imposed a land,
sea, and air blockade on the Gaza Strip since 2007, halting intra-Palestinian
relations between the West Bank and Gaza. As a form of collective punishment,
the blockade imprisoned 1.9 million Palestinians and prevented their access to
the West Bank and their exit to the outside world. The devastation enforced on
the besieged strip and the subsequent Israeli wars caused thousands of civilian
deaths and the massive destruction of neighborhoods, educational and health
facilities, and infrastructure. Gazan society has been subjected to a grave hu-
manitarian crisis and deteriorating socioeconomic standards. Today, more than
70 percent of the population relies on humanitarian aid, the unemployment
rate is the highest in the world at 43 percent, over 72 percent of households
live in food insecurity, 95 percent of factories and workshops have been shut
down, farmers are denied access to 35 percent of agricultural land, 85 percent
of fishing waters have been affected, and vital infrastructure has been destroyed.
With the systemic obstruction of Gaza’s reconstruction and the impossibility of
recovery under such conditions, Gaza’s economy is on the verge of collapse.58

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 A Century of Settler-Colonialism in Palestine
Furthermore, the division between the West Bank and Gaza, coupled with Israel’s
double approach to the West Bank (economic peace in the context of ongoing
settlement expansion) and Gaza (crippling blockade and periodic military as-
saults), has created different realities governed by opposing political, social, and
institutional visions, split by widening economic inequality.
In short, post-Oslo East Jerusalem experienced intensified “Judaization”
and the systematic destruction of its Arab heritage. The presence of Arab Jeru-
salemites is regularly targeted through different forms of “transfer” policies that
aim to displace them. Settlements are implanted into the hearts of Palestinian
neighborhoods, while the inhabitants are deprived of the right to construct
houses, schools, hospitals, and other vital facilities. Discriminatory laws, in-
cluding restrictions on civil status, confiscation of property, preclusion of urban
planning, and revocation of residency IDs, are all strategic tools for uprooting
the Palestinian population. Economic pressures and barriers to commercial
and industrial development have led to high poverty rates, reaching 75 percent
among Palestinian Jerusalemites according to recent estimates.59

A Century of Palestinian Resistance

17
The Palestinian resistance movement emerged early last century, espousing an
anti-colonial agenda and forging strategic alliances with similar anti-colo-
nial liberation movements worldwide. It defined its mission as a struggle
against the forces of international Zionism and colonialism in order to achieve
self-determination and the liberation of Palestine.60 Resistance constituted the
backbone of Palestinian steadfastness and survival in the face of Zionist coloni-
zation, dispossession, and dehumanization. For a century, resistance has been a
conscious mission among Palestinians, who have been well aware of the perils of
the Zionist project. Resistance thus shaped Palestinian national identity and was
integrated into cultural heritage, knowledge production, social life, and world-
view. Yet the Palestinian anti-colonial struggle is not monolithic: depending on
the circumstances throughout the various stages of Palestinian modern history,
resistance has been articulated differently—ranging from active to passive, col-
lective to individual, peaceful to armed, and organized to random.
Since the Palestinians became conscious of Zionist objectives and the
complicity of the British colonial mandate early last century, a series of revolts
erupted, such as those of Nebi Musa (1920), Jaffa (1921–1922), Al-Buraq
(1929), and the October revolt of 1933. The largest one was the Great Arab
Revolt (1936–1939), an organized insurgency that articulated the Palestinian

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 Tariq Dana and Ali Jarbawi
quest for independence and the end of the Zionist project in Palestine. It involved
civil disobedience, general strikes, and armed struggle against British troops and
Zionist settlers. The revolt was aborted by British empty promises on the eve of
WWII to halt Jewish immigration and allow for the establishment of a Palestin-
ian state. While Palestinian resistance continued throughout the 1940s, Zionist
paramilitary groups had developed a far superior organizational structure and
armament. The power asymmetry ended in the defeat of the Palestinian resistance
and the implementation of Zionist ethnic cleansing of Palestinian towns and
villages, finally leading to the conquest of 77 percent of the land of Palestine.61
The post-Nakba period saw the majority of Palestinians living in deplor-
able conditions, scattered in refugee camps, and deprived of political rights and
dignity. They were also denied a distinct political identity. Their activism was
subordinated to various Arab regimes and mainly exercised through Arab political
parties. By the late 1950s, a few Palestinian resistance groups had emerged and
initiated armed struggle along the Israeli borders with Jordan and Lebanon.62
While these groups lacked organizational structures and resources, they
implanted the seeds for the formation of the modern Palestinian national move-
ment. In the 1960s, these armed groups coalesced to form a more coherent
and organized national liberation movement along diverse ideological lines,
18 collectively constituting the backbone of the Palestinian Liberation Organiza-
tion (PLO). With the support of the Nasserite regime of Egypt, the PLO was
founded under the auspices of the Arab League in 1964, and its operations and
political maneuvering were restricted by, and dependent on, the political con-
siderations of Arab regimes. It was the Arab defeat in the 1967 war that caused
the PLO to prioritize the role of independent Palestinian leadership, decision
making, and manpower in determining the fate of the struggle for liberation
and self-determination.
The post-1967 rise of the PLO left a substantial imprint on the Palestin-
ian anti-colonial struggle and brought the Palestinian cause into the center of
world attention for decades. The PLO functioned as an anti-colonial liberation
movement with far-reaching influence on the worldwide Palestinian diaspora.
It was widely recognized as “the sole and legitimate representative of the Pales-
tinian people.”63 It shaped Palestinian national identity, waged armed struggle,
mobilized and represented its people, and formed transnational alliances. The
PLO functioned as a state-in-exile, provided social services to Palestinians in
refugee camps, and supported educational and cultural initiatives. It also played
a significant diplomatic role; in 1974, the PLO was the first national liberation
movement to be granted observer status at the UN.64

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 A Century of Settler-Colonialism in Palestine
The Palestinians who remained inside historic Palestine embarked on differ-
ent forms of anti-colonial struggle. The Israeli occupation of 1967 inadvertently
reunified Palestinian communities in the West Bank, Gaza, and inside Israel.
Such interaction contributed to the rise of political consciousness, collective
national identity, and a recognition of their shared fate.
Forms of struggle varied due to the different colonial systems imposed
on each community. The Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza relied, to a
large extent, on popular resistance. They challenged the Israeli authorities by
organizing themselves in
modern grassroots orga- The Palestinians who survived the 1948
nizations, trade unions, expulsion and became second-class
voluntary committees,
and student and wom-
citizens of Israel developed distinct
en’s movements. This methods of struggle for their national
process was accompa- and civil rights.
nied by, and conducive
to, the evolution of Sumud, a strategy that signified the adherence to Palestinian
national identity as a source of collective steadfastness on the land. The first
Intifada (1987–1994) was the most enlightening period of popular resistance.
19
New representative structures emerged to organize popular engagement in the
Intifada, most notably the popular committees which existed in almost every
locality. Meanwhile, the engagement of mass-based organizations; women’s
and student movements; labor unions; and professional committees decisively
transformed the spontaneous uprising into an organized action.
The Palestinians who survived the 1948 expulsion and became second-class
citizens of Israel facing institutional discrimination and exclusion developed dis-
tinct methods of struggle for their national and civil rights. First, certain political
forces established organizations and committees that aimed to preserve national
identity and civil rights. These organizations have also mobilized constituencies
to defy Israeli policies, occasionally resulting in confrontations, general strikes,
and protests. Second, other political trends adopted struggle from within Israeli
institutions, most importantly by running for the Israeli Knesset with the as-
sumption that they could influence the state’s laws and regulations in favor of
equal citizenship and civil rights.

Uncertain Conclusion

The active Zionist settler-colonial project has accumulated a series of successes

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 Tariq Dana and Ali Jarbawi
by conquering the land and encircling the people. Yet it is an entangled project,
burdened by the dynamic presence of the people of the land whose steadfastness
and resistance to injustices constitute the antithesis of Zionist colonization. De-
spite a century of repressive conditions of Zionist colonization that have made
life unbearable, millions resist by not leaving their homeland and still adhering
tirelessly to their rights.
With the intensification of Israel’s colonial expansion after Oslo, the Pales-
tinian body politic has been weakened to an unprecedented extent: the PLO lost
its revolutionary potential, the PA was established as a dysfunctional institution
lacking representation and sovereignty, the national movement became engulfed
in multiple divisions and rifts, and the society has been territorially fragmented.
For Israel, this status quo is comfortable, and its current policy is to prolong the
situation of relative stability. Nevertheless, this cannot be sustainable given the
unabated entrenchment of Israel’s settler-colonialism.
While future scenarios are uncertain, the Israeli establishment does not
hide its determination that a Palestinian state or even a meaningful type of
autonomy should never materialize. However, for many, the current reality
is that of a single apartheid state, with all the discrimination, segregation,
and structural racism this implies. The consolidation of this reality may alter
20
future directions toward a struggle for equal rights within the one-state frame-
work. This direction, however, will be fiercely opposed by Israel because it will
shake the doctrinal foundation of the state. Regardless of the way in which
Israel continues its colonization, the unrelenting steadfastness of the people
of the land will always pose a structural challenge to Israel’s settler-colonial
project. And the continuation of this state of affairs will likely make the ac-
complishment of the Zionist dream unattainable, and might result in dev-
astating consequences for the whole settler-colonial project in Palestine. WA

Notes

1. Patrick Wolfe, “Settler Colonialism and the Elimination of the Native,” Journal of Genocide Research 8,
no. 4 (2006): 387–409.
2. Ilan Pappe, The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine (London: Oneworld, 2006), 71.
3. Shlomo Sand, The Invention of the Jewish People (London: Verso, 2010), 316.
4. Ibid.
5. Alan George, “‘Making the Desert Bloom’ A Myth Examined,” Journal of Palestine Studies 8, no. 2
(1979): 88–100.
6. Nadia Abu El-Haj, Facts on the Ground: Archaeological Practice and Territorial Self-fashioning in Israeli
Society (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008), 3.
7. Israel Finkelstein, “Pots and People Revisited: Ethnic Boundaries in the Iron Age I,” in The Archae-
ology of Israel: Constructing the Past, Interpreting the Present, ed. Neil Asher Silberman and David Small

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 A Century of Settler-Colonialism in Palestine
(Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press, 1997), 219.
8. Nadim Khoury, “National Narratives and the Oslo Peace Process: How Peacebuilding Paradigms
Address Conflicts over History,” Nations and Nationalism 22, no. 3 (2016): 469.
9. On the history of Palestine and the Palestinians, see: Guy Le Strange, Palestine Under the Moslems:
A Description of Syria and the Holy Land from AD 650 to 1500 (New York: Cosimo, Inc., 2010), which
was originally published in 1890 and translated from the works of medieval geographers; Kamil J. Asali,
Jerusalem in History (Northampton: Interlink Publishing Group, 2005); Beshara Doumani, Rediscovering
Palestine: Merchants and Peasants in Jabal Nablus, 1700–1900 (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press,
1995); Beshara Doumani, “Rediscovering Ottoman Palestine: Writing Palestinians into History,” Journal
of Palestine Studies 21, no. 2 (1992): 5-28.
10. Theodor Herzl, The Jewish State (New York: Maccabean Publishing Co., 1904), 28.
11. Abdul-Wahab Kayyali, “Zionism and Imperialism: The Historical Origins,” Journal of Palestine
Studies 6, no. 3 (1977): 98–112.
12. Norman Finkelstein, Beyond Chutzpah: On the Misuse of Anti-Semitism and the Abuse of History
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 2008), 32–64.
13. Daphna Sharfman, Palestine in the Second World War: Strategic Plans and Political Dilemmas (East-
bourne: Sussex Academic Press, 2014), 93–108.
14. Khoury, “National Narratives and the Oslo Peace Process,” 469.
15. Eman Nahhas, “The ‘Silenced’ Narrative of 1948 War Events Among Young Palestinians in Israel,”
in A Social Psychology Perspective on The Israeli-Palestinian Conflict, ed. Keren Sharvit and Eran Halperin
(New York: Springer, 2016), 61–75.
16. James Barr, A Line in the Sand: Britain, France and the Struggle that Shaped the Middle East (London:
Simon and Schuster, 2011).
17. See: “In Depth: Israel and the Palestinians: Key Documents,” BBC, November 29, 2001, http://
news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/in_depth/middle_east/israel_and_the_palestinians/key_documents/1682961.stm
18. Mutaz M. Qafisheh, The International Law Foundations of Palestinian Nationality: A Legal Examina-
tion of Palestinian Nationality Under the British Rule, Vol.7 (Leiden: Brill, 2008), 93. 21
19. Elie Kedourie, “Sir Herbert Samuel and the Government of Palestine,” Middle Eastern Studies 5,
no. 1 (1969): 44.
20. Rashid Khalidi, Palestinian Identity: The Construction of Modern National Consciousness (New York:
Columbia University Press, 2010), 11.
21. “Ad Hoc Committee on the Palestinian Question Report of Sub-Committee 2,” United Nations,
November 11, 1947, http://unispal.un.org/pdfs/AAC1432.pdf.
22. Cablegram From Ralph Bunche To The Secretary-General Transmitting Report Regarding The
Assassination Of The United Nations Mediator, Security Council, September 27, 1948, https://unispal.
un.org/DPA/DPR/unispal.nsf/1ce874ab1832a53e852570bb006dfaf6/45fc0c6e511ec0c5802564d4005
60ca0?OpenDocument.
23. See: Ilan Pappe, The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine; Nur Masalha, The Palestine Nakba: Decolonising
History, Narrating the Subaltern, Reclaiming Memory (London: Zed Books Ltd., 2012); Eugene L. Rogan
and Avi Shlaim, eds., The War for Palestine: Rewriting the History of 1948 (Cambridge: Cambridge Uni-
versity Press, 2001); Ahmad H. Sa’di and Lila Abu-Lughod, eds., Nakba: Palestine, 1948, and the Claims
of Memory (New York: Columbia University Press, 2007).
24. Pappe, The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine, xi.
25. Joseph Schechla, “The Invisible People Come to Light: Israel’s ‘Internally Displaced’ and the ‘Un-
recognized Villages,’” Journal of Palestine Studies 31, no. 1 (2001): 20–31.
26. Walid Khalidi, “The Palestine Problem: An Overview,” Journal of Palestine Studies 21, no. 1 (1991): 9.
27. The Palestinian “Nakba” (“catastrophe” in Arabic) refers to the mass expulsion of Palestinian Arabs
at the hands of Zionist paramilitary groups from historic Palestine during Israel’s creation (1947–49).
28. Geremy Forman and Alexandre Kedar, “From Arab Land to ‘Israel Lands’: The Legal Dispossession
of the Palestinians Displaced by Israel in the Wake of 1948,” Environment and Planning D: Society and
Space 22, no. 6 (2004): 809–30.
29. Raja Halwani and Tomis Kapitan, The Israeli-Palestinian Conflict: Philosophical Essays on Self-

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 Tariq Dana and Ali Jarbawi
Determination, Terrorism and the One-State Solution (New York: Springer, 2007), 91.
30. Arnon Yehuda Degani, “The Decline and Fall of the Israeli Military Government, 1948–1966: A
Case of Settler-Colonial Consolidation?,” Settler Colonial Studies 5, no. 1 (2015): 84–99.
31. Shira Robinson, Citizen Strangers: Palestinians and the Birth of Israel’s Liberal Settler State (Palo Alto:
Stanford University Press, 2013).
32. Louis Rene Beres and Zeev Maoz, “Israel and the Bomb,” International Security 29, no. 1 (2004):
175–80.
33. Nur Masalha, Imperial Israel and the Palestinians: The Politics of Expansion (London: Pluto Press,
2000), 11–4.
34. Ilan Pappe, A History of Modern Palestine: One Land, Two Peoples (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 2004), 188.
35. Ali Jarbawi, “The Remaining Palestinian Options,” The Arab World Geographer 8, no. 3 (2005):
118–21.
36. Jamal Raji Nassar and Roger Heacock, Intifada: Palestine at the Crossroads (Westport: Greenwood
Publishing Group, 1990).
37. David Newman, “The Evolution of a Political Landscape: Geographical and Territorial Implications
of Jewish Colonization in the West Bank,” Middle Eastern Studies 21, no. 2 (1985): 192–205.
38. Oren Yiftachel, “Ethnocracy: The Politics of Judaizing Israel/Palestine,” Constellations 6, no. 3
(1999): 364–90.
39. Lisa Hajjar, Courting Conflict: The Israeli Military Court System in the West Bank and Gaza (Berkeley:
University of California Press, 2005).
40. For further understanding of the Israeli military orders and their impact on Palestinian life, see:
“Introduction To Israeli Military Orders,” Addameer, July 2017, http://www.addameer.org/israeli_mili-
tary_judicial_system/military_orders.
41. Yusif Sayigh, “The Palestinian Economy Under Occupation: Dependency and Pauperization,” Journal
of Palestine Studies 15, no. 4 (1986): 46–67.
22 42. Ryan Sheila, “The West bank and Gaza: Political Consequences of the Occupation,” MERIP Reports,
no. 47 (1979): 3.
43. Tariq Dana, “The Symbiosis Between Palestinian ‘Fayyadism’ and Israeli ‘Economic Peace’: The
Political Economy of Capitalist Peace in the Context of Colonization,” Conflict, Security & Development 15,
no. 5 (2015): 455–77.
44. Arie Arnon, “Israeli Policy towards the Occupied Palestinian Territories: The Economic Dimension,
1967–2007,” The Middle East Journal 61, no. 4 (2007): 573–95.
45. Leila Farsakh, Palestinian Labour Migration to Israel: Labour, Land and Occupation (New York:
Routledge, 2005).
46. George T. Abed, ed., The Palestinian Economy: Studies in Development Under Prolonged Occupation
(New York: Routledge, 1988), 8.
47. Neve Gordon, Israel’s Occupation (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2008), 49.
48. Joe Stork, “Water and Israel’s Occupation Strategy,” MERIP Reports 116, no. 13 (1983), 6.
49. Martin Asser, “Obstacles to Arab-Israeli peace: Water,” BBC, 2 September 2010, http://www.bbc.
com/news/world-middle-east-11101797.
50. “Background: Water Crisis,” B’Tselem, September 28, 2016, http://www.btselem.org/water.
51. Ibid.
52. Virginia Tilley, Beyond Occupation: Apartheid, Colonialism and International Law in the Occupied
Palestinian Territories (London: Pluto Press, 2012).
53. Tariq Dana, “The Prolonged Decay of the Palestinian National Movement,” National Identities
(2017): 3.
54. For example, see: “The Israeli Settlement Enterprise and its Impact on the Two-State Solution,”
Applied Research Institute - Jerusalem, September 2015, https://www.arij.org/files/arijadmin/poica/
report15.pdf.
55. Sahera Bleibleh, “Walking Through Walls: The Invisible War,” Space and Culture 18, no. 2 (2015):
168.

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 A Century of Settler-Colonialism in Palestine
56. Elia Zureik, Israel’s Colonial Project in Palestine: Brutal Pursuit (Oxon: Routledge, 2015), 95–134.
57. Mushtaq Khan, George Giacaman, and Inge Amundsen, State Formation in Palestine (London:
Routledge Curzon, 2004).
58. “Gaza Economy on the Verge of Collapse,” World Bank, May 21, 2015, http://www.worldbank.
org/en/news/press-release/2015/05/21/gaza-economy-on-the-verge-of-collapse.
59. Nur Arafeh, “Which Jerusalem: Israel’s Little-Known Master Plans,” Al-Shabaka, May 31, 2016,
https://al-shabaka.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/05/Arafeh_PolicyBrief_Eng_May2016.pdf.
60. Dana, “The prolonged decay.”
61. Mazin B Qumsiyeh, Popular Resistance in Palestine: A History of Hope and Empowerment (London:
Pluto Press, 2011).
62. Yazid Sayigh, Armed Struggle and the Search for State: The Palestinian National Movement, 1949-1993
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997).
63. Ibid., 35.
64. Malcolm Shaw, “The International Status of National Liberation Movements,” Liverpool Law Review
5, no. 1 (1983): 19–34.

23

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