Response to Elia Zureik's Israel's Colonial Project in Palestine

• DOI: https://doi.org/10.13169/arabstudquar.38.4.0694
• Published date: 01 October 2016
• Date: 01 October 2016
• Pages: 694-699
• Author: Thomas Abowd

694 ARAB STUDIES QUARTERLY

www.plutojournals.com/asq/

Response to Elia Zureik’s Israel’s Colonial Project in Palestine

Thomas Abowd

Why examine Israeli governance as colonial governance rather than that of a

flawed, liberal democracy? Zureik’s path-breaking work, Israel’s Colonial Project

in Palestine, provides us with some critical answers. His overarching assertion is

that colonialism must be read back into the histories of Israel/Palestine and, most

importantly, into the present, as well. This central concern seems as vital today as

ever as Israeli settler-colonialism continues to appropriate Palestinian land and

resources, while spatially marginalizing the Palestinians and confining them to

only a small part of their original homeland.

Following Talal Asad (1991) and other theorists of colonialism, Zureik reminds

us that this form of governance is not simply about a temporary subjugation of the

colonized, established through an initial moment of violent conquest. Rather,

colonialism in its various guises necessarily produces a set of radical and abiding

transformations to the territory it conquers and those it dominates. Those vast

alterations are physical, legal, historical, and discursive and manifest themselves

in broader policies and designs and in the everyday, lived realities of Palestinians

and Israeli Jews.

Many scholars of Palestine/Israel have concentrated on land and resources as

the crucial concerns of colonial authority and both of these issues have been of

paramount importance. However, Zureik reminds us that there have been other

vital dimensions of Israeli colonizing power, ones found at the nexus of power and

knowledge. Any serious observer of Palestine and Israel’s overlapping histories

must, it seems to me, examine epistemic realms and their material implications.

Ideology and what Cohn (1996) referred to as imperialism’s “forms of knowl-

edge” are routinely—and necessarily—on the march as colonizers impose them-

selves on the colonized. The Israeli state has mobilized discursive expressions of

authority as an aid to conquest, to justify the vast transformations that the Jewish

state (and the British regime before it) has wrought in Palestine. I want to address

two primary realms of Israeli colonial knowledge production, both of which inter-

act dialectically with the theft and settlement of Palestinian land. The first relates

to racism, racialization, and the formation of racist ideologies. The second con-

cerns the manufacture of histories and what I refer to as the “weaponization” of

myth. Both draw on essentialist notions of peoples and places in an attempt to

naturalize and normalize the ironclad order of apartness that the Jewish state has

crafted over the last seven decades.

Thomas Abowd, American Studies, Anthropology and Arabic Culture, Tufts University, Medford,

MA, USA.