Response to Elia Zureik's Israel's Colonial Project in Palestine: Brutal Pursuit

• DOI: https://doi.org/10.13169/arabstudquar.38.4.0683
• Published date: 01 October 2016
• Date: 01 October 2016
• Pages: 683-687
• Author: Helga Tawil-Souri

REVIEW SYMPOSIUM 683

ASQ 38.4 Produced and distributed by Pluto Journals

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

Brutal Pursuit

Helga Tawil-Souri

Calling Israel a settler colonial regime is an argument increasingly gaining pur-

chase in activist and, to a lesser extent, academic circles. The work of Elia Zureik,

who has been making this argument since at least 1979, has been formative therein.

In this latest book, Zureik directly tackles the workings of the Israeli version of set-

tler colonialism, offering a wealth of details as well as a helpful engagement with a

range of scholarship from a variety of disciplines that support this argument.

Implicitly there are a number of political conclusions that are of importance in

Zureik’s book: thinking of “Israel proper” and the “Palestinian Territories” as

separate entities, and separating Israel’s policies according to a pre- and post-1967

time frame hide what is a long-lasting and pervasive structure of control. The real-

ity on the ground is a striated and segregated hierarchy imposed ultimately by one

regime across the entirety of Israel/Palestine. By implication, the two-state solu-

tion is long dead. What makes such a reading possible is Zureik’s disentanglement

of the “surveillant assemblage” of settler colonialism, analyzing what, how, to

whom, and where the Israeli regime does what it does through different modes of

control.

Drawing largely on Foucault and aiming to reconcile that perspective with the

colonial model, Zureik builds on two axiomatic positions: first and foremost is that

colonialism can only exist in a state of tension with the indigenous population, and

second, that the enactments over the population are also territorial. Zureik reasons

that the Palestinian “problem” vis-à-vis the state of Israel has been one of biopoli-

tics and demography on the one hand, and of state security and control of territory

on the other hand. Accordingly, three main components of Israeli settler colonial-

ism help organize the book: violence, territory, and population control. Through

these, Zureik unravels the “microphysics of power” manifested through discur-

sive, corporeal, and material tools (maps, legal frameworks, censuses, among

countless others which he dutifully details) by which Zionism has created different

categories of people and places ultimately serving to dispossess and control

Palestinians. These tools of power, to put it crudely, span the quotidian and the

formal, the technical and non-technical, and through minutely focused, routinized,

and systematic applications collectively define the workings of the Israeli regime.

Zureik seems to have read everything published on Israel/Palestine over the

past decade or two (or more!), offering an impressive review of a wide range of

Helga Tawil-Souri, Director, Hagop Kevorkian Center for Near Eastern Studies, New York University,

New York, NY, USA.