Zionism and Settler Colonialism: Palestinian approaches New book published by Mada al-Carmel.

Mada al-Carmel - The Arab Center for Applied Social Research published an edited volume in Arabic titled “Zionism and Settler Colonialism: Palestinian Approaches”. The volume is edited by Nadim Rouhana, the former Director of Mada al-Carmel and professor of International Affairs and Conflict Studies at the Fletcher School at Tufs University, and Areen Hawari the Director of the Gender Studies Program at Mada al-Carmel.  

This book is the result of an academic workshop at which Mada al-Carmel brought together a group of Palestinian scholars and graduate students in Palestine for four two-day workshops over a year and a half.  The workshops focused on the study of Zionism as a settler-colonial project, examined its practices, and studied its foundational assumptions and its intellectual, religious, and political worldviews. The workshops, while addressing Zionism’s settler colonial underpinnings, also addressed the transformations that the Zionist project has undergone, as a result of its continued failure to subjugate the ongoing Palestinian resistance.

The book contributes to the debate about the position of the settler-colonial studies in understanding the nature of the Israeli State and in developing Palestinian strategies for liberation in light of this understanding. Thus, the book is a contribution to the growing literature on decolonization in the context of Palestine studies.

The contributors to this volume come from different disciplines, live in different geographical areas with different political and legal status within Palestine and work in and study in diverse academic contexts. Some of the writers approached Zionism and its colonial project from a historical perspective, others focused on both its historical and current practices, and some chapters investigated the resistance to the project. The volume also includes chapters that analyzed the colonial structure itself, and the overlap between Zionism’s settler-colonial dimension with the religious and national ones. In addition, the volume addressed the knowledge production around the question of Zionism as a settler colonialism by Israeli academic institutions and by Zionism’s opponents.

Contributors and chapters as they appear in the volume are:

Introduction

Nadim Rouhana and Areen Hawari

The first section: Settler Colonialism:  Theoretical approaches

• The Palestinian Resistance and the Dilemma of Legitimacy of Settler Colonialism in Palestine: Zionism Responds with Religious Narratives.                                                                         

Nadim Rouhana

• The Dialectic of the Colonial and Exploitative Dimension in the Structure of Israeli Colonialism: The Colonized Lands of 1967 as an Example.

Ahmad Iz Addin Asaad

• A Comparative Reading between the Colonial Cases in Palestine and Algeria.

Abaher al-Sakka

Settler Colonialism in the Israeli-Palestinian Context, Decolonization, and the Sociology of Knowledge Production in Israel

Areej Sabbagh Khoury

• Benjamin Netanyahu and the Reproduction of the Zionist Project within the Paradigm of the Clash of Civilizations.

 Mohannad Mustafa

The second section: The Settler-Colonial Policies of the Zionist Project

• The Political Economy Under the Colonial Regime and the Outbreak of the 1936 Revolution.

Mahmoud Yazbek

• In Search for the Biblical Golan: Jewish Imaginaries and Settlement in the 19th-Century

Aamer Ibraheem

• The Unchilding Politics: Tracing the Israeli Colonialism.

Nadera Shalhoub-Kevorkian

• The Biopolitics of Palestinian Class Elimination in the Colonial Labor Market.

Sarab Abu Rabia

The third section: On the Agency of the Colonized

• Ms. Keren Kayemet: The Formation of Palestinian Masculine Identities Under Military Regime.

Areen Hawari

• The Normalization within the Structure of Settler Colonialism in Palestine: The Duality of Rejection and Acceptance.

Mai Al-Bazour

• The Concept of Normalization within the Structure of Settler Colonialism in Palestine: Between the Duality of Rejection and Acceptance

Heba Yazbak

• Liberating the Past from the Captivity of a Colonized Present: The Memory as a Site of Resistance.

Amira Silmi

• The presence of the Settler Project in the political folk Songs: A Reading in the Palestinian Revolutionary oral text

Qasam Al-Haj