Patrick Wolfe’s Settler Colonialism and the Transformation of Anthropology has been one of the most persuasive theoretical interventions for understanding settler colonialism. With the latest phase in Israel’s genocidal project against the Palestinians in Gaza and displacement and Apartheid in the West Bank, Israel as a settler colonial project is being reemphasized in the public sphere. Zionist settler-colonialism, in particular, has been theorised by several Palestinian as well as Israeli scholars, namely Constantine Zurayek, Nahla Abdo, Fayez Sayegh, Baruch Kimmerling, Gershon Shafir, Maxine Rodinson, etc. The theoretical framing rests on two characteristics; firstly, the recognition that settler colonialism is a structure and not an event. Secondly, the logic underlying this structure is directed to what Wolfe terms the logic of elimination or through a process of gradual docilisation. But Wolfe’s emphasis was on ascertaining the settler colonial will as a historical force that represents a drive to expansion and not the agency of the colonised. He makes this clear, stating that ‘what needs to be written in is not the agency of the colonised but the total context of inscription.’ Although this is of immense value, it does have the downside of not factoring in acts of resistance, in this case, Palestinian agency and resistance.

Wolfe provides a historical analysis of the Zionist settler-colonisation of Palestine, looking closely at how Zionism initiated and financed land purchases in Palestine. According to Wolfe, Zionism was distinct from other forms of settler-colonialism. While other cases of settler colonialism rested on the elimination of the native populace and imagining a new society to replace it, with Zionism, these two aims were merged in the concept of return to the ‘old new’ homeland – ‘Erez Yisrael’ (‘the land of Israel’). The centrality of the concept of return to the supposed Jewish ancestral land reversed the usual colonial order of first expropriating the territory and then constructing a settler polity. With Zionism, the construction of the settler polity was a prerequisite to the physical expropriation of the territory. The name of the territory between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea was translated from ‘Palestine’, used in Arabic and in European languages to, ‘the land of Israel’ used in Hebrew. Racialising the analysis, Shlomo Sand contends that while most people know that ‘the Jews’ are not a ‘pure race’, too many adhere to the erroneous belief that ‘most of the Jews belong to an old race nation, an eternal ‘ethnos’, who had found a place among other nations and at a crucial stage, when these nations rejected it, began returning to its ancestral land’.

Wolfe’s theorization is of vital interest as until his Traces of History: Elementary Structures of Race published in 2016, studies on Zionist settler colonialism seldom factored in discussions on race and settler colonialism. Wolfe pointed out how regimes of race construct and reproduce different forms of colonialism. He outlined how Israel employs racial categorisations in its endeavour to create its own colonial society by imagining the Palestinians as a problem to be eliminated – here, elimination becomes an organising principle, i.e., a structure and not an event. Wolfe’s elucidation is powerful and despite its validity, we can discern two critical aspects to the positioning of Palestine in settler colonial studies, namely a conceptual blurring of the colonial-settler colonial distinction and the recognition of the Palestinian resistance in forcing this conceptual disruption.

In this regard, Lorenzo Veracini, points out that one key difference between colonialism and settler colonialism is that while colonialism is successful only if the distinction between colonizer and colonized is maintained, the success of a settler colonial project is contingent upon it extinguishing itself. That is, the settlers are no longer referred to as settlers and become or claim the position of native, and subsequently, this position becomes sedimented. In other words, a settler colonial project that has successfully run its course is no longer settler colonial, and here Israel presents a paradoxical conundrum. The Zionist military and administrative rule following the 1967 conquest of Palestine was intended to become permanent, like most instances of settler colonialism. At the same time, the occupation’s aims were also to expand and facilitate its own settlement projects. So, while military occupation is vital for establishing settlement and maintaining control, its success is dependent on maintaining the distinction between colonizer and colonized, a distinction that deters the completion of a successful settler colonial society.

Revealing the incompleteness of the Zionist project in the face of Palestinian popular resistance opens the possibility of factoring in resistance into settler colonial studies. This incompleteness does not arise due to differing interpretations of settler colonialism. Rather, it is the very nature of resistance that forecloses settler-colonial aims and forces the discussions around the collapsing of the colonial and settler-colonial categories. Mazin Qumsiyeh, in his Popular Resistance in Palestine: A History of Hope and Empowerment, argues that if it were not for Palestinian popular resistance, the ethnic cleansing of entire villages that commenced under British colonialism and has been ongoing under Zionist rule would have resulted in a homogenous Jewish state. Qumsiyeh summarises works by non-Palestinian writers who, despite their acknowledgment of Zionist settler colonialism, fail to recognise Palestinian agency, i.e., resistance, nor factor in the political forces at work. Even those works that discuss Palestinian popular resistance end up as a very descriptive layout of events.

In such deliberations, the condition of the colonized Palestinians is thought to be fully determined and their lives conditioned by, though not reducible to, Zionist settler colonialism. The barest characteristics of a colonised people, such as their homelessness, hunger, pain, etc. were sedimented with their colonised state. But as Walter Johnson would argue in the context of African American slavery, these “cannot simply be reformatted as resistance in a liberatory gesture which paradoxically reduces even the most intimate actions of human beings to (resistant) features of the system that enslaved them.” The point is rather to reveal the regulation of any consideration of politics in ideas of agency which conflates activity with resistance. Following such disciplinary regulation of politics, the relationship between agency and resistance has been structured as one between everyday forms of resistance and revolutionary forms of resistance. Johnson further states that when historians contend that day-to-day resistance posed an implicit threat to the system of slavery, “they leave unanswered the question of how isolated acts of sabotage and subterfuge might have grown into an explicit threat to slavery” (in this case settler colonialism). This does not imply that one was resistant while the other was not, but it points towards the need for rethinking the complexities that arise when only one narrative is acknowledged and studied.

Furthermore, the deployment of agency as an abstract human capacity has foreclosed an academic analysis of explicit acts of Palestinian resistance. This obscures both how Palestinians theorise their own actions and how they think about resistance. Simply put, when Venezuelans overcame the American-backed overthrow of their government or when the South Africans overcame a white supremacist regime, the agency was not merely ascribed to these national identities. Rather, Hugo Chavez and the working class or, in the case of South Africa, Nelson Mandela and the African National Congress were considered within the discussions of agency and resistance. But surprisingly, in the case of the Palestinians, an academic silence continues. The academic imperative then is to understand what conditions foreclose such deliberations and bravely introduce and theorise Palestinian agency and as a factor that hinders the completion of Zionist settler colonialism.