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5 ZIONISM and COLONIALISM a Comparative Approach Gershon Shafir

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5 ZIONISM and COLONIALISM a Comparative Approach Gershon Shafir 5 ZIONISM AND COLONIALISM A comparative approach Gershon Shafir Critical Israeli academicians tend to belong to the Zionist left, an affiliation which affects considerably their historical perspective. They tend to see the year 1967 as a watershed between a pre-1967 moral, contained and basically united Israel and a post-1967 occupying, expansionist and divided Jewish state. Hence, they are willing to point to colonialist features in the Israeli conduct in the occupied territories and trace all the present social and political predicaments to the making of Greater Israel in 1967. This dichotomy is the departure point of Gershon Shafir’s analysis of early Zionism as a colonialist phenomenon. Very much in the vein of other articles in this collection, he looks for the past in order to understand the present and he interprets the past out of the present. Thus, Israeli colonialism post-1967 has its roots in pre-1948 Zionism. What Shafir claims here is that while the mode of Jewish settlement in Palestine changed throughout the years—adapting itself to the political and economic realities of the day—the character or nature of this settlement was and remained colonialist. This is another example of how Israeli historians come closer to the Palestinian narrative on the one hand, and how the historiographical research touches upon the raw nerves of Israeli society, on the other. Any reference to Zionism as colonialism is tantamount in the Israeli political discourse to treason and self-hatred. *** Studies telling the story of Israeli state-building usually have two plots. One tells the story of the Zionist immigrants who constructed their institutions according to their ideals and ideologies, mostly socialist ideas imported from the Pale of Settlement, occasionally in disagreement with other non-socialist immigrants who had different blueprints for the state-to-be. The other tells the story of the interaction between Palestinian-Arabs, who were unalterably opposed to the creation of a Jewish state in Palestine, and the Jewish immigrants, who were intent on protecting their emerging commonwealth. These two plots, however, rarely intersect. These separate plots should be twined since Israeli state- and society-building were not Zionism and colonialism 73 solely an internal Jewish affair. In fact, the distinct characteristics of the Jewish- Palestinian conflict influenced and decisively shaped the character of the Jewish state-to- be and continue to do so in myriad ways. Some of the unique features and institutions of Israeli society, the overlong period of the Labor Movement’s domination, the focal place of the Histadrut, even the kibbutz, are distinct corollaries of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Further, I argue that socialist ideals and other imported blueprints played a lesser role in creating the Israeli state than the circumstances in which the Jewish immigrants found themselves in Palestine. The most crucial circumstances were found in the land and the labor markets where, as will be shown, through a prolonged period of trial and error the immigrants made hard choices that determined the character of the yishuv and the future Israeli state and society. Historians, political scientists, and sociologists of Israeli society holding the perspective that disassociates state-building and national conflict and, simultaneously, privileges consciousness at the expense of existence, tended to emphasize those characteristics of the Zionist settlement in Palestine that appear to distinguish it from colonial encounters. The separate development of Jewish and Palestinian societies was widely used as proof that the former could not have exploited the latter, while the universalist socialist ideologies of the most authoritative group among the young immigrants is presented as an impediment to any potential or lingering colonial characteristic in Zionist settlement. In response to the Likud’s large-scale settlement plans in the West Bank, a new critical perspective, according to which Israel had come to resemble Northern Ireland, Algeria in the 1950s and 1960s, and/or the white supremacist regime of South Africa, appeared in the public discourse.1 The authors of this perspective routinely drew a sharp line of demarcation between pre-1948 Zionist settlement in the coastal zone and inland valleys of Palestine and the post-1977 colonization of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip. The latter was seen as a radical departure, even better, as the corruption of Zionism; the colonial Athena seemed to have sprung full-grown from the head of her non-colonial father, Zeus. But, in spite of the many differences between the two settlement drives, they also exhibited uncanny resemblances, enough indeed to make one wing of the Labor Movement proclaim continuity, and the rest of the movement wince and shuffle uneasily while complaining that its distinctiveness was being stolen. These responses, however, can also indicate that the attempt to recommence Israeli history in 1967 has been too sweeping: its proponents ignored the similarities between the two phases of Israeli colonization and, consequently, failed to seize it as a propitious context for a revision of the dominant interpretation of the past and its long debilitating legacies. Where others see historical bastards, I find a streak of historical ancestry. I offer, therefore, a theoretical and conceptual perspective that highlights the continuous centrality of colonization in Zionism and at the same time gives appropriate weight to the changes that have taken place, under new circumstances, within the framework of settlement. European colonialism, after all, did not create just one model of overseas society, and it seems to me that we can understand the transformation of Israeli society since 1967 most fruitfully as a transition from one method of European colonization to another one. The Israel/Palestine question 74 This argument will be presented in three parts. In Section I, I will provide a typology of European overseas colonies, present the dominant Israeli colonization method, and examine it in relation to the type of European colony it most closely resembled. In the second section, I will examine the ways in which the Zionist movement adapted the European model to the conditions prevailing in Palestine for its purposes in two separate periods (1908–1920 and 1948–1967). Finally, in Section III, I will appraise the character of Israeli society in the 1970s and 1980s in light of the transition from the older to a newer model of colonization. Special attention will be paid to the impact this transition had on enhancing those characteristics Zionism shared with other colonization drives while stripping away its more idiosyncratic characteristics and, finally, I will reflect briefly on the reasons for Israeli decolonization in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip. I Methods of colonization D.K.Fieldhouse and George Fredrickson offer a four-way typology of colonies: the occupation and mixed colonies of Spain, the plantation model of Portugal, and the pure settlement colony of England. The occupation colony evolved to ensure military control of strategic locations without, however, undertaking to transform their economic order. Examples of this model abound in South East Asia and coastal Africa. The other three models were based on settlement by Europeans on a significant scale that led, on its part, to the introduction of new forms of land and labor appropriation. In the plantation colony, in lack of “a docile indigenous labor force,” the settlers acquired land directly and imported an indentured or unfree labor force to work their monocultural plantations. The best known example of this method of settlement was the South in the United States. Mixed colonies used coercive methods to elicit labor from the native population, but potential antagonism between the two groups was dampened through miscegenation. The mountainous regions of Latin America supply us with the obvious examples of mixed colonies. The pure settlement colony established “an economy based on white labor” which, together with the forcible removal or the destruction of the native population, allowed the settlers “to regain the sense of cultural and ethnic homogeneity that is identified with a European concept of nationality.” Among colonial societies, the pure, or homogenous, settlement colony had the largest settler populations who, in fact, sought to become the majority in their chosen land. These colonies have also reproduced consequently, in varying degrees, the complex economies and social structures of the metropolitan societies. Australia and the North in the United States exemplify this type.2 I need to complement Fredrickson’s typology with another category: the ethnic plantation colony that is based on European control of land and the employment of local labor. The planters, in spite of their preference for local labor, also sought, inconsistently and ultimately unsuccessfully, massive European immigration. Algeria was an example of this hybrid type. The dilemma facing the early Zionist immigrants in Palestine was whether to aim for an ethnic plantation or a pure settlement colony. It was the pure, or homogenous, type of colonization that won out, but it was realized less fully in Palestine than in most other colonial frontiers. Zionism and colonialism 75 Before examining the specific character of the Zionist method of pure settlement, I will list the differences between Palestine and other frontiers of settlement, and between
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