When does a native become a settler? (With apologies to Zreik and Mamdani)
2020; Wiley; Volume: 29; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês
10.1111/1467-8675.12470
ISSN1467-8675
Autores Tópico(s)German Colonialism and Identity Studies
ResumoThe simplest definition of Indigenous people, obviously enough, is that they are the only ones who have not come from somewhere else. (Wolfe, 2016, p. 16) With a nod to Mahmood Mamdani (1998), Raef Zreik asked, in an article of the same title: "When Does a Settler Become a Native?" (Zreik, 2016). Zreik begins his article by exploring the terms of the question itself: Is it historical (how much time needs to pass for the settler to become a native?), sociological (what changes must the settler go through to become a native?), ethical (what actions must the settler undertake in order to become a native?) or perhaps personal (is it sufficient for the settler to start feeling like he is a native?)? Although Zreik does not count "structural" among the question's possible forms, his response is very much informed by the understanding of settler colonialism as a structure—articulated most systematically by Patrick Wolfe. In very different ways, and with different conclusions, both Zreik and Mamdani claim that only with a radical change in the structure of the settler state can the categories settler/native be dissolved; not, as the title proposes, in ways that turn the settler into a native, but in ways that make this distinction less meaningful, at least in its political bearings (see also Wolfe, 2016). The question, more accurately framed, is thus whether a settler can cease to be a settler, and the response is decolonization itself. We insist here on "decolonization" and not "completion," even though Zreik, like others, proposes that the settler ceases to be a settler also when the colonial project is "completed, … as in Australia and the USA" (Zreik, 2016, p. 356). This framing, however, erases the political claims of natives in these geopolitical contexts (Simpson, 2014, p. 11). In this article we want to explore the converse query. Rather than asking, "can a settler become a native, and if so, how?," we inquire: "can a native become a settler, and if so, how?" If the answer to the first question involves laying pathways toward decolonization, our question is a way of tracing the formation of the settler project, and as part of it, its structure. Our article puts forward a dual argument, a historical one and a conceptual one. First, we seek to unfold a specific history of natives who, we argue, became settlers: Jews who lived in Palestine before the Zionist era. Focusing on two issues—language and land—we trace the movement of local Sephardi Jews22 We decided not to confine ourselves to a single term such as "Sephardi Jews," "Arab-Jews," "Palestinian Jews" or "native Jews," but to allow the many terms used to mark the Jewish native-born in the discourse of the time. For further discussion on these multiple categorizations, see Tamari (2008); Shohat (1999); Jacobson and Naor (2016). between being natives and settlers against the backdrop of the rise of the Zionist project in Palestine. Our main argument is that, although these Palestinian Jews worked to craft alternative social spaces that would transcend, overcome, or at least bypass the rigid colonial dichotomy,33 One of the distinctions that is at times made between settler colonialism and colonialism is based on their racial logic. Whereas colonialism is based on the rigid divide between the colonizer and colonized, the assimilatory racial logic organizing the settler/native divide is not dichotomic. At least in the case of Israel—indeed the Jewish state—assimilation is not considered an option. One can argue that in this sense, Israel is situated on a junction between colonialism and settler colonialism. However, looking at many other settler colonial contexts, we see that assimilation often does not erase racial—and colonial—distinctions. Therefore, the rigid native/settler divide keeps surfacing over land and resources struggles in North America, Australia, and elsewhere. and although such spaces became momentarily possible, eventually the space was organized within a settler-colonial pattern and the Palestinian Jews had to find a position along the colonial dichotomy of native/settler. Our second argument concerns the structure of settler colonialism that we seek to excavate from these historical details. Working primarily through analytical frames provided by Wolfe, Mamdani, and Fanon,44 Fanon wrote before the paradigm of comparative settler colonialism had been stabilized and he therefore does not think in these terms. Moreover, some (e.g., Veracini, 2010) have explicitly distinguished between the Algerian case and the classic cases of settler colonialism, based on the tendency of French colonists to identify with the French metropole, marking it as a "colonial" rather than a "settler colonial" case. Others, however, have maintained that the status of Algeria as a settler colony must be considered seriously, and there was even a special issue of Settler Colonial Studies (Vol. 8, No. 2, 2018) dedicated to Algeria as a settler colony. A similar approach to that was expressed in many of that issue's articles, see: Barclay, F., Chopin, C. A., & Evans, M. (2018); and following Stoler (2006), we believe that such distinctions between "classic" and non-typical cases of settler colonialism are based on a misleading unifying claim. See Section 2 of this essay. we aimed to identify the principles underlying settler colonialism, focusing on the interconnection between place, race, and movement. Our case study runs counter to the idea (common to Wolfe and Mamdani) that the category of settlers necessarily emerges through movement. Though settlers are very often defined as geographical outsiders, our case study concerns people who were transformed from being natives into settlers without moving. At the same time, Fanon's insistence that race is the defining element in the category of settlers proves insufficient here, since the racial status of the Arab-Jews within the Zionist settler mechanism did not fit into a one stable national and colonial racial structure: racially they were almost conflated with Arabs rather than with the dominant settler cohort (even if never fully so).55 Ella Shohat (1988) was the first to identify the relations between the Zionist colonial-racial mechanisms used towards the Arab-Palestinians and those used towards the Arab-Jews. Thus, our case study reveals a settler structure whose formation was more fluid and multifaceted than can be captures with a single category. Such fluidity opens up different possible histories and thus also different possible futures. The argument, then, has both conceptual and political implications. Conceptually, much like Zreik and Mamdani, we aspire to contextualize and problematize the settler/native binary by showing how a group of people can hold, at different historical moments (and sometimes simultaneously), the positions of both settler and native. Viewing the Zionist settler project from the native Jews' perspective undermines the clear-cut separation mechanisms between native and settler—as well as east and west, Arab and Jew—and thereby calls us to rearticulate some of the main understandings of the settler colonialism paradigm. Politically, returning to this period of unsettled categories is of a particular value for the present moment, a time when the rhetoric of the two states solution is being gradually abandoned. Even if the two states option may never have been viable, or has not been an option for a long while, the language of political separation has dominated public discourse in Israel for several decades. However, in recent years Israel has not only began to speak a different language, in which the two-states option is "no longer" desired; it is actively engaged in reshaping the constitutional foundations of the state and preparing the infrastructure for the annexation of the West Bank, thereby giving a legal anchor to the long-standing fact of its control over the entire territory. The horizon seems to be a political model that unites the territory into a single political entity, albeit one that is based on separation between the different governed groups. The Arab-Jews of Palestine offered an altogether different model for a unified territory, based on a shared space rather than separation. Their endeavors offer an important lesson in the process of imagining a political future beyond the logic of partition. As the future of the Jewish project in Palestine/Israel may be on the verge of a turning point, this is a crucial time to offer alternative visions for its formation. We begin with a methodological section (Section 2) on the paradigm of settler colonialism and its applicability to our discussion. We also consider in this section the methodology of working through the question of language in the Zionist/Israeli settlement project. We show that the dual separation between Arabic and Hebrew and between Arabic and the land (Palestine) was one of the core elements of the Zionist project as a settler project. Against these (settler) efforts to reorganize space and establish a European-Hebrew/Jewish national entity, Section 3 traces native efforts by local Sephardi Jews to construct a shared Hebrew-Arabic bilingual (and binational) space. Section 4 examines the cooperation and involvement of some native Jews in land purchase activities. We argue that, even if not intentionally, this involvement worked counter to the efforts to create a shared space that would not be subjected to the hierarchical logic of colonization. Section 5 explores how the complex positionality of the local Jews waned as they were interpolated into the settler project. The article's final section provides more conceptual reflections, situating the histories outlined in sections 3 to 5-3 to 5 within a more systematic analysis of settler colonialism. With the recent emergence of settler colonial studies as a discipline there has been much debate over the applicability of this framework to the Israeli/Palestinian framework.66 For the analytical and political benefits of applying this framework to the Israeli case, see Jabary-Salamanca et al. (2012). See also other chapters in the same volume. Patrick Wolfe (2016) dedicated a significant segment of his comparative account of settler colonialism to the Israeli case, marking it as a settler colonialism case par excellence. For a somewhat more nuanced application of the paradigm to the case of Israel/Palestine, see Veracini (2013). For the limits of this paradigm in this context, see also Busbridge (2018). As with any paradigm, the applicability of the general scheme to a particular context remains limited, yet as Zreik (2016) puts it "as far as the dynamics, the technology, the settling project of taking over the land, and the relationship to the native are concerned, Zionism does fit into a paradigm." We shall therefore work with it here, yet with important caveats. Ann Stoler (2006) calls us to note that each and every colonial case is unique. We can say the same about settler colonialism. Thus, while we adopt this category as the most apt for our case, and while we accept that it is largely a political category distinct from colonialism—some would even say it is an "antitype category" of colonialism (Veracini, 2010, p. 9)—we also see the insistence on rigid separations between these orders as unproductive in some cases.77 We are fully aware that our position over the settler colonial theory could be mistakenly understood as a reckless conflation of colonialism and settler colonialism. What we propose here, however, is a different reading of the settler colonial paradigm that problematizes some of its fundamental assumptions and calls to understand it, notwithstanding its important comparative dimension, as a category that should be more attuned to particular contexts. This insistence, which has come to dominate settler colonialism as a paradigm, often erases not just the unique nature of these different contexts, but also the multiplicity of orders and rationales organizing each. Palestine of the early 20th century was placed within several regimes of racialization and political rule that were at times contradictory: it was a settler colony in the making; a colony situated at the core of a struggle between several imperial forces; and part of the Ottoman imperial order, with its own racial orders.88 For more on the Ottoman sectarian divide see Makdisi (2000). To reduce all this to one paradigm is analytically misleading and politically problematic. We are thus invested in the category of settler colonialism only to the extent that it allows these complexities and intersections between different colonial, indigenous, and imperial (racial/sectarian) structures to surface, even if it means that the category itself emerges as having wide margins. Our analysis also suggests that the formation of settler colonialism in Israel/Palestine was not a necessary outcome of the existing Jewish presence in Palestine, or even of the Jewish immigration to Palestine. Not only do we focus here on Jews who lived in a non-colonial structure with Muslims and Christians in Palestine (albeit under Ottoman imperial rule); we point to a model, foregrounded by these Jews, of a Jewish existence in Palestine (including immigration to Palestine) that took the form of shared indigenousness (Campos, 2010; Svirsky & Ben-Arie, 2017). Indeed, the potential modes of inhabiting the land that we review here, combined with the fact that a minority of Jews resided in the land before the waves of Jewish immigration, as well as with the idea of a nation returning to its homeland, could have facilitated a Jewish-Palestinian political space that was organized according to a non-colonial logic (Campos, 2010; Jacobson, 2011). However, the particular mode that Jewish presence took in Mandatory Palestine and certainly after 1948, eventually stabilized Israel within the parameters of settler colonialism. In this way, our analysis of Israel/Palestine as a settler colony seeks to trouble a primary category of the paradigm, which is already under some critique. In Wolfe's (1999) account, one of the three main elements of the settler colonial structure is "an empirical binarism" separating settlers and indigenes. This binary is not strictly racial, and in later writings (2016) Wolfe makes sure of working through the historicities and construction of race, and to show the multiplicity of racial divisions alongside the social process through which difference is produced. Specifically, settler logics allow for, even facilitate, the malleability of racial constructs in the name of establishing settler's domination. The binary is therefore not strictly racial, even if it expresses itself in racial terms. It is rather a geographical binary, between those who were in the land and those who came to it from outside (invaded). This is why, for Wolfe, the process through which the categories of native and settler dissolve—that is, through which assimilation occurs—is the fortification of the settler colonial state rather than its potential eradication (assimilation, he argues, being a strategy to eliminate the native).99 The project of the settler state is to "construct . . . indigenous people as racially fragile," so they can be easily assimilated into the settler cohort (Wolfe, 2016, p. 39). Racial ambiguity is a regressive, rather than progressive, project when racial boundaries are "historical rather than biological": indigenes are the "prior owners of the land" (Wolfe, 2016, p. 57), and assimilation would eliminate them as owners. For Wolfe, this process has a clear historical trajectory: When one goes back in time, binarism is made more visible until it is a non-refutable fact—invasion. This relation to territory—to location and movement, the distinction between those who were here before and those who were not—is the empirical fact alongside which all other differentiations (racial, cultural, class, economic) are constructed (Wolfe, 1999, p. 180; 2016, Part 1). What our case study shows, however, is that even this difference between locals and invaders is constructed. Rather than returning back in time to the original moment in which difference emerges as a matter of fact, our return in time, in a proto-Foucauldian move, is to a moment before the territorial binarism of native/invader was institutionalized in order to observe its very creation. Accordingly, our mode of questioning is similar to that of Zreik and Mamdani, whose inquiry into the settlers who can (or cannot) become natives seeks to challenge this binarism as part of a project of decolonization. The fracturing of binarism is, for them, not the entrenchment of the settler state, as it is for Wolfe, but rather the fracturing of the colonial structure. At least in Zreik's case, this is probably a function of the context. Due to the Jewish separatist project, which was simultaneously unifying (all Jews presumably became one of a single project) and exclusionary (only Jews – a category to which one cannot easily convert), assimilation is not translated to this context from the Australian or North American ones. Even if before 1948 and during the first months of the war there were some believed that Palestinians could be assimilated to the state-building project, they were marginalized after the great exodus of 1948, which opened the possibility of imagining a relatively pure Jewish state.1010 On the shift of approach see Morris (1987). Cohen (2015) claims that the turning point of the imagination is actually 1929. Against this backdrop, the very possibility of "assimilation" into a single body of citizenship is a radical political horizon in the Israeli/Palestinian case—a complete democratization of the state. Yet, unlike both Zreik and Mamdani, who take the settler formation as given and seek to imagine its possible futures, we seek to understand the historical formation of the settler structure itself. To some degree, much like any other genealogical project, a return to this moment is an endeavor to question what now seems to be empirical (Foucault, 1998). In this context, it is important to emphasize that our claim is not that there were not structural binary distinctions, hierarchies, and modes of exclusion between Zionist Jews and Arab Palestinians, or between Palestinian Jews and those who immigrated from Europe; but to the moments in which binarism was still not altogether clear, and complicate the binary by contextualizing it. This mode of reading history opens up alternatives that emerged and were abandoned—alternatives going beyond partition or separation.1111 In so doing we tap into a rich seam of literature in the Israeli/Palestinian context, including Azoulay (2014), Doumani (1992), Shenhav (2012), and Tamari (2008). Indeed, as Marcelo Svirsky (2014) argues, it is precisely the ontology of binarism, as he terms it, that, "put[s] politics to death." In this regard, it is important to add that although we use here, for the sake of clarity, a seemingly rigid divide between "Sephardi natives" and "Ashkenazi settlers," this divide can be contextualized and further historicized as well, and it, too, is a matter of positionality and identification no less than a matter of ethnicity and origin. The Zionist project included a transformation of place as well as of its inhabitants—a movement both geographical (immigration, transfer) and discursive/political (moving the land, as it were, westward, and transforming landscapes and their meanings). Amnon Raz-Krakotzkin situates this movement within the ethos of the "negation of exile." The process of negation "can be interpreted as the negation of all that was considered 'Oriental,'" as part of an effort to "integrate the Jews and their history into the narrative of the west" (Raz-Krakotzkin, 2005, p. 167). Accordingly, "The transformation of the Jew into the new Jew, was also the transformation of the land that attempted to preserve the Arab 'view.'" As he goes on to argue: "This rejection had dramatic implications for the Jews from Arab countries" (Raz-Krakotzkin, 2005, p. 170). The ethos of the negation of exile thus encapsulates the essence of Zionism as a settler colonialist movement: an eastbound movement that sought to eliminate the old exilic (eastern) Jewish identity while also negating the local cultural and historical heritage of the land and its native residents.1212 Gil Eyal (2006, p. 44) offers a more complex picture of the Zionist settlers during the movement's early stages in Palestine. He points out how, in the process of negation of exile and the quest for internal change in the figure of the Jew, belonging to the land was at times expressed by an imitation of native Palestinian culture and customs as being representative of ancient Jewish culture and identity. The trajectory of movement ("westbound") is therefore also more ambivalent than a clear-cut movement from east to west, as our schematic outline suggests. See also Saposnik (2010). This was a process that was simultaneously symbolic: how land is imagined (Shohat, 1988; Shumsky, 2014); geopolitical (the physical removal of Arabs from the land); and material; consisting of the shaping of space (Tzfadia & Yacobi, 2011; Yiftachel, 2006) alongside the eradication of physical traces of Arab presence, past and present (Abu El Haj, 2001; Khalidi & Elmusa, 1992).1313 For a somewhat alternative analysis, see Leshem (2016). If we argue that the Arab-Jews of Palestine were ultimately "settlerized" without having moved, then this transformation of place itself is one of the means by which their position was transformed: with the "movement" (westernization) of the space, those who stayed put "moved" across the colonial scheme and were transformed—de-Arabized and de-nativized (Shenhav, 2006; Shohat, 1999). Within the many layers that compose this movement, we focus on language. Yet language in this context cannot be seen solely as a cultural product, as it played a crucial role in the very material facets of transferring land and rendering it available to Jewish settlement. From the beginning, the Zionist "redemption of the land" was associated with the so-called "revival of Hebrew" (Saposnik, 2010), with "Hebrew" being used in relation to a range of issues beyond the tongue one speaks. Hebrew became a marker of nationality, with references to ideas such as the "Hebrew nation"; it became (as part of this mark of nationality) the idiom organizing economic relations, particularly in the Zionist campaign for "Hebrew labor" (Avoda Ivrit) that was in fact a call to boycott Arab workers in the Jewish colonies (see Khalidi, 1997; Shafir, 1989); and it played a role in transforming space and reclaiming Jewish ownership while negating the indigenes' claims to the land, via toponymic changes (replacing Arabic with Hebrew names) and remapping projects, which are at the core of settler colonial movements (Abu El Haj, 2001; Benvenisti, 2002; Masalha, 2007). On all these different levels, "Hebrew" was the mark and tool of the de-Arabization of the land. In addition, language helped in shaping the racial contours of the land's inhabitants. After being one of the basic elements in the orientalization of Jews in Europe through the creation of the "Semite" as a linguistic-racial category (Anidjar, 2007), language (this time Hebrew, rather than "Semitic" languages) became one of the key elements in the de-orientalizing of the Jew: Hebrew was able to "return" to the east, to become the language of the land (Palestine), only after it was reconstructed as a European language, dissociated from its oriental and Semitic origins. Rather than being conceived as an indigenous language rooted in the historic and contemporary east—a relative, as it were, of Arabic—Hebrew thus became part of the westernization of the land. The demand to speak Hebrew was, accordingly, entangled with the demand to abandon, simultaneously and relatedly, Arabic and (Arab) native-ness. The Arab-Jews were caught up in this effort to eliminate Arabic as part of an effort to displace Arabs. Arabic, their own language, was gradually labelled a foreign language, and then the language of the enemy (Eyal, 2006; Mendel, 2014). This is where our story ends, yet we are more interested in its earlier moments: moments of potential opportunities created by local Palestinian Jews. If Zionism as a settler colonialist project took Hebrew to be a mark of a new Jewish indigeneity that was organized around the exclusion of Arabic and used to demonstrate exclusive land ownership, the alternative we foregrounded here via the Palestinian Jews saw Hebrew as a language that should not replace, but join Arabic as the language of the land, creating an indigeneity that was based on Hebrew–Arabic bilingualism with a constant movement (translation) between Arabic and Hebrew.1414 Evri (2019), Behar and Ben-Dor Benite (2014), and Behar (2017). To our Jewish fellow natives of the homeland, to those who were cheated by Zionism, to those who understand the goals and damage of Zionism—to them we extend our hands today and call: Come to us! We are your friends! … you and we are the sons of the same homeland, whether the Zionists like it or not… We are sorry for your persecution by the Zionists, for the denial of your rights, freedom, and ability to explore your goals and aspirations. We consider this to be an offense against the honor of the Palestinian nation, whose sons you are. Hence, your Muslim and Christian brothers strongly protest against these actions, extend their arms, and call you: Come to us! (Quoted in Jacobson & Naor, 2016, p. 22). This address rested on a long history of shared lives among the various communities inhabiting Palestine before the Zionist movement: Muslims, Christians, and Jews. But al-Husayni's call for Jews to join the Palestinian movement in the post-Ottoman context was a residue of social and political order that had already vanished and been replaced by a new (British) imperial order of partitions.1515 On this transformation, see Cohen (2015); Jacobson (2011). Under this new order, Arab-Palestinian invitations like the one that al-Husayni published, infuriated not only the Zionist leadership, but also many among the native Sephardi community. The Sephardim of Eretz Yisrael [the Land of Israel] strongly object to reports that they support the Arab delegation. They are in complete unity with the rest of the Jewish community in Eretz Yisrael and its demands for the promises about the creation of a Jewish national home to be fulfilled. (Doar Hayom, 1921, p. 2) But as al-Husayni's call implies, this alliance with Zionism was far from being self evident. During the late Ottoman era, many native Jews tried to distance themselves from the European-colonialist aspects of the Zionist movement and to position themselves as part of the imagined local Ottoman homeland alongside the native Arabs.1616 On the ethos of shared homeland in the local Sephardi discourse, see Campos (2010); Khalidi (1997). While they welcomed Jewish immigration, most of them viewed Zionism's European character as an interruption, if not a destruction, of the fabric of life in Palestine and were critical of its separatist approach. The question of the status of the Arabic language was at the heart of their critique. And when your dear reader will claim: "And how shall I read, when I cannot read Yishmael's language?"[Arabic] I will reply: … You the internal wonderer [Jew] come to France and learn French, go to Germany and learn German, Argentina and learn Spanish, come to America and learn English, and why is it when you come to Turkey—which is better for you than all these—you will not learn Turkish, and when you want to enter Palestine you will not learn Arabic—the language of the people of the land with whom you live every day? (Maman (1911a),1; authors' translation) And if you do not know how to read [the Arabic press], look for someone else who will translate for you, who will explain to you the full extent of the situation, because we [the Sephardic natives] are now inclined to agree [among us] not to help you further on this subject. It seems that our help [in translating from Arabic] only increased your indifference … to the land you are in, and to the governing people under whose auspices you live. (Maman, 1911a; authors' translation) Maman's rejection of his role as a mediator of language (translator) was in essence a refusal to cooperate with the colonial scheme that dismissed the local culture and language, and that saw locality itself as a threat. Recent scholarship has focused on the role of native Arab-Jews as translators or mediators (Gribetz, 2014; Halperin, 2015; Jacobson & Naor 2016), also as part of a larger tendency to see them as hybrid phenomena, trapped in the borderland between Hebrew and Arabic national poles.1717 Eyal (2006, p. 10), for example, argues that during the early Zionist era, different types of hybrids "at one and the same time marked and transgressed the boundary between Jews and Arab in the pre-state period." He categorizes the native Sephardim who were "well integrated into urban Palestinian society" as one of these hybrid types (2006, p. 11). See also Svirsky and Ben-Arie (2017) and Halperin (2015). But Maman did not see himself as a moderator or facilitator between European Jews who immigrated to Palestine and Palestinian Arabs. Rather than an attempt to mediate between opposing worlds, Maman's original act of translation (alongside hundreds of articles translated from Arabic to Hebrew by other Sephardi natives) was part of an effort to refuse these very divisions between Jews and Arabs, Hebrew and Arabic, settlers and locals. That is, his (and others') goal was to expose the new Jewish settlers to the local Arab political environment in order to encourage them to engage with the local political leaders and intellectual
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