Tracing Settler Colonialism: A Genealogy of a Paradigm in the Sociology of Knowledge Production in Israel

• DOI: 10.1177/0032329221999906
• Author: Areej Sabbagh-Khoury
• Published date: 01 March 2022
• Date: 01 March 2022
• Subject Matter: Articles

https://doi.org/10.1177/0032329221999906

Politics & Society

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DOI: 10.1177/0032329221999906

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Article

Tracing Settler Colonialism:

A Genealogy of a Paradigm

in the Sociology of Knowledge

Production in Israel

Areej Sabbagh-Khoury

Hebrew University of Jerusalem

Abstract

Knowledge is inextricably bound to power in the context of settler colonialism where

apprehension of the Other is a tool of domination. Tracing the development of the

“settler colonial” paradigm, this article deconstructs Zionist and Israeli dispossession

of Palestinian land and sovereignty, applying the sociology of knowledge production to

the study of the Israeli-Palestinian case. The settler colonial paradigm, linked to Israeli

critical sociology, post-Zionism, and postcolonialism, reemerged following changes in

the political landscape from the mid-1990s that reframed the history of the Nakba

as enduring, challenged the Jewish definition of the state, and legitimated Palestinians

as agents of history. Palestinian scholars in Israel lead the paradigm’s reformulation.

This article offers a phenomenology of Palestinian positionality, a critical potential

for decolonizing the settler colonial structure and exclusive Jewish sovereignty, to

consolidate a field of study that shapes not only research into the Israeli-Palestinian

case but approaches to decolonization and liberation.

Keywords

settler colonialism, sociology of knowledge, Israel/Palestine, indigenous, decolonization,

Palestinians in Israel

Corresponding Author:

Areej Sabbagh-Khoury, Department of Sociology and Anthropology, Hebrew University of Jerusalem,

Har HaZofim, Jerusalem, 91905, Israel.

Email: areej.sabbagh-khoury@mail.huji.ac.il

999906PASXXX10.1177/0032329221999906Politics & SocietySabbagh-Khoury

research-article2022

2022, Vol. 50(1) 44–83

The settler colonial paradigm, which first took shape in the 1960s alongside attendant

processes of decolonization in the Middle East and Africa, has previously been applied

to the context of the Zionist colonization of Palestine. A series of scholars—among

them Said, Sayegh, Rodinson, Jabbour, Abu-Lughod and Abu-Laban, Hilal, El-Messiri,

and Sayigh—have all employed the framework of settler colonialism to define the

reality that had emerged in Palestine.1 But the term did not take hold in the Israeli

academy until later.2 Despite—or perhaps because of—the ongoing nature of the set-

tler colonial project in Palestine, settler colonial studies as a field was notably absent

from the bulk of research on Palestine/Israel for around four decades.3 In the last two

decades, however, we have witnessed a renewed focus on Palestine/Israel from a

range of settler colonial theorists,4 whose works contributed to a shift in a field that

also bears the mark of the renewed struggles of indigenous peoples around the world.

This article examines the resurgence of the settler colonial paradigm in the case of

Palestine/Israel. It points out the distinct relevance of the paradigm for analyses of the

Zionist project and examines the evolution of the analytic within the Israeli academy,

focusing on the two major disciplines that have produced robust criticisms of the

Zionist movement and its official version of the events of 1948: sociology and

history.5

I trace the genealogy of this knowledge production while intertwining three main

arguments.6 First, I contend that the reemergence of the settler colonial paradigm in

the social sciences and humanities in Israel can be ascribed in large part to political

processes within Palestinian society in Israel in the mid-1990s, specifically, a shift in

political discourse from one that promotes a two-state solution to one that envisages a

state for all citizens. This shift challenges the Jewish character of the Israeli state, call-

ing for a transformation of the state to one based on inclusion and equal rights for all,

regardless of ethnic or religious differences, and includes public calls for the right of

return for Palestinian refugees, invoking the history of the “Nakba” (“catastrophe” in

Arabic). Second, I link this paradigm shift to a transformation in knowledge produc-

tion. Whereas critical sociology, post-Zionism/the new historians, and postcolonial

theory focused mainly on the events of 1948 or on critiques of Ashkenazi hegemony,

the settler colonial paradigm was articulated mainly by Palestinian scholars who are

citizens of Israel and by Palestinian research centers in Israel. Third, while critical and

postcolonial researchers typically framed the colonial situation in Israel as historical

rather than as an ongoing process continuing into the present, focusing mainly on the

Zionist movement and on Israelis and their practices, the new phase of research is

characterized by the return of Palestinians to history, not only as victims but also as

agents of this history—as individuals, including scholars, who resisted and continue to

resist the ongoing Zionist project and who, in the process, have altered its contours.

This new phase is articulated by the work of a global Palestinian exchange of scholarly

knowledge.7

It is, perhaps, inconceivable to formulate a sociology of knowledge that transcends

the framework of the nation-state, which is located in a field replete with refugees and

diaspora, underground organizations, and a civil society under various forms of occu-

pation existing side by side with established institutions of settler colonial society.

45

Sabbagh-Khoury

Explicating the sociology of knowledge without a unified field (in Bordieuan terms),

along with tracking the hegemony in a field so scattered and polarized, is but a great

challenge I strive to begin here. Ultimately, I point to the well-rehearsed claim that

theorizing is itself a political practice (not separate from it) in the subaltern case. The

settler colonial paradigm highlights the ways in which both hegemonic knowledge and

colonial structures are organized to occlude alternative possibilities. Through my

genealogy, I point to a prerequisite for a just future: the decolonization of the apparatus

of supremacy and settler privileges, including reframing the analysis of Jewish-Israeli

privileges, reflected in theorizations and representations of Palestine and Palestinians,

and dismantling persistent reproduction of epistemological violence in knowledge

production. While the turn to the settler colonial paradigm I trace is not the only step

required to dismantle our current colonial infrastructure (one designed and ordered

around exclusion and domination), it offers a lens grounded in the enduring past and

oriented toward a contingent future.

The Settler Colonial Paradigm in the Israeli-Palestinian

Context

The settler colonial paradigm is not an orderly or monolithic theory. Rather, it is an

interpretative framework of cumulative historical analogies, one that enables the

examination of a series of societies that have been shaped as settler societies from the

early modern period until today. These include but are not limited to the United States,

Australia, Canada, New Zealand, and Algeria. While specific settler colonial practices

differ from society to society and in different historical constellations, the outcomes of

the settler colonial processes are commensurable because of their similarities, espe-

cially given the focus on land expropriation as the central dynamic.

The “reemergence” of this paradigm does not amount to a simple return to origi-

nal usage. The frameworks that address colonialism and related varieties of colonial

studies have a long history, but the reemergence in question here is that of, specifi-

cally, settler colonial studies, a framework crafted to explore the inner logics of

multiple cases of settler colonialism (e.g., New Zealand, the United States, Canada,

and Australia). Thus the reemergence of settler colonialism does not imply a simple

homology between this paradigm and the previous incarnations. Whatever the dif-

ferences between earlier and current versions, all applications of the paradigm share,

as a common denominator, the attempt to compensate for (but not to replace) the

often overly broad use of the undifferentiated term “colonialism,” with its connota-

tions of plantation and other exploitative labor economies, by emphasizing the dis-

crete characteristics of the processes of colonization, predicated on not only relations

of settler domination but also the dispossession and replacement of indigenous peo-

ples by a colonizing population.8

In the processes of settler colonization, settlers, typically backed by a metropolitan

country, appropriate space inhabited by an indigenous people. The demographic bal-

ance between the settler population and the indigenous population gradually favors the

former as a result of methods of dispossession, expulsion, or extermination. Whereas

46 Politics & Society 50(1)