In liberal circles in the United States, it has become a shibboleth to assume that the Palestine–Israel conflict is fundamentally about the occupation and the settlements, and, as former president Jimmy Carter put it, that Israel within its own borders is “a wonderful democracy with equal treatment of all citizens, whether Arab or Jew.” Shira Robinson's deployment of Carter's statement, coming at the end of her recent book Citizen Strangers, rings with irony. In her reading, the project of statehood in Israel—quite apart from the question of the occupied territories—was from its inception fundamentally imbued with the language, tactics, and structures of a highly racialized settler colonialism.
Citizen Strangers traces the early years of Israel's dealings with the Palestinian Arabs remaining within its borders, who could be neither finally expelled nor absorbed into an explicitly Jewish (and Ashkenazi-dominated) state-building project. Robinson coins the phrase “liberal settler state” to describe the particularity of this early Israeli regime, which faced the fundamental quandary of meeting increasingly explicit international standards for political inclusion and democratic representation while simultaneously appropriating Palestinian territory and ensuring the ethnocommunal character of the Jewish state. “Above all,” Robinson writes, “Israel's dilemma stemmed from the unprecedented colonial bargain that its government believed it had to strike in order to gain international recognition in 1989—to grant Palestinians the right to vote in the midst of its ongoing quest for their land” (p. 55). In five detailed, compact chapters, Robinson outlines the messy and often contradictory philosophies and practices that emerged in these early years of statehood, as Israeli officials tried to decide how to deal with the Palestinian “minority” remaining within their new borders.
The first chapter, “From Settlers to Sovereigns,” outlines in brief the passage from early Zionist settlement to British imperial sponsorship to the expulsion of the Palestinians and the founding of the Israeli state in the 1948 Arab–Israeli war, emphasizing the racialized language of empire that inhered in Zionist settler philosophies and practices, particularly after the British declaration of support for the Zionist project in 1917 and its incorporation into the terms of the Mandate. In Chapter 2, “The Liberal Settler State,” Robinson settles into a discussion of the simultaneous development of a government rhetoric of democracy and liberalism alongside a military regime intended to entrap, silence, and dispossess Palestinians. She carefully traces the development of a legal apparatus around the appropriation of Palestinian land (including the infamous “absentee property” laws of the immediate postwar period), the ghettoization and cantonization of Palestinian communities and their recategorization as legal “minorities,” and the establishment of military rule (continued even after the armistice agreements) to control Palestinian movement and activity. She also discusses the public reactions to such policies from both sides: on the one hand, the clear Israeli “public complicity” in this strategy of appropriation and imprisonment on the grounds of state security and an unspoken but clearly understood hierarchy of ethnicity (p. 47); on the other, disputes over the most effective forms of activism within the demoralized and fractured Palestinian communities. The role of MAKI (the post-1948 Communist party, counting both Arabs and Jews as members) is particularly interesting in this context, as its members struck a delicate balance of exposing some of the more egregious crimes of Israeli military rule even while coming to some political accommodation with the state.
The third chapter in many ways represents the core of the book. Titled “Citizenship as a Category of Exclusion,” it traces the military and legal measures Israeli officials took both to keep out Palestinians intent on returning to their land and to restrict Palestinian rights and land claims where expulsion and deportation were impossible. The so-called “sweep” operations—formally named the “War on Return” and the “War on Infiltration”—that began in early 1949 sought simultaneously to count and to expel as many Arabs as possible. These were followed by a new system of regulation known as the “Temporary Residence Permit,” a highly contested plan intended, as Joshua Palmon put it, to “achieve the concealment of the War on Infiltration” and make possible the deportation of any Palestinian who possessed neither a TRP or state papers (p. 87). The question of citizenship for Palestinian Arabs in Israel was finally settled in 1952 by construing Palestinians as a separate and lesser category of citizen, governed not by the Law of Return (1950) but by the 1952 “Nationality Law.”
Robinson's final two chapters tell the story of Palestinian incorporation, under duress, into public celebrations of Israeli statehood and—offering greater resistance—into the public accounting and reconciliation measures that followed the massacre at Kafr Qasim in 1956. Such moments came to represent a test of priorities for both Jewish and Arab members of MAKI, which increasingly faced the question of whether and how to align with the global decolonization movements of the 1950s and 1960s that claimed kinship with the Palestinian cause. The struggles over the Kafr Qasim massacre eventually, Robinson suggests, led Palestinian activists to make the strategic decision to “narrow the scope of their broad demands for equality . . . and focus on a more limited campaign to end the most visible expressions of segregation in order to enlist the support of Jewish liberals”—a decision that finally ended martial law in Israel, but allowed for the permanent institutionalization of many forms of Jewish settler privilege.
The idea of analyzing the Zionist movement and the state of Israel through the lens of settler colonialism is not new; it produced some compelling work as long ago as the 1980s, and has moved into new prominence in the past twenty years despite considerable ongoing resistance. But it has been regrettably rare that serious scholars of Palestine/Israel have made use of this approach in conjunction with specific, detailed, documented accounts of precisely how settler domination operated in this context—its rhetoric, its practice, its use of both coercion and violence—and what sorts of resistance and/or accommodation were available to its opponents. Robinson's book represents a remarkable accomplishment for its empirical accounting of a settler society, and opens new possibilities for thinking about Palestine/Israel in terms that are both locally specific and globally conscious.
