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Colonizing Palestine: The Zionist Left and the Making of the Palestinian Nakba
Among the most progressive of Zionist settlement movements, Hashomer Hatzair proclaimed a brotherly stance on Zionist-Palestinian relations. Until the tumultuous end of the British Mandate, movement settlers voiced support for a binational Jewish-Arab state and officially opposed mass displacement of Palestinians. But, Hashomer Hatzair colonies were also active participants in the process that ultimately transformed large portions of Palestine into sovereign Jewish territory. Areej Sabbagh-Khoury investigates this ostensible dissonance, tracing how three colonies gained control of land and their engagement with Palestinian inhabitants on the edges of the Jezreel Valley/Marj Ibn 'Amer. Based on extensive empirical research in local colony and national archives, Colonizing Palestine offers a microhistory of frontier interactions between Zionist settlers and indigenous Palestinians within the British imperial field. Even as left-wing kibbutzim of Hashomer Hatzair helped lay the groundwork for settler colonial Jewish sovereignty, its settlers did not conceal the prior existence of the Palestinian villages and their displacement, which became the subject of enduring debate in the kibbutzim. Juxtaposing history and memory, examining events in their actual time and as they were later remembered, Sabbagh-Khoury demonstrates that the dispossession and replacement of the Palestinians in 1948 was not a singular catastrophe, but rather a protracted process instituted over decades. Colonizing Palestine traces social and political mechanisms by which forms of hierarchy, violence, and supremacy that endure into the present were gradually created.
376 pages, Hardcover
Published August 22, 2023
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June 18, 2025
“Paradoxically, the Zionist Left has widely rejected the indigeneity of the Palestinians and the legitimacy of resistance to colonization, whereas the Right, particularly figures like Jabotinsky, has subtly reinforced the status of the Arabs as natives, anticipating indigenous resistance to colonization.” A main thesis of this book is that it was not the extreme right Zionists that brought settler-colonialism to Palestine but “it was the Zionist Left that pioneered the violence of settler-colonialism.” Strangely it was those early socialist Kibbutzim which were complicit and were settler-colonial pioneers. Zionist settlement (like the settlers out West in the US who forcefully expanded into Native lands) uses “the logic of entitlement to claim space deemed open, to continually expand settlement, and to disregard indigenous will.” Zionism began as a colonial project and it was common to call it that in the decades before 1948, even as decolonization was taking hold elsewhere. Settler-colonialism expert Patrick Wolfe says settler-colonialism is a structure not an event that seeks “the elimination of natives from desired space, whether by assimilation, displacement, or liquidation.” “The figural New Jew (Sabra) of Zionism …. was constituted through the colonial appropriation of Palestinian belonging.” 1948 was not the origin of colonization, but the continuation. For a long time, Palestinians had seen settlers as their neighbors, thus deserving of Palestinian hospitality; sadly, that trust was misplaced.
“Upon arrival in the western margins of the Jezreel valley in the 1920s and 1930s, Zionist settlers encountered not a terra nullius but a densely populated and cultivated frontier.” “Generally, the kibbutzim did not stumble upon uninhabited land on which they could establish a colony but instead navigated contentious conditions of resistance and opposition.” The author posits that the kibbutz movement was placed “squarely in the colonizing of Palestine.” It was the labor Zionist settler movement that caused the damage before 1950, “not the Zionist Right who have led the project in recent decades.” This settler-colonial state was even then predicated “on replacement, dispossession, and symbolic degradation.” “Palestinian resistance to settlement meant settlers main focus and resources were directed toward security.”
“Zionist settlers were not simply immigrants seeking to join an existing polity. Rather they sought to replace the existing polity (and indigenous aspirations) with their own political sovereignty.”
For example, this Zionist testimony from 1948: “Last night forty of our men and ten from Yokne’am demolished the houses of Qira. The roofs had already been removed two weeks ago, and last night the shacks were removed and the walls of stone houses removed. All this was done to JNF (Jewish National Fund) instructions. …I find it hard to get over the feeling that we have done wrong.” The Zionists “knew their enterprise depended on British backing and, ultimately, British bayonets (at least until the White Paper of 1939).” “The settlers argued that, UNLESS they occupied their Palestinian neighbor’s lands, they would be exposed to potential attacks.” [imagine feeling sociopathic enough to tell your peaceful neighbors, “I decided I feel unsafe so I’m taking all your shit & evicting you by force”.] This settler-colonial mindset was also seen in the 1948 testimony of an Ein Hashofet settler, who phrased it as the settlers faced an “assaulting gang” who gave out “savage cries” - unlike the assumedly non-gang, non-savage settlers who instead showed “exemplary courage.”
“The 1948 war completed what the Zionist settlers could not have achieved through years of purchase and settlement: they gained control of lands still lived on by the Palestinians and seized additional lands.” “Arabs were often employed to guard Zionist settlements, effectively incorporating them into the colonization that was already engendering the erasure of indigenous lifeways.” Historical Palestine was dotted “with colonies to establish the territorial contiguity desired for a future sovereign Jewish state.” Strangely the author says “socialist-Zionists who were engaged in coerced practices generally did not see their colonization practices at being at odds with their commitment to collectivist cooperation and class liberation.”
In 1931, there were 944,423 Arabs and 91,398 Jews in Palestine. Yet today Zionists get their panties in a bunch at the thought of Israel ever having more Arabs than Jews. The horror! Interesting that, Arabs and Jews got along a lot better back then when there were ten times more Arabs than Jews – and no imposed racist ethnostate. Think of “Zionism as a settler colonial project that aimed not to incorporate the Zionists into the region but to conquer it and form a distinct social and political structure alien to the local one.”
“For the settlers, land occupation via afforestation marked ownership. At times trees served as an ‘advance guard of the settlement process’.” Settlers learned from Palestinians how to grow food locally, but Zionist budgets afforded fossil fuel intensive agriculture using gas powered machinery, artificial fertilizer and pesticides. Zionists therefore had a longer growing season (due to fossil inputs) and fewer pests. Since Palestinians didn’t have the cash to attempt such fossil fueled adventures, they were seen as “primitives” – not unlike settler-colonial US settlers who saw Native Americans as primitives. Never mind that historically the Palestinian village of Abu Zureiq was already then using agricultural machinery. The Zionist Orientalist mindset saw Palestinians as backwards and poor, with their lands destitute or neglected, and their society primitive. Settler-colonials throughout history have to see others as “the Other”, the inferior other, to better justify taking their shit and their land, pretending the “others” were doing nothing with it (e.g. aboriginals in Australia, or Hitler wanting the Lebensraum of the Slavs). Never mind that ignoring indigenous knowledge is the mark of an idiot. Never mind that Palestinians and Native Americans both have frequently taught settlers valuable stuff they did NOT know. Like stealing is bad. Or making people miserable cuz you covet something of theirs is uncool.
The Zionist Project “promoted colonies separated from the indigenous population.” It led to a morally questionable false flag operation: in 1948 three Hazorea settlers staged an attack on their own kibbutz to make local Qira villagers flee in fear that they would be blamed for it (p.160). It worked – Qira inhabitants fled. This led to another false flag attack on the Yokne’am settlement “from the direction of Qira.” Edward Said accurately described Palestinians as “the victims of the victims, the refugees of the refugees.”
With the Zionist land grab of 1967 (the year Noam says Israel chose expansion over security) the Zionist Right became dominant (“although labor Zionist ministers and settlers, actively participated in the process”). Back then there was talk about Palestinian villages with “dead bodies left under the rubble (p.225)” and “the plunder they ‘inherited’ from the Palestinians.” The Zionist Right then would tell the morally complaining Left that they were hypocrites because “the kibbutzim themselves were complicit in colonization and expulsion.”
One settler waxed nostalgically: “WE looted everything – property and livestock, stationary or alive, not just donkeys and dogs.” Another settler said (p.229), “I am bothered that if I wish to preserve my personal and national existence, I am forced to carry out or agree to or support actions that are contrary to some of my general world views. And I am embarrassed.” “Settlers cultivated a selective memory that obfuscated the history of colonization, thereby turning expulsion into a by-product of war and viewing the indigenous as complicit in their demise.” “The few Zionists who expressed regret nonetheless classified the expulsions as inevitable.” “Indigenous opposition to Zionist appropriation …became the justification for Zionist violence.” Then as now, “Palestinian resistance to colonization was interpreted as a refusal of Jewish existence.” Since October 7th, 2023, I seen a dozen laughably paranoid Facebook posts by American Zionists I know, about how they feel completely personally unsafe. I don’t see Christians, Muslims and Jews around me playing the “I feel unsafe” victim card – For decades I have only seen malignant narcissists, sociopaths, and Zionists, playing the victim card for propaganda/Karen/gaslighting purposes.
In one testimony in this book, one common sense-oriented Zionist says, “I understood very well that my dad did not hate Arabs. He knew that eventually we would have to live with them in good neighborliness (p.254).” The same guy says, “One of the reasons they managed to annihilate so many Jews (during the Holocaust) was that the Jews had no way to defend themselves”.
This book is about the author examining the settler-colonial process of three Hashomer Hatzair kibbutzim from 1936 to 1956 and their interactions with neighboring Arab villages. He shows how all three kibbutzim nurtured relations with Arab residents with “the strategic intention of inducing them to accept colonization in peaceful ways” and to create “ethnically exclusive communities.” He looks at the shift from land acquisition and colonization to military conquest. Zionists were only able to buy 7% of Mandate Palestine and 20% of the cultivatable land before 1948. That meant if you really want to create your own sordid little racist ethnostate in 1948 with those small percentages of land, you’d have to reach out and take the land from your neighbors (with no history of hurting Jews who couldn’t defend themselves) by force – in other words it’s Nakba time!
Extra Credit Quiz: What is the difference between Hitler’s plan during WWII to ethnically cleanse the Slavs and take their land (with no legal claim) by force for Lebensraum, AND the Zionist plan since 1948 to ethnically cleanse the Palestinians and take their land (with no legal claim) by force also for Lebensraum?
Collective resistance to the Zionist project was expressed by the Great Arab Revolt of 1936-1939. Look at the Nakba and closely and you’ll see that it never ended (al nakba al-mustamirra). If you study the history of the Zionist Left as this author has in depth you will see that “Left-socialist values did not motivate significant protest in response to the uprooting of the Palestinian villages before and during 1948 or prevent the kibbutzim from taking possession of the land and property of the adjacent Palestinian villages.”
The author ends with two great sentences: “Zionist national identity is premised on settlement, replacement, and the denial and negation of Palestinian indigeneity. Reimagining is central to Zionist claims to re/possession.” You’d think that socialist-Left Zionists who advocated class liberation, brotherhood of peoples, and the abolition of social hierarchy, would not then shove Palestinians to the bottom of the abolished hierarchy, deny brotherhood to all non-Jews - but to their credit socialist-Left Zionists did achieve one goal – class liberation – but ONLY because those Lefty Zionists PROVED they now had NO class. This book’s message seemed to be: Don’t hold your breath that the Zionist Left sees, or ever saw, a future of Zionists living peacefully alongside Palestinians and other humans like in 1931. That’s it - this book was great. I recommend it. And kudos to the author for bringing something really different to the Israel/Palestine book section.
“Upon arrival in the western margins of the Jezreel valley in the 1920s and 1930s, Zionist settlers encountered not a terra nullius but a densely populated and cultivated frontier.” “Generally, the kibbutzim did not stumble upon uninhabited land on which they could establish a colony but instead navigated contentious conditions of resistance and opposition.” The author posits that the kibbutz movement was placed “squarely in the colonizing of Palestine.” It was the labor Zionist settler movement that caused the damage before 1950, “not the Zionist Right who have led the project in recent decades.” This settler-colonial state was even then predicated “on replacement, dispossession, and symbolic degradation.” “Palestinian resistance to settlement meant settlers main focus and resources were directed toward security.”
“Zionist settlers were not simply immigrants seeking to join an existing polity. Rather they sought to replace the existing polity (and indigenous aspirations) with their own political sovereignty.”
For example, this Zionist testimony from 1948: “Last night forty of our men and ten from Yokne’am demolished the houses of Qira. The roofs had already been removed two weeks ago, and last night the shacks were removed and the walls of stone houses removed. All this was done to JNF (Jewish National Fund) instructions. …I find it hard to get over the feeling that we have done wrong.” The Zionists “knew their enterprise depended on British backing and, ultimately, British bayonets (at least until the White Paper of 1939).” “The settlers argued that, UNLESS they occupied their Palestinian neighbor’s lands, they would be exposed to potential attacks.” [imagine feeling sociopathic enough to tell your peaceful neighbors, “I decided I feel unsafe so I’m taking all your shit & evicting you by force”.] This settler-colonial mindset was also seen in the 1948 testimony of an Ein Hashofet settler, who phrased it as the settlers faced an “assaulting gang” who gave out “savage cries” - unlike the assumedly non-gang, non-savage settlers who instead showed “exemplary courage.”
“The 1948 war completed what the Zionist settlers could not have achieved through years of purchase and settlement: they gained control of lands still lived on by the Palestinians and seized additional lands.” “Arabs were often employed to guard Zionist settlements, effectively incorporating them into the colonization that was already engendering the erasure of indigenous lifeways.” Historical Palestine was dotted “with colonies to establish the territorial contiguity desired for a future sovereign Jewish state.” Strangely the author says “socialist-Zionists who were engaged in coerced practices generally did not see their colonization practices at being at odds with their commitment to collectivist cooperation and class liberation.”
In 1931, there were 944,423 Arabs and 91,398 Jews in Palestine. Yet today Zionists get their panties in a bunch at the thought of Israel ever having more Arabs than Jews. The horror! Interesting that, Arabs and Jews got along a lot better back then when there were ten times more Arabs than Jews – and no imposed racist ethnostate. Think of “Zionism as a settler colonial project that aimed not to incorporate the Zionists into the region but to conquer it and form a distinct social and political structure alien to the local one.”
“For the settlers, land occupation via afforestation marked ownership. At times trees served as an ‘advance guard of the settlement process’.” Settlers learned from Palestinians how to grow food locally, but Zionist budgets afforded fossil fuel intensive agriculture using gas powered machinery, artificial fertilizer and pesticides. Zionists therefore had a longer growing season (due to fossil inputs) and fewer pests. Since Palestinians didn’t have the cash to attempt such fossil fueled adventures, they were seen as “primitives” – not unlike settler-colonial US settlers who saw Native Americans as primitives. Never mind that historically the Palestinian village of Abu Zureiq was already then using agricultural machinery. The Zionist Orientalist mindset saw Palestinians as backwards and poor, with their lands destitute or neglected, and their society primitive. Settler-colonials throughout history have to see others as “the Other”, the inferior other, to better justify taking their shit and their land, pretending the “others” were doing nothing with it (e.g. aboriginals in Australia, or Hitler wanting the Lebensraum of the Slavs). Never mind that ignoring indigenous knowledge is the mark of an idiot. Never mind that Palestinians and Native Americans both have frequently taught settlers valuable stuff they did NOT know. Like stealing is bad. Or making people miserable cuz you covet something of theirs is uncool.
The Zionist Project “promoted colonies separated from the indigenous population.” It led to a morally questionable false flag operation: in 1948 three Hazorea settlers staged an attack on their own kibbutz to make local Qira villagers flee in fear that they would be blamed for it (p.160). It worked – Qira inhabitants fled. This led to another false flag attack on the Yokne’am settlement “from the direction of Qira.” Edward Said accurately described Palestinians as “the victims of the victims, the refugees of the refugees.”
With the Zionist land grab of 1967 (the year Noam says Israel chose expansion over security) the Zionist Right became dominant (“although labor Zionist ministers and settlers, actively participated in the process”). Back then there was talk about Palestinian villages with “dead bodies left under the rubble (p.225)” and “the plunder they ‘inherited’ from the Palestinians.” The Zionist Right then would tell the morally complaining Left that they were hypocrites because “the kibbutzim themselves were complicit in colonization and expulsion.”
One settler waxed nostalgically: “WE looted everything – property and livestock, stationary or alive, not just donkeys and dogs.” Another settler said (p.229), “I am bothered that if I wish to preserve my personal and national existence, I am forced to carry out or agree to or support actions that are contrary to some of my general world views. And I am embarrassed.” “Settlers cultivated a selective memory that obfuscated the history of colonization, thereby turning expulsion into a by-product of war and viewing the indigenous as complicit in their demise.” “The few Zionists who expressed regret nonetheless classified the expulsions as inevitable.” “Indigenous opposition to Zionist appropriation …became the justification for Zionist violence.” Then as now, “Palestinian resistance to colonization was interpreted as a refusal of Jewish existence.” Since October 7th, 2023, I seen a dozen laughably paranoid Facebook posts by American Zionists I know, about how they feel completely personally unsafe. I don’t see Christians, Muslims and Jews around me playing the “I feel unsafe” victim card – For decades I have only seen malignant narcissists, sociopaths, and Zionists, playing the victim card for propaganda/Karen/gaslighting purposes.
In one testimony in this book, one common sense-oriented Zionist says, “I understood very well that my dad did not hate Arabs. He knew that eventually we would have to live with them in good neighborliness (p.254).” The same guy says, “One of the reasons they managed to annihilate so many Jews (during the Holocaust) was that the Jews had no way to defend themselves”.
This book is about the author examining the settler-colonial process of three Hashomer Hatzair kibbutzim from 1936 to 1956 and their interactions with neighboring Arab villages. He shows how all three kibbutzim nurtured relations with Arab residents with “the strategic intention of inducing them to accept colonization in peaceful ways” and to create “ethnically exclusive communities.” He looks at the shift from land acquisition and colonization to military conquest. Zionists were only able to buy 7% of Mandate Palestine and 20% of the cultivatable land before 1948. That meant if you really want to create your own sordid little racist ethnostate in 1948 with those small percentages of land, you’d have to reach out and take the land from your neighbors (with no history of hurting Jews who couldn’t defend themselves) by force – in other words it’s Nakba time!
Extra Credit Quiz: What is the difference between Hitler’s plan during WWII to ethnically cleanse the Slavs and take their land (with no legal claim) by force for Lebensraum, AND the Zionist plan since 1948 to ethnically cleanse the Palestinians and take their land (with no legal claim) by force also for Lebensraum?
Collective resistance to the Zionist project was expressed by the Great Arab Revolt of 1936-1939. Look at the Nakba and closely and you’ll see that it never ended (al nakba al-mustamirra). If you study the history of the Zionist Left as this author has in depth you will see that “Left-socialist values did not motivate significant protest in response to the uprooting of the Palestinian villages before and during 1948 or prevent the kibbutzim from taking possession of the land and property of the adjacent Palestinian villages.”
The author ends with two great sentences: “Zionist national identity is premised on settlement, replacement, and the denial and negation of Palestinian indigeneity. Reimagining is central to Zionist claims to re/possession.” You’d think that socialist-Left Zionists who advocated class liberation, brotherhood of peoples, and the abolition of social hierarchy, would not then shove Palestinians to the bottom of the abolished hierarchy, deny brotherhood to all non-Jews - but to their credit socialist-Left Zionists did achieve one goal – class liberation – but ONLY because those Lefty Zionists PROVED they now had NO class. This book’s message seemed to be: Don’t hold your breath that the Zionist Left sees, or ever saw, a future of Zionists living peacefully alongside Palestinians and other humans like in 1931. That’s it - this book was great. I recommend it. And kudos to the author for bringing something really different to the Israel/Palestine book section.
November 28, 2023
one of the most well-researched in-depth reads on the Nakba and Settler-Colonialism. A must read for understanding how Socialists (can) still uphold colonialism + how Settler relationality can exist in any political economy
December 27, 2024
Many of the Jewish settlers arriving in Palestine from the 1920s onward saw themselves as socialists, and they set out to build collective farms called kibbutzim. These settlers have always maintained that they were working peacefully on agricultural communes, on land purchased legally from absentee Palestinian landlords, while maintaining decent relations with neighboring Palestinian villages, until the war broke out in 1948 and their Palestinian neighbors fled. Many kibbutzniks convinced themselves that the Nakba was an unfortunate event that had nothing to do with them. The largest socialist-Zionist organization was Hashomer Hatzair, the Young Guard, which formally opposed ethnic cleansing and called for a binational Jewish-Arab state in Palestine, even after 1948.
Areej Sabbagh-Khoury, a Palestinian scholar with Israeli citizenship and Hebrew skills, has dived into the archives of three kibbutzim founded by Hashomer Hatzair. Even as the kibbutzniks claimed they wanted peace, their documents show how they carried out a long process of ethnic cleansing in the 1930s and 1940s, playing an active role in the final push of 1948. Colonization is an inherently violent and dehumanizing process, and their "socialist" and "internationalist" ideology was nothing more than a justification for their racist crimes. Tracing internal debates over the decades, Sabbagh-Khoury shows how kibbutzim historical memory was created and recreated, even as they were reminded of the historical facts. This is unchanged today: kibbutzniks still tell themselves and the world they are left-wing, even when doing objectively right-wing things.
I read this book due to my interest in Jewish activists who went from Hashomer Hatzair to Trotskyism, of whom there have been many over the last century. Some arrived in Palestine and loved the collective life of the kibbutz, but quickly realized that there could be no socialism based on ethnic cleansing.
I disagree with Sabbagh-Khoury's use of settler colonial theory: she argues that the colonial project superseded the settlers' socialist convictions. I would counter that "socialist Zionism" was always a poor version of socialism, based on petty bourgeois layers working together with imperialist powers. This was true long before the colonization process had begun: Jewish Marxists polemicized against socialist Zionists years before the first kibbutz was established. While I learned a lot from this book, I should warn that it is a dense academic study and took me more than a month to get through it.
Areej Sabbagh-Khoury, a Palestinian scholar with Israeli citizenship and Hebrew skills, has dived into the archives of three kibbutzim founded by Hashomer Hatzair. Even as the kibbutzniks claimed they wanted peace, their documents show how they carried out a long process of ethnic cleansing in the 1930s and 1940s, playing an active role in the final push of 1948. Colonization is an inherently violent and dehumanizing process, and their "socialist" and "internationalist" ideology was nothing more than a justification for their racist crimes. Tracing internal debates over the decades, Sabbagh-Khoury shows how kibbutzim historical memory was created and recreated, even as they were reminded of the historical facts. This is unchanged today: kibbutzniks still tell themselves and the world they are left-wing, even when doing objectively right-wing things.
I read this book due to my interest in Jewish activists who went from Hashomer Hatzair to Trotskyism, of whom there have been many over the last century. Some arrived in Palestine and loved the collective life of the kibbutz, but quickly realized that there could be no socialism based on ethnic cleansing.
I disagree with Sabbagh-Khoury's use of settler colonial theory: she argues that the colonial project superseded the settlers' socialist convictions. I would counter that "socialist Zionism" was always a poor version of socialism, based on petty bourgeois layers working together with imperialist powers. This was true long before the colonization process had begun: Jewish Marxists polemicized against socialist Zionists years before the first kibbutz was established. While I learned a lot from this book, I should warn that it is a dense academic study and took me more than a month to get through it.
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January 9, 2024Through a thorough analysis of Zionist leftist politics, Areej Sabbagh-Khoury's study juxtaposes history and memory to demonstrate how the Palestinian Nakba was not a singular catastrophe but rather a protracted process of confiscation.
Read our review here: https://www.newarab.com/features/how-...
Read our review here: https://www.newarab.com/features/how-...
March 30, 2024
God this is a disturbing book that seriously unsettles many assumptions that are very commonplace esp among leftists about space, governance, and nationality/ethnicity. five stars.
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