Ana’s Reviews > Colonizing Palestine: The Zionist Left and the Making of the Palestinian Nakba > Status Update

'In Lockean liberalism, legitimate ownership of land is established through labor, by making land productive. This principle has historically formed a legitimating basis to expel or expropriate indigenous territory, because the natives can be deemed nonproductive (Wolfe 2016a).'

'Tamir saw himself, not as a political being relating to a political victim, but as someone merely powerlessly ensnared in a bewildering war. That he, like his neighbors, "doesn't understand" what happened effectively asserts innocence, a disavowal of his role in settler colonialism...Here the narrator simultaneously exists inside and outside reality or in two different realities.'

'But, the rural peripheries, where the majority of Palestinians lived, remain understudied. One important reason is the scarcity of archival material about this area. But this has changed in the last decade, due in part to the development of the methodology of oral history and its legitimacy in Palestine studies.'

'Within the field of settler colonial occupation, security thus operates as the supreme mechanism that constitutes and is recursively constituted by the struggle over settlement.'

'One way I recenter leftist Zionism in the settler colonial process is by attending to settlers' self-identification in relation to their practices. This includes attention to their qualified anti-imperialist worldview, which they largely understood to exclude their own actions, and their class-liberationist ideology, which in practice did not encompass the Palestinians.'

'Reading along the archival grain set the backdrop for my attempt to work against the concealments, gaps, and derisions of the archive and the subaltern it silences.'