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olonizing Palestine: The Zionist Left and the Making of the Palestinian Nakba by Areej Sabbagh-Khoury, a senior lecturer at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, is in many ways a groundbreaking study of the formation of Israel through the lens of settler colonial studies. By examining a component of the Zionist movement that ostensibly sought to break with the movement’s overtly colonialist leadership, Sabbagh-Khoury uncovers the unavoidably racist core of Zionism as an ideology and practice.

The author specifically examines the Marxist socialist formation known as Hashomer Hatzair (Hebrew for “Young Guard”), which refused to endorse the notorious 1942 Biltmore Program, in which the Zionist movement publicly proclaimed that its goal was the creation of a Jewish state in Palestine. As an early Socialist-Zionist settler group in Palestine, Hashomer Hatzair had also distanced itself from the Zionist labor federation known as the Histadrut because its policies excluded Arab workers.

The Illusion of Marxist Zionism

Settler colonial studies typically earmark two distinguishing features of settler colonialism: the “conquest of labor” and the “conquest of land.” But whereas Hashomer Hatzair repudiated the idea of creating a dominant Jewish labor force in Palestine, it actively pursued Jewish settlement of the land in the form of the kibbutz (Hebrew for “communal farm”). In its early years this left-wing component of the Zionist movement appeared to be open to the idea of sharing the land with the indigenous Palestinians known as fellahin, but as Sabbagh-Khoury shows, all that changed seemingly overnight with the 1948 Nakba (Arabic for “The Catastrophe”). The author’s unique contribution is exploring how and why that changed.

Other studies have probed the core beliefs of Socialist or Labor Zionism, as proclaimed by founding figures such David Ben-Gurion, Israel’s first prime minister. Most notably, the Israeli historian and political scientist Zeev Sternhell in The Founding Myths of Israel (1999) exposed the fact that these Zionists were more nationalist than socialist. Sternhell depicted Socialist Zionism as a form of National Socialism, much like the extreme right-wing ethnonationalists of the European fascist movements; National Socialism is a better descriptor of their ideology than Marxism.

In choosing to focus on Hashomer Hatzair, however, the author of Colonizing Palestine (2023) explicitly probes the self-proclaimed Marxist variation of Socialist Zionism. This relatively small wing of the Zionist movement never embraced Marxism-Leninism and, therefore, never became identified with Communism; nevertheless, it strove to hew to the ideas of Karl Marx as it understood them. And it is this contradiction that intrigued the author who wondered how its ideology and practice came to diverge.

As a historian, Sabbagh-Khoury studied the archives of three kibbutzes belonging to the Hashomer Hatzair movement in Palestine’s Jezreel Valley: Mishmar HaEmek, HaZore’a, and Ein HaShofet. However, she cautions that her analysis was not centered on examining their “experiences and ideologies,” but rather “their interactions with the indigenous Palestinians,” mainly farmers in nearby villages. Building on archive records that were contemporaneous or nearly so with the events described, she then probes more deeply into the “selective memory” or the “double reconstruction” revealed by later memoirs and accounts written by the kibbutz settlers decades after the 1948 Nakba.

A few settlers expressed remorse: “I had very mixed feelings all day long,” one wrote. “I was glad that we were being rid of the village, but, on the other hand I am wholeheartedly against murder and warfare.” Sabbagh-Khoury notes a rare sentiment expressed about Palestinians belonging to the land: “I am not at peace with the idea of war against Arab villagers who have been on this land longer than us and are fighting for their home with the same feeling we are.”

Many of the accounts of the Nakba that appear in the original, contemporary archives simply disappear in subsequent memoirs and other recollections written decades later. Except for one account by, Arnon Tamir, who wrote in a journal published in 1972 about his continuing difficulty in coming to grips with the expulsion of more than 750,000 Palestinians from their homes and land.

Noting in particular the fate of two nearby towns in 1948, Tamir lamented, “I am not at peace with myself neither about Qira nor about Abu Zureiq.” He remained particularly troubled about the looting of the villages that followed their destruction and the way the kibbutz settlers left their former neighbors “lying under the rubble of their homes, unburied.” Yet even he added, “I cannot say today whether this was wrong or not. It did relieve things for us considerably for a while and enabled us to establish the state, but whether it brought us closer to a solution, that I doubt.”

For others, however, in subsequent accounts, the atrocities committed during the events of 1948 simply disappear in what Sabbagh-Khoury labels “selective memory.” If the events no longer fit in the dominant narrative of justifying the expulsion, the memory ceases to exist in subsequent memoirs.

The author attributes the phenomenon to the process described by the French-Tunisian chronicler of settler colonialism, Albert Memmi, who writes in The Colonizer and the Colonized (1957) about the process of “double reconstruction” in which the colonizers imagine themselves becoming the native and erasing entirely the existence of the indigenous.

Class reductionist paradox of the Zionist Left

How was Marxism or simply a belief in the “brotherhood of peoples” so easily discarded in this process? Sabbagh-Khoury offers several explanations. One is simply the fact that the very material existence of kibbutzim depended on the successful colonization of the land. Marxist principles stood in direct contradiction with the practical activity of surviving as settler farmers, particularly because the communal effort in the kibbutz involved Jews alone, not the “brotherhood of peoples.” Workers may have had nothing to lose but their chains, but settler and Jewish-only farmers actually had much to lose if their enterprise failed.

Another reason was a kind of class reductionist position adopted by the Hashomer settlers, a position that some would describe as a betrayal of Marxism. Hashomer Hatzair never acknowledged that the Palestinians had national aspirations as a people. They depicted the situation as one in which the fellahin were exploited by the effendis, the rich absentee landlords who actually owned the land on which Palestinian farmers mostly worked as tenants. In their eyes, the fellahin had no attachment to the land. The settlers’ usurpation was therefore justified.

Furthermore, Hashomer Hatzair settlers depicted socialism as progress, an unleashing of productive forces otherwise constrained and held back by capitalist greed. In this vein they depicted the Palestinian farmers as backward and undeveloped. According to their view, the rightful progression of history depended on the advanced European settlers who were improving the land, never mind that the Palestinian farmers were actually quite successful in their work.

“Backwardness,” as the author notes, allegedly “justified the erasure of the Palestinians from their land.” This is a common refrain still heard today among Zionists who claim their settler enterprise made the “desert bloom,” whereas in fact the land was historically well cultivated and more ecologically balanced than the non-native pine forests planted over destroyed Palestinian villages.

Because many Palestinians were tenants on the land, the Hashomer settlers also depicted them as rootless and easily transferable. This alleged rootlessness, in contrast to the newly arrived European settlers who were in fact the ones uprooting 800 years of indigenous habitation, supposedly justified the Nakba expulsion. Sabbagh-Khoury quotes the settler Eliezer Be’eri: he “drew on a common representation of indigenous people to justify expulsion: they were rootless, he argued. There was no chance for them to resume their life here. He invoked the inherent logic of settler colonialism: ‘it’s either them or us.’”

Those chilling words today play out in the ongoing Nakba and genocide visible for the whole world to see in Gaza.

Light in Gaza: Writings Born in Fire (2022) is a book of, by, and for Palestinians. And that is precisely why everyone can learn from it.

Conceived and created out of a desire and a need to tell their own story, the authors assembled in this collection of essays represent Palestinian journalists, artists, writers, and academics who are engaged in a variety of disciplines, including architecture, artificial intelligence, economics, history, and literature.

What they all have in common is lived experience in Gaza under Israel’s brutal massacres and colonial occupation. What they all rightfully resent is being repeatedly portrayed in the media merely as numbers, as victims with no agency and no voice. Imagine seeing yourself or your loved ones constantly depicted in news accounts as a statistic, falling under the categories of dead or injured, your house damaged or destroyed, your neighborhood obliterated or somehow still intact. The figures themselves are in a way dehumanizing because they can never convey the lives of those you lost—your children, parents, grandparents, siblings, friends, and neighbors—let alone your own trauma and nightmares.

That Palestinians have long been denied “permission to narrate,” as the Palestinian intellectual Edward Said put it, has at least been acknowledged in Western circles for some time now, even though it still must be fought for. Palestinian narratives are beginning to achieve reliable though limited outlets, but a solid infrastructure capable of sustaining those voices is yet to be firmly in place.

This anthology of writings, however, seeks to go beyond “permission to narrate,” as one of the editors, Jehad Abusalim, puts it in the Introduction. Instead of merely narrating, the editors—all connected with the American Friends Service Committee (AFSC), including veteran Palestine solidarity activists Jennifer Bing and Michael Merryman-Lotze–and the authors seek in the words of Abusalim “to inspire action and offer a glimpse of hope,” and maybe even “provide an exercise in imagination.”

That the exercises in imagination sometimes appear counterintuitive and unexpected is a confession this reviewer has to make. One such exercise, “Ethical Implications of Experimental Design on Affected Communities in the Gaza Strip,” by the award-winning architect Salem Al Qudwa is a case in point.

Al Qudwa begins the essay by pointing to the lack of Palestinian agency in recovery and rehabilitation efforts following the deadly Israeli bombardments on the densely populated Gaza Strip in 2008-2009, 2012, and 2014 when 100,000 homes were destroyed or damaged. So much of Palestinian culture is based on the extended family, he notes, and yet when international aid agencies and other donor groups arrive to help rebuild, they seek little Palestinian input and ignore Palestinian culture, building units that isolate and break up families even further, adding to the trauma and sense of powerlessness.

So far, so good. But when the author announces that he seeks “to empower Gazans, making them self-sufficient and able to use existing resources without having to rely on Israel or other external sources for building materials,” this reviewer sensed a disquieting feeling. Isn’t the whole point to end the blockade and occupation and ultimately liberate Palestine? Isn’t the struggle inherently and wholly political? And isn’t an effort to build housing self-sufficiently merely an attempt to ameliorate an awful situation that can only be fully remedied once liberation comes?

Yet, as I read on and the author explained further the key importance of community planning in housing restoration, it suddenly dawned on me. So much of Palestinian resistance is based on sumud (Arabic for steadfastness). Al Qudwa’s “exercise in imagination” that resulted in the building of 167 houses was in fact designed to strengthen Palestinian families and culture. It represented “a matter of dignity and empowerment,” as he put it, and thus contributed to sumud , to the ability to carry on the struggle relentlessly.

Similarly, the poet Mosab Abu Toha’s essay, “Exporting Oranges and Short Stories: Cultural Struggle in the Gaza Strip,” explores his personal attempts to resuscitate libraries, art, and cinema in Gaza following Israel’s bombing of the Islamic University of Gaza in 2014, which included the destruction of its library. Abu Toha became particularly motivated to replenish children’s libraries, knowing that children make up half of Gaza’s population and suffered intense fear during the bombings.

Not all of the essays in this collection depict projects. Many describe in depth the manifestations of the Israeli government’s barbarity and its efforts to strangle Gaza and its resistance.  Every essay in this anthology is effective at describing these methods of control, particularly Suhail Taha’s “People’s Light in Gaza’s Darkness,” which details how Israel‘s control of electrical power to Gaza is an attempt “to break the people of Gaza.” Yousef M. Aljamal’s “Travel Restrictions as a Manifestation of Nakba: Gaza, the Path Backward Is the Path Forward.” exposes how the lack of freedom of movement for Palestinians represents Israel’s ongoing ethnic cleansing, which has never ceased since the 1948 Nakba (Arabic for catastrophe) when Zionist paramilitaries expelled more than 750,000 Palestinians from their homes and villages, creating the refugee population that is still the major component of Gaza’s population to this day.

It’s left to Palestinian artist Shahd Abusalama and physiotherapist Basman Aldirawi to address how to get to liberation in their respective essays “Breaking the Vicious Cycle of Permanent Temporality” and “Gaza 2050: Three Scenarios.” Abusalama stresses the importance of “a decolonial strategy,” “a one-state vision,” and the right of refugees to return to their homes. Aldirawi further explores the one-state solution and the deficiencies of a two-state approach.

Steadfastness is on display throughout this collection of essays. Writings born of fire are keeping the lights on in Gaza and all of Palestine.

The recent capture of six escaped Palestinian political prisoners from Israel’s Gilboa prison meant their freedom was tragically short-lived. But the escape itself, reportedly through a tunnel dug with a rusty spoon, helped put a spotlight on the plight of Palestinian prisoners and their steadfast resolve to resist the Israeli settler-colonial regime.

The publication of A Shared Struggle: Stories of Palestinian & Irish Hunger Strikers (2021) by Norma Hashim and Yousef M. Aljamal is likely to help steady the focus of that spotlight and add another dimension; namely, the use of the hunger strike to call attention to the freedom struggle and the long history of this tactic which has been used not only to improve prison conditions and uphold the dignity of prisoners but also to expose the fundamental nature of colonialism.

A Shared Struggle is the third in a series of books on Palestinian prisoners by the authors. It is preceded by The Prisoners’ Diaries: Palestinian Voices from the Israeli Gulag (2013) and Dreaming of Freedom: Palestinian Child Prisoners Speak (2016). What makes A Shared Struggle unique is its focus on the hunger strike and the parallels it draws between the Irish hunger strikers who helped bring about the Good Friday Agreement of 1998 and Palestinian hunger strikers who have long been an integral part of the fight for the Palestinian right of self-determination.

Of course, numerous other parallels between the Irish and Palestinian struggles abound. In their valuable introductions, the Palestinian-Irish academic Asad Abu Sharkh and former Irish political prisoner Danny Morison point out many of them, including the settler-colonial Plantation of Ulster and the role of Herbert Samuel, the British Home Secretary who oversaw the internment of thousands of Irish revolutionaries during the Easter Uprising of 1916 and who later advocated for the Balfour Declaration and became the High Commissioner to Palestine, where he helped repress Palestinian resistance to British colonialism.

Ultimately, it’s the contrast between the Irish and Palestinian hunger strike experience that seems most politically instructive, as noted by international law expert Richard Falk in his foreword.

It becomes easy to understand why to this day popular sentiment in Ireland is often with the Palestinians, why murals in Belfast testify to this solidarity, and why the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) movement has made such headway there.

But ultimately, it’s the contrast between the Irish and Palestinian hunger strike experience that seems most politically instructive, as noted by international law expert Richard Falk in his foreword. Chief among the differences, Falk notes, was the willingness of the Western corporate media to cover the Irish hunger strikers in 1981, most notably Bobby Sands who was elected to the British Parliament while on hunger strike and whose death from starvation, along with nine other strikers, is often credited as a pivotal moment.

That same media, however, studiously avoided coverage of Palestinian hunger strikers, denying them the publicity that is essential to the success of a hunger strike, as several contributors to this book point out in their accounts of their experience.

Currently, Israel incarcerates about 4,650 Palestinian political prisoners, including 200 children, 40 women, and 520 held under “administrative detention”, which is a suspension of habeas corpus that means people are never charged and never have their day in court, the kind of draconian, Kafkaesque measure that the United States duplicated in Guantanamo.

The testimonies in A Shared Struggle provide flesh and blood to these statistics and give readers a glimpse of the courage and determination of the hunger strikers who risk death, do serious harm to their own health, and experience agonies that few can even imagine.

As A Shared Struggle shows, several hunger strikes have been carried out to protest administrative detention, along with cruel and inhuman treatment, torture, restrictions on and denial of family visits, medical neglect, solitary confinement (itself a form of torture), and other violations of international law that the Israeli government implements on a daily basis.

The testimonies in A Shared Struggle provide flesh and blood to these statistics and give readers a glimpse of the courage and determination of the hunger strikers who risk death, do serious harm to their own health, and experience agonies that few can even imagine. Their heroism is all the more profound when you realize that being removed from society does not mean you are removed from history. In fact, as both the Irish and Palestinian struggles demonstrate, prisoners make history.

Harsha Walia’s Border and Rule, published by Haymarket Books in 2021, bulldozes through political partisanship to present a critical perspective of both sides, reminding us that the Left and the Right may seem different on the surface, but that paying close attention to the vernacular used by adherents would reveal how they are one and the same, and how embroiled both factions are in looking upon the world and its resources as worthy of exploitation.

Thus the immigrant/asylum seeker in the United States (US) through a right-wing lens is seen as ‘stealing jobs’ while through a left-wing perspective, he/she is ‘building the economy’. (19) In both cases, the immigrant/asylum seeker has been commoditized. (14)

Walia directs us to the concerted efforts of not just the US but the rest of the world in their move towards perfecting immigration policy in the optic of ‘displacing, immobilizing, criminalizing, exploiting, and expelling migrants and refugees’. (2) She goes on to point out that the US attracts only 1 percent of the global population of migrants—a fact that may surprise many, given the extensive publicity of how it promotes itself as migrant and refugee-friendly. (160) She believes that border politics should be rephrased in terms of ‘border imperialism’, and encourages moves towards ‘restitution, reparations, and responsibility’, rather than ‘charity and humanitarianism’. (3)

She views ‘anti-migrant xenophobia, immigration enforcement, detention centers, migration controls, and border securitization’ as symptoms of a more fundamental policy at play: ‘the rule of racist, nationalist borders.’ Along these lines, it makes sense that she finally advocates a ‘leftist politics of no borders’ (213) which implies an abolition of the concept of citizenship in order to allow a free movement of people across countries.

Walia’s book focuses on the plight of refugees and asylum seekers as they are forced to abandon conflict-ridden countries and homes affected by natural disasters and climate change.

Walia’s book focuses on the plight of refugees and asylum seekers as they are forced to abandon conflict-ridden countries and homes affected by natural disasters and climate change. She retraces the hardships endured in the course of these travels, commenting especially on the process-burdened entry they face, and eventual acceptance into host countries. But entering the host country is only the beginning of the ordeal of migration, she avers. Delay in issuing work permits or in processing applications for permanent residency or citizenship subjects them in the interim to harsh working and living conditions, as they are turned into an unregulated pool of exploitable manpower.

But there is some respite too, as Walia discusses the success of grassroot level strategies that now allow migrants to be welcomed into countries together with their families, or have even led to the abolition of the live-in requirement for caregivers in countries like Canada. Previously the live-in policy subjected workers to a variety of abuses so that the Filipino Women’s Organisation in Quebec reported how caregivers ‘could not use fans or the internet, lock their rooms, entertain visitors, or leave the home when not working.’ (165-66)

In India, the rise of Hindutva ideology, embraced by Modi and his government, has stoked resentment against Muslim migrants so that among other policies of exclusion, compulsory registration in Assam in the National Register of Citizens (NCR) has turned Muslim Indians of Bengali origin into noncitizens, although they were born and lived there for generations. (159-160)

Walia also explores the effects of the COVID19 pandemic explaining how it provided excuses to tighten border control and impose further injustices on refugees and asylum seekers. Thus the government of Malta abandoned passengers on a boat in its seas so that some of them perished from dehydration and drowning, and later arranged for the remainder to return forcibly to Libya. (11)

Walia also explores the effects of the COVID19 pandemic explaining how it provided excuses to tighten border control and impose further injustices on refugees and asylum seekers.

Moreover in Australia, detained refugees in onshore and offshore centers were among the most vulnerable as they were forced to live in close proximity and many already suffered from health issues. (99) The pandemic also allowed authorities in Lebanon and China to impose stricter regulations on refugees from Syria and Africa respectively, and indulge in discriminatory practices where local citizens were made to adhere to a different set of precautionary rules. (11) In such times, refugees, asylum seekers and/or new migrants were also easily shunned and marked out as ‘vectors of diseases’. (196)

While Walia proposes a solution to remedy the global migration crisis—that is, ‘a leftist politics of no borders’—her war appears to be more ambitious than that. Arguably it may be looked upon as utopian, as she advocates a complete revamp of the capitalist system in place.

‘Empires crumble,’ she says, ‘capitalism is not inevitable, gender is not biology, whiteness is not immutable, prisons are not escapable, and borders are not natural law.’ (215) Her insistence and resilience are both contagious, and it is easy to be drawn by the bigger parentheses of this book that appeal to us to look upon a refugee not as a stranger, an outsider, or chattel, but a human being.