Indigenous Sovereignty with Jamal Nabulsi

Indigenous Sovereignty with Jamal Nabulsi

YULIA: Welcome to Unpacking Zionism. I am Yulia Gilich, a member of the founding collective of ICSZ, the Institute for the Critical Study of Zionism. Today’s guest is Jamal Nabulsi, a diaspora Palestinian writer, researcher, and organizer. And the term he is helping us unpack in this episode is “Indigenous sovereignty.”

In 2023, Jamal published an article called “Reclaiming Palestinian Indigenous Sovereignty” in the Journal of Palestine Studies, and that’s the text that’s guiding our conversation today. The link to the article and our guest’s more detailed biography is posted in the episode notes and on our website, criticalzionismstudies.org. 

 Let’s jump right in. Jamal, welcome. Really appreciate you joining us.

JAMAL: Yeah, of course. Thanks so much for having me.

YULIA: I tend to start these conversations about keywords in Critical Zionism Studies by asking my guests to define the terms we’re discussing. And I will ask you to do just that, but I first want to acknowledge that to talk about Indigenous sovereignty, we actually need to define quite a few terms, right? There is sovereignty, state sovereignty, Indigenous, and Indigenous sovereignty. So can you please guide us through all of that?

JAMAL: I might start with defining state sovereignty. So, sovereignty is one of, if not the most kind of fundamental principle of the international system, and is of course really foundational to the nation states that make up the system. And sovereignty in these kind of state-based conceptions essentially refers to the supreme authority within a given territory. And this idea of sovereignty, it’s usually traced back to 16th and 17th century Western philosophy. And without going too deep into it, I think it’s very important to note that this understanding of sovereignty was developed alongside that time emergent forms of European colonialism, was often used to justify these colonial projects as of course it still is.

And sovereignty was always reserved for those peoples who demonstrated sufficient civilization which of course was and is defined racially to actively exclude Indigenous peoples, for example. So what does that mean? First of all, state sovereignty is performative. So while it constantly works to present itself as something that’s natural and given, in fact it relies on reproducing itself through a wide range of state practices. But fundamentally this sovereignty is performed through violence. And that violence is directed at particular bodies; it’s unevenly distributed. In the context of the settler colony, the primary articulation of this violence is the elimination of Indigenous bodies from the land.

And this is one of the central tenets of settler colonial theory but it’s also something that’s been understood in different terms by Indigenous peoples for far longer, I mean, since it has been put into practice, you know, eliminating Indigenous peoples from their land. Why must Indigenous peoples be eliminated? Because Indigenous peoples continue to carry their own forms of sovereignty. And these Indigenous sovereignties pose a fundamental threat to the legitimacy of the settler state. And so they have to be extinguished. And that can take a range of different forms, but almost always entails at least partly ethnic cleansing from the land and outright genocide, which is of course the form that we’re now seeing it take in Palestine with Israel’s genocide of Palestinians in Gaza. 

So what’s Indigenous sovereignty then? This is a much less straightforward question to answer not least because Indigenous peoples around the world are so incredibly diverse to the extent that I don’t think we can really talk about one singular Indigenous sovereignty but rather plural Indigenous sovereignties. But something that Indigenous sovereignties share is that they all essentially index an enduring political claim to Indigenous land. And while settler colonies relentlessly attempt to extinguish Indigenous sovereignties, they ultimately cannot be extinguished through the violence of the settler state.

And this creates sort of one of, if not the fundamental contradiction of the settler colony that continues to plague them and push them to commit things like genocide. And Indigenous sovereignties endure because they’re ontologically grounded in the land, in Indigenous land, and are persistently embodied and lived by Indigenous peoples even when the full exercise of their Indigenous sovereignty is suppressed. So it can be suppressed, but it can’t be extinguished. Like, even if you suppress its exercise for example, by destroying Indigenous political institutions, fire of that Indigenous sovereignty continues to burn and will find other forms of expression especially in resistance to the settler state, for example.

And so within this, it’s crucial that we understand Indigeneity as a political relationship to the structure of settler colonialism. And so this is in contrast with, for example ideas of blood quantum where Indigeneity is sort of measured in like an amount of Indigenous blood or in contrast with what Lana Tatour describes as “the culturalization of Indigeneity” where Indigeneity becomes contingent on the performance of some kind of essentialized Indigenous culture. And these sort of measures of Indigeneity are typically set up by settler states precisely in order to delegitimize and in another way eliminate Indigenous peoples, you know, sort of eliminate them by definition, by defining them as not Indigenous. 

YULIA: Let me try to recap it to make sure I’m getting this right. So state sovereignty is supreme authority over a given territory. And this authority is performed and enacted through violence. And in the context of settler colonial states, this violence is primarily directed at Indigenous people with the goal of their elimination. In contrast, despite this violence, Indigenous sovereignties, plural, because they take a variety of different forms, persist as an enduring political claim to the land, which is why Indigenous sovereignties present a continuous threat to the legitimacy of the settler state. So what does it all mean for Palestinian Indigenous sovereignty specifically? 

JAMAL: So, when we talk about Palestinian Indigeneity we’re talking about political relationship. Palestinians are Indigenous to Palestine insofar as there are people resisting their elimination and fragmentation under Zionist settler colonialism. And, you know, in saying that, of course, the Palestinian presence on the land and belonging with that land long predates Zionist settler colonialism but there’s no need to articulate that belonging as Indigeneity until the Zionist settler arrives claiming exclusive rights on the land and expelling Palestinians from their land and of course committing genocide against them too, as we see happening now so clearly. And then Palestinian Indigenous sovereignty is the enduring political claim to the land of Palestine that derives from this Indigeneity. And that sovereignty is really embodied in a whole range of Palestinian ways of being, knowing, and resisting on and for the land of Palestine. 

YULIA: I think you made it really clear, but it begs the question of why the terms Indigeneity and Indigenous seemingly make a lot of settlers confused to the point where Zionist settlers can claim to be Indigenous to the Levant, to Palestine, to a certain extent successfully, as far as public discourse goes. How did the term become diluted so much and how do we counter it?

JAMAL: I think, one important thing to note is that the attempt by Zionist Israeli settlers to kind of become native or to claim Indigeneity, it’s often held up as this kind of complication or you know, thing that’s unique about the settler colonial context of Palestine, but it’s actually entirely consistent with the attempts to become native by other settler populations. Of course it has its own unique narrative, it has its own unique nuances but this is actually something that’s very common to all settler colonies. You know, settlers always try and claim a kind of belonging to the land because it’s an attempt to resolve this contradiction of sovereignty that we were speaking about before. So I think that’s something important to clarify. 

But yeah, at least one way of challenging it is being very clear about Indigeneity as a political relationship. Like it’s not a question of who was here first, it’s a political relationship to the structure of settler colonialism. So I think part of how we challenge it is really just defining that very clearly and essentially making the reality of Palestinian presence on the land very, very clear. 

YULIA: Yeah, I think you’re so right that we need to be very clear that Indigeneity is not a question of who was there first, but as you state, it’s a political relation to the structure of settler colonialism. And I want to ask you about a different political relation, and it has to do with transnational Indigenous solidarities. We definitely see a lot of brutal solidarity among settler states, right? The US, Canada, Australia are all supporting, justifying, and funding Israel’s unrelenting genocidal violence. So I hope you can talk about the relationship between Palestinian and other Indigenous peoples, be it intellectually or politically. And on the other hand, I don’t want to collapse or flatten the specificity of Palestinian Indigenous sovereignty. So maybe you can say a few words about that as well.

JAMAL: So I think, to answer that, I want to first locate myself and not least because this kind of theorizing around Indigenous sovereignty really, for me personally, emerges from a particular place and from a particular community of struggle. So I’m a diasporic Palestinian and I live and work on the sovereign lands of the Yuggera and Turrbal peoples. And so, as diasporic Palestinians who are also settlers here, we occupy this kind of ambivalent relationship to Indigenous sovereignty in that we continue to embody our Palestinian Indigenous sovereignty in exile while at the same time impinging on the Indigenous sovereignty of the peoples whose lands we dwell on as settlers. And I think this ambivalent position makes possible a particular relationship and creates a particular responsibility for us to the Indigenous peoples of the lands that we live on. 

And here in Makunschan also known as Brisbane, as well as, across so-called Australia, for some years now, we’ve been working on really building solidarity between Palestinians and First Nations folk here and this is essentially recognizing that settler colonialism is a global structure that must be resisted at every node. So, for example, making sure that we’re turning up at protests and actions for example, against Black deaths in custody. One of the sort of primary Indigenous issues, here. We organize solidarity events from conferences and symposiums, doing some of that intellectual work. You know, there’s creative collaborations, like songs and artwork. And also more like local community-based events focus more just on kind of building those connections, at a community level and really grounding that political solidarity. And I also, like, I don’t see these kind of intellectual and political sides of this as in any way separate as well. Like, I feel like I’ve learned the most, actually, about Indigenous sovereignty from witnessing it embodied for example, at these protests against the murder of First Nations peoples at the hands of the state. 

And even when we run events that are sort of intellectually focused like a Black Policy and Solidarity panel discussion, for example, we always make sure that there are also you know, more material contributions to struggle being made, so maybe that’s raising funds for political organizing, promoting upcoming actions. So I think all of that is, It’s kind of crucial, it’s in this context that not only me, but, you know, a lot of people have begun thinking about Indigenous sovereignty and what that means to think about Palestinian political struggle in terms of sovereignty.

And so in the process, we’ve inevitably drawn on these kind of conceptions of other Indigenous peoples. Like here, for example there is a strong emphasis on Indigenous sovereignty as something that’s embodied and lived. Like even when Indigenous peoples are exiled from the land, they continue to embody their sovereignty even if this sort of exercise of that sovereignty is suppressed in that way, that sovereignty doesn’t just die out, it continues to be lived until it can be exercised on the land again. 

And so that’s something that for me really resonated with the Palestinian experience as well, in that you know, there’s a strong focus in Palestinian resistance and long has been in the Palestinian struggle of this kind of embodied connection to the land. And yeah, from that as well, I think there’s definitely unique aspects of Palestinian Indigenous sovereignty as well. For example, there’s unique conceptualizations, you know, the concept of Sumud, for example, or steadfastness, which is embodied in a lot of different ways, from remaining in your home in the face of home demolitions or remaining steadfast in the face of Israeli interrogation and torture. And I think there’s a real opportunity to further develop those uniquely Palestinian conceptions of Indigenous sovereignty in conversation with existing conceptions to sort of draw on both, find the unique ways of elucidating settler colonial violence and of, crucially, challenging that violence as well.

YULIA: I want to pause on this idea of embodiment and Palestinian Indigenous sovereignty as an embodied political claim. In your article, you quote from Mahmoud Darwish’s Journal of an Ordinary Grief, where he contrasts an attempted Zionist belonging to the land that needs to be theorized, produced, and manufactured with an embodied Palestinian belonging. And there is one line that really struck me, where Darwish says that for a Zionist, a rock is an intellectual exercise, but for its Palestinian owner, it’s a roof and a wall. And I thought it just really demonstrates the materiality of this embodied Palestinian belonging. 

JAMAL: Yeah, absolutely. That’s the fundamental difference between this palestinian belonging to the land of Palestine and the Zionist claims to belonging is that the former is based in material reality and actually living on the land and an actual ontological relationship with the land. And the latter is based in mythology. I mean, of course there’s a long and real Jewish history in Palestine, but then what the Israeli state does is it tries to map on a kind of Zionist narrative to this Jewish history. It actually appropriates that Jewish history and converts it into this exclusionary claim to the land of Palestine. 

YULIA: Totally. And Israel uses that real Jewish history, and sometimes it manufactures it. Nadia Abu El Haj in Facts on the Ground details how Israel curates and constructs archaeological records and national landscape to impose a Zionist narrative over Palestinian heritage. And I think that stating clearly that Indigeneity is a political relationship to the structure of settler colonialism offers this necessary intervention into the Zionist mythology, which is what your article does so well. So let me transition us to talking more about the article, which you open with the claim that the 2021 Unity Intifada represented a vital moment in the history of Palestinian resistance. Can you tell us more about that particular uprising and why that is the event with which you start the article?

JAMAL: Well, partly it’s because I was writing it at the time basically during and in the wake of the Unity Intifada. but more than that, the work was really very heavily inspired by that intifada.And why was that so inspiring, that moment? Probably the main reason is that it really was a moment where the fragmentation of Palestine and Palestinians was so dramatically resisted and challenged. Because, we saw Palestinians across the 48 and 67 territories of Palestine as well as in the diaspora really united in resistance to the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians in Jerusalem and to the violence of the Israeli state more broadly as well. And there were joint actions like Palestine-wide strike and there was just this overwhelming sense and really increased awareness of the connectedness of the Palestinian struggle across its different fragments. So I think it was an important moment in the history of Palestinian resistance. And I think, it’s harder to see now, in the context of genocide as well, even though, you know, that was three years ago. 

YULIA: Yeah. And you know, you point out in the article that the Unity Intifada demonstrated that all Palestinians belong to all of Palestine. And it is that unity that challenges the territorial fragmentation of Palestinian land and Palestinian people. And you use this framework and the framework of Palestinian Indigenous sovereignty to offer a criticism of the PA, the Palestinian authority. And, you know, there’s been a lot of criticism of the PA, but I think your framing does not just criticize how the PA practices state building, but it really undermines the whole premise of the state building project. So can you walk us through that argument.

JAMAL: So yeah, the Palestinian Authority created through the Oslo Accords in the 90s. I think it’s, you know, very widely recognized now as a part of the Zionist settler colonial apparatus as a subcontractor for Israeli settler colonialism. I think this is kind of pretty well-established facts now. And a huge part of their project, the Palestinian Authority, is this idea of state building, of attempting to build a state at this point exclusively in the West Bank under occupation. And in doing that, it’s attempting to assert some kind of state sovereignty. 

Meanwhile, in reality, Israel absolutely have this supreme authority over the land that they’re attempting to create a state in, is fundamentally bolstering Israeli state sovereignty. Because the acquiescence that they have to perform in order to be allowed, because they have to be permitted by Israel to, you know, to do anything, to move a single inch, they have to basically facilitate the further and further theft by Israel of Palestinian land of the very land that they’re supposedly building a state on. And if it sounds kind of contradictory, that’s because it is. It doesn’t really make much sense at the core of it. They’ve really led Palestinians into this kind of sovereignty trap where the apparent building of the Palestinian state is contingent on giving up more and more and more Palestinian land.

And, for one, it undermines the Palestinian Indigenous sovereignty and that in reality what is happening is that the Palestinian Authority are suppressing Palestinian resistance to Israel, or, you know, for example at the moment suppressing Palestinian resistance in the West Bank against the genocide in Gaza, as well as resistance to the Palestinian authority and facilitating in many ways the further appropriation and theft by the Israeli state of Palestinian land in the West Bank. And so this project of building a supposed Palestinian state on what’s really a tiny fragment of Palestine for a fragment of the Palestinian people in itself erases the Indigenous sovereignty of the majority of Palestinians that it very actively excludes from that project.

YULIA: Absolutely. I want to tease out one other point you’re making in the article that I think is really important and is a really difficult one to talk about now. But you write about the Zionist failure to erase Palestinian Indigenous sovereignty. And you also write that Israeli sovereignty is performed through violence on the Palestinian body and that violence is real, ongoing, it’s literally genocidal. So I wonder if you can say more about how we can account for this incomprehensible level of violence and yet understand it as a failure to erase Palestinian Indigenous sovereignty. How do we reconcile the two?

JAMAL: Yeah, I mean, you’re right. It is, very difficult to answer in the context of the genocide when so many Palestinians are paying this unspeakable, unspeakable price at the hands of this Israeli settler violence. But I do think in many ways, this moment, it clarifies the fact that Israel relies on performing its settler state sovereignty through egregious acts of violence against Palestinians. Like, that’s clearer than it ever has been because of how egregious and how atrocious the violence is. And also that this is an expression of the fragile and anxious claim to legitimacy of the Israeli state because that legitimacy is threatened by the ongoing and persisting Indigenous sovereignty of Palestinians that they’ve refused to give up on. 

And so I think the inherent contradictions of the Zionist project are becoming ever more pronounced. But yeah, if we can take something from this moment, it’s people waking up to that reality. For example, anti-Zionist Jewish communities growing and growing, communities and solidarity between Palestinians and all kinds of other anti-colonial movements growing and growing, and really Palestinians in Gaza especially teaching the world a lot about liberation, about settler colonialism.

YULIA: Yeah. I want to finish on what I thought was a hopeful note, but maybe it’s just fraught. You write that the potential of Palestinian Indigenous sovereignty lies in its fundamental ability to move us towards decolonial futures. And, you know, we dedicated a whole mini-series to futures, there is so much to say, but can you give us just a glimpse of that future? How do we begin to envision free, sovereign, decolonized Palestine? 

JAMAL: This is another, very difficult question to answer in the context of, a full year of Israel committing genocide against Palestinians. As we’re struggling to first of all, just put an end to the genocide, right now it’s very hard to see beyond that. But at the same time, I think it’s kind of crucial that we do because of course the colonial power’s already planning what’s going to come afterwards, you know? Is it going to be like, are the Palestinian Authority going to ride in on the back of an Israeli tank and seize control there as well? They’re planning these different ways that colonization might be further entrenched there. 

But at the same time, it’s crucial that we do think about these decolonial futures as well. In more hopeful moments, I do believe that what we’re seeing are the death throes of the settler colonial project, like the egregious intensity of the violence in some way I think speaks to the desperation of that project. And of course, Palestinians in Gaza are being made to pay an unspeakable price for that Zionist desperation, and we always have to center that. But in the process and through their resistance and their steadfastness, Palestinians are teaching the world so much, as I mentioned before. They’re exposing the lies and inherent violence not only of the Zionist project actually, but of this so-called liberal international order and all the structural violence that it upholds globally. 

And I think more than ever, I don’t see that Palestinians can ever be truly liberated without the liberation of colonized peoples more broadly from colonization and empire in all the forms that it takes. And so in building solidarities and broad communities of struggle and fighting from where we are located, we’re also trying to bring into existence these kind of futures because I think that anti-colonial solidarities are really the key for both bringing about and building that kind of future.

YULIA: Jamal, thank you so much. Listeners, you can find the transcript of this conversation, Jamal Nabulsi’s biography, and a link to his article, “Reclaiming Palestinian Indigenous Sovereignty,” in the episode notes and on our website, criticalzionismstudies.org. 

Until next time, solidarity from the Institute for the Critical Study of Zionism.