Settler Colonialism with Sai Englert

Transcript

Settler Colonialism with Sai Englert

Yulia Gilich: Welcome to Unpacking Zionism. I am Yulia Gilich, a member of the founding collective of the Institute for the Critical Study of Zionism. Today, I am joined by Sai Englert to talk about settler colonialism as a keyword in Critical Zionism Studies. In his analysis of settler colonialism, Sai is doing really important work of bringing in the question of labor, which is so necessary to consider in this horrific moment. Just a few weeks ago, Palestinian General Federation of Trade Unions issued a statement calling on US labor to take concrete actions against Israel’s genocide of Palestinians in Gaza. In the past few months, labor organizing in solidarity with Palestine has seen a tremendous boost. And just last week, on May 20th, student workers at the University of California went on strike to demand the University’s divestment from Israel. So today, we’ll talk about settler colonialism, its logics and contradictions, and why we need to think about labor to better understand settler colonialism and Zionism specifically. 

So let me introduce our guest. Sai Englert is a lecturer at Leiden University in the Netherlands. He’s the author of Settler Colonialism and Introduction, and most recently he published an article, “Gaza and Settler Colonialism” in the Spectre journal. In fact, the most recent print issue of the journal, the one for April 2024, is a special issue on Palestine, and we’ll link to it in the episode notes. You need to be a subscriber to get access to the print issue, which if you can swing it is so worth it. But Sai and the journal generously shared the PDF of his article with us and it is available on our website. So check out the episode notes for more details. 

Sai, thank you so much for being here.

Sai Englert: Thanks so much for having me.

Yulia Gilich: Maybe we can start by defining our terms. So what is settler colonialism? 

Sai Englert: I think when we think of colonialism, we often tend to think of what’s often called franchise colonialism, so British rule in India or Dutch rule in Indonesia, for example. So the idea that the colonial power is primarily a military force which of course conquers a territory that it colonizes, but that it really rules externally. So that there is a military force that is present, there is often a colonial administration, but the sort of day to day running of the colonies also alongside military violence is dependent on the collaboration and participation of Indigenous ruling classes that participate in the reproduction of colonial power. 

There’s something, you know, that’s maybe ironic about the idea that we think primarily about franchise colonialism, because really until the 19th century, let’s say, the dominant form of European power is a settler colonial one. And as the name indicates, it is colonial power, which is not only dependent on military conquest and might, although it certainly is that also, but it imposes its power by establishing a colonial population in the land that is controlled or that is conquered and a population which sees itself as reproducing the metropolitan society in the colony. And that generates a whole number of different social realities, not the least that there is an ongoing presence of a colonial population, which is in continuous conflict with the Indigenous population over land, resources, labor, et cetera in a way that is not necessarily the case in, in franchise colonies.

Yulia Gilich: I think the fact that we think of franchise colonialism first is a symptom of settler colonialism being naturalized and invisibilized, right, at least to the settler population. And that’s what I understand the field of settler colonial studies to generally do – to denaturalize these systems, structures, and relations that settler colonialism deliberately obscures. In your book, Settler Colonialism and Introduction, you actually intervene in some of the well established tenets of settler colonial studies. Can you tell us more about the field and your theorization of settler colonialism? 

Sai Englert: The study of settler colonialism is in a sense as all the settler colonialism itself, certainly in terms of how Indigenous populations have made sense of it, fought against it but also within the metropole itself. So, you know, throughout the 19th century, there’s a whole number of radical thinkers who make their analysis of what they at the time called classical colonialism, which again is a interesting indicator of how the historical logic has shifted, a central part of their analysis of capitalism, Marx being the sort of most famous person in that tradition. 

And then throughout the 20th century, there’s really important writings on settler colonial power, really notably amongst Indigenous populations in North America and in Palestine. And so that there’s long radical Palestinian tradition that, that discusses settler colonialism well before those traditions are represented in the academy within the framework of what we now call settler colonial studies, which happens in the late 1990s and early 2000s under the impulse of a number of intellectuals, most centrally of which is Patrick Wolfe.

And so, he develops what becomes really a canonical reading of settler colonialism in settler colonial studies. And in many ways, it’s a really important intervention. And he makes a couple of observations, one of them is to say that settler colonialism is an ongoing reality and one that is not only identified through the moment of conquest, but that is continuously reproduced within the structures of a settler colony. And so he has this famous sentence that “settler colonization is a structure, not an event.” The idea being that it’s a sort of an ongoing process that is structurally reproduced. 

And the second aspect that’s probably the most important or the most well-known in Wolfe’s work is that he identifies the fact there is what he calls a logic of elimination within settler colonies that comes from this central conflict over land. And so his claim is to say that because settler colonies established themselves on Indigenous land and aimed to develop an entire society on that land, they have by definition to eliminate the society that exists there already. 

And that leads, both of these things together, lead to a number of conclusions or reflections by Wolfe about settler colonialism, including its real stability, right? So that he makes an argument that because it is structurally imposed and because it works through this process of eliminating the native, that it is much more stable than forms of franchise colonialism, which we’ve seen largely defeated by the heroic struggles of national liberation movements throughout the 20th century.

And I guess I’ve sort of tried to approach the question a little bit differently. Is I think there’s a danger in that idea of universalizing a very specific experience, which is that what I think Wolfe and many people after him have focused on and often described is primarily the experience of Anglo settlements in Canada, the United States, Australia, and New Zealand. And, you know, for good reason, these are very important places and they’ve of course, you know, shaped present in really crucial ways. 

I think my approach has been sort of the other way around, which is to start by saying what makes settler colonialism specific is that social relation, this idea that there is an ongoing relation between Indigenous and settler populations that are locked into an ongoing struggle over land, labor and resources. And that that struggle can be resolved in a whole number of different ways, dependent on the intensity and efficiency of Indigenous resistance, the strength and size of the settler population, the ability of the metropole to eliminate and/or replace Indigenous populations in large enough numbers, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. And so that the outcome of those social relations is historically generated rather than always the same. 

Now, why does that matter? It matters because I think on the one hand, it avoids maybe teleological accounts that are possible when you focus primarily on Anglo Saxon settler colonies. So one is that it, I think, opens up the field of possibilities when we think about different historical and contemporary experiences. And the second one is that actually, I think it opens up the possibility of thinking about decolonization. Which is the danger of thinking about settler colonialism is too stable because one selects for the most stable examples. 

And so just to be practical about that, if you think about the African continent, the African continent is the continent where settler colonies were defeated, in Kenya, in Algeria, in Morocco, in Tunisia, in South Africa, in Namibia in Zimbabwe, in Zambia, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera, in Angola. And that what those example have in common is that they are settler colonies that were based on the exploitation rather than on the elimination of the Indigenous population, which people like Wolfe and after him and really centrally somebody called Lorenzo Veracini have sort of set up a contradiction between elimination and exploitation. And what I’m trying to say is that exploitation is a continuous reality within the settler colonial world as well, and can lead to very different outcomes.

Yulia Gilich: I really appreciate this more expansive analysis, and I also would like us to zoom in on the specificities of the Zionist case of settler colonialism, and how thinking about these logics of colonial power and violence, right, of elimination and exploitation, helps us make sense of what is and has been happening in Palestine for the past at least 76 years. Basically, why is it important to think about settler colonialism to understand Zionism?

Sai Englert: One of the things that’s interesting about Zionism is that in many ways it’s quite a late project. It’s not alone in that, so Portuguese settler colonialism is also a very late development, in Africa, I should say. And in many ways, maybe even later than Zionism, is that the Portuguese state tries to increase its settler population until quite late into the 20th century. So it’s not alone in that, but it’s a late settler colonial project. 

And in that sense, it draws very self-consciously from the wide historical examples of other settler colonies. And I think this is important when we think today about how controversial it’s become to describe Zionism as a colonial movement, because it certainly wasn’t controversial to Zionists actually quite late.

I have an Israeli newspaper printed in French to celebrate the 10 years of the existence of the Israeli state. So it’s 1958 and it’s directed at the French public in which it describes the development of agricultural production within the Green Line as the advance of colonialism. So in 1958, Zionists are still describing their own processes within their own state as a colonial project. But, the reason I think it’s interesting to then think about Zionism within this settler colonial world is that that’s how Zionists thought of themselves. And they debated very openly on that basis. So early Zionist settlement from the late 19th century, for example, very self consciously looked at at French settlement in Algeria and thought of Zionist projects as developing a sort of a minority landlord class that would own land and exploit a majority of cheap Indigenous workers in order to be able to export cash crops to the European market.

Herzl thinks of South Africa and is really enamored by Cecil Rhodes, who he writes to, in fact, trying to convince Cecil Rhodes give him advice on this colonial question. And he thinks of the Zionist organization and its financial arm, which will be set up by the Zionist organization, called the Jewish Colonial Trust very much as a mirror of Cecil Rhodes financing of settlements in the Transvaal in South Africa. And that can be seen as a sort of a bourgeois Zionism that imagines a minority of very wealthy landowners who will exploit the majority of Indigenous workers.

Against that develops what will be known as labor Zionism and will be the dominant sort of political force in the Zionist movement in Palestine between the 1920s and the late 1970s that will develop itself really in opposition to that idea. And they will do so on a number of bases. One of them being that they are not interested in a minority of bourgeois Zionists. They want a majority of workers, of a society of Jewish workers, for a whole number of reasons. But one of the things that those theoreticians are worried about is to say that to develop an economy based on the exploitation of the Indigenous population is to weaken the colonial project because it opens itself up to Indigenous resistance.

And so that you really have these very clear debates within the Zionist movement about what kind of settler colony they are to be. And so the arguments about so-called transfer, which is the polite way in which Zionists will talk about ethnic cleansing up until the Nakba, which start from the 1920s. If people are interested Nur Masalha’s book on transfer in Zionist discourse is the reference on this kind of stuff. But it emerges out of this logic, which is to say, we cannot be Algeria or South Africa. We have to be a settler colony that will do away with the dependence on Palestinian labor.

And I think, you know, the whole history of Zionism, it’s always dangerous to say something like that, but I’ll say it anyway. I think that the whole history of Zionism up until the present can really be caught in that tension, which is to say, what are they to do with the Palestinians? And the fact that you have for a very long time, a dominant idea, which is that the state will be built through the elimination of the native if we can go back to Wolfe and the expulsion of the Palestinians, and actually the continuous failure of the Israeli state to do so that leads to all sorts of, you know, different political moments. And I think that the current one is impossible to understand without that kind of tension.

Yulia Gilich: You make this tension really visible in your article, “Hebrew Labor without Hebrew Workers,” that we will link to in the episode notes. You demonstrate that the history of the Zionist project is reflected in the changing and contested status of Palestinian and to some extent, migrant workers. And you focus specifically on the Israeli construction industry. Can you walk us through that history and these changes?

Sai Englert: Yes. So maybe if I can just sketch very broadly the sort of the historical periods of the Zionist project. So you get from the 1920s onwards, this argument that the labor Zionist movement has to conquer labor, produce, and land, which basically means exclude Palestinian agricultural workers, workers, and the produce that they generate from the economy, first of the yishuv and then of the Israeli state. And all of the institutions of the labor Zionist movement, the kibbutz, the Histadrut, the militias, the Haganah, most importantly et cetera, the labor party in all its different forms, are all built on this idea of the full exclusion of the Indigenous population. And you know, so this is also this thing about what does it mean to talk about the left and the right and the Zionist movement? That’s the argument of the so-called Zionist left against the Zionist right, who thinks, you know, certainly that the Palestinians should be subjugated, but that they should stay because they should be exploited. 

The high point of that conquest is the Nakba, with the expulsion of three quarters of the Palestinian population within the borders of the new Israeli state, is the moment that the Labour Zionists project gets the closest to the achievement of this conquest of labor. And quarter of the Palestinian population, you know, between two and three hundred thousand remain within the borders of the state. They are put under military rule and they are used really as reserves of labor. So only in the situations in which, for particular industries or particular jobs, there are no Jewish workers available, then Palestinians can receive permit to go work in those places.

That situation starts pulling at the seams by the mid-1960s, both because the Israeli economy has expanded the way it has and so there’s labor shortages. Of course, the institutions of the labor Zionist movement continue this exclusion. So the kibbutz and the Histadrut, the Israeli trade union, continue this exclusion. So Palestinians can’t be members of the Histadrut until the mid-1960s and very much continues this logic of defending Hebrew labor. 

This collapses in the mid-1960s, first through the integration of Palestinian citizens, because they are needed. There are labor shortages. The Mizrahim have arrived in very great numbers in Israel and there are no new significant waves of Aliyah up until the collapse of the Soviet Union really in the 1990s. And so the Palestinians are the sort of the available and cheap, hyper exploitable and repressed labor source. And that of course augments drastically after 1967, the conquest of the whole of historic Palestine, as well as the Sinai and the Golan means that there are now you know, a very large amount of Palestinians that can be exploited and are integrated in particular industries. And really by the 1980s, Palestinians are, if you take both citizens and Palestinians from the OPT, of the occupied Palestinian territories, are the majority in construction and agriculture.

Which means that by the first Intifada, as Palestinians rebel, they are also having a direct economic impact on the Israeli economy, which is the very thing that the labor Zionist had warned against in the 1920s and 30s, is that Palestinian resistance is also an economic resistance. This leads in the 1990s to a reversal of the policy. So to try to kick Palestinians out of the labor market and replace them with migrants on the model of the Gulf States. And so you get a major attempt at bringing in over a hundred thousand migrant workers throughout the 1990s into the second Intifada. And the second Intifada is going to be a sort of a sign that it’s a bad policy because Palestinians don’t have access to the Israeli job market, so they have less work. There’s less income coming into the West Bank and Gaza. And so it increases social unrest and confrontation. And so it’s actually the army and the secret services that are really going to push after 2005 to reintegrate Palestinians into the workforce.

And we’re into a new moment now. People will have followed that there’s again arguments about pushing Palestinians of the occupied territories out of the Israeli workforce and replace them into the workforce with migrant workers primarily out of India now and there’s also a lot of Chinese workers in construction and, and et cetera. But so you get this pendulum. And that’s what I was saying before is that you can identify continuously this contradiction in design this project, which is a, both a desire to get rid of the Palestinians and an inability to which is continuously visible. 

All of that to say that today the construction industry is an industry in which the majority of workers are Palestinians, both from the West Bank and from within the Green Line. There are differences in the realities they face. Often, for example, 48 Palestinians are contractors who hire Palestinians from the West Bank, for example, to work in very small units. But the construction industry in Israel is, of course, politically hyper-important because it builds the settlements, the walls, the roads, the infrastructure of the state and is dependent on a majority Palestinian workforce in which there is also a significant minority of migrants. What that means is that there’s a sort of a racialized stratification of the workforce in which Jewish workers are highly skilled technical staff, overseers, engineers, managers, etc., often directly employed by large construction firms and therefore are covered by existing collective agreements, which are very good.

And so you’ll have the Histadrut goes round international labor conferences saying they have these wonderful collective agreements, in which Palestinian, migrant, and Jewish workers have the same rights in which they have the highest minimum wage in Israel. It’s unheard of across the world, it’s an example of how well Israeli society is doing and also of how well Palestinians and migrant workers are treated. In practice, the terms of those collective agreements are applied only on permanent workers who are Jewish workers and highly skilled workers that are directly employed by the construction companies with which those collective agreements are negotiated. And the vast majority of the workforce are hyper-casualized Palestinian and migrant workers who work often in very small teams, who will come for a very short period of time onto a construction site, do a particular job and leave in a way that is absolutely not overseen or regulated and certainly not covered by any of these agreements, which remain entirely theoretical.

And so that while the Histadrut goes around the world demonstrating the wonderful nature of its theoretical argument, the practice is that there is a hyper-disorganized and decentered workforce, which is Palestinian and migrant that works in terrible conditions, often illegally, often at of their health and their life, while there is a small minority of skilled, overseeing kind of Jewish labor which is actually covered by that agreement.

And so that you see that, although even in a situation where clearly the argument for Hebrew labor in construction has been lost, there is not going to be a situation where the majority of construction workers in Israel are ever going to be Jewish again. The logic of Hebrew labor remains, which is that the union is defending Jewish workers while it’s allowing these atrocious conditions to be reproduced.

Yulia Gilich: So the Histadrut is basically doing labor-washing, right? It goes around the world. Parading it’s supposedly progressive collective bargaining agreement that on paper applies to all workers in the construction industry, but in practice it protects and elevates a small elite class of Jewish workers. And in fact, this  collective bargaining agreement entrenches the racialized discrimination against Palestinian and migrant workers. And it seems to be a microcosm of labor Zionism in general, right? This political framework that is represented as leftist, as socialist, as progressive, but in fact is predicated on the full exclusion of Palestinians. 

Sai Englert: Yeah, totally. It’s not the case for the whole of the Israeli economy, but you get this situation in settler colonies, like, you know, South Africa or Algeria, where the settler working class is assured these better paid, better protected, less dangerous, highly unionized jobs on the condition effectively that it allows the hyper-exploitation of the Indigenous working class. And that certainly is the case in construction. It’s the case in a different way in agriculture, where actually it’s largely migrant and Thai workers and in care you see some of these logics play themselves out as well. But so it’s a totally contradictory reality for a state that was founded on the logic that it needed to avoid that reality to take place.

Yulia Gilich: This makes me think of organized labor actions that have been a huge part of Palestinian resistance from before the establishment of the Israeli state. Does your theorization of settler colonialism make us understand Palestinian labor and its role in resisting settler colonialism differently?

Sai Englert: Well, it points to the political question of how to organize the settler colony. And I think what’s striking is that at every historical moment, where the exclusion of Palestinians either is not yet in place or collapses, the question of Indigenous labor being mobilized as part of the national liberation movement re-emerges.

So, the most important moment in the Palestinian national movement and the closest it gets to liberation are the 1930s where the Great Arab Revolt and where really Palestinian labor is absolutely central to the British colonial economy. And you get this kind of you know, six months-long general strike, potentially the longest general strike in history, that then turns into a generalized three year long military conflict. And that points at that time to the kind of major economic power that Palestinian workers have. The Nakba really undermines that process through the process of ethnic cleansing, but it returns after 1967. And so the first Intifada in many ways is also, a labor uprising. Although it’s not necessarily the central way in which it is mobilized, but you get these strikes and this ability to mobilize economic as well as political, social, and military power. In a weaker sense, it is also something that we’ve seen again in the aftermath of the second Intifada.

And so the sort of the most visible moment of that was in 2021, when Palestinian unions called for a general strike across historic Palestine. And where you had for a day stay-aways in a whole number of industries, largely in construction, but also in health care, in education. And that was significant because it meant that 48-ers participated in these actions and pointed at least in theory, I think, to the potential of the mobilization of labor actions in extremely, extremely difficult situations.

And so I also don’t want to be read as sort of, you know, saying it’s around the corner, the large uprising of Palestinian workers. I mean, the fact that the Israeli state is using both Palestinian and migrant workers is, of course, also about the ability to mobilize one population against another, as we are seeing for the moment. So you get a large conflagration in the national struggle and the response to that is economic punishment, push all the Palestinian workers out and replace them with migrant workers. Of course, the infrastructure of the occupation and of colonial power that you know, disciplines, punishes Palestinians extremely violently and rapidly when they participate either in political or in economic forms of resistance, including you know, trade union activity et cetera. So there are lots of things that mitigate against it and divide and discipline Palestinian workers. But nonetheless, I think what is striking is the ability of Palestinians to continue to return to that possibility of resistance.

Yulia Gilich: You also write that in settler colonial context, settler workers participate in the accumulation of resources acquired through the dispossession of the Indigenous people. And it leads to a greater identification of settler labor with the settler colonial project and the state. And we can see that very clearly in the case of Israeli settler colonialism. And I wonder what it means for the labor movement in the US, another settler colony, and its growing campaign of organized labor for Palestine. And I mean, labor in the US has a long history of racial discrimination that also points to white settler workers’ identification with settler colonialism and its racialized logic over multiracial working class solidarity. So what do you make of labor for Palestine in the US in this moment?

Sai Englert: I should say that I’m at no point saying this is a sort of an automatic reality. There are communist, radical syndicalist movements that fight for real radical structural change, including decolonization. And they include settler workers who are prepared to break with the kind of the logic of capitalism and therefore also with the logic of colonialism. You know, that’s been the argument in lots of different places, both by Indigenous and by settler like I said, communist or radical syndicalist, which is to say that a way out of capitalism also necessitates a way out of the structures of colonial rule. And that, I think, is also something that’s worth thinking about in terms of the present moment, which is that, although its power is not being challenged, ideologically, there is major crisis in the reproduction of the capitalist order. I think there is a quite general sense that you know, the center can’t hold and that the system doesn’t work. There’s real questions about what the political consequences or conclusions are that people will come to in terms of that crisis, but that in that crisis, I think it also opens up obviously possibilities for an argument of a way out of capitalism. Which, you know, I think in societies like North American ones can only also be a way out of the structures of settler colonial power. And that that might be one of the reasons why we are in a period in which those possibilities seem to be opening up.

Yulia Gilich: Absolutely. Inshallah. 

Sai Englert: Inshallah. Yeah.

Yulia Gilich: Now I want to get to the article that you published in the Spectre journal called “Gaza and Settler Colonialism” that is linked in the show notes and available for the listeners. Can you walk us through that article and explain what Israel’s settler colonialism means for the Gaza Strip?

Sai Englert: We tend to be told of the Gaza Strip as a sort of uncomplicated, internally coherent geographic area, if not a kind of independent quasi-state. And that really what we call the Gaza Strip is the outcome of previous waves of settler colonial violence and ethnic cleansing. And so that the Gaza Strip is really the area around Gaza city. And that to the roughly 80,000 Palestinians that live in Gaza and the villages around it, 200,000 refugees are added the process of ethnic cleansing in 1948. That from that moment onwards, this strip, this idea of this small area where refugees are being held becomes a strategic problem for Israel. And I tried to go through the different moments of that strategic problem. 

In 1956 Israel briefly occupies it as it also occupies the Sinai during the Suez crisis. But also there’s the famous speech by Moshe Dayan in 1956, which is sort of so central to Israeli myth-making. He speaks very strikingly, and I think that’s always the case for people who study Zionism is that often you just have to listen to what Israeli officials say. And I think that’s a bit what’s happening now, while the world is sort of having these really complicated discussions, is it a genocide or not, Israeli officials are on TV talking about, you know, how good it would be to ethnically cleanse the entirety of the Gaza Strip. And Dayan is very similar. And he says, you know, of course, the Palestinians in Gaza look at us living on the lands we kicked them out of, at the time eight years ago, and you know, not prepared to accept this. And so his conclusion is of course not that they should be allowed to return and you know, democratic and equal societies for all should be built. But he says we will have to live in continuous military preparedness because that is the only way to reproduce and manage to keep the Palestinians in Gaza.

In 1967, when Israel lays hold on the entirety of historic Palestine, Gaza again becomes a strategic problem. It’s at the crossroads towards the Sinai and Levi Eshkol, who’s the Prime Minister at the time, famously muses in a meeting that perhaps if the water is cut to the Palestinians in Gaza, they will leave by themselves. And so again, the genocidal hopes that, have these echoes and, you know, Gallant than cutting waternow, for example. 

During the Oslo process, Rabin again, sort of, you know, famously says that he wishes he could wake up one morning and that Gaza would have disappeared into the water. There’s this ongoing thing that there is a small piece of land on which there’s a very high concentration of Palestinians, and a high concentration of highly politicized Palestinians, like Gaza is repeatedly at the center of the different kind of phases of the Palestinian national movement. And then you have this repeated desire to make it disappear. And I think that desire to make it disappear captures the contradiction between having created a place where Palestinians were expelled and then having re-established political power over it. 

Sharon famously in 2005 solves quote unquote the problem by saying Gaza is not worth it. He pulls out the 3000 settlers in Gaza and imposes the beginning of the blockade, which I, you know, I also think is important to remember actually predates the election of Hamas, after which it intensifies, but the beginning of the blockade is actually at the moment of the unilateral retreat or, pulling out of the settlers of Gaza. And so the Sharon plan is that Gaza can be ignored, it can be locked into a cage.

So that the current moment I think is, only readable through that long history, which is that it is seen as a desire by the Israeli ruling classes to, and not only actually, as there is a real kind of popular joy around this idea of destroying the entirety of Palestinian life in Gaza, making it impossible for Palestinians in Gaza to return, that that is really this moment of hoping that it is possible to resolve the contradiction that emerges out of the colonial policies of the Israeli state over the last 75 years. I sort of warn in the piece as well, that there’s always a difference between colonial fantasy and material reality.

I think there’s all sorts of ways in which Palestinian and wider Arab resistance put real limits on what’s possible, but certainly that’s the drive. And I think that drive comes out of that long history of repeated Israeli desire to do away with the Palestinians and Gaza.

Yulia Gilich: But this brings us back to the logic of elimination, right?

Sai Englert: This is this thing about the fact that it’s always contentious, right. Which is that throughout the 60s, 70s, and 80s for all its problems, Gaza was also the perfect Bantustan, it was economically unsustainable. It therefore had the population of Palestinians that could be hyper-disciplined through military occupation, and in that process turned into a very cheap labor force. So that you also get period in which the logic is not one of elimination, it’s one of exploitation. 

But the logic of exploitation doesn’t do away with anti-colonial resistance. And so that in response to that resistance, you get a different logic that reestablishes itself. And actually, I think in many ways, Zionism is a colonial project that is stuck between a logic of exploitation and a logic of elimination. And I think it’s true that that logic does lead to a genocidal process, but it’s not the only thing it leads to. 

You know, if you look at the settlements, one of these contradictions, which is that the settlers are extremely open to the exploitation of Palestinians. They don’t at all have this idea of the need to disappear or to develop an economy that is not dependent on Palestinian labor. Now, that might change in the current situation, but really their history from 1967 onwards is to not at all have the hyper-productivism of labor Zionism and on the contrary, you have this idea that the difficult work should be done by the Palestinians. They certainly want to get rid of any form of you know, national, social or cultural expression of what it, means to be Palestinian. But certainly want to you know, this idea of being, you know, baalei adama, right, the Lords of the land and that the Lordship over the land comes with the right to exploit the Palestinian workers is very, very present in those populations. 

And so, you know, my argument is never to deny the eliminatory logic of settler colonialism or of colonialism in general. On the country, I’m very clear on the fact that it can only survive through the regular and continuous expression of extraordinary amounts of violence that very regularly explode in these mass killings to teach the Indigenous population that they are never allowed to rebel again. But it is to say that it’s not the only thing that’s happening and that there are also tendencies that go in the direction, which I actually think are extremely visible in the case of Zionism, that it’s riddled with this double logic that expresses itself differently at different times.

Yulia Gilich: Sai, thank you so much for this conversation. Listeners, you can read Sai Englert’s article, “Gaza and Settler Colonialism” on our website. Check out the show notes for the link. And thank you to the Spectre journal and Sai for sharing the PDF of the article with us. The link to the special issue of Spectre dedicated to Palestine is also linked in the show notes. 

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