In Memoriam: Elia Zureik

Abstract

Palestine studies has lost one of its giants. Working on ’48 Palestinians and on the politics of settler colonialism and indigeneity, I often find myself returning to Elia Zureik’s book The Palestinians in Israel: A Study in Internal Colonialism, which was published in 1979. One cannot overstate how revolutionary this work was at the time it was written, and how important it remains. The book appeared during a period when a host of Israeli and Zionist scholars—often explicitly serving the state and its propaganda machine—were producing work on ’48 Palestinians that aimed to portray Israel as a positive civilizing force that was modernizing and developing its backward Arab population.1 It challenged Israel’s racist, culturalist civilizational discourse on ’48 Palestinians head on. The book explores class and sociopolitical transformations among Palestinians in Israel, tracing how Israeli-Zionist colonization led to the shift from peasantry to proletariat, producing patterns of land alienation as a result of the mass dispossession of Palestinian land. Moreover, at a time when it was taboo in the Western academy, and more generally in the West, to identify ’48ers as Palestinians, Zureik’s decision as an early career scholar to insist on using the term “Palestinians” rather than “Israeli Arabs” was nothing short of courageous. One of Zureik’s most significant contributions was locating the study of ’48 Palestinians firmly within the then-evolving field of Palestine studies. His work was part of the burgeoning critical scholarship on Palestine by Palestinian scholars and allies. The publication of The Palestinians in Israel was supported by the Institute of Palestine Studies in Beirut and Zureik also published a series of articles during the 1970s in the then new JPS, which served as a significant platform for emerging critical work on the Palestinians in Israel.2 Among his intellectual interlocutors were Elias Shoufani, Hisham Sharabi (who was then the editor of JPS), Janet and Ibrahim Abu-Lughod, Noam Chomsky, and Khalil Nakhleh. In the spirit of the period, The Palestinians in Israel drew on Third World literature and political thought, centering settler colonialism, imperialism, Zionism, race, racism, and apartheid, and theorizing Israel as a “Zionist settler regime.”3 Zureik located ’48 Palestinians within the question of Palestine and in relation to the broader global imperial and (settler) colonial context, drawing comparisons with “the situation of the blacks in the United States, the North American Indians, and the blacks in South Africa.”4 Zureik’s work centered settler colonialism and a critique of Zionism in the study of ’48 Palestinians decades before the ascent of settler-colonial studies as a distinct field and the recent wave of work on settler colonialism and ’48ers. Israel, he argued, best fits the model of settler colonies. “Whether or not it differs from other settler colonial societies,” he wrote, “is an empirical and sociological question”—an insight that we should take more seriously in the way we study, understand, and theorize settler colonialism in the context of Palestine.5 Zureik’s theorization of settler colonialism resonated with other writings of the time, including those