Indigeneity, Apartheid, Palestine: On the Transit of Political Metaphors

Israel is an apartheid state. Israel is a settler-colonial state. Are these statements the same? Are they compatible? What is effaced, displaced, and/or forgotten in the conceptual, rhetorical, and institutional movement between these formulations? These two political metaphors—apartheid and settler colonialism—suggest different frames of reference and arise out of their own scholarly conversations and political contestations. Describing them as "metaphors," though, should not indicate their distinction from some "real" or "literal" state of affairs.¹ The initial construction of the Israeli state, legal processes implemented over the course of its history, and current policy in the Occupied Territories and within pre-1967 boundaries all suggest the applicability of these characterizations. Moreover, asking whether Israel really constitutes an apartheid state or a settler-colonial one usually functions as a means of at best displacing, and at worst foreclosing, the demands for justice by variously situated Palestinians (those living in exile, those who are Israeli citizens, and those living in the Occupied Territories).² As against such deferrals, I do not seek to assess the validity of these political metaphors but to examine what happens when they are run together. These two ways of talking about Israeli modes of state violence bring with them a host of associations due to the distinct kinds of political struggles to which they refer and the ways the terms have transited in their transnational movement (within and among national contexts and through international fora),³ and those histories of usage influence critical discussion of Zionism. When these concepts—apartheid and settler colonialism—are treated as if they referred to the same thing, which they often are within scholarly accounts of Israel/Palestine, the notion of indigeneity tends to vanish, in that the political goal for indigenous peoples gets envisioned as full belonging within the nation-state rather than as acknowledgment of their distinct modes of sovereignty and self-definition. That process of conceptual collapse, which I will address in this essay, significantly truncates the meaning of indigenous self-determination in ways that not only have implications for thinking Palestinian peoplehood(s) but for engaging indigenous peoplehoods more broadly, given the ways that the case of Israel/Palestine (like that of South Africa before it) itself transits transnationally and comes to serve as a prism through which to view other political struggles.

Indigeneity goes missing in such conflations of apartheid and settler colonialism because inclusion as part of the state is cast as the primary mode of redress for the latter, and the analysis of Israeli political economy as apartheid helps propel that dynamic due to the ways the South African case has been narrated in and to solidarity movements outside South Africa. According to the UN International Convention on the Suppression and Punishment of the Crime of Apartheid,⁴ apartheid is "a crime against humanity" organized around "policies and practices of racial segregation and discrimination" (Article I), specifically "for the purpose of establishing and maintaining domination by one racial group of persons over any other racial group of persons" (Article II). The violence of such institutionalized racial distinction lies in the ways it excludes a racialized population from access to full citizenship through "legislative measures and other measures calculated to prevent a racial group or groups from participating in the political, social, economic and cultural life of the country" (Article II[c]). While noting that "expropriation of landed property belonging to a racial group or groups" constitutes an act of apartheid (Article II[d]), and observing in the preamble that "an end must be put to colonialism," the convention frames apartheid as a domestic issue, in that it concerns the access of subjects of a given state to resources and rights as members of that state. Such a charge certainly applies to Israeli policy in a range of ways, including the extensive limitation on access to land and resources (such as education, health care, and employment) for Palestinians who are Israeli citizens living in pre-1967 borders; racially biased immigration policies; the limitation of the ability of Palestinians living in the Occupied Territories to cross into pre...