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CHAPTER 9 The need to acquire land and to establish presence on it had a considerable impact on the shape of the institutions of the Yishuvand to a certain extent on the social and political processes in the Jewish collectivity from its formative stages to the present day.... [It] brought about a societal institution comparable to the frontier settlements in North and South America and South Mrica. The character of this type of settlement was not determined by economic considerations or social needs, but by its geo-politicallocation. -Baruch Kimmerling Permanent settlement as a means of altering the political status of territories may ... be seen as the bedrock of Israeli nationalism.... I wish to argue that in examining the Israeli case we cannot but be struck by the impact of the frontier expansion and conflict on the formation of Israeli nationalism. -Gershon Shafir "A Late Instance of European Overseas Expansion" Colonization The further we move on our continuum away from the mainstream nation -building perspective, the more critical and radical the sociological perspective becomes. The more critical and radical it is, the more it is rejected by mainstream academic discourse. Accordingly, the last trend to be examined in this study, the colonization trend, presents the clearest antipode to the nation-building perspective, and more broadly to mainstream Israeli Zionist ethos. This is the only perspective on the sociological agenda to consider Israel from a point ofview external to its own self-perceived images. This point ofview expedites the examination ofIsraeli society in its geopolitical context and in interaction with the Palestinian society. The distinctive 171 172 Chapter 9 uniqueness of this perspective is that it takes the Israeli-Arab binational set ofrelations-rather than theJewish-Israeli community in itself-as its vantage point from which to problematize Israeli society. Israel is viewed from this perspective as a colonial society or, more precisely, a settler-colonial society. This results from a drastic shift in the conceptual and comparative interpretive framework. Rather than being compared to Western democracies (the nation-building school), to Eastern autocracies (the elite trend), or to dependent nations (the Marxist trend), Israel is considered in the company of social formations such as Algeria under French rule or Kenya and Rhodesia under British rule, and mostly-and most distressing to liberal Israelis-formations such as the South African apartheid state. Historically speaking, the category of settler-colonial society includes also the formative periods ofnation-states such as the United States, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand. The term "colonization"-compared to "imperialism" and "colonialism "-requires clarification. D. K. Fieldhouse, an authority on the issue, suggests using "imperialism" in reference to the dynamics ofempire-building and "colonialism" in reference to the subjugation of a (non-European ) society that is the product of imperialism. "Colonization" refers to "the movement and permanent settlement of people from one country in another," where "the immigrants intended to establish societies as similar as possible to those they had left behind: they were not primarily concerned with the indigenous peoples they found overseas." The special feature of "colonization," he summarizes, "was thus the creation of permanent and distinctively European communities in other parts of the world," though communities that have included a portion of indigenous population and in many cases also adjunct sections of a non-European labor force (1981:4-5). From the colonization perspective Israel is considered a colonizing and belligerent society. Sociologist Gershon Shafir claims: "At the outset, Zionism was a variety of Eastern European nationalism, that is, an ethnic movement in search of a state. But at the other end of the journey it may be seen more fruitfully as a late instance of European overseas expansion " (1989:8). Likewise, sociologist Avishai Ehrlich characterizes Israel as a "permanent war society," and claims: The Israeli-Arab conflict has at its core the efforts of the Zionist settlers to create an exclusivistJewish society in Palestine and the resistance , first of the native Arab Palestinians, and later of states, Arab and other, to this colonization project. . .. The social, national and state-building processes of Israel are seen by the Arabs as processes A Late Instance of European Overseas Expansion 173 of destruction, dispersion and destructuration of Palestinian-Arab society. (1987:121,122) The Frontier Reopened: New and Old Settlers Though the characterization of Israel as a colonial society is probably as old as the Zionist idea itself, as a specific scholarly sociological perspective it was formulated only recently. This novelty was instigated by processes that followed...

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