sheikh jarrah

The New Frontier of Settler Colonialism

By Nathaniel Ibrahim

Republished from Michigan Specter.

In early June, a video went viral of a Palestinian woman arguing with an Israeli man. “Yakub, you know this is not your house,” says Muna El-Kurd, a resident of Sheik Jarrah, to a man who has been living in some part of her family’s property for years.

“Yes, but if I go, you don’t go back,” he replies, in a Brooklyn accent, “So what’s the problem? Why are you yelling at me?” He throws his arms in the air in an expression of ostensible innocence and confusion. “I didn’t do this. I didn’t do this. It’s easy to yell at me, but I didn’t do this.”

“You are stealing my house,” she insists.

“And if I don’t steal it,” he replies, “someone else is going to steal it.”

How Did We Get Here?

Settler colonialism is often seen as a thing of the past. The United States, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and many other places around the world are populated primarily by the descendants of people who took that land by force, drove out or slaughtered the natives, and claimed it as their God-given right. It is generally accepted that the world was shaped by these forces, but we are rarely willing to see this process as continuous. Even the left, critical of power and skeptical of narratives that ignore the modern implications of past atrocities, tends to frame the continuation of imperialism primarily as neocolonialism, or unequal relationships between countries maintained by debt, corruption, regime change, threats, and cultural hegemony by which developed governments and corporations drain money and resources from the third world without resorting to the older methods of colonization. This framework, while useful, places the world of colonial annexation, direct governance, and settler colonialism firmly in the past.

White European settler colonialism, specifically from the western European countries, has been by far the dominant form of settler colonialism in recent centuries, and arguably in all of human history. Europe, led by the British Empire, carried out settler colonial projects in the Americas, Africa, Asia, and Oceania. Nearly all settler colonial territories eventually became independent of the Empire, but imperialism continued. The United States was the leader in this, securing most of its territory after independence, but it was not the only one. Apartheid in South Africa and Canadian sterilization of Indigenous women, to give just two examples, existed long after British control, but no one could deny the shared origin of this oppression and the continued cooperation and connections between these states, especially in the military and intelligence fields, but also culturally, linguistically, and economically. In all of these countries, settler colonialism is not a process that is completed or one that has ended. Indigenous people are still marginalized and oppressed, and they are forced to exist in a system set up by the colonizing forces. It would be a mistake, however, to view internal repression as the only descendent of settler colonialism. Settler colonialism continues to find new frontiers, most notably in the state of Israel.

Historical Parallels

Israeli settler colonialism is really a continuation of the same process that European settlers started in the Americas hundreds of years ago. White settlers, marginalized in their homelands, but generally viewed as superior to the natives by the great powers of their day, invaded new territory and drove the native peoples out. They stole the land and the resources on it, exploited the native inhabitants while destroying their economy, culture, resources, and way of life.

The process of Israeli settler colonialism is much the same as American settler colonialism. Both the United States and Israel began as important projects of the British Empire. Violence and ethnic cleansing against Native Americans and Palestinians, in the bloody so-called Indian Wars fought by European powers and later the United States and Canada and events in Israel like the Nakba, forced Native people to flee their homes, relegated to locations the colonial power had no need of yet, west in America, east in Palestine. Once a region is conquered and integrated, the frontier moves. Palestinian self-governance, legally at least, exists only in a group of physically divided areas, places in the West Bank labeled as “Area A” and “Area B”, and of course, the Gaza strip. (In reality, Israel controls security in Area B, and completely surrounds these areas and Gaza, controlling emigration, immigration, and trade, making actual Palestinian self-governance a fantasy). Native Americans were deported to lands far away from their homeland, and the US government has even attempted to send Palestinians out of Israel and Palestine altogether, like when U.S. Secretary of State Condoleeza Rice suggested that Palestinians could be resettled in Argentina and Chile in a meeting with Israeli and Palestinian negotiators in 2008.

On the other side of the colonial state, the direction they came from, things look similar as well. Israel does the majority of its trade with Europe and North America, including the profitable weapons trade. Early America traded heavily with Europe as well, and its cotton plantations, maintained by slave labor and existing on stolen land, shipped massive amounts of cotton to Europe to help fuel the textile industry and industrialization. Both countries may be considered “Nations of Immigrants,” but both are quite discriminatory in the type of immigrant they populate their territory with. For America, it was blatantly white supremacist, prioritizing a small group of peoples seen as the most advanced, and gradually growing to include other people considered white.

Jewish immigrants to the United States, so long as they came from white, European countries, were tolerated much more than immigrants considered racially inferior. Though they faced violence, discrimination, and marginalization in a conservative country dominated by Christians, Jewish immigrants received recognition as valued members of society by people such as George Washington and equal political rights. The tolerance of Jewish institutions was not the same reality for other ethnic groups living in America at the time. Again, because it needs to be made absolutely clear, this does not erase the reality of antisemitism, especially in institutions and from individuals that promote white supremacy. Rather, Jewish identity and whiteness are intersecting identities, not mutually exclusive ones.

Israel has faced accusations of racism from its Jewish citizens of non-European origin, including accusations of police brutality, discrimination in school enrollment, and even forced sterilization. This is compounded by the fact that Jews living in the so-called “developed” world, typically meaning white-majority countries in Europe and North America, simply have greater opportunities to move to Israel. The advantages of living in the “developed” world (their greater wealth, higher levels of education, easier transportation to Israel) allow Jews living there to move to Israel more easily than Jews living in poorer countries. This reality, while it is a result of global capitalism and white supremacy and not any aspect of the Zionist movement, effectively privileges white immigrants to Israel.

Race, Religion, and Civilization

There are also important parallels to draw between the settler colonial ideologies of Israel and America. Israelis claim that the land is theirs due to their ancestry, but ignore the fact that many Palestinians have descended from the ancient Jewish residents of Palestine. Zionists like Ber Borochov and David Ben-Gurion accepted this and saw the Palestinians as descendants of the Israelites who had stayed on the land. This is not to say that Palestinians have some special status over other people because of their ancestry, or that any Jews are somehow “not real Jews,” or that race is a metric that dictates a particular allocation of power or land. It does show, however, the inherent failures of relying on abstract and contradictory concepts like race and descendancy over thousands of years. Israeli ideology relies on the idea that Israelis are somehow more tied to the land than the people who live on it now, and who have lived there in recent history. Israeli ideology relies on claiming a difference in ancestry between the Palestinians and Israelis. The only difference that can be reasonably discerned is the European ancestry of the Israeli colonizers.

An important clarifier is the distinction between the Zionist movement of Jews, mainly from Europe and the Americas, and the historical existence of Jews in the land between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea. Jews have always lived there, but their simple existence is not Zionism. Zionists may seek to tie these Jews to their cause, but the core of Zionism is the movement of Jews from outside of this territory, with the backing of Europe and America, into Palestinian territory. That is a settler colonial project. Zionist ideology appropriated the right of Palestinian Jews to keep living where they were to justify a larger project of colonialism, ethnic cleansing, and apartheid.

Americans also steal a component identity of those they colonized, even as they sought to replace that identity. Individual white Americans from the participants in the Boston Tea Party to Democratic presidential candidate Elizabeth Warren have dressed up as Native Americans or claimed Native American identity without evidence or any cultural link. We took the name Apache for a helicopter, we took the Powhatan word tamahaac for a missile, we took the word Ojibwe word mishigami for our state, our university, and the Michigamua club here at the University (renamed in 2007 and disbanded in 2021), where members would disrespectfully appropriate Native dress, custom, and names. These identity thefts are key to settler colonialism. As the connections native peoples have to the land are severed, the land must be reconnected, even if sloppily and artificially, to the new inhabitants.

Both colonizers claimed to be more civilized than the colonized, sometimes in explicitly racist language, sometimes not. We hear over and over how Israel is the only democracy in the Middle East despite it having near-total control over millions of people with no say in their own governance. The early United States claimed to be more civilized in its day too, promising “liberty and justice for all” while maintaining slavery and calling itself a republic, “by the people, for the people,” even when voting rights were restricted to a small elite of wealthy white men. We hear the same narratives of development, that Israel is “making the desert bloom,” and that America tamed a vast, uncivilized and unpopulated wilderness, and that the wealth of both is a sign of their superior industry, talent, and work ethic, or even of God’s favor.

God’s favor is actually tied with civilization in other interesting ways. According to many Jews and Christians who use God as a justification for colonization and expansion, Israel was promised to the Jewish people by God in the Bible. The ideology of Manifest Destiny also relied on God allowing his chosen (white) people to conquer the world and convert the natives from their religions, which were represented as uncivilized, savage, and infantile, into members of the Christain religion, which was seen as the religion of the civilized, developed world. The Pope himself would proclaim the rights of European colonizers to the land they conquered. Mormons, like the Puritans before them and the Jews after them, were an oppressed religious minority who led the charge of expansion, believing God wanted them to.

In much the same way as Ashkenazi Jews (along with Italians, Irish, and others before them) have gained some degree of “whiteness” and integration into structures of white supremacy, the Jewish religion has gained some degree of legitimacy in the eyes of American Christians. Some conservatives will talk about “Judeo-Christain Values,” a confusing term that ultimately serves to drive a wedge between Jews, Christians, and “enlightened” western Atheists who allegedly hold these values, and Muslims, who allegedly do not and are therefore deemed to have an inferior civilization. Exclusionary ideologies are anything but consistent, and as they lose power, they can expand the in-group to unite against a new outgroup. This has led to bizarre political alliances and support, such as American white nationalist Richard Spencer praising Israel’s political system, or Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu calling Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban, who has praised Nazi collaborators and used antisemitic language to refer to his enemies, a “true friend to Israel.” Many early American settlers were marginalized in Europe for their religion, but that did not stop the Christians from uniting themselves against some other, more distinct religion or group of religions.

The Frontier

The creation of Israel is not just a copy of the United States but an extension of the United States. Its colonial efforts are also American colonial efforts. The United States provides $3 billion to Israel annually in military aid, as well as billions more in loan guarantees. The US State Department changed its position on settlements under Mike Pompeo, supporting the obviously illegal project. In the private sector, an entire network of American nonprofits support Israeli settlers in Palestine, and many American and European corporations are closely intertwined with settlements and do business with the Israeli government. Jared Kushner, Senior Advisor and son-in-law to President Donald Trump, previously ran one such foundation funding the settlements. The Israeli Land Fund, funded by American donors, has assisted in the eviction of a Palestinian family in Sheikh Jarrah. Its founder, the deputy Mayor of Jerusalem, and a settler living in a Palestinian neighborhood, Aryeh King, has worked hard to increase Jewish settlement in East Jerusalem. King, while on his visit to Sheikh Jarrah on May 6, even wished for the death of a Palestinian activist who was shot by police.

The recent forced evictions and other police violence are not unique to East Jerusalem. King is also supporting the eviction of residents in Silwan, another Palestinian neighborhood in East Jerusalem. The land from which Israel clears the houses may actually be used to expand a biblical theme park called City of David National Park, run by a settler group called the Ir David Foundation. Nothing exemplifies the Israeli colonial project more than the destruction of Palestinian homes and neighborhoods to make room for a park named after a king who lived some 3,000 years ago where settlers and tourists can look at ancient artifacts. Tourists to Israel are predominantly Christian, and a plurality of them travel from America to visit Israel.

It is not just American money, but American people who help drive settler colonialism. US Citizens make up 15% of the settlers in the West Bank. It’s a familiar phenomenon: Americans, on the frontier, traveling inland and claiming new land for themselves and their people, building a homestead, and arming themselves to fight the people who lived there before. America didn’t stop when it got to California, or even Hawaii, it just sought out new avenues for colonial expansion.

Palestinian poet and activist Mohammed El-Kurd, the twin brother of Muna El-Kurd, went on Democracy Now! and explained the altercation between his sister and the settler that began this article and how it represents a broader settler colonial project.

“Can you explain this scene? And talk more specifically about what’s happening in Sheikh Jarrah right now,” asked Amy Goodman, the host of Democracy Now!.

“Absolutely. The scene that you saw, Amy, is a scene of colonialism. People often think that colonialism is this archaic concept or a concept of recent memory, but in fact, it’s alive and well in Palestine. And this is a colonizer that happens to be from Brooklyn, as you can hear by the accent, who decided to find a home in my backyard. This happens because we, as a community of refugees in Sheikh Jarrah, have been battling billionaire-backed, often U.S.-registered settler organizations that employ these people to come and live in our homes and harass us and intimidate us…What’s happening in Sheikh Jarrah today is nothing short of ethnic cleansing.

“…You know, I know it sounds bizarre that an Israeli settler is taking over half of my home, and likely they will be taking over the entirety of the neighborhood should no international action be taken. But it’s not as absurd when you put it in the context [of] how the state of Israel came about. It came about by destroying and burning hundreds and hundreds of Palestinian cities and villages and taking over Palestinians’ homes. Today, all over historic Palestine, there are settlers who are living in homes that were once Palestinian.”

Sheikh Jarrah Is Not a New Event! It is Our Relived Generational Trauma

By Nazek Jawad

Growing up in Damascus, I didn’t realize the occupied Palestinian territories were a separate political entity from Syria, until I was in fourth grade. Up until then, I thought it was a part of Syria. This is how present the Palestinian cause has been in our daily lives. The shadows of generations of Palestinians, who were forced out of their homes, followed us in schools, in the streets, and in our homes. The shadows of the Palestinian “Children of the Stones” shared our desks with us in the classrooms. We grew up with the open wound of Palestine. We grew up with the pain of women protecting their olive trees from being uprooted by military tanks. With the agony of the stolen childhood of Palestinian kids, who looked like us, but had to become men at ten years old to defend their livelihood, their homes, and their families. 

In 1993, while the usual images of the Israeli destruction of Arab land in Palestine were on the front page of one of the daily newspapers, on the back page was an image of Hillary Clinton with Big Bird. I remember gazing at that image, staring at Big Bird’s fluffy yellow feathers and rounded big eyes. I felt sunnier just by looking at Big Bird. I stared at Clinton’s cheerful smile and in my eight years old mind I gushed to myself: It must feel lighter to exist on the other side of the world, without the weight of all what’s happening here- life tastes differently there, it is not as salty! That brightness of the image illuminated how life feels like, without the weight of an existential threat looming in the background.

Every night when the clock hits 8:30pm, it was the time for the news segment, a time for another Palestinian tragedy. In my child mind I would think to myself: Is this the one? Is this the tragedy that would finally get the world moving to help us end this misery? Does the world know what’s happening? Is everyone around the world watching the news? 

Silence. Silence was the answer to all my questions. Silence was the world’s answer to all what was happening.

You see, in a child’s mind the sense of humanity remains untouched and pure, from all man-made divisive concepts. You don’t know nationalities nor borders. All what you know is humanity. You understand people around the world as a continuum of individuals around you-you imagine them like your neighbors. When a suffering happens, it doesn’t matter on which side of which border it took place-in your mind, the world exists in one stretch. What matters is the world’s response, and its absence has always aggravated me, and later when I grew up, it pained me, as I understood the world is choosing to stand still while we bleed.

In geography classes, we practiced the map of the Arab land with all its pieces intact. Where the world map outlines Israel, we wrote Palestine! That was our form of defiance. It was our small way of claiming our agency, and resisting the injustice of land dispossession. That small dose of self-made justice felt very empowering. It helped ease the frustration at times, especially on days when the American UN ambassadors raised their hands to veto a UNSC resolution condemning an Israeli aggression. So, there you go! For each one of your vetoes, we will draw a map. We will mark Palestine with capital letters. We will hang the map on every wall. On every door. On the sun! That land is Palestine, and all the millions of dollars sent in aid to Israel will never be enough to erase Palestine from our consciousness, from our being. 

You see, a child’s mind does not understand politics, but can feel hostility. We didn’t understand the political calculation behind the imperialist aggression against our region, but we felt the animosity against us. To be denied a mere condemnation, we knew our suffering is not seen. We knew the wailing of Palestinian mothers over the dead bodies of their children and the ruins of their homes is not heard. We felt the rejection. We are not wanted, not even to exist on our own land. But, what does a child do when they are rejected? They fight back claiming the very identity that has been taken away from them by force! It simply did not matter what all American Foreign Affairs Secretaries planned and negotiated and announced with Israeli and Arab leaders. For us, these borders that we practiced and perfected, are the borders of Palestine.

In history classes we learned about the Israeli occupation, the failed Arab revolution to free Palestine, and all the UN resolutions. We memorized the dates of every peace treaty, the names of the towns of every massacre, the numbers of deaths, and the names of all the Arab martyrs. We gazed at images of the Golan, the occupied part of the Syrian land, which we knew we will never see, not even in our dreams. A land that is only a couple-hours’ drive from Damascus, but seemed impossible to reach. It’s beautiful, I always thought. I could almost smell its scent out of the page of my book, but I could never touch it. This wound grows to be another extension of you. The loss becomes your shadow. Your land is who you are. As you grow older, you move around the world knowing your existence is simply incomplete. 

After every history lesson, we had so many pressing questions for our teacher: Where is the world from what’s happening? How is this massive generational injustice even allowed to continue in an advanced world? Isn’t this the same world that preaches to us about international law and human rights? Well, what about our rights? 

Once again. Silence. Silence was the answer to all our questions. 

But there’s no such thing as silence in a child’s mind. A child’s mind will always find answers. We realized then that our human value is not equal to others. We learned at an early age that it didn’t matter whether our cause is a just cause, our human suffering is insignificant to the rest of the world because we are weaker. Only those who are strong can move the world when they are touched. 

I always thought, how unfortunate for us that the world doesn’t measure our strength by the thousands of years of our civilization. It doesn’t measure our strength by the hospitality of our homes, the tastefulness of our food, the craftiness of our people. Somehow, by some arbitrary measures, which we didn’t decide, we ended up on the weaker side, while our survival over that land, and the creativity and endurance it takes to continuously inhabit a place for thousands of years, measured up to nothing. 

When you are a victim on the weaker side, the world sits in silence watching, desensitized to your bloodshed, and when you resist, the world roars pointing at you calling you a villain. When all liberation movements around the world are celebrated, while you don’t even have the right to resist-you realize then that you don’t matter. It’s that simple. It’s that painful. 

For seventy-three years we have been reliving the same devastating images, hearing the same condemnation statements, frustrated with the same inaction. For seventy-three years, the only thing human race has been successful in recycling is human misery, and an agonizing inaction to this misery.

This relived trauma in our region has been passed down generation after generation, because no one can wash away the daily lived sense of loss. We simply don’t have the privilege to forget. We don’t have a choice but to feel the pain of our missing pieces. How can you forget when all you feel is the pain of that void?

Today, with all what’s happening in Sheikh Jarrah, I am thinking about the entirety of the region where I come from, that has been subject to injustice that feels as ancient as time. When the world is celebrating technology that reduces physical distance, this region feels more isolated than ever. I will never understand such cruelty. How could a place that has given so much to the world, a place that has been a safe haven to so many civilizations, be faced with such harshness? What could be worth of unconceivable amount of human suffering?

I will never understand.