Presentation at the Academics for Palestine webinar, 17 April 2025.
Speakers: Dr Sai Englert, Leiden University; Dr Greg Burris, Northwestern University in Qatar; Dr Ronit Lentin, Trinity College Dublin (ret). Chairs: Eman Aboud, Trinity College Dublin; Bana Abu Zuluf, Maynooth University. This is a short version of my papers for the special issue on Racial Capitalism and Palestine, for the Journal of Holy Land and Palestine Studies, co edited by Kieron Turner and me.
In January 2024, three months after the launch of the Gaza genocide, extreme right Zionist politicians held a conference titled “Jewish settlement in Gaza.” The conference followed several reports outlining the Zionist entity’s intention to expel Gaza’s Palestinian population and replace it with Jewish settlements, one of them, by the Misgav Institute for National Security and Zionist Strategy, stated that the Hamas attack provided Israel with a “unique and rare opportunity to evacuate the entire Gaza Strip,” and proposed that Israel pays Egypt to house Gaza’s former inhabitants in empty apartments near Cairo. This was since overshadowed by Trump’s February 2025 plan to transform Gaza into a Mediterranean resort.
By April 2025, a month after relaunching its genocide, the Zionist entity expanded its footprint in Gaza: it now controls more than 50% of the Strip and is squeezing Palestinians into shrinking wedges of land. On 12 April Defence Minister Israel Katz said that the IGF (Israel Genocide Forces) was extending the “buffer zone,’ where Israeli troops will “remain indefinitely”, to include Rafah, evacuating its 200,000 inhabitants to the so-called “safe zone” of Al-Mawasi, preparing to complete its takeover of the whole Gaza territory.
I follow Patrick Wolfe’s claim that settler colonialism is about the “logic of elimination,” but also about the acquisition and transfer of territory “from Native ownership (that) requires the mobilisation of technologies of violence together with the social relations that underpin their deployment”, as evidenced by the Zionist plans to evacuate and resettle Gaza. I also argue that the Zionist colonial project fits Cedric Robinson’s theorisation of racial regimes as “social systems in which race is proposed as a justification for the relations of power. While necessarily articulated with accruals of power, the covering conceit of a racial regime is a makeshift patchwork masquerading as memory and the immutable. Nevertheless, racial regimes do possess history” (1983: xii). The concept of racial regime also relies, inter alia, on mythical narratives, which, in the case of Zionism, are Biblical narratives of land ownership.
While debated mostly with regards to South African apartheid and the anti-Apartheid struggle, racial capitalism, as argued by Kieron Turner, has not yet engendered similar debates in relation to the colonisation of Palestine, yet such an analysis is crucial. I read the Zionist colonisation of Palestine through the lenses of Cedric Robinson’s and Patrick Wolfe’s theories of racial regimes / regimes of race – crucial to understanding how racial capitalism is reproduced – and of Zionist European whiteness as property.
Racial regimes, Zionism, and white European supremacy
According to Cedric Robinson, world capitalism emerged from the forces of racism and nationalism. Race predated capitalism, being internal to European Christianity, and the “native racisms” responsible for death on a massive scale, are evident globally, as argued by Josh Myers. European civilisation aims to turn regional, subcultural, and dialectical differences into ‘racial’ ones.” And differentiations, Ruth Wilson Gilmore argues, are at once the prerequisite and the consequence of racial dehumanisation, which has always characterised the Zionist approach to the Palestinian other.
In Forgeries of Memory and Meaning, Robinson defines racial regimes as “constructed social systems in which race is proposed as a justification for the relations of power.” For Robinson racial regimes are “actually contrivances, designed and delegated by interested cultural and social powers with the wherewithal sufficient to commission their imaginings, manufacture, and maintenance”, and he proposes that racial regimes tend to wear thin over time. For Patrick Wolfe race – a process, not an ontology – is a practice, and as such involves not only doctrinal, but also economic, political, moral, legal, institutional as well as mythic dimensions. Race, Wolfe writes, is ever shifting in the balance between “those with a will to colonise and those with a will to be free, severely racialised in relation to each other”, and racial regimes are “ever-incomplete projects whereby colonisers seek to maintain White supremacy”. Robinson argues that racialism is an internal European process, and just as European Christians employed their “superior” race to justify colonialism, Zionism, as a new member of the colonial club, claimed European white superiority to justify the colonisation of Palestine.
European white Jewishness as property
Like other colonial racial regimes, Zionism was always about imperial accumulation. Owning property is a key component of whiteness; you become white by acquiring property that “becomes the lens through which significations of race emerge.” European civilisation, Josh Myers argues, is ultimately about whiteness, which in turn is about property. According to George Lipsitz, whiteness emerged as a category in US life because of slavery, segregation, immigration restrictions, “Indian” policy, conquest, and colonialism. The fictive identity of “whiteness” became law as people who arrived as racialised migrants became something called “whites” when they got to North America, where they established legal structures encouraging possessive investment in whiteness that authorised the theft of Native American lands.
Palestinian legal scholar Noura Erakat posits white Jewishness as property, though without fully clarifying what is Jewish about it beyond interpreting the value of “Jewish nationality” and its differentiation as white supremacy that informs the Zionist legal system. Zionism’s relations with Palestinians not only led to their deprivation, but it also imbued “Jewish nationality” with actual material value. White European Jewishness as property was legislated for in a series of laws since the 1950s, giving Jewish people material, economic and political property rights in comparison with the native Palestinians, and granting white Euro-Ashkenazi Jews property rights over both Palestinians and non-European non-white Jews.
These laws include:
- The Law of Return (1950) and The Citizenship Law (1952) allow every Jewish person to settle in Israel and automatically become a citizen, a right not granted to Palestinian natives of the land;
- The Absentees’ Property Law (1952) enables the state to take charge of property belonging to Palestinians “who were expelled, fled, or who left the country after 29 November 1947, mainly due to the war”;
- The Jewish National Fund Law (1953) charges the Zionist land purchasing agency with purchasing and administering public land which became state land and bars its selling to “non-Jews” (Palestinians);
- The Admissions Committees Law (2011) enables screening applicants seeking to buy land in Jewish “community towns” on the basis of racist criteria, which means the exclusion of Palestinians;
- and The Nation State Law (2018) guarantees the ethno-religious character of Israel as exclusively Jewish, legitimising exclusion, racism, and systemic discrimination against Palestinian citizens.
The European founders of the state both reified European supremacy and ascribed new value to Jewish nationality relative to the Arab other. The Zionist entity consecrated the value of these Jewish-inflected laws that restrict basic services, land, housing, education, and employment. Whiteness as property privileges Jewish people, granting them material, political and cultural rights over and above Palestinian citizens and occupied Palestinian subjects. I now detail some examples of European white Jewishness as property in terms of land, labour, securitisation and incarceration.
Land
The centrality of land fits Cedric Robinson’s emphasis on dispossession, exploitation, and extraction. According to Wolfe, Eurocolonial powers arrived in Native country ex nihilo condensing power and expanding violence, and this pre-formedness is colonialism’s preaccumulation. Wolfe reminds us that the Zionist project, upheld by the British Empire, is “part and parcel of what we might call project Europe: the Zionism on which the entity is founded is organic to and shaped by European imperialism”. Insisting that Imperialism is not the latest stage of capitalism but its foundational warrant.
The Zionist project was not initially driven by economic considerations of profit and resource exploitation. Many early white European Jewish settlers regarded themselves as Labour (socialist) Zionists, even though, as argued by Shulman, “for most Labour Zionist leaders, ‘socialism’ was a rhetorical means of legitimating the national project of creating a Jewish state and little else”. Wolfe calls the Zionist modus of colonisation “purchase by another means,” whereby the European Jewish funders of the Zionist project differed from speculators who financed colonial expansion in Australia and North America in not looking to return a profit, financing Zionist settlers to convert Palestinian lands from native to European Jewish ownership.
In 1901 the World Zionist Organization (WZO) founded the Jewish National Fund to ensure Jewish land ownership in Palestine and “acquire the greatest amount of land with the smallest number of Palestinians and to concentrate the greatest number of Palestinians onto the smallest amount of land”. The JNF green washes its racialised land purchases by having planted millions of trees, built dams and reservoirs, and established parks and nature reserves. By 2007, The JNF owned 13 per cent of the total land in Israel, 80 per cent of which is owned by the state, and half of these lands are controlled by the security services, facilitating the ongoing demolition of Palestinian houses and villages, and the expulsion of Palestinian citizens from their lands. Many JNF forests were planted over and used to cover the ruins of depopulated Palestinian villages, making the JNF a key technology of Zionist colonisation and racialisation.
Beyond the material expropriation of Palestinian lands, villages, towns, and urban neighbourhoods, the 1948 Nakba also brought about the attempted erasure of Palestinian society and culture. One aspect is what Israeli historian Ilan Pappe calls “the memoricide of the Nakba” that led to establishing the Naming Committee tasked with Hebraising Palestine’s geography, giving Palestinian places Hebrew names, so as to whiten and de-Arabise Palestine’s terrain and erase its history.
Labour
The WZO also established the Conquest of (Hebrew) Labour policy that underpinned core Zionist institutions such as the communal agriculture-based kibbutz, and the Jews-only labour trade union Histadrut. The Conquest of Labour policy was central to the colonisation of Palestine and sought to actively dispossess Palestinians of their economic relevance, and to prevent Zionist dependency on Palestinian labour.
Analysing the Israeli class structure, Moshe Machover and Akiva Or of Matzpen, the Socialist Organisation in Israel, argue that the Israeli Jewish labour market must be understood in the context of the Zionist colonisation of Palestine. Israeli Jewish workers were all settler-colonisers, who put their national loyalties before their class loyalties. However, because large numbers of the working class were non-European Arab and African Jewish settlers – who started life in transit camps – when they did express discontent, it was not directed against their conditions as proletarians but rather against their racialisation as “orientals” (Mizrahim) by white European Jews.
The 1967 occupation of Palestinian territory in the West Bank and the Ghaza Strip required a much larger labour force and resulted in the influx of tens of thousands Palestinian workers into the Israeli labour market, increasing the Israeli economic reliance on cheap and dispensable Palestinian labour. However, the occupation introduced a complex bureaucratic permit regime and Israel imported a large migrant labour force to replace Palestinian workers, creating a host of legal and semi-legal racialised complexities.
Israel’s prison industrial complex
Haidar Eid and Andy Clarno argue that neoliberal apartheid regimes like Israel depend on advanced securitisation and on military deployments, electronic surveillance, imprisonment, interrogations, and torture. The Israeli racial colony produces a fragmented geography of isolated Palestinian enclosures and Israeli companies take the lead in lucratively and globally marketing weapons and security systems, by “battle-testing” arms and high-tech devices in the Occupied Palestinian Territory and the Gaza Strip.
Ruth Wilson Gilmore’s link between the prison industrial complex and racial capitalism is relevant to theorising the Zionist justice and carceral systems according to which Palestinians and Israelis are judged and incarcerated in separate legal and prison systems as another aspect of racial capitalism. Racism, Gilmore argues, means “organized abandonment” by both state and capitalism, working together to raise racial barriers that create group-differentiated vulnerabilities.
Since 1948 the Zionist entity has imprisoned and tortured hundreds of thousands of Palestinians. As of April 2024, according to Addameer, the Palestinian Prisoner Support and Human Rights Association, the Israel Prison Service (IPS) is holding 9,900 Palestinians in detention or in prison– at least 400 of whom are children. and since October 2023 new arrests brought the number of Palestinians detained by the IGF to over 14,300, not including those arrested from the Gaza Strip. The Palestinian BDS National Committee (BNC), the largest coalition in Palestinian society, condemns the complicity of silence surrounding Israel’s relentless policy of mass arrests and the systematic and horrific infringement of the most basic rights of Palestinian political prisoners in its prisons and detention centres, as an integral component of its genocidal apartheid regime.
Microsoft, HP and Cisco have long been implicated in and profiting from Israeli apartheid, ethnic cleansing, and mass incarceration of Indigenous Palestinians. “Digital transformation makes it possible to consider prison as a business,” says Microsoft. HP, Cisco and Microsoft are not hiding their complicity in Israel’s grave human rights abuses through their partnerships with the Israeli Prison Service:
- HP equipment is installed in the Israeli Prison Service’s central server farm, and they provided the Israeli police with equipment and technological support used to enforce repressive measures in occupied East Jerusalem and within present-day Israel. HP sold invasive surveillance tools to Israeli prisons despite IPS’s history of torture and unlawful detentions.
- Cisco provides phone tapping service using voice biometric data of Palestinian prisoners, many of whom are held hostage without charge or trial in inhumane conditions described as “human chicken coops” by the leading Israeli human rights organization.
- Microsoft has provided Microsoft Cloud Services (MCS) to the Israeli Prison Service to streamline Israel’s regime of wrongful detentions without due process and inhuman prison conditions that in many cases amount to torture.
This demonstrates that, economic exploitation is key to enabling the Zionist racial regime to control, exploit and quell insurgency. Palestinians are made to finance the cost of their subjugation by being made to pay the occupiers to demolish their homes or have an executed relative’s body returned for burial, and by paying the heavy fines imposed by the military courts on Palestinian prisoners: in 2016 alone, fines averaged 500,000 shekel (120,000 euro) per prisoner. All of this makes Israel’s colonial judicial system a central building block in the racialisation and economic exploitation of the Palestinians.
To conclude
Cohen and Gordon’s “Israel’s Bio-Spatial Politics” focuses on the Judaisation of space in both “good Israel” (the 1949 Armistice borders Israeli state) and “bad Israel” (colonised Palestine) but does not theorise race as “a technology for the management of human difference, the main goal of which is the production, reproduction and maintenance of white supremacy,” as argued by Alana Lentin. Focusing on demographic and “security” justifications for the spatial segregation between “Jews” and “Palestinians”, they do not theorise racial capitalism as a suitable framework for highlighting the concerns of Indigenous peoples under settler colonialism, the centrality of land fitting the emphasis in racial capitalism on dispossession, exploitation, and extraction.
As both Robinson and Wolfe argue, racial regimes require high maintenance and refurbishment. The Zionist racial regime is no different, and enlists Jewish religious myths, using Jewish racial supremacy and racial discrimination to grant Jews exclusive land and property rights, denied to Palestinians. The Zionist racial regime keeps reminding us of the European, civilised nature of the Zionist project. Thus, Israel’s president Isaac Herzog could argue in December 2023, two months into the Gaza genocide, that the Gaza “war” was intended to “save Western civilisation”.
Alana Lentin writes about Robinson’s emphasis on the interrelationship between race, Herrenvolk ideology and nationalism, which “helps explain both the expression of Zionism as a branch of European racial-colonialism and the succour it gives to European ethnonationalism which looks to Israel for inspiration in a move of perverse reversal.” Focusing on white Jewish supremacy as distinct from white supremacy tout court might be a step too far, but as Zionists mythologised European Jews as both descendants of ancient Hebrews and as European to the core, this meeting point between white supremacy and Jewish supremacy leads me to theorise Zionism as the Jewish variant of white European supremacy as property as I have attempted to argue.