Category: Race

Notes on Racial Capitalism and Palestine: Land, Labour and Jewishness as Property

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Ronit Lentin
Internal documents show Canadian tax agency protected Jewish National Fund from scrutiny | The Electronic Intifada

Haider Eid and Andy Clarno’s (2017) analyze Zionist apartheid as both a racialized and an economic regime; racial capitalism is central to understanding race and the question of Palestine relating to questions of land, labour and resources. Charisse Burden-Stelly (2020) theorizes US racial capitalism as “a racially hierarchical political economy constituting war and militarism, imperialist accumulation, expropriation by domination and labour superexloitation…and permanent war” (cited in Alana Lentin 2021), all key components of the Zionist colonization of Palestine.

While Clarno (2017) focuses his analysis of post-apartheid South Africa and post-Oslo Palestine/Israel on the neoliberalization of apartheid, racial capitalism was integral to Zionism since its inception, even though many founding Zionists saw themselves as socialists. The colonization of Palestine involved several aspects of racial capitalism including the judaization of Palestinian lands by the Zionist movement since the early twentieth century, and the segmentation of labour from the Zionist Conquest of (Hebrew) Labour policy (Shafir 1989) to the current reliance on cheap and dispensable Palestinian labour. I would also like to posit Israel’s racialized justice system and prison industrial complex and white European Jewishness as property as further aspects of racial capitalism. As David Lloyd and Patrick Wolfe (2016, 116) write, “to the extent that Israel’s regime in Palestine recapitulates and extends earlier models of settler colonial dispossession and domination, its function as a program for contemporary state forms not only supplies new technologies and practices of regulation and segregation but also highlights the continuities between the logics of settler colonialism and those of the neoliberal state globally” (cited in Turner, forthcoming).

The racialization of land

According to Cedric Robinson (1983), racial capitalism is a suitable framework for highlighting central concerns of Indigenous peoples under settler colonialism, as the centrality of land fits with the emphasis in racial capitalism on dispossession, exploitation and extraction. Although the Zionist project was not primarily driven by economic considerations of profit and resource exploitation, Patrick Wolfe (2016) speaks of “purchase by another means” as the modus of Zionist colonization.

According to Wolfe (2016, 22), Eurocolonial powers arrived in Native country ex nihilo condensing power and expanding violence, and this  pre-formedness, relatively resistant to local determinations, is colonalism’s preaccumulation, which is different from the European experience of primitive accumulation that figures in Eurocentric Marxist historiography. In arriving in Native country, capitalism already contained its own global preaccumulations, such as enslaving Africans in the Americas and purchasing, seizing and depopulating value-added Native land in Palestine. Insisting that “imperialism is not the latest stage of capitalism but its foundational warrant,” Zionism, Wolfe writes, consciously avoided confinement to a single metropolis in favour of a “collective mother country” (Rodinson 1973, 76), purchasing Native land in conformity with the law of the current imperial power. Brenna Bhandar (2018, 2) argues that property law, a crucial mechanism for the colonial accumulation of capital, and racial subjectivity developed in relation to one another, along racial regimes of ownership. Importantly, Wolfe (2016, 211) argues, Zionism’s diffuse metropolis and Jewish land purchases in Palestine were linked in that the former financed the latter. 

In 1901 the Zionist movement’s main institutional structure, the World Zionist Organization (WZO), founded the Jewish National Fund so as to extend Jewish land ownership in Palestine (Wolfe 2016, 224). Zionist land purchasing strategies attached usufruct – the right to enjoy the use of another’s property – to title, so that (Palestinian) vendors might sell a right that might not have been theirs to sell (Wolfe 2016, 231). The dual aim of the Zionist purchasing methods was “to 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” (Erakat 2015, 85).  By 2007 the JNF, a donation-based organization that green-washes its racialized land purchases by having planted millions of trees, built dams and reservoirs, developed many acres of land and established parks and nature reserves, owned 13 per cent of the total land in Israel (About JNF, n.d.), 80 per cent of which is owned by the state and managed by the Israel Land Authority. Half of these lands are controlled by the IDF and the security services (Shiefer and Oren 2008), facilitating the ongoing demolition of Palestinian houses and villages, and the expulsion of Palestinian citizens from their lands (see e.g., Boxerman 2022). Many JNF forests, where European conifers displaced native trees, were used to cover the ruins of depopulated Palestinian villages, making the JNF a key technology of Zionist colonization and racialization (Cohen and Gordon 2018).  

Key to Israel controlling Palestinian lands is the 1950 Absentee Property Law that enabled the state of Israel via the Custodian of Absentees’ property to take charge of lands, houses, bank accounts and movable properties belonging to Palestinians expelled after 29 November 1947 (Adalah 2017). As most land in Israel is either state- or JNF-owned, a major effect of racial capitalism on Jewish property and Palestinian deprivation is the prohibition of purchasing or leasing land by Palestinian citizens and occupied subjects (Safian 1997). 

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Sandwith Street: ‘Whiteness riots’ and ‘local’ white communities

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Ronit Lentin

The violent events in Dublin’s city centre on Friday 12 May 2023 when groups of Dublin based people set upon five hundred plus asylum seekers, forced to live in tents outside the International Protection Office in Sandwith Street, setting their belongings on fire and shouting racist abuse at them were very troubling indeed. Lawyer and activist Gary Daly, who came to stand in solidarity with the asylum seekers, wrote on his Facebook page that what was particularly disturbing was that “the people threatening extreme violence or calling all refugees ‘rapists’ sounded just like me. They were Dublin voices… I recognised the accents, but I was a stranger to the language used. Claiming that we (those standing between them and the homeless migrant camp on Sandwith Street) were all ‘anteefa’ or ‘government shills’ or ‘paid NGOs’. This language is imported only very recently from far-right America.”

Following the Ukraine refugee crisis, the number of people seeking international protection in Europe has grown exponentially. Ireland is currently housing 19,874 asylum seekers, including 4,139 children, in 172 locations around the country. This is a 90 per cent increase in a year and a 266 per cent increase since 2018. Although still high when compared with pre-2022 figures, the number of applications has gone down considerably in recent weeks according to data provided by the Department of Justice. 

The much-criticised Direct Provision system, inadequate as it was, and epitomising Ireland’s ‘asylum industrial complex’ whereby private landlords and hotel owners had been paid millions of euros to house thousands of asylum seekers by the government, that is, by Irish tax-payers, as Vukašin Nedeljković and I reported in Disavowing Asylum: Documenting Ireland’s Asylum Industrial Complex, is no longer able to cope. Hotel owners have reverted to the more profitable tourism business which the government prefers to nurture at the expense of accommodating applicants for international protection, and hotels are no longer available. Due to Ireland’s disastrous housing and homelessness crisis, the result is a huge shortage of accommodation to newly arriving asylum seekers, 580 of whom are currently camping on the streets of Dublin, some in tents outside the ironically named International Protection Office, where they have been subjected to appalling racism by what has been described by some activists as ‘fearful local working class communities’ rather than by white Irish racists.

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Ulysses, race and the new Bloomusalem

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Ronit Lentin

Paper presented at the Global Ulysses seminar, 14 June 2022

One of the Hebrew language books I took from my parents’ Haifa home when I came to Ireland with my late partner Louis Lentin was מלחמת האירים לעצמאותם –The Irish War for their Independence written by a Jewish emigrant from Ireland, one Efraim Schwartzman, who gifted it to my parents. He was my grandparents’ neighbour in the Jerusalem neighbourhood of Talpiot, in my native mandatory Palestine.

The book, published in 1947, is dedicated to Schwartzman’s sister and her family who were killed in the Romanian ghettos of Transnistria, where many members of my own Bucovina Jewish family had been exiled to during World War II.

These two serendipitous points – Schwarzman’s northern Romania Jewish family, and his Irish origins – must have been the fateful omens that led me to Ireland, a country I was barely aware of prior to meeting Louis in Israel television. Arriving in Dublin in 1969 – jumping from the Israel-Palestine frying pan to the Northern ‘Troubles’ fire – was made easier by taking Bloom as my flanneur-stroller guide through the estrangement of late sixties Catholic Irish society. Under Louis’s guidance I spent my first year – in a rented apartment in the ironically named Zion Road – reading Ulysses complete with guidebooks and concordances…

Irish Jews make great copy. After all, as the late David Marcus asks, ‘Who has ever heard of an Irish Jew?’ Schwartzman’s book deals only briefly with the history of the Jews in Ireland and came out after Bernard Shillman’s A Short History of the Jews in Ireland (1945). Since then there were quite a number of books, articles, theses and television documentaries about the Irish Jewish community. Quite apart from David Marcus himself who returned obsessively to what he called his hyphenated Jewish identity, in Next Year in Jerusalem (1954), A Land not Theirs (1986), Outobiography: Leaves from the Diary of a Hyphenated Jew (2001), and Buried Memories (2004), there were Louis Hyman’s The Jews of Ireland(1972), Dermot Keogh’s Jews in Twentieth-Century Ireland: Refugees, Anti-Semitism and the Holocaust (1998), Cormac O’Grada’s Jewish Ireland in the Age of Joyce: A Socioeconomic History (2006), Ray Rivlin’s Shalom Ireland: A Social History of the Jews in Modern Ireland (2003), Memory of an Irish Jew by Lionel Cohen, Rory Miller’s The Book of the Irish: Irish Jews and the Zionist Project, 1900-1948 (2011), and the outlying Irish Sephardim- A Memoir from Ireland’s Hidden Jews, by Kelly Gill Seymour (2016) – definitely not an exhaustive list. And I cannot count the number of times I have been asked for interviews for magazine articles, television programmes and postgraduate dissertations. So yes, Irish Jews are great copy, clearly a tradition established by Joyce.

I suppose I should have consulted Schwartzman’s book in writing my chapter. For instance his claim that the names of the first three Jewish people arriving in Ireland in the year 1600 after the expulsion from Spain were Freira and Faro – Murano Jews who had escaped the Spanish Inquisition and who registered as Protestants when they arrived yet continued to stealthily keep their Jewish religious customs. Indeed, many of the early Jews in Ireland were Sephardi – only later was the community made up of Lithuanian pogrom refugees. He also recounts that in 1689 forty five rich Jews contributed 45,000 pounds towards funding the English invasion of Ireland; and that the Jewish community in Dublin was the second largest in Britain after the expulsion of the Jews from Spain. He describes the Irish liberation movement’s sympathy for the Jewish people and cites the founder of the Zionist movement Theodor Herzl describing himself in a 1895 diary entry as the ‘Jewish people’s Parnell.’ But perhaps most sensationally, Schwarzman claims that Parnell’s mother Dalia Tudor came from a Jewish family, who had been exiled to Spain…

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