Table Of ContentFrom Shared Life
to Co-Resistance in
Historic Palestine
Critical Perspectives on Theory, Culture and Politics
Critical Perspectives on Theory, Culture and Politics is an interdisciplinary series, developed
in partnership with the Centre for Critical and Cultural Theory, which is based in the School
of English, Communication and Philosophy at Cardiff University, UK. The series focuses on
innovative research produced at the interface between critical theory and cultural studies. In
recent years much work in cultural studies has increasingly moved away from directly critical-
theoretical concerns. One of the aims of this series is to foster a renewed dialogue between
cultural studies and critical and cultural theory in its rich, multiple dimensions.
Series editors:
Glenn Jordan, Visiting Research Fellow, Cardiff School of
Journalism, Media and Cultural Studies, Cardiff University.
Former Director of Butetown History & Arts Centre.
Laurent Milesi, Reader in English, Communication and
Philosophy and Chair of the Centre for Critical and Cultural
Theory, Cardiff University.
Radhika Mohanram, Professor of English and Critical
and Cultural Theory, Cardiff University.
Chris Norris, Distinguished Research Professor, Cardiff University.
Chris Weedon, Professor Emerita and Honorary Chair, Centre for Critical and Cultural
Theory, Cardiff University.
Titles in the series:
Culture Control Critique: Allegories of Reading the Present, Frida Beckman
Prometheanism: Technology, Digital Culture and Human Obsolescence, Günther Anders and
Christopher John Müller, translated by Christopher John Müller
Creole in the Archive: Imagery, Presence and the Location of the Caribbean Figure, Roshini
Kempadoo
The Attention Economy: Labour, Time, and Power in Cognitive Capitalism, Claudio Celis
Performative Contradiction and the Romanian Revolution, Jolan Bogdan
Chinese Subjectivities and the Beijing Olympics, Gladys Pak Lei Chong
The Extreme in Contemporary Culture: States of Vulnerability, Pramod K. Nayar
Superpositions: Laruelle and the Humanities, edited by Rocco Gangle and Julius Greve
Credo Credit Crisis: Speculations on Faith and Money, edited by Laurent Milesi, Christopher
John Müller and Aidan Tynan
Materialities of Sex in a Time of HIV: The Promise of Vaginal Microbicides, Annette-Carina
van der Zaag
From Shared Life to Co-Resistance in Historic Palestine, Marcelo Svirsky and Ronnen Ben-Arie
Affective Connections: Towards a New Materialist Politics of Sympathy, Dorota Golańska
Homemaking: Radical Nostalgia and the Construction of a South Asian Diaspora, Anindya
Raychaudhuri (forthcoming)
Partitions and Their Afterlives: Violence, Memories, Living, edited by Radhika Mohanram and
Anindya Raychaudhuri (forthcoming)
Contested Borders: Queer Politics and Cultural Translation in Contemporary Francophone
Writing from the Maghreb, William J. Spurlin (forthcoming)
Archaeologies of the Instant: Essays on Hypermodernity and Seeing, edited by Peter R.
S edgwick and Damian Walford Davies (forthcoming)
From Shared Life
to Co-Resistance in
Historic Palestine
Marcelo Svirsky
and Ronnen Ben-Arie
Published by Rowman & Littlefield International Ltd
Unit A, Whitacre Mews, 26–34 Stannary Street, London SE11 4AB
www.rowmaninternational.com
Rowman & Littlefield International Ltd. is an affiliate of Rowman & Littlefield
4501 Forbes Boulevard, Suite 200, Lanham, Maryland 20706, USA With
additional offices in Boulder, New York, Toronto (Canada), and Plymouth (UK)
www.rowman.com
Copyright © 2018 by Marcelo Svirsky and Ronnen Ben-Arie
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any
electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems,
without written permission from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote
passages in a review.
British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
ISBN: HB 978-1-78348-963-3
PB 978-1-78348-964-0
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Available
ISBN 978-1-78348-963-3 (cloth : alk. paper)
ISBN 978-1-78348-964-0 (pbk. : alk. paper)
The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of
American National Standard for Information Sciences – Permanence of Paper
for Printed Library Materials, ANSI/NISO Z39.48–1992.
Printed in the United States of America
Dedicated to our parents,
For their love
To Ruth and Zvi
and
Berta and Gideon
Contents
Foreword by Raef Zreik ix
Acknowledgments xiii
Introduction 1
1 Formulating the Problems 3
2 Shared Life in Palestine 47
3 Palestine and the Settler Colonial Paradigm 131
4 Co-Resistance 149
Bibliography 167
Index 183
About the Authors 191
vii
Foreword
One of the positive side effects of the failure of the Oslo process is that it
forces us to deal with the roots of the problem, and with what came to be
known as the Palestinian-Israeli conflict.
More and more people acknowledge that the issue goes beyond the ques-
tion of the 1967 occupation, and that the ‘conflict’ dates back to the events of
the Nakba, and even before that: to the Zionist settler project half a century
before the Nakba, and which the Nakba was partially one of its outcomes.
The failure of the Oslo process and the world of concepts that accompanied
and nourished it had opened the door for an alternative approach towards the
issue. No wonder that, in the recent years, we are witnessing a revival of the
settler colonial paradigm becoming the conceptual lens through which we can
conceptualise the situation in Israel-Palestine. At the heart of this approach is
the growing understanding that what we really need is a process of decolo-
nisation that could transform the reality in Palestine-Israel and offer a new
horizon for the relationships between settlers and natives, which can end the
relations of supremacy, subjugation, domination and dispossession and could
in fact transcend the dichotomy itself. This book is an added and brave effort
in this alternative literature.
The book offers theoretical and political insights as well. The point of
departure is the settler colonial paradigm as has been developed by prominent
authors like Patrick Wolfe and Lorenzo Veracini, and while it adopts some
of the main tenants such as the ‘logic of elimination’, and ‘settler colonial-
ism is structure not just an event’, the book problematises and enriches this
framework by engaging creatively with its theses, and by offering a rela-
tional approach that perceives identities as something that is being made and
remade through mutual interactions between different groups, concepts and
processes.
ix
