Abstract
This essay discusses settler-colonialism in Palestine and the world system during late neocolonialism. It offers a materialist methodology for interpreting settler-colonial social formations, showing the linkage between settler-colonialism, class, imperialism, and world accumulation. It then considers how race continues to structure local reactions and condition local and international attempts at transformation. It concludes with some reflections on contemporary orientations to Palestine in the periphery, especially within racialized social formations.
Introduction
The term settler-colonialism is now widely used to interpret contemporary social formations. The concept’s use increased further amidst the 2023–2024 Israeli genocidal counterinsurgency to eradicate the political and social bases of national liberation in the Gaza Strip. The settler-colonial analysis has been useful in restoring the demand for decolonization to the political agenda, bringing Zionism into question, and building alliances between Palestine and Indigenous struggles and has been a potent radicalizer around Palestine and within, and against, enduring settler-colonial formations like the United States, Canada, and Australia.
There is general agreement that settler-colonialism is linked to land, the category of Indigenous, and to “elimination,” and that it is a continuous structure and not a one-off event (Wolfe, 2006). It is usually considered as a sub-type of colonialism. Yet, although use is frequent, the theory—meant to shine a light on the logic of historical processes—often fails to illuminate fully all the contours of settler-colonialism, an opacity likewise present in discussions around colonialism and coloniality. This is so due to a variety of ideological deviations, which have brought the term far from its origins in the national liberation movements. First, epistemic variations on decoloniality and decolonization often dominate (Jha et al., 2020). Second, colonialism and settler-colonialism are reified, treated as abstractions (e.g., Clarno, 2017) to then be “combined” with an abstract (sometimes racial) capitalism, rather than understanding settler-colonialism as a political, social, and economic form which is part of the history of capitalist expansion (McMichael, 2004). Third, settler-colonialism is seen as occurring in self-contained national spaces (McMichael, 1990). Fourth, national liberation is mostly absent from theorizing (Ajl, 2024a; Barakat, 2018; Salamanca et al., 2012). Fifth, there is a blurring between neocolonialism and colonialism, part of broader confusion around the political sovereignty regime (Ajl, 2024b; Moyo & Yeros, 2011), including rampant hostility to the state. 1 Sixth, the category of Indigenous is essentialized, robbed of class divisions (for exceptions, see Curley, 2018; Rabie, 2021), and separated from questions of political sovereignty in situations of clear colonial control, to suppress entirely an older debate about national and repressed minorities within postcolonial nation-states. As a result, imperialism remains invisible, and class and its relationship to imperialism, on the one hand, and the national struggle, on the other, are often absent. The international alliance system supporting the Palestinians is generally dismissed. In turn, the strategy of decolonization often remains opaque, or indeed deliberately obscured, in part through disinterest in casting light on the demands of the national liberation forces, ignoring them, or condemning them. 2
This essay aims to deepen understanding of settler-colonialism in Palestine and more broadly by linking it to global accumulation and imperialism, and their racialized character in national-level social formations. The article proceeds by, first, recuperating older world-historical and materialist methodologies for understanding settler-colonialism. It does so by re-reading the works of Amílcar Cabral, Ghassan Kanafani, and Utsa and Prabhat Patnaik, which, while foregrounding the national question, keep imperialism and class in view as well. The second section elaborates the moments and trajectories of settler-colonialism in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. During the modern period, it examines Palestine as a prism through which to read world-historical dynamics, including the social bases of fascism and reaction, pro-systemic orientations within core, peripheral, and semiperipheral social formations and examines how race and settler-colonialism continue to structure world property relations. Finally, it traces antisystemic attributes of contemporary struggles against settler-colonialism and the property relations it left behind after the implementation of formal equality before the law, in Zimbabwe, South Africa, and Latin America, and orientations to Palestine within those states and regions.
Settler-colonialism: Methodological Notes
As a modern phenomenon, settler-colonialism has been part of the expansion of capitalism on a world scale, polarized accumulation, the racialized distribution of development, and the genocides which underpinned that spatial broadening and deepening. As a social-historical process—rather than an abstraction—settler-colonialism is marked by wide-scale capitalist alienation of land from its previous inhabitants. Such colonies, Cabral reminds us, caused varying levels of destruction of the pre-existing population, ranging from their total devastation with population substitution from Europe or elsewhere; their destruction only in part, paired with a lesser or greater “influx” of exterior populations, or their “apparent conservation” alongside policies of Bantustanization, with “massive implantation” of exterior populations. Cabral identified the latter two types as prevalent in Africa (1979, pp. 128–129). He considered this type of colonialism, or “classical” colonialism, part of a broader “imperialist domination,” following Lenin’s notion of imperialism as the monopoly stage of capitalism, and showing how poor Portugal was practically a satrap of the broader British Empire (Cabral, 1974, pp. 10–12). Furthermore, Cabral analyzed the internal social structure in Guinea, to show which classes were allied to colonialism, their orientation to the national liberation struggle, and their potential for supporting post-independence revolutionary reconstruction (Cabral, 1974, pp. 47–51). Finally, he considered Guinea–Bissau’s liberation struggle unintelligible outside of the broader struggle for Communism inaugurated by the Bolshevik Revolution and the even wider struggle against foreign domination in Africa and elsewhere (Cabral, 1974, pp. 11–15, 33, 38).
We may make five points. First, Cabral’s understanding was materialist (El Nabolsy, 2019). This did not mean putting class ahead of nation, but rather understanding the role of different forces in a colonized social formation in a national liberation struggle—an approach rare in contemporary settler-colonial studies. Second, Cabral’s notions of oppression and liberation were neither reduced to nor locked in a national box. As the world-system was global, struggles for rupture were national, regional, and international at the same time. Third, the anticolonial struggle, which for Cabral was more important and decisive for humanity’s future than the Communist achievements in imperial Russia, was nonetheless linked to that achievement: each component bearing a different load in the broader edifice of liberation. Fourth, Cabral was not concerned with erecting a narrow and logically pure concept of settler colonies—for example, those which were the fruit of the overwhelming destruction of the population. He was, primarily, trying to conceptualize the “effects of imperialist domination on the social structure and historical process of our peoples” and its implications for the national liberation struggle (Cabral, 1979, pp. 128–129). Fifth, he was concerned with sketching a pliable, practice-oriented typology into which the great bulk of experiences of colonialism could fit, precisely in order—as was the order of the day in the high noon of the worldwide national liberation struggles—to knit together, intellectually and theoretically, struggles which politically and militarily were bound in their battles against the common enemy of Euro-American colonialism. These colonies were largely what Utsa and Prabhat Patnaik term “colonies of settlement.” To the extent they were marked by significant population transfers from Europe, they were the child of the capitalist destruction of pre-capitalist petty production in Europe, where land inhabited by the pre-existing populations served as a steam valve to release the built-up population pressure on land with attendant downward pressure on wages. That is, one of the components of imperialism—the social formations and political processes that composed it as a world-spanning historical fabric—was the genocidal destruction and landed settlement within, primarily, temperate zones—the United States, Australia, New Zealand, Canada, the southern reaches of South America such as Chile, Argentina, and southern Brazil (Patnaik & Patnaik, 2016, pp. 147–149), and to a lesser extent, Rhodesia, South Africa, and Tunisia and Algeria. The settler populations in those arenas not only, perforce, adopted genocidal ideologies (Drinnon, 1997) which would later be revamped and redeployed as part of genocidal US counterinsurgency in Southeast Asia. They would also benefit from the bargaining power of the white proletariat from their parent nations, a benefit which did not accrue to Black or Indigenous populations (Fields & Fields, 2014; Gill, 2021), and who would, perforce, be the primary victims of primitive accumulation on a world scale (Moura, 1994; Rodney, 2018). Portions of such zones, later, became recipients of massive amounts of capital re-exported from South Asia.
This capital was a hinge, linking what the Patnaiks conceptualized as “colonies of settlement,” where settlers arrived bearing immense power and in comparatively larger numbers, with “colonies of conquest,” marked by militarized occupation, land take-over, and accumulation through labor exploitation, primarily in agriculture or mining. Within the latter colonies, relatively small percentages of settlers arrived—0.3% in the case of the British Raj. The peasantry lingered, although often losing its rights to land, and becoming “inferior tenants.” It was not supplanted, but was forced to produce crops, such as jute, spices, or coffee, which went to feed the metropolis. These were appropriated through complex mechanisms of colonial taxation, which had the effect of “resetting” the indigenous productive system at successively lower levels, while leading to declining food grain absorption—a process with parallels and discontinuities with the phenomenon of de-development (Kadri, 2014; Patnaik & Patnaik, 2021; Roy, 2016). These colonies were major sources of the wealth systematically siphoned by the metropolis (Karmakar, 2004). Three methodological notes are in order. First, colonialism in the “colonies of conquest” was a process of imperialist domination linked to the constitution of the world system, and not reducible to any single mover. Second, economics, politics, and ideology constituted a whole. Third, colonies of conquest and colonies of settlement were not isolated, but interlocking gears driving the juggernaut of imperialist domination.
One gear of that apparatus was Palestine, a political reference for Cabral. It is one of the remaining areas under settler-colonial control, and for over half a century, Arab theorists have used that framework to interpret their reality (Jabbour, 1970; Sayegh, 2012). As we shall see, this was a loose framing device, rather than a Procrustean bed, and tied most closely to the usurpation of land and the rapid dismantling of an entire society. 3 While many early Arab interpretations of that assault immediately focused on the need for rapid modernization to overcome the defeat (Zurayq, 1948), a later generation of theorists turned to a fine-grained class analysis to examine the bases of Palestinian and broader Arab inability to confront the Israeli-imperialist threat (Higgins, 2023). It was in this context that Kanafani explored the building blocks of settler-colonialism in a national environment: that of Palestine. He uses the term “settlers” repeatedly, alongside “settler entity” and “settler society” (Kanafani, 1972). For him, the creation of the settler entity relied on “European Jewish capital” alongside whatever social contradictions in Europe which birthed a Jewish proletariat. At the same time, he noted that much of the “proletariat,” having arrived with considerable resources, were in fact capitalists. Aggressive land purchase was one of three forks of a trident upon which the “Palestinian rural masses” were impaled: “Zionist invasion, Arab feudal ownership of the land and the heavy taxes imposed by the British Mandatory Government” (Kanafani, 1972). Settler-colonialism was the political framework wherein class interests found their expression: different proletariats warred, different agricultural classes battled, and the Arab small landowners and urban “middle bourgeoisie” were threatened by encroaching Jewish capital. For Kanafani, settler-colonialism structured the objective oppressions and the subjective awareness of those oppressions. The poor people of the countryside, although targeted by class and even gender (al-Saleh, 2022), were mainly aware of the national challenge. In order to buy arms, they sold their lands to larger landholders, many of whom were, in turn, a conveyor belt for passing on the land to Jewish capital. The nationalist dimension of the challenge helped feudal elements within Palestinian society partially to control the nationalist movement. Based on this analysis, Kanafani showed how the Palestinian poor and, therefore, the Palestinian national question, as seen from a national-popular perspective, had to contend during that period and into the 1970s with the combined forces of imperialism, world Zionism, and Arab reaction, which Cabral might have identified as neocolonialism (Kanafani, 2024).
Thus, for Cabral and the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP), their notions of settlement were linked to the double-faced role of the domestic ruling class, capable of betraying the working-class majority of the nation economically, while politically even leading it sometimes. They saw the need for class analysis within the nation—like Cabral, they saw the danger of unalloyed nationalism. And they saw clearly that the allies of the Palestinian popular classes were regional, including within the Arab state-system itself (PFLP, 1969). Thus, while deploying settler-colonialism as a looser heuristic device and keeping in front of them the colonial contradiction, they embedded it analytically in a world-system, wherein class, imperialism, and the Arab state-system needed theorization, in order to be built into the liberation strategy.
Periodization of Theories
These modes of thought were linked to, or emerged from, lineages of antisystemic practice which upheld the national liberation movements of the 1960s and 1970s. Their earlier and contemporary uses were tied to aspirations for state sovereignty, national independence, the consummation of the worldwide political sovereignty regime and for
The first “wave” of settler decolonization emerged as part of the defeat of the European empires and was the fruit of the anticolonial and Marxist-Leninist revolutionary movements which blossomed in the second half of the twentieth century. Throughout the 1950s–1980s, struggles against settler-colonialism in Africa and Asia largely succeeded in creating a framework for political sovereignty for the majority populations, although sometimes at the expense of maintaining settler property relations, and usually defeated in attempting socialist construction and national liberation, leading to neocolonial outcomes.
This wave, bolstered by the revolution in Cuba and the people’s war of liberation and socialist construction in China (Ajl, 2025), set the groundwork for re-thinking racialized power in a postcolonial era. Having consummated the basic framework of political sovereignty, theorists had seen history happen. They saw what a categorical rupture with monopoly control looked like, illuminating one path to one future. And they saw what a relapse into monopoly control on the other looked like too—another path into another future, one of renewed servitude, as Cabral pointed to in his comments on Nkrumah and at the Tricontinental (Cabral, 1979, pp. 114–123). Indeed, these works by African scholars provided the foundational analysis of neocolonialism, later enriched by dependency work of various stripes in Latin America and the Caribbean, on semifeudal and semicolonial outcomes in Southeast Asia, and Arab–North African core-periphery analysis. The fall of the USSR cast a pall over worldwide thinking about the past, present, and future. In turn, a process of intellectual “structural adjustment” took place, causing a rupture with the Third World traditions of the 1960s–1980s, as in equal measure universities were gutted and horizons of hope seemed to collapse worldwide (Ajl, 2021; Jha et al., 2020; Moyo & Chambati, 2013). These “readjustments” set the stage for a worldwide disenchantment with liberation traditions within Marxism, with the pathologies taking various forms worldwide (Ahmad, 1997; Womack, 2005), and Marxism generally sterilized, leaving behind barrenly Eurocentric and economistic forms (Moyo et al., 2013), with small lanterns of liberation thought scattered across the tri-continent and even more scarcely, in the Euro-American core.
The second birth of settler-colonial analysis was partly contiguous and partly novel, emerging, and flourishing, in the late 1990s, alongside burgeoning struggles for equity, recognition, justice, and decolonization among those colonized or stigmatized within settler and nonsettler nation-states—the indigenous question, with its own complex relationship to Marxism and Marxist governments (Coulthard, 2014; Dunbar-Ortiz, 2016). On the one hand, Indigenous-oriented popular movements like the Zapatistas made land claims (Bellamy, 2021; Raymundo, 2024). On the other, fora which raised indigenous concern emerged globally, partially as a correction of the defencism and revisionism in the Soviet and Bandung projects, and often against the headwind of settler-colonial states which did not wish to accept or even acknowledge the claims of their national minorities. Furthermore, it emerged in the wake of the rise of “human rights” in general and Indigenous rights in particular, and after the Latin American bloodbath against the Left. Studies of peasants as a class receded and claims as Indigenous emerged as a ground to make claims for redistributive justice “with the help of anthropologists and NGOs” (Fabricant & Postero, 2017, p. 130). 4 Finally, the analysis re-emerged during an anti-Communist post-Soviet moment amidst rising suspicion of the party-form and the nation-state as organizational practices and political horizons. More and more, the use of the term “Indigenous” grew, not just in its traditional heartlands like the Canadian and US settler-states, but furthermore elsewhere such as in Palestine, where although the term might have had historical relevance, the argot of Arab nationalism was a more dominant category of practice. 5 As with the ambiguities of the broader “alter-globalization” movement alongside which they had emerged, these movements’ hostility to state power created openings for redirection in the service of balkanization, partition, and destabilization in the Third World or non-Western states (see, e.g., Byler, 2022).
Alongside this evacuation and denudation and denial of even the existence of these older traditions (Coulthard, 2019) and rising radical interest in Indigenous struggles (Estes, 2019), a second stage in settler-colonial analysis emerged. This work was, on the one hand, rooted in a loose materialism and reacting to the alleged indifference of postcolonial theory to settler-colonialism—there is little need to dwell here on the incongruence of this position with Cabral’s typologies, or Fanon’s work, which was grounded in the struggles against landed settlement in Algeria and Tunisia (Wolfe, 1999, p. 1ff), which Wolfe labeled “colonies with settlers” (Kauanui & Wolfe, 2012). This second stage shared with the first an emphasis on prevailing and racialized property structures and the importance of the alienation of land from the Indigenous inhabitants. Yet the second stage essentially focused on cases where destruction of the Indigenous population had been far more profound, as in the temperate zones of the Americas and the antipodes.
It therefore turned an outcome, namely catastrophic destruction of the previous population, into the essence of the theory, emphasizing teleological elimination, most famously associated with Wolfe (Ajl, 2023). Yet, the Weberian and Maussian mode based on “ideal types” often is now used to create parallels between situations which, while they have important similarities, also have important differences. For example, the parallel or analogy between the United States and Israel has often gone far afield with baleful implications for movement practices, not because the similarities are unimportant—catastrophic destruction of the previous population—but because the differences are critical.
Illustratively, as Lila Abu-Lughod (2020, p. 3) writes with what seems an excess of contempt for the older struggles for national liberation,
[i]nstead of the well-worn comparisons with the imperial powers of the colonial/post-colonial canon—the French, the British, or the Dutch—or with the anti-colonial struggles that emerged in response, struggles that presumed national liberation to be the goal, anticolonial nationalism to be the ideology, and political solidarities to lie with Third World anti-imperial struggles, the references now privilege Indigenous and First Nation peoples.
She is entirely correct, and the references to the Indigenous built important political bridges. Yet it has never been shown—it is rather implied—why national liberation ought to have been discarded, anticolonial nationalism to be dismissed, and political solidarities with Third World states irrelevant. Indeed, such talk, which builds some bridges only by burning others, can only be sustained by ignoring the Palestinian national movement and its factions, and by spurning or demeaning their political alliances (indeed, it remains subject to accusations of “campism” to point out that Syria and Iran arm and provide logistical routes for the Palestinian militia and their allies), and ignoring the foreign policies of Syria and Iran in favor of a focus on class structures within national borders, an economism that foregoes any analysis of the world-system, or reduces it to geo-politics, as though stable state structures or political institutions are not conditions for working-class human flourishing, or states are not necessary military corridors for a broader armed resistance project (see, e.g., Mogannam, 2022; for a corrective, Ajl, 2024b).
Indeed, parallels focused exclusively on indigeneity have been used to paint China, Russia, and the United States as analogous social formations by dint of their oppression of national minorities, a claim which cannot sustain any serious examination, and which, indeed, only works by holding history as a constant. 6 Furthermore, these parallels have tended to foreclose consideration of the Arab national question and Arab–Iranian strategic, material, and logistic depth when it comes to Palestine, to the point that contemporary anti-Zionist academia will literally not mention the forces which support the Palestinian armed struggle, or label them, in words endorsed by David Harvey, as “sub-imperialism” (Collective, 2019), and accordingly tend to underplay, if not effectively endorse imperialism. They also fail to bring into view the Western urgency to defend the existing property structures, as with the sanctions regime on Zimbabwe for its radical antiracist agrarian reform, or that Israel is an outpost of US imperialism, a point erased or denied in most modern anti-Zionist scholarship—helping constitute an anti-Zionism shorn of anti-imperialism.
This chapter now turns to the landscape of remaining racialized or settler-colonial social formations in a late neocolonial moment. In so doing, the chapter highlights the importance of racialized power, while re-working—rather than discarding—emphases on land, class, and imperialism, and accordingly the centrality of national liberation in challenging these structures of power.
Late Neocolonialism: Three Settler Trajectories
The late neocolonial regime (Yeros & Jha, 2020) is marked above all not merely by the perseverance of worldwide accumulation and continued foreign monopoly control over the productive forces. It is also marked by the continuance—although embattled by wars (Kadri, 2023) and sanctions (Doutaghi & Mullin, 2022)—of the worldwide political sovereignty regime, the achievement of the national liberation struggles. Geopolitically, it is marked by the demise of Bandung, the fall of the USSR, the economic rise and partial re-incorporation of China, and the existence of industrial plants in large peripheries/semiperipheries within the world-system. Furthermore, late peripheral neocolonialism has been coupled with worldwide neoliberalism, including escalating value transfer from the peripheries alongside reduced compensation to the core working classes. Direct kinetic and proxy wars in the periphery have escalated, alongside strategies of tension exacerbated by US mediatic and logistical strategies. Furthermore, the peripheral bourgeoisie have succumbed to full-on compradorization, alongside the deterioration of nationalism. The social accompaniments have been deepened rural flight, increased vulnerable and informal employment, widespread crisis of social reproduction (Ossome & Naidu, 2021), and, finally, generalized semiproletarianization.
Remaining settler-property relations on a world-scale remained a structuring element of neoliberalism in core and periphery alike, with outcomes linked to the trajectories of struggle within each nation-state and the place of each within the world-system. One trajectory was whitewashing of settler-property relations through formal democratic institutions—which always threatened to become a mechanism for redistribution—as occurred in Namibia, South Africa, or New Zealand. A second outcome has been the move to formal political democracy, and a second move to a radicalization which threatened settler property structures, as in Bolivia, Ecuador, or Venezuela, or the most radical post-Soviet agrarian reform: Zimbabwe. A third trajectory is enduring settler-colonialism crystallized in political structures, where the Indigenous population remains under the boot of entrenched, militarized, or genocidal settler-capitalist regimes (New Caledonia, the United States, Canada, Australia, and above all Israel).
We now elaborate on each trajectory. First, formal-democratic decolonization from above, with unchanged property structures. For example, in South Africa, by the late 1980s, there was partial industrialization, a subimperialist role throughout southern Africa, amidst apartheid, settler colonialism, and racial capitalism, which suppressed the wages of the Black population, a tool to gather land within the hands of the elite, and generally juridically defend a racialized capitalist distribution of the productive forces (Gleijeses, 2013). The liberation struggles—region-wide armed national movements—fought against these systems and had a curious noon precisely at the dusk of the Soviet Union and the space for antisystemic mobilization and the normative framework for distribution it had set in place. Thus, democratic transitions were partially pacted, with class compromises where the national question and the demand for formal political democracy took pride of place over demands for social and economic transition, as articulated in the Freedom Charter for South Africa, for example. Indeed, at these moments of decolonization—furiously internally contested—white power remained nearly untouched at the economic level. Yet formal decolonization opened space for internal struggles for change, as with the Economic Freedom Fighters in South Africa.
The second trajectory is that of political sovereignty opening the way to radicalization. Within Latin America, settler decolonization (Yeros & Gissoni, 2024) left in place highly racialized distributions of landed property, alongside primitive accumulation of labor through enslavement (in Brazil) or highly restrictive labor arrangements of the Indigenous (in the Andes). In all cases, the agrarian structure was based on primitive accumulation of land. Later, the settlers would carry out a racial project of industrial development based on an intra-class project subtended by a racialized agrarian structure (Gissoni et al., 2024). In Central America, this led to genocidal counterinsurgencies when the Indigenous population challenged the existing distribution of land. Even within moderate populist states such as Lula’s Brazil, the efforts of the Workers’ Party to open the university network to the Black population met with white backlash. And yet further, in several cases—Bolivia, Ecuador, and Venezuela—radicalized forces took state power and tried to dismantle the racial structure of the state, and the nationally raced distribution of the means of production. In nearly every case of the phenomenon of state radicalization, and with lights and shadows, agrarian reform was on the agenda as they were practically alone in challenging at the state level the legacy of settler-decolonization. And furthermore, in the case of Hugo Chávez in Venezuela and Evo Morales in Brazil, the simple fact of a person of clear Black and/or Indigenous lineage entering castles of the state from which they had theretofore been excluded challenged the native ruling classes, leading to racist revanchism (Salas, 2005). Another radicalization of the political sovereignty regime occurred in Zimbabwe, where the war veterans and slum-dwellers converged around demands for land, leading to radical agrarian reform.
A third settler outcome has been the hardened settler-colonial states of the temperate core and Israel. Within these states, primitive accumulation of Indigenous land still continues through cuts away from Indigenous land rights, as in Canada and the United States, alongside demographic warehousing: the reservation system. A cultural facet of this economic form is settler self-expiation, which does not question these social formations’ distribution of land rights but acknowledges their sordid past. 7 Israel, however, has only partially had such an opening, through its “New Historians” (Beinin, 2005), because it is comparatively the least consolidated settler-colonial regime outcome, where in concert with its imperial patron it engages in constant primitive accumulation through the settlement project in the West Bank and the Golan Heights. When “cold” methods of settler-capitalist containment (Abdo, 2014) and conflict management fail, as in the post-2006, and even more so in the post-2008 Gaza Strip, Israel turns to hard methods of counterinsurgency. Within that counterinsurgent paradigm, Israel prefers “mowing the lawn”: deplete guerrilla arms reserves and manpower capacity, re-instill deterrence, and possibly seek out logistical and technological capacities (Ajl, 2014). In turn, when that option has failed, as has occurred in 2023–2024, the state turns to yet-harder options: genocide, the logical outcome of a counterinsurgent practice when counterinsurgency is unable to effectively return to containment (Ahmad, 1971; Ajl, 2024c).
Settler-colonialism Within and Across the Neocolonial Order
Within the neocolonial world order—that is, with Northern monopoly control still with an iron grip on the greater share of peripheral productive forces—settler-colonialism remains critical to structuring and legitimization of the world-system. Surviving settler states provide the containers for capitalism and imperialism to organize fascist or social-chauvinist movements, as with Israel and domestic Zionist movements in the United States. Furthermore, the eclectic and genocidal mix of white supremacy, defense of extant property relations, support for imperialism, and ideologies of nativism and cleansing find particular support in the remaining high-development index settler colonies of advanced capitalism (e.g., Trump’s support base). Elsewhere, neo-fascist ideologies and parties of the far right are on the rise across the capitalist core, with the hard right within Germany or France equally devoted to Israel.
Palestine and Israel, however, also provide synecdoches of the broader support for, or opposition to, the racial allocation of class power on a world-scale, and remain compasses for the world’s national liberation struggles. Indeed, settler-colonialism goes beyond the material, the land, to its symbolism for capitalist property relations and white racial power, because of the brutality of the Zionist colonial practice and its role as a worldwide Sparta for imperialism and reaction. The global right—in fact, a frequent source of antisemitic politics—has taken pains to pay fealty to Israeli settler-colonialism upon assuming office, understanding Israel as a key component of and symbol of the global class war, repression against internal minorities or other oppressed people, and a defense of a racially coded property structure. This has been a way of paying the dues of a vassal to the United States and the global capitalist order which the United States superintends, bodyguards, and within which it is the major repository of accumulation. Thus, Milei in Argentina, or Bolsonaro in Brazil, hastened to support Israel as they came to power.
Finally, within international fora where the national question comes into sharp relief, support for Israel and resistance to acknowledgment of, or reparation for, the colonial legacy meld into one unit. One example of this was the Durban process, when in the heat of the Second Intifada, the 2001 World Conference against Racism demanded reparations for slavery and colonialism and insisted that Zionism was a form of racism. In fact, the history of that equation within the UN system is a vignette which perfectly captures the centrality of Israel to the symbolic economy of racial power. At that conference, they re-raised the equation of Zionism = Racism, engraved in a 1975 United Nations Resolution when the Eastern Bloc and Arab republics could act backstopped by the Non-Aligned Movement (Dinkel, 2018, pp. 192–193). The resolution was repealed in 1991 amidst the fall of the USSR. It then re-emerged in Durban where the newly politically decolonized South Africa hosted the UN World Conference against Racism. The Palestine question became a pretext for the United States and Israel to leave the conference, foreclosing any pressure to confront the broader colonial and racial order upon which the United States was built.
Furthermore, unwillingness to embrace clearly a national liberation politics is not merely a politic of the Right. It is one of the Left in the Euro-American core, which too frequently remains unable to take a clear stand in support of national sovereignty and anticolonialism. For example, one of the first moves of Alexis Tsipras as SYRIZA came to power in Greece and as he signaled that he wished to play ball with the Troika and essentially surrender to European (German and secondarily French) monopoly capital was to visit Israel, calling Greece the former’s “friend.” Elsewhere, Leandros Fischer (2024, p. 14), in a special issue of [a]s a misguided response to real-existing antisemitism … while frequently the Palestinian struggle was simplistically framed as merely one of state-centered territorial national liberation, with the far more complex mechanisms of settler-colonial oppression—themselves justified with the experience of European antisemitism—left largely ignored.
What Fischer terms “simplistic” is, essentially, the position of the Palestinian national liberation movement, although with due attention to the other global forces of oppression including global Zionism and Arab reaction (PFLP, 1969). Understanding more “complex” mechanisms of “settler colonial oppression” may add to comprehension, but they do not dilute the correctness of the “simplistic … fram[ing].” Such pleas for complexity against an exterminationist military occupation generally militate against clarity with respect to alignment with the resistance project. And they are more or less the norm, certainly accepted, within a wide range of German and mainstream US left politics, 8 where denunciations of Hamas for irrational violence, or practicing a cousin of European genocidal antisemitism, are frequent (Omar, 2023). Elsewhere, for example, Perry Anderson writes of Hamas’s “pretensions of resistance”—in fact, what was clearly the build-up of a massive arsenal to confront Israel, which Hamas unleashed on October 7, 2023, while dismissing each stage of Palestinian political organizing as suffering from “ruinous leadership,” with Hamas “putting religion before democracy,” and cast as “bigots” (Anderson, 2015, pp. 32–37). Here, Anderson—in the historical magazine of the British left—is so hostile to Palestinian nationalism that he could not see, circa 2015, that Hamas had in fact constituted through blood and cave-ins a rapidly professionalizing guerilla army, nor that it had been the main enemy of ISIS-style sectarian preachers in the Gaza Strip, and that neither Hamas, Fateh under Arafat, Islamic Jihad, or the PFLP were in any way “ruinous” but rather confronted with a situation that—until October 7—it seemed impossible to challenge meaningfully but wherein, nevertheless, they had successfully organized their people to prevent extermination and final defeat. These positions, then—primarily in the North—are essentially hostile to national liberation, and under the shadow of the “terror lists” which function to silo political struggles and exiles from their homelands (Kates, 2014; Nabulsi, 2024), threaten to reduce struggle to abstraction.
Nor has such flabbiness on the national question been restricted to Palestine. In Zimbabwe, after an antiracist agrarian reform which redistributed land from white settlers to Black slum-dwellers, rural laborers, and nearly landless farmers (Moyo, 2011), there was wide-scale reaction from neocolonial powers on a world scale (Mararike, 2019) with severe impacts on Zimbabwean development efforts and popular well-being (Ogbonna, 2017). Once again, it was not merely the Right but the Left which was unable to clearly defend national sovereignty and self-determination and the forces defending them. Nearly the entire ranks of the progressive intelligentsia within the West closed ranks around white agrarian landed power, questioning the agrarian reform in Zimbabwe on a smorgasbord of pretexts, ranging from democracy to the relative productivity of white versus Black farmers (Moyo & Yeros, 2007). Zimbabwe remains nearly erased from the current global discussion around food sovereignty, despite being this century’s most radical land to the tiller agrarian reform, and the sanctions’ regime enjoys a conspiracy of near-silence within the Western left. Can this be interpreted outside the ambit of defense of white property relations? Indeed, the Northern left broadly supported or maintained a strategic silence on the sanctions, or called them, in Patrick Bond’s (2007, p. 3) words, “mythical,” often choosing to align with white capitalist power under discourses of “democracy” or against “corruption.”
9
The Zimbabwe question—as with Palestine—arguably, because it brought the national question to the forefront, articulated in the argot of a specifically
We now turn from the meaning of settler-colonialism to capital, to the meaning of national liberation to antisystemic movements on a world scale. First, there are the struggles against settler-colonialism. While these have been easier to co-opt in the settler-capitalist heartlands like the United States and Canada rather than Palestine, they have also been among the most potent challenges and activators to the global distribution of wealth. Within the United States, the American Indian Movement, or other challenges to the United States as a settler-capitalist landed empire, such as the various agrarian forms of Black nationalism, faced white-hot scorching by the counterinsurgency apparatus of the settler-capitalist states (Onaci, 2020). More recently, in a more complicated episode, the anti-settler-colonial revolts within the United States have been activating points for antisystemic resistance on a national scale, as at Standing Rock. (They have also been talking points or touchstones easily fetishized by imperialist social democrats like Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez.) Similarly,
Yet, it is not the extant settler-colonial capitalist property structures within the capitalist core, and the challenges to them, that have illuminated the contours and textures of global imperialism in the clearest relief, but those in the Third World. It is significant that the major challenges to the existing system over the last two decades have, in a wide variety of registers, contested white capitalist property relations. In Bolivia and Venezuela, racialized lumpen-proletariat or semiproletarianized sectors of Indigenous or Indigenous–Black ancestry elected radical-populist leaders whose very presence in the castles of the state challenged, if only symbolically, the racialized dispensation of social power. Furthermore, even with the limits and tragedies and reversals of those experiments, it is notable that support for the Palestinian struggle has been a central component of their foreign policy and the images they display to the world.
Furthermore, the Arab national struggle, historically and in the present moment, articulates itself through support for Palestine, with the understanding, present in the entire lineage of Marxist Palestinian thought that settler-colonial property structures and their organic relationship with militarism and imperialism constitute a wrecking ball of social destabilization and geopolitical fragmentation and disarray in the Arab region (Avramidis, 2005). Palestine has been and remains the primary legitimating issue within the Arab region (Hudson, 1977), and one major index of state-party radicalization within the Arab–Iranian region is support for the armed elements of the Palestinian cause.
Finally, within the Third World, especially former-current settler Africa, one finds some of the strongest global expressions of support for Palestinian national liberation. That does not merely trace back to the historic relationships between the
Conclusion
The continued salience of settler-colonial structures on a world scale overlaps with the preservation of a unipolar and capitalist world. The urge to preserve those class relations explains the convergence of the settler states and the European capitalist core around support for Israel. Israel is closely tied to those states through economic partnerships and arms sales and furthermore provides a discourse and justification for maintaining counterinsurgent modalities of secondary citizenship to an array of Arab and Muslim immigrants who effectively are denied basic citizenship rights, in particular, that of free expression around Palestine, as a condition for existing within European political culture—or even, as with the German law demanding that immigrants recognize Israel’s “right to exist.”
On the other side of the coin, there is near-universal support, from Right to Left, for punishing via sanctions and de-development of the forces which seek to challenge existing property relationships, from Zimbabwe to Iran to Venezuela to Yemen to Palestine. In nearly every case, these forces have taken a strong position in support of Palestine, from the nearly silenced-and-erased historic support of the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea for Palestinian national liberation, to Palestine being an index of radicalization within the Latin American left in-state power, to the banner of Palestine held aloft by the National People’s Army in the Philippines. Indeed, exactly this support has become the point at issue, with normalization of relations being the carrot and sanctions and war the stick offered to states like Syria, forces like Hezbollah, and parties like Ansar Allah to get them to drop the Palestinian case. Such policies only make sense because of what Israel represents in terms of white capitalist property relations: that its existence is an alibi for the permanence of neocolonial power in the Arab World, an inciter of worldwide arms sales, and a base for hundreds of billions of fixed capitalist assets on only a barely solidified set of property relations, and which is central worldwide, but especially in a region of 400 million Arabs, to instilling a sense of defeat—or being a lodestar for resistance. In this sense, settler-capitalism under late neocolonialism remains, in symbol and practice, a central contradiction for the world’s liberation movements.
Footnotes
Declaration of Conflicting Interests
The author declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The author received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.