Israeli Sociology by Uri Ram

Author:Uri Ram
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Springer International Publishing, Cham

6.3 Sociology of Colonization

The last sociological school of thought of the period of the 1970s and the 1980s to be discussed in this chapter is the school of colonization (i.e., the analyses of Israel as a settler colonial type of society). Such a perspective claims that Israeli society had been shaped neither by pioneering values (the Jerusalem Modernization school), nor by its own internal hierarchies (the Tel Aviv elites school), or even by its own internal class relations (the Haifa Marxist school ). Rather, it had been shaped by the process of Jewish incursion in Palestine , its settlement, and its eventual appropriation. This process led necessarily to a protracted conflict with the local native Palestinian Arab society. The basic features of Israeli society, politics, and culture had been shaped by the inherent antagonism between natives and settler s (see Ehrlich 1987).

The designation of Israel as a settler-colonial society opposes, of course, one of the most common and cherished Israeli self-images as a nation returning an expelled people to their ancestors’ homeland. Assuming this ethos, mainstream sociology was enclosed in a “Jewish bubble.” It presumed a dual model by which two distinct societies, an Arab and traditional one, and a Jewish modern one, existed side by side, and with only a minimal and external impact on each other (the “dual model” is reviewed critically in Kimmerling 1992).

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The colonization perspective was common among Palestinian scholars (e.g., Zureik 1978; Nakhleh and Zureik 1980) , but it was entirely absent inside Jewish Israel. The relative legitimization of the colonialism perspective in Israeli academia was facilitated by the political strife over the Occupied Territories of the 1967 war. The policy of fixing “facts on the ground” by Jewish settlement, the de facto annexation of territories, and the dispossession of Palestinian s opened up the questions of how the land was acquired in the first place and what had happened to its residents. These questions were repressed in Israeli memory until 1967 (Ram 2009).

Two sociological approaches of colonization were formulated: Weberian and Marxist . The Weberian approach of Baruch Kimmerling (1983) highlighted the struggle over the possession of territories and drew theoretically on the classic American frontier analysis of Jackson Turner (cf. Turner 1956). The Marxist approach of Gershon Shafir (1989) highlighted the struggle over the labor market, and drew, theoretically, on the comparative settler colonialism analysis of David Fieldhouse (1981) and on the ethno class analysis of Edna Bonacich (1972).

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Baruch Kimmerling (HUJI; 1934–2007) maintained that the most effective method of penetrating into an already inhabited territory and getting a hold over it had been concerted mobilization of resources. The Zionist settler-colonial society was shaped as a result of such a constellation. It created an efficient triangular mechanism, which was composed of institutions of land purchase, collective communities that settled the land, and armed defense organizations. By this, Kimmerling proposed an overall “colonization model” that provides an explanation of the major characteristics of Israeli society, and especially of the reason for the Labor movement’s hegemony in the nation building process.

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