From Balfour to the Nakba: The settler-colonial experience of Palestine Ilan Pappe | 4 November 2020 | Middle East Eye
▻https://www.middleeasteye.net/opinion/balfour-nakba-settler-colonial-experience-palestine
The late prominent scholar of settler-colonialism, Patrick Wolfe, reminded us repeatedly that it is not an event, it is a structure. While settler-colonialism in many cases has a historical starting point, its original motivation guides its maintenance in the present.
By and large, settler-colonial projects are motivated by what Wolfe defined as “the logic of the elimination of the native”. Settlers’ wish to create a new homeland almost inevitably clashes with the aspirations of the local native population. In some cases, this clash leads to the physical elimination of native populations, as seen in the Americas and Australia; in others, such as South Africa, settlers enclave the indigenous population in closed areas and impose an apartheid system.
Zionism in Palestine is a settler-colonial project, and Israel remains to this day a settler-colonial state. This depiction is now widely accepted in the scholarly world, but rejected by mainstream Israeli scholars.
On 2 November 1917, Arthur Balfour, then British foreign secretary, endorsed the idea of a “national home for the Jewish people” without “prejudice” against the “civil and religious rights” of the “non-Jewish communities in Palestine”. While this might imply that Jews were the native and majority population of Palestine, in reality, they comprised 10 percent of the population. (...)