Rethinking Settler Colonialism

Abstract

Our article is a response to a previous article published in American Quarterly (2010), by Laura Pulido and David Lloyd, “On the Long Shadow of the Settler: On Israeli and US Colonialism.” By engaging in this discussion, we hope to provide further historical information, clarifying some salient differences between nineteenth-century settler colonialism in the United States and Israeli twenty-first-century settler colonialism on the West Bank. Recent Israeli attacks on the Gaza Strip that have left over two thousand Palestinians dead, mostly civilians, and current Israeli plans to take over more lands on the West Bank call for world condemnation of these tragic events, an end to the siege of Gaza, and an end to US support of Israel to the tune of $3 billion in military aid annually.

Israel-Palestine and the Settler Colonial ‘Turn’: From Interpretation to Decolonization

“…The ideology of manifest destiny so crucial to the mythology of Northern American settlement has been brought into comparison with the biblical justifications of Zionism, as have the affective connections between Palestinians and Native Americans by virtue of their mutual dispossession (Mikdashi, 2012;Salaita, 2006;Waziyatawin, 2012). And with a special forum in American Quarterly, the paradigm has even been stretched to compare the situation of Palestinians with Chicano/a incorporated into the US Southwest following the American victory in the 1848 Mexican-American war (see Lloyd and Pulido, 2010;also Lubin, 2008;Sa´nchez and Pita, 2014).…”

Nuestra ciencia as transborder ecological knowledge and survival

“…South Texas is one of the most biodiverse regions in the United States, and settler colonial perceptions of progress and “primitivity” relating to medicine and science in the region reinforced racial and ethnic inequality in the transborder region. Settler colonialism—as a structure that the settler states of Mexico and the United States enacted—transformed the land, destroyed native medicinal plants, stigmatized and further de‐Indigenized the region, and helped reinforce white supremacist racial hierarchies in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries (Sánchez & Pita, 2014). De‐Indianization, as Guillermo Bonfil Batalla has defined it, is useful in seeing that the mestizo and Indigenous populations of south Texas underwent changes that removed Indigeneity “not [as] the result of biological mixture, but of the pressure of an ethnocide that ultimately blocks the historical continuity of a people as a culturally differentiated group” (Batalla, 1996, 17).…”