Ten - The environment as a site of struggle against settler-colonisation in Palestine

Summary

Introduction

The Zionist settler-colonisation of Palestine is primarily an ecological distribution conflict (Martínez-Alier, 2002) because it is focused entirely on dispossession of land, water and other environmental resources. The state of Israel since 1948, and its military occupation of the West Bank and Gaza Strip since 1967, as well as precursor Zionist colonisation under British mandatory and Ottoman empirical rule, have been predicated on dispossession of Palestinian resources. Unlike classical colonisation, which exploits indigenous labour for the purpose of capital accumulation in the colonising state, settlercolonialism has no long-term interest in indigenous labour. On the contrary, the settler-colonial process actively expels or exterminates indigenous people in the process of resource dispossession (Veracini, 2010). Palestinian resistance to settler-colonisation should therefore be understood as a struggle for environmental justice.

In classical colonialism, value is extracted from the resources and labour of the colonised lands for the benefit of a colonising (usually European) country (Veracini, 2010). In such contexts, community development has often been used to integrate indigenous peoples into social, economic and political structures that serve the interests of the colonial power. By contrast, the purpose of settler-colonisation is access to land and resources by a settler population expelled from their origins, usually in Europe. The settler-colonist therefore seeks to remove and replace the indigenous population and has therefore largely not employed community development strategies. Britain, which had used community development strategies extensively elsewhere through its Colonial Office, did not do so during its Mandate of Palestine, where the policy objective was explicitly to facilitate Zionist settler aspirations rather than Palestinian economic, political or labour integration.

Palestinian popular resistance to settler-colonialism has taken a range of forms, from scholarship and legal challenge, through noncooperation and non-violent confrontation to armed struggle and the occasional targeting of civilians In the current context of an Israeli settler state, Israel's occupation of the West Bank, annexation of East Jerusalem and military blockade of the Gaza Strip, Palestinian community development has been employed in ways that both resist and collude with Zionist settler-colonisation. The distinction between collusion and resistance is a central tension, in response to environmental justice struggles against the settler-colonisation of Palestine.