Mixing, Separation, and Violence in Urban Spaces and the Rural Frontier in Palestine

From its inception, the Zionist project entailed spatial relocation of Jews from small towns in Eastern Europe to Palestine, where they were to become population firmly rooted in rural agriculture and physical labor. Conquest of the (kibush ha-karka) and the conquest of labor (kibush ha-'avoda) were the supreme ideals of Labor Zionism, the vanguard of the movement by the time of the second aliyah (wave of immigration) in 1904 and its hegemonic current from the 1930s to 1977. Conquest of the land, which until 1948 meant acquisition by purchase, was prerequisite to establishing Jewish state in Palestine. The attendant dispossession of indigenous Arabs, although legal, often provoked violent conflicts with peasants and Bedouin. During the 1948 war, by expelling or frightening the inhabitants of over four hundred Palestinian Arab villages into fleeing, Zionist armed forces literally the land in ways not possible under British rule.The decades of Labor Zionist hegemony and the appropriation of elements of its discourse by the post-1967 settlement movement tend to obscure the fact that the majority of Zionist settlers in the pre-state period and in the territories occupied in 1967, as well as the Jewish community in Palestine before Zionist settlement began in 1882, were urban. Consequently, histories of urban Arab-Jewish coexistence have only recently begun to be excavated. This article argues that the trajectory of the Zionist settlement project encompasses transition from urban coexistence and rural violence toward increasing urban violence as the frontier shifted from the countryside to the cities. The clashes in Jerusalem and Jaffa in 1920 and 1921, and in several cities in 1929, mark early stages of the shift; it became more evident with the 1948 Arab-Israeli war and the expulsion or flight of the great majority of the urban Arab population. The renewed settlement drive in the territories conquered in 1967 was primarily urban and accompanied by sustained, high level of urban violence, especially in Hebron and East Jerusalem.Zionism, like other settler-colonial enterprises, imagined the frontier as a distinctly non-urban geographical space that sits somewhere out in the country or borderlands.1 As corrective, Penelope Edmonds compares late nineteenth-century Victoria, British Columbia, on Canada's Pacific coast, where large numbers of Native Americans lived, with Melbourne, Australia, which had very few Aboriginal inhabitants.2 In both cities, by the early twentieth century, the indigenous peoples had been coercively, if legally, dispossessed; those few remaining were marginalized and racialized. Like these examples, the Zionist settlement project entailed the deployment of legalized violence, concentrated at first in rural areas and later in cities.In his critique of Gershon Sha^r's3 thesis that the terms of the Palestinian-Israeli con^ict were de^nitively established by contestation over and labor from 1882 to 1914, Zachary Lockman4 argues that Sha^r fails to account for important Zionist institutional, political, and military developments a^er the 1917 Balfour Declaration, especially the persisting violent and coercive character of Zionist settlement. Lockman's emphasis on the historical continuity of violence recalls Patrick Wolfe's pithy formulation, Invasion is structure, not an event.5 It develops dynamically over time informed by factors such as the balance of forces among groups of settlers or settlers and their sponsors, the extent and nature of resistance, and the global balance of forces and discourses that enable or constrain its consolidation. The post-1967 settlement drive in the occupied Palestinian territories exempli^es both the long-term structure, and the dynamic and changing character, of the Zionist invasion.Ariella Azoulay highlights the crucial role of violence in the Zionist project in her photo essay about Palestine/Israel during the decisive years of 1947-50. …

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