Colonizing Palestine: The Zionist Left and the Making of the Palestinian Nakba by Areej Sabbagh-Khoury

Sabbagh-Khoury details the historical sociology of Zionist settler colonialist practices in Israel-Palestine from 1936 to 1956 through “disaggregating Zionism into its constituent submovements” (8). Through examining the colonization practices of three kibbutzim—Mishmar ha-Emek, Hazorea, and Ein Hashofet—the author demonstrates the inextricable relationship between socialism and colonialism on the Zionist frontier and highlights the critical gap between Labor Zionist socialist ideology, which advocated that purchased land belonged to those who cultivated it (in this case, Jewish labor), and the philanthropic capital by which settlers accumulated and later nationalized said land. Departing from the predominant Leftist Zionist historiographical narrative that demarcates 1948 as the beginning of settler colonial violence against Palestinians, Sabbagh-Khoury identifies the Hashomer Hatzair movement and the Zionist Left as the origins of settler colonial violence, one founded upon the legal (read: Western imperial) purchase of land as a legitimizing mechanism of accumulation and denial of Palestinian rights therein,...