Quotidian attachments to/and Imperial Violences: US Jews and Palestine’s Colonization

• In Event: 30264 - Witnessing the Violences in and of Empire

Abstract

For over a century, US Jews have financially underwritten every aspect of the Zionist settler colonial project in historic Palestine through coordinated campaigns generating millions of dollars towards land appropriation, settler migration, state-building and Palestinian dispossession. Indeed, both copious scholarship since and political actors at the time stated clearly that the Israeli state’s founding could not have occurred without US Jews’ financial and political support. However, little research has addressed this transnational link normalizing and enabling settler colonial dispossession and ethnic cleansing of Palestinians from their land, nor has scholarship attended to this accomplishment given Zionism’s lack of hegemonic hold on US Jews during this historical period. This paper uses materials from dozens of Zionist archives across the US to explore Zionists’ efforts to generate both affective attachments and the material resources necessary to colonize Palestine and dispossess its Indigenous population between 1917 and 1956. Data reveals Zionists’ campaigns relied on emotional appeals to US Jews enabling both the amplification and normalization of settler colonialism alongside the strategic erasure of repressive power and state violence necessary to dispossess Palestinians of their land and livelihoods. In doing so, Zionists facilitated quotidian attachments to both the Zionist settler colony in Palestine and the (often unseen and unpublicized) imperial violences necessary to remove Palestinians from their land. These findings enable us to consider how “regular” people, far away from the actual site of settler colonial violence, not only become complicit in imperial violences, but also how they enact those complicities as a routine aspect of their daily lives to perpetuate these violences.

Author

• Melissa F. Weiner, College of the Holy Cross