New Article: Freeman-Maloy, Reflections on Zionism and ‘Dominion’ Status within the British Empire

Freeman-Maloy, Dan. “The International Politics of Settler Self-Governance: Reflections on Zionism and ‘Dominion’ Status within the British Empire.” Settler Colonial Studies (early view; online first).

 

URL: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/2201473X.2016.1190177

 

Abstract

Before falling into disuse towards the middle of the twentieth century, the term ‘Dominion’ connoted the autonomous status of select polities on the British Empire’s geographic periphery (and Ireland). This concept factored into British discourse as the extension of liberal norms of self-government. Originally associated with the British-majority settler states of Canada, Australia, and New Zealand, Dominion status was in turn extended to the South African Union in 1910. Advocates for a similar form of ‘self-governance’ sought to see the example emulated elsewhere in Africa and, through the Zionist enterprise, in the Middle East. The reluctance of historians of the British Empire to examine the structural manifestations of racism in British policy has obscured the significance of the Dominion concept and its historical evolution. Settler self-governance within the British sphere is still often framed in terms of liberal conceptions of ‘responsible government’, as Lord Durham phrased it his Report on the Affairs of British North America. However, self-government on the Empire’s periphery was a patently exclusionist and racialised practice. Its exclusionist bounds were not so narrow as the Anglo-Saxonist racism that first marked its introduction. By the early twentieth century, French-speaking Canadians and Boers alike were sharing in the enterprise of British representative government. The bounds of exclusion were nonetheless unmistakable. Today, it is in respectable circles no longer acceptable to present settler rule on the African continent as a liberal enterprise. Yet the histories of the original Dominions and of the Zionist enterprise continue to be distorted by intellectuals leveraging an exclusionist politics of self-representation. The valorisation of Israel in particular through claimed rights to self-determination should prompt renewed engagement with this history. The invocation of the Dominions’ example by an earlier generation of pro-Zionist advocates speaks to a shared history that demands critical attention.

New Article: Meiton, Electrifying Jaffa

Meiton, Fredrik. “Electrifying Jaffa: Boundary-Work and the Origins of the Arab-Israeli Conflict.” Past & Present (early view; online first).

 

URL: http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/pastj/gtw002

 
Extract

In the summer of 1923 the Russian-born Jewish engineer Pinhas Rutenberg threw the switch at Mandate Palestine’s first electrical distribution system, lighting up a portion of Allenby Street in Tel Aviv. It was the first step in an endeavour that, according to Rutenberg, was ‘destined to become the most important instrument for the sound development of the country’. The local British government in Jerusalem agreed, as did Whitehall. Major Hubert Young of the Middle East Department predicted that ‘the successful inauguration of Mr. Rutenberg’s schemes will do more than anything else to pacify Palestine, facilitate immigration, and develop the country’. The excitement was echoed among Tel Aviv’s Jewish residents. To them, the roadside pylons could not multiply fast enough. To the Palestinians in neighbouring Jaffa, however, the grid’s expansion was a mixed blessing. The high-tension cable wound its way into town with promises of modernity and the creature comforts of civilized life, but it also signalled the encroachment of Jewish nationalism on Arab Palestine. A significant portion of the Palestinian Arab community was staunchly opposed to Rutenberg’s electrification, and a few weeks before the lights went on along Allenby Street, an angry crowd made its way through the city chanting ‘The lamp-posts of Rutenberg are the gallows of our nation’.

This article argues that electrification played a part in making Palestine an object of nationalist contention, and that properties of the technology itself had a fundamental and lasting impact on the character and strategies of both Zionism and Palestinian nationalism. Far from being part of a neutral backdrop, then, the process of electricity generation and distribution was inherently political.

 

 

Lecture: Sabbagh-Khoury, Zionist Left and the Nakbah, 1936-56 (NYU, April 11, 2016)

Areej Sabbagh-Khoury

Meyers-Taub Postdoctoral Fellow (NYU) / Fulbright Scholar

“The Zionist Left, Settler-Colonial Practices and the Nakba in Marj Ibn ‘Amer (Jezreel Valley), 1936 – 1956.”

April 11, 2016 @ 6pm
14A Washington Mews, 1st Floor

New Article: Pappe, The Bible in the Service of Zionism

Pappe, Ilan. “The Bible in the Service of Zionism: ‘We Do Not Believe in God, But He Nonetheless Promised Us Palestine.” In History, Archaeology, and the Bible Forty Years After ‘Historicity’, Changing Perspectives 6 (ed. Ingrid Hjelm and Thomas L. Thompson; Abingdon and New York: Routledge, 2016).

 

 

Extract

The secular early Zionists quoted intensively from the Bible to show that there was a divine imperative to colonize Palestine, or in their discourse, to redeem Eretz Israel. But in fact the Bible is not a very useful text for reinventing a Jewish nation: the father of the nation, Abraham, was not from Palestine, the Hebrews became a nation in Egypt and the Ten Commandments were given to them in Egypt (the Sinai). This text was reinterpreted by the early and secular Zionists. The nation was one of the tribes, living under occupation in Canaan, exiled to Egypt and came back to redeem the homeland, as did the modern Zionists. As new occupiers of Canaan was how the secular Zionists saw themselves. Namely, the successors of Joshua and the Judges, and, then, they too founded a Jewish kingdom.

 

 

 

New Article: Penslar, Rebels Without a Patron State: How Israel Financed the 1948 War

Penslar, Derek. “Rebels Without a Patron State: How Israel Financed the 1948 War.” In Purchasing Power. The Economics of Modern Jewish History (ed. Rebecca Kobrin and Adam Teller; Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2015): 171-91, 316-20.

 

Extract

The Zionist project was as much a product of the era of post-1945 decolonization as it was of colonialism’s zenith in the early twentieth century. The British Empire nurtured the Jewish National Home, yet it was empire’s collapse that made possible the state of Israel’s birth. The nascent state of Israel generated a revolutionary torque akin to that which caused the overthrow of tyrannical regimes and expulsion of colonial masters throughout the world. Like other revolutionary projects of the last century, Zionism displayed hubris and cruelty, but also an unshakable faith in humanity’s capacity to re-engineer itself. Some historians of the 1948 war have described the Yishuv as a well-oiled machine that aligned its entire population into a dedicated fighting force. Not only are such explanations exaggerated, they also overlook the fact that other national liberation organizations such as the FLN or Viet Minh were highly successful at organizing the extraction of revenue and resources from the population and developing an effective fighting force. Compared with the Arab world, Israel in 1948 was indeed exceptional, and the war that secured sovereignty for Israel also brought catastrophe upon the Palestinians. When observed on a global level, however, Zionism’s resemblance to anticolonial and national liberation movements becomes apparent, not only in self-conception but also in method.

 
See: http://www.academia.edu/21075807/Rebels_Without_a_Patron_State_How_Israel_Financed_the_1948_War
 

 

New Article: Ranta, Re-Arabizing Israeli Food Culture

Ranta, Ronald. “Re-Arabizing Israeli Food Culture.” Food, Culture & Society (early view; online first).

 

URL: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/15528014.2015.1088192

 

Abstract

This paper examines the role Arab-Palestinian food plays in the construction of Israeli national identity and food culture. In particular, it sets out to understand the recent willingness in Jewish-Israeli society to acknowledge Arab, and to a lesser extent Arab-Palestinian, culture and food. This new phenomenon has resulted in the re-Arabization of Israeli food culture. For the first time Arab and Arab-Palestinian food is acknowledged, written about and celebrated. This follows a historically longer process in which the construction of Israeli identity and food culture was based on adaptation and imitation, leading to appropriation and nationalization of Arab-Palestinian food culture.

 

 

 

Encyclopedia Article: Smooha, Israeli–Palestinian Conflict

Smooha, Sammy. “Israeli–Palestinian Conflict.” The Wiley Blackwell Encyclopedia of Race, Ethnicity, and Nationalism Chichester: Wiley, 2016.

 
URL: http://dx.doi.org/10.1002/9781118663202.wberen253
 
Extract

The Israeli–Palestinian conflict is the dispute between the Palestinian and Jewish peoples about the ownership and control of the area between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea. It is protracted, intractable, and deadly. As a multilayered and deep conflict, it is also territorial, national, religious, regional, international, costly, zero-sum, and unwinnable. Its intractability stems from its quasi-colonial nature. Partition of the land into two states to two peoples is the only logical solution to this unique conflict. Both sides have already reached this realization but deeply distrust each other and disagree over details of the implementation. Stateless, occupied, and refugee stricken, the Palestinians bear a much higher cost of the impasse than the Israelis.

 

 

 

New Article: Jaffee, Settler-Colonialism and the Geopolitics of Disability in Palestine/Israel

Jaffee, Laura Jordan. “Disrupting Global Disability Frameworks: Settler-Colonialism and the Geopolitics of Disability in Palestine/Israel.” Disability & Society (early view; online first).

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URL: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/09687599.2015.1119038

 

Abstract

In recent years, Israel has seen an increase in disability studies scholarship and disability rights activism. At the same time, critical disability studies scholars have begun calling attention to the role of colonization and neocolonial powers, too often obscured in disability studies work, in disabling oppressed nations. This article brings these critiques in conversation with disability studies scholarship regarding Occupied Palestine to argue that disability is inextricably intertwined with the settler-colonial project of the Israeli state. By highlighting the geopolitical production of disablement, this work suggests that social approaches to disability have largely effaced disability injustice rooted in geopolitical power imbalances.

 

 

 

New Book: Kotef, Movement and the Ordering of Freedom

Kotef, Hagar. Movement and the Ordering of Freedom: On Liberal Governances of Mobility. Durham: Duke University Press, 2015.

 

We live within political systems that increasingly seek to control movement, organized around both the desire and ability to determine who is permitted to enter what sorts of spaces, from gated communities to nation-states. In Movement and the Ordering of Freedom, Hagar Kotef examines the roles of mobility and immobility in the history of political thought and the structuring of political spaces. Ranging from the writings of Locke, Hobbes, and Mill to the sophisticated technologies of control that circumscribe the lives of Palestinians in the Occupied West Bank, this book shows how concepts of freedom, security, and violence take form and find justification via “regimes of movement.” Kotef traces contemporary structures of global (im)mobility and resistance to the schism in liberal political theory, which embodied the idea of “liberty” in movement while simultaneously regulating mobility according to a racial, classed, and gendered matrix of exclusions.

 

Table of Contents

Preface
Acknowledgements

• Introduction
• 1. Between Imaginary Lines: Violence and Its Justifications at the Military Checkpoints in Occupied Palestine / Hagar Kotef and Merav Amir
• 2. An Interlude: A Tale of Two Roads—On Freedom and Movement
• 3. The Fence That “Ill Deserves the Name of Confinement”: Locomotion and the Liberal Body
• 4. The Problem of “Excessive” Movement
• 5. The “Substance and Meaning of All Things Political”: On Other Bodies
• Conclusion

Notes
Bibliography
Index

 

HAGAR KOTEF is based at the Minerva Humanities Center at Tel Aviv University.

 

 

ToC: Journal of Israeli History 34.2 (2015)

Journal of Israeli History, 34.2 (2015)

No Trinity: The tripartite relations between Agudat Yisrael, the Mizrahi movement, and the Zionist Organization
Daniel Mahla
pages 117-140

Judaism and communism: Hanukkah, Passover, and the Jewish Communists in Mandate Palestine and Israel, 1919–1965
Amir Locker-Biletzki
pages 141-158

Olei Hagardom: Between official and popular memory
Amir Goldstein
pages 159-180

Practices of photography on kibbutz: The case of Eliezer Sklarz
Edna Barromi Perlman
pages 181-203

The Shishakli assault on the Syrian Druze and the Israeli response, January–February 1954
Randall S. Geller
pages 205-220

Book Reviews

Becoming Israeli: National Ideals and Everyday Life in the 1950s

Deborah Bernstein
pages 221-224

The “Magic Carpet” Exodus of Yemenite Jewry: An Israeli Formative Myth

Ari Ariel
pages 224-227

The Bride and the Dowry: Israel, Jordan, and the Palestinians in the Aftermath of the June 1967 War

Itamar Radai
pages 227-230

Editorial Board

Editorial Board

.

Reviews: Meir-Glitzenstein, The “Magic Carpet” Exodus of Yemenite Jewry

Meir-Glitzenstein, Esther. The “Magic Carpet” Exodus of Yemenite Jewry. An Israeli Formative Myth. Eastbourne: Sussex Academic Press, 2014.

 

 
Reviews

• Frantzman, Seth J. “Book review: The Yemenite tragedy.” Jeruslaem Post , January 10,, 2015.
• Ariel, Ari. “Review.” Journal of Israeli History (early view; online first).

See also interview: Lee, Vered. “The Frayed Truth of Operation Magic Carpet.” Haaretz, May 28, 2012 (on Hebrew version).

 

 

New Article: Bar-Yosef, Heart of Darkness in Israeli Culture

Bar-Yosef, Eitan. “‘The Horror’ in Hebrew. Heart of Darkness in Israeli Culture.” Interventions (early view; online first).

 

URL: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/1369801X.2015.1079499

 

Abstract

Tracing the intricate presence of Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness in Israeli culture, this essay explores how elements of the novella (the journey to Africa, the iconic Kurtz, and the nature of ‘darkness’) have been repeatedly evoked, both implicitly and explicitly, in various cultural contexts. Focusing on three major episodes – the emergence of political Zionism in the 1890s; young Israel’s intensive involvement in Black Africa in the 1960s; and the pessimism that engulfed Israeli society after the 1973 war – the essay suggests that the novella’s relevance to Israeli culture is rooted in the work’s fluid allegorical mode, which parallels tensions and contradictions that have characterized the Zionist project from its inception. This mirroring reached a climax in the journalistic work of Adam Baruch, who offered a highly stylized postcolonial reworking of Heart of Darkness in his influential account of a journey undertaken to find a disgraced Israeli general, self-exiled in Africa. The search for the Israeli ‘Kurtz’ thus continues to function as a powerful emblem of Israel’s colonial violence.

 

 

New Book: Spangler,Understanding Israel/Palestine. Race, Nation, and Human Rights in the Conflict

Spangler, Eve. Understanding Israel/Palestine. Race, Nation, and Human Rights in the Conflict. Rotterdam: Sense, 2015.

 

 

The Israeli-Palestinian conflict is the longest, ongoing hot-and-cold war of the 20th and 21st centuries. It has produced more refugees than any current conflict, generating fully one quarter of all refugees worldwide. Everyone knows that the Palestinian-Israeli conflict is important itself, and is also fueling tensions throughout the Middle East. Yet most people shy away from this conflict, claiming it is “just too complicated” to understand.

This book is written for people who want a point of entry into the conversation. It offers both a historic and analytic framework. Readers, whether acting as students, parishioners, neighbors, voters, or dinner guests will find in these pages an analysis of the most commonly heard Israeli positions, and a succinct account of the Palestinian voices we seldom hear. The author argues that human rights standards have never been used as the basis on which the Israeli-Palestinian conflict should be resolved and that only these standards can produce a just and sustainable resolution.

This book will be useful for classes in Middle East studies, peace and conflict studies, Middle East history, sociology of race, and political science. It can be helpful for church groups, labor groups, or other grass roots organizations committed to social justice, and for all readers who wish to be informed about this important topic.

 

Table of Contents

Preface
Acknowledgements

Section 1: Introduction
Chapter 1: Introduction: Tell Our Story
Chapter 2: In Israel and Palestine: What You See Is What We Bought
Chapter 3: Basic Concepts: Human Rights, Race, and Nation
Chapter 4: Zionism: The Idea That Changed Everything

Section 2: The History of the Conflict: Another Look
Chapter 5: State Builders, Settlers, and Colonial Subjects: The Past Is Prologue
Chapter 6: Establishing the State, Preparing Occupation
Chapter 7: Occupation and Resistance: The Zionist Dream Comes True, or Be Careful What You Ask for 129
Chapter 8: The Endless, Deceptive Peace Process

Section 3: Moving Forward
Chapter 9: Four Frames: Israeli Self-Defense, Genocide, Apartheid, Ethnic Cleansing/Sociocide
Chapter 10: Zionism Revisited: From 1967 back to 1948
Chapter 11: Conclusion: Hope and History

Section 4: Supplementary Materials
Appendix: Study Questions
References
Index

Eve Spangler is a sociologist and a human and civil rights activist. For the last decade, her work has focused on the Israel/Palestine conflict; she argues that human rights are the neglected standards that could lead to a just and sustainable solution. See more at evespangler.com.

Reviews: Levy, Poetic Trespass

Levy, Lital. Poetic Trespass: Writing between Hebrew and Arabic in Israel/Palestine. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2014.

 

Reviews

• Irving, Sarah. “Can literature disrupt Israel’s identity?” Electronic Intifada, May 19, 2015.
• Stern, Ramon. “Review.” International Journal of Middle East Studies 47.3 (2015): 605-607.

New Article: Piterberg, Israeli Sociology’s Young Hegelian: Gershon Shafir and the Settler-Colonial Framework

Piterberg, Gabriel. “Israeli Sociology’s Young Hegelian: Gershon Shafir and the Settler-Colonial Framework.” Journal of Palestine Studies 44.3 (2015): 17-38.

 

URL: http://dx.doi.org/10.1525/jps.2015.44.3.17

 

Abstract

In April 2014, the Center for Near Eastern Studies at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) convened a conference titled “The Settler Colonial Paradigm: Debating Gershon Shafir’s Land, Labor and the Origins of the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict on Its 25th Anniversary.” This essay emanates from the conference. I first chart the dialectical emergence of Shafir’s thought out of Israeli sociology, and then gauge its impact on the growing presence of the settler-colonial framework in the study of Palestine/Israel. The analysis of Shafir’s book shows how a powerful hegemony has produced its disavowal. The examination of Palestine/Israel as a settler-colonial situation past and present underscores the benefit of studying this topic comparatively and as part of a global phenomenon.

New Article: Barker, Confronting Imperialism and Colonialism in Israel and Canada

Barker, Adam J. “No Walls, No Borders: Confronting Imperialism and Colonialism in Israel and Canada.” Social Movement Studies (early view; online first).

 

URL: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/14742837.2015.1070340

 

Abstract
Review essay of two books, Anarchists against the Wall, edited by Uri Gordon and Ohal Grietzer, and Undoing Border Imperialism
, by Harsha Walia.

 

 

New Article: Masalha, Appropriation of Palestinian Place Names by the Israeli State

Masalha, Nur. “Settler-Colonialism, Memoricide and Indigenous Toponymic Memory: The Appropriation of Palestinian Place Names by the Israeli State.” Journal of Holy Land and Palestine Studies 14.1 (2015): 3-57.
 
URL: http://dx.doi.org/10.3366/hlps.2015.0103

 

Abstract
Cartography, place-naming and state-sponsored explorations were central to the modern European conquest of the earth, empire building and settler-colonisation projects. Scholars often assume that place names provide clues to the historical and cultural heritage of places and regions. This article uses social memory theory to analyse the cultural politics of place-naming in Israel. Drawing on Maurice Halbwachs’ study of the construction of social memory by the Latin Crusaders and Christian medieval pilgrims, the article shows Zionists’ toponymic strategies in Palestine, their superimposition of Biblical and Talmudic toponyms was designed to erase the indigenous Palestinian and Arabo-Islamic heritage of the land. In the pre-Nakba period Zionist toponymic schemes utilised nineteenth century Western explorations of Biblical ‘names’ and ‘places’ and appropriated Palestinian toponyms. Following the ethnic cleansing of Palestine in 1948, the Israeli state, now in control of 78 percent of the land, accelerated its toponymic project and pursued methods whose main features were memoricide and erasure. Continuing into the post-1967 occupation, these colonial methods threaten the destruction of the diverse historical cultural heritage of the land.

 

 

 

New Article: Tesdell, Territoriality and the Technics of Drylands Science in Palestine and North America

Tesdell, Omar Imseeh. “Territoriality and the Technics of Drylands Science in Palestine and North America.” International Journal of Middle East Studies 47.3 (2015): 570-573.

 
URL: http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/S0020743815000586

 
Abstract
At the turn of the 20th century, agricultural experts in several countries assembled a new agro-scientific field: dryland farming. Their agricultural research practices concomitantly fashioned a new agro-ecological zone—the drylands—as the site of agronomic intervention. As part of this effort, American scientists worked in concert with colleagues in the emerging Zionist movement to investigate agricultural practices and crops in Palestine and neighboring regions, where nonirrigated or rainfed agriculture had long been practiced. In my larger manuscript project, I consider how the reorganization of rainfed farming as dryfarming is central to the history of both the Middle East and North America, where it was closely related to modern forms of power, sovereignty, and territoriality. I suggest that American interest in dryfarming science emerged out of a practical need to propel and sustain colonization of the Great Plains, but later became a joint effort of researchers from several emerging settler enterprises, including Australia, Canada, and the Zionist movement. In contrast to a naturally ocurring bioregion, I argue that the drylands spatiality was engineered through, rather than outside, the territorialization of modern power.

 

 

CFP: The Past in the Present of the Middle East (CBRL Conference, April 15-16, 2016, London)

 

CBRL Conference: The Past in the Present of the Middle East

15 & 16 April 2016 at the London Middle East Institute in SOAS

The Council for British Research in the Levant is pleased to open a call for papers and posters for a two-day conference to be held in London with the LMEI to showcase the work of CBRL and its partners in the region. The conference will present sessions on a number of themes linking the past to the present day in the Middle East.

• Cultural heritage in conflict

• Cultural heritage, society and economics

• Britain and the Levant: Culture and (Mis)Communication

• The past in the political present: the legacy of colonialism and intervention

• The Politics of Dissent: challenges to Orientalism and Zionism

• The impact of research – working with humanitarian agencies/practitioners

Closing session: The future of the past in the Middle East

Participants in the conference will include both invited speakers and participants who respond to this call, including early career scholars sponsored by CBRL to undertake new research, as well as established scholars presenting their own research, and research partners from the region. The conference is intended as an opportunity to speak to a wide audience, not only the academic community but also policy makers, practitioners and members of the public. We believe that this event will make an important contribution to the profile of research in the region.

Please send proposed paper or poster titles and abstracts of no more than 250 words to CBRL@britac.ac.uk by September 7th 2015. We will notify participants whether their paper or poster has been accepted by the end of October.

The conference fee is £50 (with an early bird rate of £40 until 15 January 2016), with a discounted rate of £20 for student participants. The fee will cover attendance at the conference, including lunches during the conference and the conference reception.

The CBRL is the British Academy-sponsored organization that promotes, sponsors and carries out high-quality research in the humanities and social sciences throughout the countries of the Levant.

Please circulate to all interested colleagues.

Council for British Research in the Levant

10 Carlton House Terrace

London SW1Y 5AH.  UK

www.cbrl.org.uk

New Article: Lewsen, Settlements and the Evacuation of an Israeli Fishing Village from Gaza

Lewsen, Emily. “Reeled In: The Settlement Project and the Evacuation of an Israeli Fishing Village from Gaza.” Settler Colonial Studies 5.1 (2015): 66-83.
 
 
URL: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/2201473X.2014.911671

 
Abstract
Footage of emotional Israeli settlers leaving their homes as part of Ariel Sharon’s disengagement plan evoked a mixed reaction from critics, underlying a lack of consensus on the relationship between individual settlers, the settlement project and the government. In this essay, I explore the political dynamics between the Israeli state, settlers in the occupied territories and the Palestinians on a micro-level by analyzing Dugit – a small and overlooked former settlement from the Gaza Strip. The study of this marginal settlement shifts focus away from settlements that have more political clout and a larger public profile and troubles the idea of the settlement project as a monolithic enterprise. Furthermore, by virtue of its marginal status and its location at the very northern tip of the Gaza Strip just near the Green Line, Dugit existed at the intersection of many interfacing groups, ideas, institutions and geo-political entities within Israeli society. These include Israelis and Palestinians; Israeli settler society and Israeli liberal society; religious and non-ideological settlements; settlers and the Israeli government; Mizrahi Jews and Palestinians; as well as the concept of Israel proper and the occupied Palestinian territories. Based on interviews conducted with former members of Dugit, this study analyzes informants’ understanding of the politics of living in the occupied territories, their relations with their former Palestinian neighbors as well as their interpretation of their position in Israeli society post-eviction. Israeli–Palestinian encounters in Dugit were represented as amicable but these relations were nevertheless over-determined by the larger political structures, which the Dugit settlers did not challenge. This essay argues that a nuanced understanding of the dynamics of the Dugit settlement needs to take into account the settlers’ position as partial agents of their own political actions but also as victims of government policies.