When does a native become a settler? (With apologies to Zreik and Mamdani)

Abstract

The simplest definition of Indigenous people, obviously enough, is that they are the only ones who have not come from somewhere else. (Wolfe, 2016, p. 16) With a nod to Mahmood Mamdani (1998), Raef Zreik asked, in an article of the same title: “When Does a Settler Become a Native?” (Zreik, 2016). Zreik begins his article by exploring the terms of the question itself: Is it historical (how much time needs to pass for the settler to become a native?), sociological (what changes must the settler go through to become a native?), ethical (what actions must the settler undertake in order to become a native?) or perhaps personal (is it sufficient for the settler to start feeling like he is a native?)? Although Zreik does not count “structural” among the question's possible forms, his response is very much informed by the understanding of settler colonialism as a structure—articulated most systematically by Patrick Wolfe. In very different ways, and with different conclusions, both Zreik and Mamdani claim that only with a radical change in the structure of the settler state can the categories settler/native be dissolved; not, as the title proposes, in ways that turn the settler into a native, but in ways that make this distinction less meaningful, at least in its political bearings (see also Wolfe, 2016). The question, more accurately framed, is thus whether a settler can cease to be a settler, and the response is decolonization itself. We insist here on “decolonization” and not “completion,” even though Zreik, like others, proposes that the settler ceases to be a settler also when the colonial project is “completed, … as in Australia and the USA” (Zreik, 2016, p. 356). This framing, however, erases the political claims of natives in these geopolitical contexts (Simpson, 2014, p. 11). In this article we want to explore the converse query. Rather than asking, “can a settler become a native, and if so, how?,” we inquire: “can a native become a settler, and if so, how?” If the answer to the first question involves laying pathways toward decolonization, our question is a way of tracing the formation of the settler project, and as part of it, its structure. Our article puts forward a dual argument, a historical one and a conceptual one. First, we seek to unfold a specific history of natives who, we argue, became settlers: Jews who lived in Palestine before the Zionist era. Focusing on two issues—language and land—we trace the movement of local Sephardi Jews22 We decided not to confine ourselves to a single term such as “Sephardi Jews,” “Arab-Jews,” “Palestinian Jews” or “native Jews,” but to allow the many terms used to mark the Jewish native-born in the discourse of the time. For further discussion on these multiple categorizations, see Tamari (2008); Shohat (1999); Jacobson and Naor (2016). between being natives and settlers against the backdrop of the rise of the Zionist project in Palestine. Our main argument is that, although these Palestinian Jews worked to craft alternative social spaces that would transcend, overcome, or at least bypass the rigid colonial dichotomy,33 One of the distinctions that is at times made between settler colonialism and colonialism is based on their racial logic. 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