16 introduction race’ as creating coherence, artificing initially discursive homogeneity of and for ‘the Jewish people’ in the face of a scattered and diffuse ‘nation’” (Goldberg 2008, 31). Within such a framework, the Zionist project of settlement, colonization and statehood renders the continued existence of an indigenous non-Jewish population in the coveted territory essentially contradictory. For instance, the incompatibility of non-Jewish persons with the Zionist state project is made explicit in the discriminatory land policies of the Jewish National Fund – a Zionist organization that, by May 1948, was the largest landowner in Mandate Palestine (Lehn 1974, 74–75). Proposed in August 1897 at the First Zionist Congress in Basel, Switzerland and amended in subsequent years, the title to the lands held by the Jewish National Fund was “to be held in perpetuity, ‘as the inalienable property of the Jewish people’.”21 These lands “could not be leased to a non-Jew, nor could the lease be sub-leased, or sold, or mortgaged, or given, or bequeathed to any but a Jew,” and “non-Jews could not be employed on the land or even in any work connected with the cultivation of the land.”22 The racial configuration of modern Zionism and its principal progeny, the State of Israel, is nicely elucidated through South African scholar David Theo Goldberg’s concept of “racial palestinianization.” Refraining from defining Israel as an apartheid state, Goldberg employs critical race theory to describe Israel, as a modern nation-state, to be a racial state: “a state racially characterizing itself in its founding self-representation” (Goldberg 2008, 27). As a “racially configured” and “racially representative” nation-state, Israel has been “caught up in the race-making web of modernizing statehood.”23 The importance of examining Zionism as a racially, and not merely ethnically or religiously, configured ideology and movement becomes evident when we look at the racialized structures of power within Israel, and its placement within the racial hierarchy of the region. Goldberg explains: Israel is taken as an outpost of European civilization, a frontier of sorts, in an altogether hostile and alien environment. Brothers to Christians, keepers of the faith and holy sites, a flourishing democracy in the land of Christ and 21 Article 3 of the Constitution of the Jewish Agency for Palestine (adopted August 1929, reprinted 1945); see Lehn 1974, 92–93. 22 Ibid. 23 Goldberg continues: “Israel represents modernization, progress, industry and industriousness, looking to the bright future, the civilizing mission of the best that has been thought and could be thought. [And] Palestine represents the past, failed effort if effort at all, antique land still tilled by hand and the perennial failure of governance, a place constantly in the grip of its time past and passed” (ibid.).