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is exactly this approach that indigenous scholars (in Canada, Palestine, Hawaii and
elsewhere) have been consistently arguing against. The call for the politics of rejection
and refusal of mechanisms of incorporation, inclusion and recognition of the settler state,
with citizenship standing as perhaps the most effective method of the state, is a consistent
feature of such literature (Coulthard 2014; Simpson 2014). Accordingly, even radical
moves ‘within’ citizenship or ‘on’ citizenship are thus incompatible as a framework for
anticolonial struggle against the settler state. It thus can be determined that ‘acts of
citizenship’ cannot be reconciled with the inherent violence of settler citizenship, and the
settler state itself, and with the reality of the anticolonial struggle. How, then, can we
think about resistance practices of the anticolonial settler-citizen and their capacity to
contribute to a radical transformation of the settler state?
The anti-zionist settler-citizen
The practices of resistance exercised by anti-Zionist Jewish Israelis have been extensively
chronicled.11 They include a variety of ‘acts’: direct actions; demonstrations; conscious
ness-raising activities; dissemination of reports; publications in local media; support and
encouragement of boycott, divestment and sanctions against Israeli institutions; and
many others. These are primarily designed to show solidarity with existing Palestinian
struggles, to answer a call to participate and protect Palestinians who suffer from
continuous threats by West Bank settler communities or harassment by the state’s
security apparatuses. They strive to expose the violence that is integral to Israel’s
colonisation and exercise of brute force towards Palestinians and to undermine the
broad acceptance of state violence among Israelis.
Yet, while struggling for the same cause alongside and in support of the Palestinians –
that of dismantling the settler state – the colonial lines of difference are ever present. As
Jewish citizens of the Israeli state, they occupy a position of power, ‘both legally
enshrined and socially embedded, relative to Palestinians and other non-Jews in Israel/
Palestine [. . .] and have historically been, and continue to be, privileged by the Israeli
settler-colonial project’. (Wright 2018, 5). The paradox of ‘refusal’ (in Memmi’s sense)12
from within surfaces. For these anticolonial Jewish Israelis resistance is a means to cope
with an unresolvable and inherent crisis of existence, wherein members of the settler
society who want to refuse the privileges that define them, in fact have no structural way
of doing so. Even if they leave the colony as Memmi’s solution to Algeria’s French settlers
suggests (not a realistic option as most Israeli-Jews born in Israel have nowhere else to
go), it will not resolve the problem or empty Palestine of settlers, nor is it what
Palestinians necessarily have asked them to do.
These anti-colonial settlers try to live the present through attempts at manifesting their
desire for a common future with the Palestinians – as a consciousness, practice of friend
ship and solidarity and political act. Amongst anti-Zionist Jewish Israelis this has mani
fested in a range of political platforms – the most radical of which currently on the ‘table’ is
the ‘one state solution’ to the conflict. These proposals are often presented as an alternative
to the problematic and failed ‘two states for two peoples’ logic that frames the mainstream
discourse on Israel/Palestine. The ‘one state’ solution has spawned separate discussions and
formulations by groups of Palestinians and Israelis that have steadily gained ground in
political discourse in the past decade (Bashir and Busbridge 2019; Hussein 2015; Todorova