CITIZENSHIP STUDIES 2024, VOL. 28, NO. 3, 263–281 https://doi.org/10.1080/13621025.2022.2086298 The anticolonial settler: reflections on citizenship, violence and decolonisation Elian Weizman School of Law and Social Sciences, London South Bank University, London, UK ABSTRACT ARTICLE HISTORY Focusing on Israel/Palestine, this article explores the role of antic­ olonial settler-citizens, discussing how they may advance or impede struggles to dismantle the settler state. It shows how in settler states citizenship is founded on, and functions through, violence. It then analyses how the settler colonial condition imposes a set of paradoxes on those settler-citizens who wish to resist the colonial condition, thus limiting possibilities for settler solidarity and coresistance. Overall, the article presents a critique of the role of citizenship in decolonisation struggles, including through the fra­ mework of ‘acts of citizenship’. It shows that the role of violence and non-violence in the (anti)colonial project is key to unravelling the impossibility of bridging the inherent fault line of being anticolonial while remaining settlers. Lessons from other past and present decolonisation struggles teach us that settler solidarity and coresistance must centre indigenous struggles and take leadership from them, in ways accepting the uncertainty of the settlers’ future after decolonisation. Only such recognition can allow genuine ally­ ship and solidarity and with it hope for such a future. Received: 20 January 2020 Accepted: 16 May 2022 KEYWORDS Settler citizenship; resistance; violence; allyship; anticolonial struggle No matter how liberated you are, if you are still occupying Indigenous lands you are still a colonizer. [. . .] The work of an accomplice in anti-colonial struggle is to attack colonial structures & ideas. (Indigenous Action 2014) In Israel, Zionist ideology, discourse and practice hold a hegemonic commonsensical position. Only a tiny minority of Israeli Jews, numbering in the hundreds at most, consider themselves part of an anti-colonial struggle – one led by Palestinians whose continued existence on their own land is at stake. These Israeli Jews contribute their voices, bodies, skills and knowledge to the struggle against the Israeli state’s ideology, practices and policies. They regularly travel to the occupied West Bank or approach the fence encircling the Gaza Strip, using their bodies to confront armed soldiers or violent settlers. They chain themselves to trees at risk of being uprooted and houses facing demolition, remove road blocks, sleep in situ, escort Palestinian children to schools or farmers to their fields to protect them from settler violence, join marches, document, CONTACT Elian Weizman weizmane@lsbu.ac.uk © 2022 The Author(s). Published by Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group. This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/ licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. The terms on which this article has been published allow the posting of the Accepted Manuscript in a repository by the author(s) or with their consent.