The Politics of Decolonisation and Bi-Nationalism in Israel/Palestine
| Published date | 01 May 2019 |
| Author | Rachel Busbridge,Bashir Bashir |
| Date | 01 May 2019 |
| DOI | 10.1177/0032321718767029 |
| Subject Matter | Articles |
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Article
Political Studies
2019, Vol. 67(2) 388 –405
The Politics of Decolonisation
© The Author(s) 2018
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https://doi.org/10.1177/0032321718767029
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Palestine
Bashir Bashir1 and Rachel Busbridge2
Abstract
Recent years have seen a revitalisation of decolonisation as a framework of analysis in the Israeli–
Palestinian conflict. This article maps changes in the meanings attached to decolonisation in the
Israeli Israeli–Palestinian context, paying particular attention to the one-state paradigm. One-state
proposals highlight bi-national realities in historic Palestine in order to lay out a decolonising vision
grounded in equal civic rights. Many one-state advocates, however, are suspicious of a prescriptive
bi-national paradigm that would afford the two national groups equal collective rights, primarily
because its recognition of Jewish national self-determination is seen as entrenching, rather than
decolonising, colonial relations of power. We argue that a prescriptive bi-nationalism in fact offers
rich resources for a decolonising project in Israel/Palestine that seeks to establish a polity based
on the principles of justice and equality – come to terms with historical injustice and imagine
alternative pasts, presents and futures based on Arab–Jewish relationships.
Keywords
decolonisation, Israel/Palestine, bi-nationalism, settler colonialism
Accepted: 5 March 2018
In his recent book with Noam Chomsky and Frank Barat, Ilan Pappé (2015: 1) observes
that ‘we seem to be in the midst of a transition from an old conversation about Palestine
to a new one’ which has reframed the Israeli–Palestinian conflict in terms of ‘a simple
story about colonialism and dispossession’. Decolonisation as a process of ‘undoing’
colonial relations of domination between Palestinians and Israeli Jews has been afforded
a compelling and revitalised role in this new conversation. Of course, the concept of
decolonisation is not new in the context of the Israeli–Palestinian conflict. The Palestinian
struggle for self-determination and against Zionist expansion has long been considered in
anti-colonial terms. Likewise, the variety of solutions proposed to ‘solve’ the conflict are
1Department of Sociology, Political Science and Communication, Open University of Israel, Ra’anana, Israel
2ACU’s National School of Arts, Australian Catholic University, Melbourne, Australia
Corresponding author:
Bashir Bashir, Department of Sociology, Political Science and Communication, Open University of Israel,
Derekh ha-Universita 1, PO Box 808, Ra’anana 4353701, Israel.
Email: bashbashir@gmail.com
Bashir and Busbridge
389
embedded in language of decolonisation, even as they attach different conceptual and
political meanings to it. What is striking about this present transition, however, is the re-
centring of settler colonialism as the core dynamic shaping the conflict. Whereas the
two-state hegemon has seen decolonisation primarily framed in terms of partition and
state-building, reducing colonial concerns to the ongoing Israeli settlement project in the
West Bank, more recent accounts have taken their lead from earlier critical scholarship
(e.g. Rodinson, 1973; Said, 1979; Sayegh, 1965) which considered Zionism in terms of
settler colonialism. Accordingly, they seek to articulate a decolonising mandate which
includes the Palestinians as a whole constituency and recognises their collective aspira-
tions in the entirety of historic Palestine. In this new conversation, a liberal democratic
one-state solution has taken precedence as offering the greatest potentialities for decolo-
nisation in Israel/Palestine – laying down the foundations for a genuine regime change
that would affirm Palestinian rights at the same time as re-orient Arab–Jewish relation-
ships around the principles of equality and cohabitation.
This article seeks to bring an additional, albeit under-engaged, element into this newly
emerging conversation: bi-nationalism. As an empirical description of the realities on the
ground created by Zionist colonisation, bi-nationalism often plays an important role for
advocates of a one-state solution, insofar as it designates the seemingly irrevocable ter-
ritorial, social and political intertwinings of Jews and Palestinians in historic Palestine
and highlights the unviability of partition (e.g. Benvenisti, 2009; Farsakh, 2017; Judt,
2003; Remnick, 2014). As a prescriptive political project that would affirm the rights to
national self-determination for both Palestinians and Israeli Jews within a shared terri-
tory, however, bi-nationalism is far more controversial and typically regarded with a great
deal of scepticism, if not suspicion, with regard to its decolonising potential (e.g. Abu-
Odeh, 2001; Farsakh, 2011; Tamari, 2000).
Save for a handful of scholars who have explicitly sought to articulate variants of bi-
nationalism in decolonial terms (e.g. Raz-Krakotzkin, 2011; Todorova, 2015; Yiftachel,
2016), the idea that Palestinian rights to national self-determination in historic Palestine
should be achieved alongside Israeli Jewish rights to the same is widely seen by one-state
advocates as an anathema to genuine decolonisation. If nationalism is a process of ‘iden-
tity-enforcement’ that is ‘almost always’ implicated in the suppression or denial of other
identities as Edward Said (1988: 58) has argued, then not just accommodating but explic-
itly foregrounding national identities in any future shared polity risks entrenching separa-
tion, exclusion and Othering – hardly the stuff of decolonising relationships. Israeli
Jewish nationalism, in particular, is regarded as especially problematic given that it is
largely a settler colonial achievement (e.g. Abunimah, 2012; Barghouti, 2009).
In this article, we make two claims. The first is that the civic vision of one-state advo-
cates may be too dismissive of deeply rooted national affiliations for Palestinians and
Israeli Jews alike. That Jewish Israeli and Palestinian national identities – like all national
identities – are ‘projects of political invention and imagination’ (Tilley, 2015: 428) is
clear, as are the political risks and dangers of nationalism. Yet, in sidestepping the reso-
nance of national identities or, alternatively, over-estimating the ease with which they
may find civic expression, what proponents of a liberal one-state solution ultimately
avoid is the difficult question of Jewish Israeli collective rights in historic Palestine. As a
decolonising proposal, the liberal one-state vision, in its various modalities, may thus
satisfy Palestinian demands for justice but ultimately suffers from a poverty of imagina-
tion when it comes to re-imagining the relationship between Arabs and Jews. We argue
that bi-nationalism as a prescriptive paradigm is not only better equipped to deal with
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Political Studies 67(2)
such questions but also to develop affective relations of co-belonging. Accordingly, our
second claim is that bi-nationalism in fact offers rich resources for imagining an ongoing
decolonising project in Israel/Palestine. Specifically, its insistence on equal rights to
national self-determination both satisfies Palestinian demands and dismantles the ethno-
exclusive vision of Zionism, insofar as it rejects Jewish colonial privileges as well as
Zionist claims to exclusive Jewish sovereignty over historic Palestine. Furthermore, its
political accommodation of national identities arguably creates a context more conducive
to the reckoning with historical injustice and the concordant taking responsibility and
offering reparations that decolonisation demands.
The article begins by reflecting on the meanings of decolonisation in settler colonial
contexts, suggesting that the emphasis of any potentially postcolonial polity must be
placed on decolonising relationships. Among others, this entails dismantling settler aspi-
rations to exclusivity as well as establishing equality between natives and settlers.
Thereafter, we explore how decolonisation has been imagined in the context of the
Israeli–Palestinian conflict, with a particular focus on the one-state paradigm. The last
section explores the decolonising potential of prescriptive bi-nationalism, which we
define as the egalitarian recognition of two distinct national groups in one political entity.
While a bi-national polity of the type we articulate here comes with certain challenges, we
maintain that it promises a richer political, ethical and moral foundation for a postcolonial
polity in Israel/Palestine than the partialities of both the two-state and liberal one-state
solutions.
Theorising Decolonisation
For all its attached redemptive prospects and radical possibilities, it is important to
emphasise that the meanings of decolonisation as both a concept and political project are
not just broad, but also multifaceted and highly contested. What it means to ‘undo’ colo-
nialism is deeply contextual (Jansen and Osterhammel, 2017). While colonialism can be
defined broadly as a relationship of domination in which a people or territory is politically
and economically subjugated to a foreign power, actual colonial situations vary quite
widely from each other, depending on, among others, the particular political...
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