From Shared Life to Co-Resistance in Historic Palestine

How do we contribute to the decolonisation of Palestine? In what ways can we divest from settler arrangements in the present-day? Exploring the Zionist takeover of Palestine as a settler colonial case, this book argues that in studying the elimination of native life in Palestine, the loss of Arab-Jewish shared life cannot be ignored. Muslims, Christians, and Jews, shared a life in Ottoman Palestine and in a different way during British rule. The attempt to eliminate native life involved the destruction of Arab society – its cultural hegemony and demographic superiority – but also the racial rejection of Arab-Jewish sociabilities, of shared life. Thus the settlerist process of dispossession of the Arabs was complemented with the destruction of the social and cultural infrastructure that made Arab-Jewish life a historical reality. Both operations formed Israeli polity. Can this understanding contribute to present-day Palestinian resistance and a politics of decolonisation? In this book, the authors address this question by exploring how the study of elimination of shared life can inform Arab-Jewish co-resistance as a way of defying Israel’s Zionist regime. Above and beyond opposing an unacceptable state of affairs, this book engages with past and present to discuss possible futures.