Zionist settlement required maintaining the fiction of Palestinian absence

Evidence

As in all colonial projects, Israel’s settlers needed to engage in various kinds of active unseeing. The legendary U.S. investigative journalist I. F. Stone supported the creation of a Jewish homeland in Palestine, even embedding himself on one of the clandestine boats, crowded with Holocaust survivors, that eventually made it to safety in “stucco-colored Haifa” in 1946. But after the 1967 war, he conceded, “For the Zionists, the Arab was the Invisible Man. Psychologically he was not there.” Or as the Israeli prime minister Golda Meir put it, “There was no such thing as Palestinians … They did not exist.” The great Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish maps this spectral status—of being a “present-absentee”—in his book In the Presence of Absence. The lie of Indigenous absence, familiar to all settler colonial projects, required a great deal of effort to maintain. The Jewish National Fund planted pine trees on top of Palestinian villages and centuries-old agricultural terrace systems. Hebrew place names replaced Arabic ones. Olive trees, some millennia old, were, and still are, uprooted. — Naomi Klein, Doppelganger, 977

Categorization

• ADDENDUM: The uprooted olive trees and pine-planting over villages extends the ‘Grafting & Growth: On Trees as Infrastructure’ piece’s theme of trees as erased infrastructure wielded by colonial power.
• XREF: ‘Present-absentee’ and the active unseeing of an Indigenous people connects to the reader’s settler-colonial material on Terra Nullius in Drake and Australia — same denial mechanism. — connects to: Zionism’s settlement of Palestine structurally required demographic and cultural replacement of natives. — Nadim N. Rouhana and Nadera Shalhoub-Kevorkian, When Politics Are Sacralized:…, 466