The 1948 Arab-Israeli Conflict and International Law

International law’s indeterminacy and its capacity to be shaped by what Duncan Kennedy describes as “legal work,” or the intervention of the legal worker to shape many available parts, (i.e., evidence, primary documents, testimony) into an argument makes certain that there is no singular account of a conflict in international law. Despite the myriad legal arguments presented in jurisprudence, scholarship, and advocacy, not a single one of them is the “truth” to the exclusion of all others as the law itself represents a terrain of battle rather than a science to be discovered or verified. This could not be truer in the case of the 1948 Arab-Israeli conflict. The conflict itself refers to the establishment of Israel, self-defined as a Jewish state, in Mandate Palestine, where a native, and numerical majority, Arab population sought to be self-determined. Perhaps the worst way to pursue this scholarly inquiry is to begin in the 1948 War between Israel and six Arab armies. Doing so effectively erases the three decades of British colonial oversight in its capacity as the Mandatory power that facilitated the settler-colonization of Palestine, the supplanting of nascent Palestinian sovereignty with Jewish-Zionist settler-sovereignty, and, ultimately, the country’s transformation into the modern state of Israel. While I begin this inquiry roughly during the First World War, which ended with the defeat of the Ottoman Empire and its dominion over Palestine since 1299, there is room to begin much earlier especially in regard to the development of legal regimes regulating nationality and citizenship as well as land to understand their mutations over the course of the Palestine Mandate between 1922 and 1948. Similarly, it would be a mistake to end this inquiry upon Israel’s establishment, and then begin again during the 1967 War and the subsequent occupation of Arab lands, as do most legal accounts. The intervening decades between the two wars serve as an analytical bridge to understand the continuities in law between Britain’s colonial oversight of Palestine, Israel’s racialized governance of Palestinian natives who remained, and Israel’s occupation of the West Bank and Gaza, which together provide a more holistic picture of an ongoing settler-colonial regime of land usurpation, native removal, and settler replacement. This bibliography aims to provide historical context as well as reflect some of the debates within the historiography and legal literature. It includes a mix of primary sources, legal analysis, and historical accounts that together should help shape a robust research project.

‘In the Midst of Three Fires, a French one, an American one, and an Indian one’: Imperial-Indigenous Negotiations during the War of 1812 in Eastern British America

This essay argues that the War of 1812 in Eastern British America, despite the near-absence of land-based conflict in this region, marked a turning point in an imperial-Indigenous relationship that differed notably from comparable relationships elsewhere in North America because of the relatively late advent of substantial settler colonization. Diplomacy, which led in 1812 to the conclusion of a series of neutrality agreements in the borderland jurisdiction of New Brunswick, contributed to the forestalling of outright military conflict in the region. But diplomacy of this nature at the same time reached the end of its effective life, as the balance tipped towards a settled environment that eroded the effectiveness of the formerly powerful diplomatic tools of Indigenous-imperial negotiation. 1

Before colonization (BC) and after decolonization (AD): The Early Anthropocene, the Biblical Fall, and relational pasts, presents, and futures

Anthropocene debate centers on the start-date and the cause of the geologic Epoch. One argument for the Epoch’s start-date is the “Early Anthropocene,” contending humanity “took control” of Earth systems during the Neolithic Revolution. Adherents contend agriculture contributed to rising carbon emissions and laid the groundwork for societal ills such as colonialism and extractive capitalism. Such a deterministic theory erases centuries of relational agriculture practiced by Indigenous peoples in the Americas. This article upsets the narrative of the “Early Anthropocene” that would mark all agriculture and agricultural societies as destructive and extractive, and instead offers embodied Indigenous narratives that view agriculture as a relational system of partnerships between humans and other-than-human beings over centuries. First, I trace the “Early Anthropocene” narrative from its origins with paleoclimatologist William Ruddiman to its contemporary adherents and show how such a theory lines-up with the narrative of the Christianized Biblical Fall. I show that “Early Anthropocene” theorists portray agriculture as society’s “ultimate sin,” wherein humans fall from a hunter–gatherer Eden and must toil to cultivate crops, eventually giving way to colonialism and extractive capitalism, ultimately causing environmental degradation and destruction and leading to a second coming of the hunter-gathering Eden. I then argue against such stories, tracing examples of relational agriculture practiced prior to settler colonization into our contemporary moment by Cherokee, Anishinaabe, Haudenosaunee, Western Apache, Karuk, Coast Salish, and Ponca peoples. Such stories show a pattern of missteps, understanding, and knowledge production between human groups and the more-than-human, rather than the environmental and societal destruction that Early Anthropocene theorists portray as the inevitable end of agricultural societies. This study disproves the agricultural “Early Anthropocene” as a starting point for Earth’s Epoch. It also presents relational environmental understanding through decolonized agriculture on repatriated land as a future method for interacting with the other-than-human environment.

John Galt’s ‘Whole Art of Colonization’

The Scottish novelist John Galt provides the clearest example of a writer in whose works fiction, literary technique, and settler colonization overlap. Famous for his regional novels about communities on Scotland’s western seaboard, he also had careers as parliamentary lobbyist, entrepreneur, and colonist in Upper Canada. In the 1820s, he spent a period working for the Canada Land Company, a colonization company he helped to establish in London, and through which he travelled to Canada to participate in the development of colonial settlements, including the city of Guelph. This provided copious material for writings in the final years of his life. Although Galt, and subsequently critics and biographers, have tended to represent the two periods of his life separately, they both are part of a single colonial project, connected by the extensive print networks of which he was a part. The connections are evident principally in his preoccupation with voice and dialect, sound and hearing. In the Scottish works he emphasizes phonological aspects of Scottish regional voices, and ways in which literature trains the ear. Sound operates as a mode of organizing and producing space. In the Canadian works, he explores the themes of sound and acoustic management in the context of colonial space. Together his works present an archive of colonial sound management, and an exploration of the auditory elements of his colonial project.

Geography and State Power

Chapter 1 situates the US Post within the larger landscape of the 19th-century American state. Analyzing the geography of the US Post challenges traditional assumptions about how states are organized and the ways in which they exercise power. First, rather than functioning as a centralized bureaucracy, the US Post operated through the agency model: a decentralized organization in which small tasks are delegated to a scattered workforce of part-time local agents. Second, rather than exercising coercive power, the US Post operated through structural power, or the ability to shape the conditions under which people make decisions. Rather than weaknesses, these features were key to how the US Post was able to rapidly expand over recently conquered territory and, in doing so, tie together the machinery of governance and settler colonization in the western United States.

Traditional Food Energy Intake Among Indigenous Populations in Select High-Income Settler Colonized Countries: A Systematic Literature Review

The traditional diets of Indigenous Peoples globally have undergone major transition due to settler colonization. This systematic review aims to provide a perspective of traditional food intake of Indigenous populations in high-income countries with a history of settler colonization. For inclusion, studies reported the primary outcome of interest: traditional food contribution to total energy intake (%E) and occurred in Canada, the United States (including Hawaii and Alaska), New Zealand, Australia and/or Scandinavian countries. Primary outcome data were reported and organized by date of data collection by country. Forty-nine articles published between 1987 and 2019 were identified. Wide variation in contribution of traditional food to energy was reported. A trend for decreasing traditional food energy intake over time was apparent; however, heterogeneity in study populations and dietary assessment methods limited conclusive evaluation of this. This review may inform cross-sectoral policy to protect the sustainable utilization of traditional food for Indigenous Peoples.

Demobilised Soldiers, Small Holdings Colonies and the Compulsory Acquisition of Land after World War One: Scotland and Canada

This article compares the Small Holdings Colonies Acts (1916 and 1918) for demobilized WWI soldiers in Britain upon which the Land Settlement (Scotland) Act of 1919 was established; and similar small holdings colonies for demobilized soldiers in Canada with a particular focus on provisions for the state to engage in compulsory acquisition of land for this purpose. My research shows in the Highlands and Islands of Scotland, colonies and compulsory acquisition of land under the 1919 Act were part of a larger land reform movement (breaking up large estates) and represent progressive advances for traditional occupants – the crofters and tenant farmers – to have rights over their own lands. In Canada, on the other hand, domestic colonies for British soldiers served to displace indigenous peoples from their reserves already vastly diminished compared to traditional territories. The compulsory acquisition of land through surrenders from reserves compounded the problem. As such colonies in Canada had negative impacts on indigenous peoples as part of an ongoing settler colonization process. Thus I show that small holdings colonies particularly when combined with compulsory acquisition of land work in opposite directions normatively and materially in each country.

The Pioneers of Sámi Children’s Books

This article discusses the Sámi children’s books produced in the 1970s and 1980s during the Sámi political “awakening,” and which are part of the larger Sámi project of cultural self-determination. In the historical legacy of images of the Sámi that were part of the vast colonial apparatus employed by the surrounding majority cultures, Sámi children of earlier generations had been exposed to and internalized representations of themselves that reproduced a hierarchical social order in which they were on the lower rungs. Since the 1970s, Sámi children’s book creators have been actively engaged in decolonizing children’s literature from this legacy of settler colonization and assimilationist policies by not only foregrounding language and Sámi traditions, but also reappropriating stereotypes and images in a decolonizing gesture in order to reclaim their past and their identities. Because the first generation of Sámi children’s book authors and illustrators were women, Vuokko Hirvonen has termed them the “mothers” of Sámi literature (Voices from Sápmi). Their books also contain deeply feminist critiques, not only of the legacy of the majority culture, but of patriarchy within Sámi culture as well. By working and reconfiguring traditional narratives, their books have thus a dual mission of giving voice, visibility and agency to the Sámi while recouping the silenced female voice.

Cultural resistance in occupied Palestine and the use of creative international solidarity through song1

Protest song has been an important component of grassroots political struggles, and the Palestinian resistance to Zionist settler-colonization is no exception. This article draws on original research with activists in the Palestinian popular resistance on the impact of song during the first intifada (1987 to 1993) and more recently in the opposition to the segregation wall and accelerated colonization of the West Bank. The significance of international solidarity to the Palestinian struggle is noted, and the role of protest song in international solidarity is explored. The activities of Edinburgh-based community choir San Ghanny in using song as an expression of solidarity with the Palestinian popular anti-colonial struggle is analysed. Protest song is a globally recognizable form, which can help to build connections with social movements in different parts of the world and in different periods of history, which is both rooted in individual places and struggles, and also transcends these at the level of global solidarity.