Marcelo G Svirsky

The collaborative struggle and the permeability of settler colonialism

This special issue gathers presentations given at the ‘Collaborative Struggle’ international conference held at the University of Wollongong on 24–25 of September 2012, together with other contributions. The conference was supported by the Institute for Social Transformation Research at UOW, which over recent years has been the base for a rich critical research culture. Though convened to discuss different aspects of joint collective action – or ‘collaborative struggles’ – as a way of exiting not only colonial divisions and more generally oppressive relations in contemporary societies, most presentations at the conference focused on struggles for decolonisation in Australia and Israel–Palestine. We learnt from these presentations on the similar role the communist party played both in Australia and Israel–Palestine as an agent of change, and we also learnt more broadly on the history and the present of the collaborative efforts undertaken by natives and settlers to overcome the divides that settler colonialism has forced on them in these regions. Because of the extent of the elimination of the Aboriginal people and its ways of life, it is in the Australian context, more than in the Israeli, that Patrick Wolfe’s observation that ‘settler colonialism is relatively impervious to regime change’ makes more sense. Wolfe’s position on the historical continuity and pervasiveness of the settler-colonial ‘logic of elimination’ was strongly expressed in 1994 in Social Analysis in his article ‘Nation and MiscegeNation: Discursive Continuity in the Post-Mabo Era’. In 1997 the same journal devoted a space for reflection on Wolfe’s article. In her critique, Francesca Merlan argued that the main problem with Wolfe’s argument on the continuity of the settler logic of elimination is that his diagnosis of the settler project means that settler colonialism is ‘impervious to agency and event’. More specifically, Merlan explains that ‘Wolfe’s strategy of talking about the present synoptically, as totally included within a continuous logic, effectively denies Aborigines and others entry points into it’. Only recently Tim Rowse stressed again the difficulty in Wolfe’s works to deal with indigenous agency and with the characterisation of indigenous difference that is not necessarily a result of state action in the form of ‘repressive authenticity’. In that 1997 issue of Social Analysis both Elizabeth Povinelli and Jeffrey Sissons added to Merlan’s critique of Wolfe on the bracketing of agency; Povinelli by highlighting the role of counter-publics in challenging state policy and public culture, while Sissons by stressing the post-colonial elements in the Native Title Act that, according to Sissons, ‘signals a rupture with the earlier logic of elimination’. Wolfe’s binarism leaves unexplained the liveliness of the forces that the settler elimination machines have to work against in order to maintain their primacy. This is where Wolfe’s ontology put politics to death. But can we really denounce Wolfe that his diagnosis on the persistence of the settler logic is historically incorrect? Wolfe is not alone in his justified pessimism. This journal has adopted a similar standpoint. In the first issue of 2013, Edward Cavanagh and Lorenzo Veracini stated that ‘settler colonialism is a resilient formation that rarely ends’. An outright rejection of this somehow structuralist settler-colonial paradigm forces onto us the burden of explanation of the actual perseverance of settlerist formations. It will be senseless to deny that reality. However,

On the study of collaborative struggles in settler societies

This paper problematises the ways in which the passions of ‘identity’ constrain the collaborative aspects of the struggle for decolonisation in settler-colonial societies. The discussion will focus on Israel–Palestine, where the idea of collaborative struggle has attracted significant criticism. As a corollary of the discussion of this particular case study, an alternative reading of the idea of the collaborative struggle will be offered.

Resistance is a structure not an event

ABSTRACT By looking into the case of Palestine, this article has two goals: the first is to provide philosophical scaffolding to the theme of resistance in settler colonial theory, and in so doing to argue that resistance need to be regarded as part of the structure in settler social formations. Secondly, the article rereads ‘the logic of elimination’ upon which settler colonialism is founded in order to suggest that as a settler colonial project Zionism historically evolved via a process of ‘double elimination’ – of indigenous life and of shared life. The aim of this article is then to fold the second conclusion into the first: alongside with indigenous resistance, shared life need be conceived as part of the structural struggle against settler colonialism. The article has three sections. In the first section, the state of the art in the field of settler colonial studies is presented in order to identify strengths and weaknesses. The second section offers a conceptualisation of the idea/practice of resistance by drawing from Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattaris works. The last section reframes the logic of elimination concluding with a political vision that expands on the notion of resistance.

Interculturalism and the pendulum of identity

This article offers a critical appraisal of the role played by cultural identity in intercultural bilingual Arabic–Hebrew schools in Israel. While engineered as oases of interculturalism amidst a life of ethnic segregation, such schools ultimately confront serious difficulties in escaping the constraints of identity politics and representation. This is expressed by the leading part that group identity plays in the schools’ everyday life. By drawing on the philosophy of Gilles Deleuze, we argue that this state of affairs diminishes the potential of the intercultural encounter to overcome emotional and conceptual inhibitions reigning in larger society. Interculturalism, in order to distance itself from a politics of ressentiment that can only restrict its capacity to flourish, needs to place itself before representation.