Filling the Gaps: Forced Migration and Racialized Patterns of Settlement and Labor in Mid-20th-Century Israel/Palestine

The Palestinian Nakba, the forced migration of roughly 750,000 Palestinians from their homes during the 1947-1949 war and the establishment of Israel, is arguably the defining event of modern Palestinian history. Following decades of colonization, it generated Palestinian statelessness, refugeehood, and dispossession. However, the Nakba remains contentious in Israeli history. Although the fact of expulsion is now largely acknowledged, there are ongoing debates in Israeli historiography on the Nakba’s scale and whether it was a pre-meditated ethnic cleansing, a product of opportunism, or a so-called natural, if regrettable, outcome of war. Underlying these debates is the question of to what extent Zionism should be regarded as a settler colonial project or a national movement.

This paper resituates the Nakba as the defining event of Israeli history. It shows how the Nakba shaped the political economy, labor divisions, and settlement patterns of early Israeli statehood, focusing on two central processes: the 1949-1959 austerity (tzena), usually ascribed to fiscal concerns, and war and immigration expenditures; and the state’s immigrant productivization policies, including vocational training and the establishment of “work villages,” in depopulated Palestinian villages. Scarcity, rationing, and the need to train, employ, and settle immigrants in trades previously dominated and land long settled by Palestinians, I argue, were products of the Nakba’s expulsions, revealing the Zionist settler community’s unacknowledged dependence on Palestinians. They were also driven by state expropriation of lands and imposition of movement and employment restrictions upon Palestinians who remained or returned after the Nakba. Productivization and its spatial manifestations were, in turn, defined by racialized ideas about labor and standards of living. Mizrahi (Middle Eastern and North African) Jews, who state officials frequently regarded as physically and culturally similar to Palestinians, were the main objects of policies intended to fill in the spatial and socioeconomic vacuums the Nakba produced