Citizenship as Accumulation by Dispossession: The Paradox of Settler Colonial Citizenship

This paper extends critical trends of citizenship studies and the theory of accumulation by dispossession to articulate how settler colonial citizenship is instantiated through the active accrual of land and resources, and how the emerging settler colonial citizenship entrenches both structural subjugation and resistance. Zionist colonization was not a spatial fix for capitalist expansion. At the same time, capitalism and the privatization of land, which, despite the purported socialist ideologies and practices, played a role in the development of the Israeli state. And so while the particularities of capital are not my focus in this paper, I am concerned with the systems of hierarchy inherent in materialist processes, especially as it pertains to ownership over the means of production and inhabitancy (land and resources). By attending to the materialist realm, I aim to show how accumulation by dispossession is a characteristic feature of citizenship in settler colonial cases that has specific dynamics and logics. The paper then examines the reformation of the boundaries of citizenship through indigenous agency. I do so through examining the Palestinian citizens in Israel, specifically centering the Internally Displaced Persons, a segment among the “1948 Palestinians” (approximately 46,000 of the 156,000 Palestinians who remained in Israel in 1948 after the Nakba) whose towns were uprooted and relocated and their property appropriated but were granted Israeli citizenship. The paper asserts citizenship’s double paradox in settler colonial contexts. Settler colonial citizenship regulates certain rights and mobilities. However, it simultaneously entraps the indigenous in a structure in which recursive accumulation is constitutive. Settler colonial citizenship thus entrenches indigenous dispossession and the further loss of other rights and claims.