The Zionist Engineering of Forced Labor: Prison Camps and Settler Colonies

This paper traces the development of Britain’s prison labor camps in Palestine between the 1920s to 1948 through the story of an American-Zionist engineer who played a prominent role in the operation of prison labor camps in northern Palestine as an engineer with the Public Works Department. By focusing on the story of this engineer, his active involvement in the Zionist movement, and his development of prison labor camps and settler-colonial infrastructure, I show how the Zionist movement contributed to the underdevelopment of Palestine through the simultaneous build-up of settlements and the super-exploitation of Palestinian and Arab men in prison labor camps. I aim to delineate how this story clarifies the bi-directional and symbiotic relationship between British imperialism and Zionism settler-colonialism, and reflects the colonial path of development and underdevelopment in Mandate Palestine.