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Resistance is a structure not an event
Article · March 2016

DOI: 10.1080/2201473X.2016.1141462
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Settler Colonial Studies
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Marcelo Svirsky
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SETTLER COLONIAL STUDIES, 2016
http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/2201473X.2016.1141462

Marcelo Svirsky
School of Humanities and Social Inquiry, University of Wollongong, Wollongong, NSW, Australia
ABSTRACT KEYWORDS
By looking into the case of Palestine, this article has two goals: the Settler colonial studies;
first is to provide philosophical scaffolding to the theme of settler colonialism; Palestine;
resistance in settler colonial theory, and in so doing to argue that Israel; power and resistance;
Deleuze and Guattari
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
Downloaded by [Marcelo Svirsky] at 10:04 07 March 2016
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 Guattari’s works. The last section reframes the logic of
elimination concluding with a political vision that expands on the
notion of resistance.
The state of the art in settler colonial studies

For a discipline just about two decades old – if we take Patrick Wolfe’s book Settler Colo-
nialism and the Transformation of Anthropology as marking its critical breakthrough – it is
reasonable to diagnose the condition of settler colonial studies as healthy and thriving.1
Paradigmatic positions, critique and counter-critique, a growing number of comparative
empirical studies, and even attempts at dialogue with sister disciplines – these synchronise
to make settler colonial studies a vibrant field.2 This article contributes to academic and
political conversations about settler colonialism by focusing on one concept, resistance.
Patrick Wolfe introduced his ideas already in 1994, with ‘Nation and Miscegenation’,
published in Social Analysis.3 Since then, as Alex Trimble Young states, Wolfe ‘has articu-
lated one of the most influential theoretical models for understanding the processes of
settler colonial invasion’.4 Wolfe’s theoretical edifice is built on the following principles:
(a) settler invasion is a structure not an event; (b) the logic of that structure is one of elim-
ination of the Native (historically strategised by the settler state via implementations sup-
plementary to pure violence – mainly assimilation);5 and (c) polarity, or empirical binarism
(indigenous vs settler), is the only critical way to conceive relations of invasion. To state the
CONTACT Marcelo Svirsky msvirsky@uow.edu.au

© 2016 Taylor & Francis
2 M. SVIRSKY
matter more explicitly, settler colonialism is a structure because as settlers come to stay
invasion unfolds as an ever expanding spatial intervention that creates a new form of
habitat by means of conquest, domination, and displacement-replacement. And since
these and newer strategies of elimination in the established settler state have never
ceased to inform political power and more broadly to manage life, indigenous–settler
relationships should be interpreted in an oppositional fashion. As Wolfe explains:
If the historical surface is complex, it might seem doctrinaire to insist on the primacy of an
underlying polarity. The motivation is, however, empirical. Retrospectively, polarity is indispu-
table – back from a certain point, there can be no question as to the mutual separateness of
the two principal parties to the Australian colonial process. The differences within them were
smaller than the differences between them. Thus the empirical question is whether or not
(and, if so, when and where) that initial polarity came to be dissolved. There is no justification
for simply assuming that it did [ … and] to assume that the opposing identities became
merged [ … ] is to underwrite assimilationism, a phenomenon that we should be analysing
rather than practising.6
In a more recent article, Wolfe presses home the same point, this time by way of addres-
sing the idea of the frontier:
In our theoretical enthusiasm at the complexities, hybridities and transgressions that the study
of frontiers opens up, therefore, we should not lose sight of the fact that, for all the holes and
inconsistencies in the concept, its primary referent is stable enough. Behind all the indetermi-
nacy, the frontier is a way of talking about the historical process of territorial invasion – a
cumulative depredation through which outsiders recurrently advance on Natives in order to
take their place. Go back far enough, in other words, and there can be no disputing the exist-
ence of an unqualified empirical binarism.7
Challenging the epistemological status of oppositionality that empirically characterises

indigenous–settler relationships in contemporary settler societies means to challenge the
idea that, in the words of Veracini (along with Wolfe, a key architect in the shaping of
settler colonial theory), ‘settler colonialism is as much a thing of the present as a thing
of the past’.8 And to contest the empirical nature of the historical continuity of strategic
elimination – discursively by periodising settler societies as if they were placed beyond
the initial relations of invasion, or politically by either endorsing public policies that
reduce the history of the indigenous predicament to a mere coordinate in the multicul-
tural matrix, or just by ignoring the dreadfulness of the indigenous situation – is, for
Wolfe, and rightly so, to be complicit with assimilatory practices of indigenous elimination.
This theoretical and political position is widely accepted among scholars in the field and
has become the platform on which a theory of settler colonialism has been developing
during the last years. From the viewpoint of research, the important question is how
Wolfe’s conceptual framework based on the continuity of empirical binarism translates
into a methodology. His position, which as he unambiguously states, ‘has a clear impli-
cation for the current liberal preoccupation with writing in the agency of the subaltern’,9
is summarised in the very last page of Settler Colonialism and the Transformation of Anthro-
pology: ‘What needs to be written in is not the agency of the colonised but the total
context of inscription.’10 The Wolfean paradigm opts to focus research on ‘the settler-colo-
nial will, a historical force that ultimately derives from the primal drive to expansion’.11 Two
separate lines of inquiry are presented: the study of settler colonial domination, and the
SETTLER COLONIAL STUDIES 3
study of indigenous discourse and resistance – the second being ‘peripheral’ as Wolfe
states – to the analysis of the first.12 As Wolfe adds,
It is important to keep the two perspectives separate. As stated, my purpose is to categorize
colonizing strategies employed in Australia. It is not to categorize Indigenous strategies of
resistance, survival or anything else. The failure to distinguish between the two perspectives
recapitulates assimilationism. (emphasis added)13
To properly understand Wolfe’s methodological strategy, we should take seriously his

use of the first-person singular as his personal historical coordinates in the settler
project. Wolfe is proposing a research agenda that counters the historical complicity of
white settler academics in the making and maintenance of (Indigenous) elimination. In
this reading, by engaging in acts of representation of indigenous discourses and experi-
ences (resistance included), white academics reproduce settler invasion. If these practices
are assimilatory it is simply because
nothing can escape being turned into a text for the analyst to appropriate, interrogate and
reconstruct [ … ]. The outcome is an ethnographic ventriloquism whereby invaded subjects
are made to speak unawares, in contexts in which they could reasonably believe they were
doing something else.14
Yet, the charge of practising assimilationism is ratified by, yet does not stem from, the
impositions of an ethical sensibility and a determination to counter current power
relations. Wolfe’s methodological preference rightly rests on undeniable historical
grounds: in settler societies there can be no innocent academic discourses about indi-
genous knowledges and experiences.15 For all its historical complicity, the white
settler academy is always already suspicious, since, as, for instance, in the Australian
case, ‘the significance of anthropology is that it has provided – though not exclusively
– narratives that have been selected in furtherance of the logic of elimination’.16 As
Wolfe explains:
Claims to authority over indigenous discourse made from within the settler-colonial academy
necessarily participate in the continuing usurpation of indigenous space (invasion is a struc-
ture not an event). This theoretical conclusion is abundantly borne out by the Australian acad-
emy’s deep involvement in successive modalities of settler-colonial discourse. Whether by
accident or design, whether by measuring, quantifying, pathologizing, expunging or essentia-
lizing, a comprehensive range of authorities – anthropologists in particular, but also historians,
biologists, archaeologists, psychologists, criminologists, the whole Foucauldian line-up – have
produced an incessant flow of knowledge about Aborigines that has become available for
selective appropriation to warrant, to rationalize and to authenticate official definitions, pol-
icies and programmes for dealing with ‘the Aboriginal problem’.17
Similarly, reflecting on the role of Israeli historians in the production of knowledge jus-
tifying the Zionist settler colonial project, Ilan Pappé similarly commented:
Rather than setting out to validate grand claims such as a persistent, age-old Jewish urge to
settle in Palestine or the emptiness of Palestine prior to the arrival of the Zionists, they sliced
up these claims by time frame or topic and provided limited empirical evidence for their val-
idity. Thus they would look at Jewish urges for Palestine during a particular decade or discuss
conditions in Palestine during a particular year or season. But whether they reconstructed the
historical process as a whole, or focused on a single anecdotal chapter within it, they remained
loyal both to Zionism and to scientific truth, as they saw it.18
4 M. SVIRSKY
Undoubtedly, the question of positionality justly troubles choices and roles in the study
of settler colonialism. Nonetheless, it is not only that, as Merlan pointed out, Wolfe esca-
lates the ban on ‘speaking for’ into one of ‘speaking about’; it is just that it makes no sense
to write in the settler context of inscription, to use Wolfe’s words, and pretend that indi-
genous knowledges, perceptions and experiences are not affected.19 Isn’t Wolfe’s own
oeuvre, in itself, a form of intellectual activism that inescapably contributes to the antico-
lonial struggle? In other words, the politicisation of white complicities within theory does
not answer the question of who should research what and why. Wolfe’s answer to this
question amounts to a racial division of academic labour. He proposes a form of collabor-
ation where indigenous scholarship emerge as the sole legitimate source of knowledge of
indigenous strategies of resistance and survival, and white academics are left with one and
only one untainted avenue of research to follow; that is, engaging in critical white auto-
ethnographies.20 However, in the attempt to ‘recuperate empirical binarism’ in theory
and politics, this division of labour runs the risk of echoing – rather than combatting –
the segregative effects of the empirical divisions that exist. This racial division of academic
labour also takes us directly into questions about the dimensions of the anti-colonial
struggle, such as who is entitled to participate in the struggle, under what conditions,
and in which actions. This stance may even lead us to doubt any political project that
takes seriously the potentials for cultural transformation of settler subjectivities as part
of the broader anti-colonial project. As Macoun and Strakosch observe, settler colonial
studies ‘explains more of who we are than previous approaches, but it is not coincident
with all that we are, and is not able to explain the entire encounter between Indigenous
and settler peoples’.21 I find an emphasis on the correspondence between identity-cat-
egories and the distribution of academic roles unhelpful.
I reject the entrenchment of subjectivity in identity as much as I reject the passivity of
being chained to an epistemological and affective correspondence between subjectivity,
the history of settler whiteness, and the accountancy of settler power. Away from the palsy
of bad conscience and yet aware of our embeddedness in the structural and material
advantages of colonial power and privilege, I chose here to follow Aboriginal Gangulu
elder Lilla Watson who in the 1970s unambiguously stated, ‘If you have come to help
me you are wasting your time. But if you come because your liberation is bound up
with mine, then let us work together’.22 As part of this liberation, I adopt the academic
practice of studying resistance.
Wolfe’s position on the issue of resistance, I suspect, encompasses more preoccupa-
tions than how to respond to the white appropriation of indigenous discourses. According
to Wolfe, ‘Indigenous resistance has been a constant feature of the entire settler-colonial
era’, and therefore, ‘in generating its own resistance, settler-colonial power also contains
it’.23 Wolfe conceives resistance, it seems, in a Newtonian fashion, as a necessarily reactive
force that is always responding to the constraints of power and is thus quickly re-appro-
priated. In adopting this conception, we risk conceiving no outside to settler colonial
power. Thus, oppression and domination in all their forms and shapes are given explana-
tory monopoly replicating their omnipresence in the shaping and managing of life.
Yet, importantly, since Wolfe does not place an emphasis on the study of resistance, this
position prompted a lively debate on the ways the strategies of resistance and survival of
those subjected to settler colonial domination should be investigated. The implications
this scholarly debate has for our understanding of reality in settler societies, and for
potentially transformative political work, can hardly be overstated. As Macoun and Stra-
kosch note, the critique of Wolfe’s paradigm centres on its ‘failure to take resistance
seriously or to see subjects as sites of freedom and innovation’.24 And as they add: ‘By
emphasizing continuities in colonial relationships between the past and the present,
SCT [settler colonial theory] can depict colonization as structurally inevitable, and can
be deployed in ways that re-inscribe settler colonialism’.25 This line of critique is not
new and in fact joins the scholarship that preceded Wolfe’s publications. In this regard,
Wolfe construed works such as Henry Reynolds’s The Other Side of the Frontier (1981) as
his theoretical-other, since, as Altenbernd and Young explain, Reynolds ‘decisively recast
the Australian frontier as a site of settler conquest and indigenous resistance’, and in so
doing ‘transformed the content and conclusions of Australian frontier historiography by
recuperating the suppressed history of the violence that subtended settlement, and the
indigenous agency expressed through various forms of resistance’.26
This critique is not unprecedented. Replying to Wolfe’s 1994 article, Francesca Merlan
stated that his position ‘seems to offer no prospect of a place and a future for indigenous
peoples ‘within the modern order’, except perhaps a completely oppositional one, defined
in terms of a binary logic of radical difference, Aborigine versus Other’, adding that in ‘cen-
tering the notion of a continuous “logic” of settler-colonialism, and regarding this as a
“structure not an event”, Wolfe succumbs to the appealing closure of all structuralisms,
and constitutes this logic as impervious to agency and event’.27 Looking into the dimen-
sion of settler subjecthood, Elizabeth Povinelli claimed that identifying ‘one’s procedure if
not oneself as thoroughly other to an invasion logic, in no way comparable to or impli-
cated in that invasion’, troubles the identity binary Wolfe flagged as essential to his
project.28 In a recent edited book Lisa Ford and Tim Rowse bring together a collection
of essays committed to analyses centred on contingency and complexity rather than on
‘notions that settler states were ever total institutions and that settler colonialism is a struc-
ture bent inexorably on dispossession, subordination, erasure or extinction’.29 The list does
not end here. In the last two years, Settler Colonial Studies has published two special issues
dedicated to transformative political work. In 2013 Tate A. LeFevre edited a special issue
titled Difference, Representation, Resistance, highlighting – in LeFevre words – ‘a peculiar
paradox: the eliminatory logics of settler colonialism are also generative. As the state
settles, it produces the materials and possibilities of its own unsettlement’.30 A second
special issue, edited by myself, tackles Wolfe’s paradigm from another perspective, that
of ‘collaborative struggles’ – those arrangements whereby indigenous agency lead settlers
and cooperatively find ways to transcend settler formations.31
These concerns in regards the role of resistance and of the anticolonial struggle in
settler colonial theory have a particular relevance for the study of Palestine, perhaps epit-
omised in Veracini’s poignant question, ‘what can settler colonial studies offer to an
interpretation of the conflict in Israel–Palestine?’32 Until recent years, analyses of Palestine
have placed the focus majorly on the Zionist structures of domination, a trend that is still
been adopted by the younger generations of scholars.33 Yet, as Ilan Pappé recently
explained, as useful as the settler-colonial paradigm is, it is nonetheless insufficient to
take account of settler constructions such as Israel-Palestine in a comprehensive
fashion. For him, while the paradigm ‘challenge effectively the official Israeli, and main-
stream scholarly approach [ … ] it is unsatisfactory [because it] applies historical case
studies with a known closure to an ongoing reality’.34
6 M. SVIRSKY
On the one hand, a rigid analysis of the history of the Zionist incursion since the late
nineteenth century that excludes the study of Palestinian and other forms of struggle
and survival would severely distort our empirical understanding of indigenous and
settler subjectivities. On the other hand, it would be no less empirically erroneous, and
also ethically obscene, to maintain that in Palestine the destructive logics of Zionist settler-
ism have surrendered to more toned-down axioms. That neither of these understandings
should subdue the other is a strategy in the present study. But the reason for bringing
these two perceptions together is motivated by a concern to recuperate not just a
sense of urgency about the still oppositional and thus oppressive character of settler real-
ties, nor indigenous agency per se, but a sensibility towards political work that reorients
settler colonial studies to better communicate with the specificities of historical and
ongoing anticolonial struggles.
Structure, power, forces

In what seems to be an attempt to soften Wolfe’s methodological position, Veracini
explains that if ‘there is a plot in the “historiography of elimination” and more generally
in settler-colonial studies it is that while the structure attempts to eliminate Indigenous
peoples it fails to do so’. The ‘structure cannot be reduced to its intention’.35 That is to
say, Wolfe’s logic of elimination should not be equated with elimination itself. As Veracini
explains:
Far from equating settler colonialism with elimination, Wolfe’s ‘structure’ refers to a continuing
relationship of inequality between Indigenous and settler collectives. Beside ‘structure’ and
‘event’, it seems important to note that Wolfe refers to a logic of elimination, not to elimination
itself. After all, were Indigenous elimination to become an accomplished and irretrievable fact,
settler colonialism would lose its logic.36
Though the key for Wolfe is to shed light on the mechanisms of elimination, Veracini
takes Wolfe’s position that ‘we should not view the logic of elimination as solely a drive
to exterminate Native human beings’, and suggests that we should focus on what the
structure actualising the logic fails to accomplish.37 The difference between the two high-
lights the incompleteness of the settler project. If settler colonialism is not a fait accompli
but an incomplete project invested in a continuing structuration of life actualising the
logic of elimination, then we may expect the settler colonial paradigm to take seriously
phenomena of struggle, resistance and confrontation, and hence to align itself with the
idea of power not just as coercion or repression but as a complex multiplicity. This is
simply because the incompleteness of elimination must be explained, and it cannot be
explained just in terms of the oppressor’s self-error or strategic deferment. The methodo-
logical imperative that derives then, is to trace the forces that cause the settler structure to
fail and remain incomplete – forces that work either by compelling retreat in specific policy
areas, or because of the ineffectiveness of the settler structure in territorialising its logic
and imposing its discourse, codifications, and meanings in all areas of life. As Macoun
and Strakosch note, ‘[e]xposing the settler colonial project as fundamentally incomplete
– and unable to be completed in the face of Indigenous resistance – has the potential
to be a profoundly liberating and destabilizing move’.38 This is because this move leads
research to deal with liberatory forces. Some Palestinian scholars have taken the analysis
of the Israeli settler state in this direction. Recently, Nadera Shalhoub-Kevorkian draws on
Wolfe’s logic of elimination but not without combining her analysis of surveillance and fear
with an account of practices of resistance.39 Similarly, Mazin Qumsiyeh notes that the
brutal removal of villagers during Ottoman and later the British and, finally, Israeli rule over the
past thirteen decades would have proceeded much faster and certainly would have resulted in
a far more homogeneous Jewish state had it not been for Palestinian resistance.40
Explaining strategic and tactical changes in the continuing implementation of elimin-

ation only by means of the subject’s determination to eliminate appears as an act of theor-
etical cannibalism. The vicissitudes of elimination are the vicissitudes of the struggle, of
resistance; or, as Veracini recently put it: the ‘settler colonial present is also an indigenous
one’.41 Settler stability, in other words, needs to be explained not just by way of the dis-
course of settler inscription but by taking seriously Veracini’s insistence that the settler
colonial situation is best described in terms of a ‘permanent movement’.42 Movement
here needs to be conceived as a constantly changing composition of forces – those
which seek to eliminate indigenous life together with those that either cause some of
these attempts to fail, or that institute forms of life contiguous to settlerism – in both
cases compelling settler colonialism to rework itself.
The benefit of adopting the perspective of a field of forces lies, in the words of James
Williams, in its questioning of ‘the evolution of things in order to sense how they have
become what they are and how they may become something other’. This analytical sen-
sibility, as he rightly adds, ‘sets things in movement above the secure foundation of an
unchanging given’, enabling a view of political life which emphasises the variations occur-
ring within a social order – though always in the making – claiming to be established.43
This logical development and contribution to the settler colonial paradigm is inspired
mainly by the works of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari. However, the objections to
their works among some scholars of settler colonialism, warrant a more extended
response.
The opposition to Deleuze and Guattari in settler colonial studies may be seen as orig-
inally deriving from Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak’s famous ‘Can the Subaltern Speak?’44 The
short answer to that question is that the charges raised by Spivak cannot stand, especially
if we take into account Deleuze and Guattari’s own political activism in indigenous
struggles, particularly with specific Palestinian and Algerian anticolonial campaigns.45
Spivak hinged her critique of Deleuze and Foucault on a conversation between them.46
According to Spivak, Deleuze is ‘a dangerous [ … ] first world intellectual masquerading
as the absent non-representor who lets the oppressed speak for themselves’, where in
fact, so the story goes, he is ascribing to a Western philosophy and politics of anti-differ-
ence.47 As Robinson and Tormey rightly explain, Deleuze and Guattari focus not on the
authenticity of the voice but on ‘whether the subaltern is “speaking” so as to be added
as an axiom, or is “speaking” in a manner disruptive of processes of capture and
control’.48 Namely, in Deleuze and Guattari, questions of representation are relegated in
favour of strategic questions of decolonisation. As Robinson and Tormey put it, for
Spivak, ‘Subalternity is thus a condition of inaccessibility and radical otherness that in
turn escapes the clutches of anthropology and the “human sciences”. They cannot
speak and we cannot “know” them – though of course the subaltern can be represented’.49
Agreed: if the subaltern can speak, it is certainly not through the theorisations of Western
8 M. SVIRSKY
white intellectuals. This is where, to some extent, Wolfe’s critique of white ventriloquism
and the resonances of this form of representation with the settler project, finds an ally.
Moreover, the relegation of the study of resistance to that of domination and the belief
on the inevitability of oppression is also common to both. As Spivak states,
the question is not of female participation in insurgency, or the ground rules of the sexual div-
ision of labour, for both of which there is ‘evidence’. It is, rather, that, both as object of colo-
nialist historiography and as subject of insurgency, the ideological construction of gender
keeps the male dominant.50
The inevitability of power, so to speak, seems to be the Spivak’s standpoint, from where, as
Andrew Robinson explains, she
opposes the openness of theories such as those of Deleuze and Foucault, who leave space for
resistance and ‘lines of flights’, insisting instead that the system is a total trap which can actu-
ally go as far as to foreclose the possibility of subaltern colletivities emerging.51
This reading of Deleuze, Guattari and Foucault turned into a springboard for others, and
has influenced the works of a number of scholars in settler colonial studies, such as Jodi
Byrd, and Alex Trimble Young. Eyal Weizman’s works have also been marked as critical
of Deleuze and Guattari.52 Byrd and Young share a similar critique – that Deleuze and
Guattari ‘reproduce frontier tropes’, particularly in their engagement with the US west
and with some American writers.53 According to Byrd, A Thousand Plateaus ‘performs a
global, nomadic reframing in which the frontier becomes, again, Frederick Turner’s site
of transformation, possibility, and mapping’.54 The disavowal of Deleuze and Guattari in
these authors is fashioned by means of three techniques: decontextualisation, adjectiva-
tion, and bad association. In the first technique, passages from A Thousand Plateaus are
disassociated from the general method according to which there are no good or bad rhi-
zomes, nomads, transformations, or possibilities – but rather a Spinozean ethics of move-
ments and forces as a problem of what can a system do. Thus, to imply that Deleuze and
Guattari are not offering theoretical tools but rather celebrate white-led deterritorialisa-
tions – as ‘US imperialism has always celebrated “pioneers” who would “go across, get
out, break through” new frontiers’ – is to join Spivak in her critique.55 The second tech-
nique is an exercise on appropriating Deleuze and Guattari’s concepts to enliven depic-
tions of settler domination. In a bid to prove the natural suitability of Deleuze and
Guattari’s concepts to speak power, Young deploys their work to animate descriptions
of settler domination. For instance: ‘For Wolfe, there is a parallel between nationalist his-
toriography [ … ] which imagines the frontier as the site where a diverse assemblage of
settlers is forged into a “composite nationality”’.56 A similar form of adjectivation takes
place in Young’s analysis of Eyal Weizman’s ‘Walking through Walls’. There, Young desig-
nates Israeli power in terms of settlers following ‘“lines of flight” made possible by the
“smoothing” of indigenous space’.57 In this narrative, ‘assemblage’, ‘rhizomes’, and ‘lines
of flights’ are produced or experimented by villains – whether the legendary frontier
addict Frederick Jackson Turner, Kerouac’s characters, or IDF general Kohavi. With the
third technique Young condemns Deleuze and Guattari for citing authors such as Leslie
Fiedler, and Jack Kerouac, who imagined ‘the West as a site of national significance’.58
What matters, however, is how we use a thing and not how others use, or who these
others are.
Deleuze and Guattari are important for a focus on resistance. Pivotal to a Deleuzian-
Guattarian ontology is that its ‘elements’ – defined in terms of forces, fluxes and their
relations – exist in a processual state. For them, ‘the general theory of society is a gener-
alized theory of flows’.59 It may be argued that the settler colonial paradigm does inves-
tigate processes, as, for instance, in Wolfe’s three-phased genealogy of settler
domination. But the problem with this genealogy is the majoritarian role the monologue
of oppression plays in it.
To become a truly critical enterprise, settler colonial theory must foster an ethical sen-
sibility towards the coexistence and competition of the myriad forces that aggregatively
produce transformation or its arrest, and to translate this sensibility into a new method-
ology. Deterritorialisations and reterritorialisations occur, as Deleuze and Guattari
explain, as ‘strictly complementary and coexistent, because one exists only as a function
of the other’.60 This ontological perspective may promote in settler colonial studies
interpretations that acknowledge the multiplicity of the field of forces manufacturing
the social. Deleuze and Guattari add: ‘It is in terms not of independence, but of coexistence
and competition in a perpetual field of interaction, that we must conceive of exteriority

and interiority, war machines of metamorphosis and state apparatuses of identity’.61
The question is how to translate this ontology of social forces and flows into a model
for what we commonly term ‘resistance’.
The problem of theory with ‘phenomena of resistance’ is not only how we conceptual-
ise the material and discursive manifestations of these phenomena and their potentialities,
but also how we carry the linguistic burden of a concept – resistance – that etymologically
and semantically, in all its various fields of application, speaks of ‘opposition to’ an
acknowledged arrangement of organised force (electrical current, motion of solids or
fluids, erosion, political power, and so forth). This convention is indeed problematic not
only because there is more to ‘phenomena of resistance’ than operations of counterattack,
but also because operations of counterattack have a low liberatory theoretical status, or as
Wolfe puts it, because ‘in generating its own resistance, settler-colonial power also con-
tains it’.62
In my attempt to develop a model for ‘phenomena of resistance’, I propose firstly to
retain the term resistance as employed in public discourse, and also in the humanities
and the social sciences. In retaining the name of resistance for ‘phenomena of resistance’,
I aim to challenge not only the straightjacket of designation (or denotation), but also the
cuff of existent significations that make resistance as ‘opposition to’ to be the condition of
truth and falsehood of the phenomena.63 Secondly, beyond controversies over the term
resistance, what matters is the sense of ‘phenomena of resistance’, that is, an affection
of dis-alignment of bodies (material and non-material bodies) in relation to common
sense and the consensual patterns and directions of society.64 In resistance, as Deleuze
put it, we resist ‘the temptation against being forced’ in the majoritarian directions of
society and popular opinion.65
To move this discussion one step forward, we would need to provide an answer to the
problem of the location of the initial gesture of dis-alignment. Given the arrangements of
power, I would like to argue that ‘phenomena of resistance’ or dis-alignment may take
place both before and after processes of capture, organisation and signification by
forces operating in the space of interiority of systems. This suggestion risks being seen
10 M. SVIRSKY
as going against Deleuze and Guattari’s choices: in 1977 Deleuze writes to Foucault in a
letter,
I myself don’t wonder about the status resistance phenomena may have, since flights line are
the first determinations, since desire assembles the social field, power arrangement are both
products of these assemblages and that which stamps them out or seal them up.66
Lines of flights come first, power stratifies them after. Three years after, in A Thousand Pla-
teaus Deleuze and Guattari ratify this view that ‘power is a stratified dimension of the
assemblage’, and that ‘lines of flight are primary’, that lines of flights ‘are not phenomena
of resistance and counterattack’.67 Hence, here they distinguish between flow/forces that
in their nature are pre-capture, and other forces – of resistance or counterattack – operat-
ing as a reaction to power arrangements. Again, it is commonplace to see this distinction
as a cautionary measure against mixing up always-already reterritorialised challenges of
power with the exteriority of lines of flights. But this distinction omits some materialisa-
tions of ‘phenomena of resistance’. I would like to suggest that three modus operandi
under the general name of resistance derive from this view on social flows and forces.
The first form of resistance is Deleuze and Guattari’s lines of flights, or resistance ‘A’: as
Ronnen Ben-Arie explains following Deleuze and Guattari, ‘there is always an excess of
flows and forces that escape the mechanisms of organisation, codification and manage-
ment’ of power;68 ‘there is always something that flows or flees; that escapes the binary
organizations’.69 It is this excess, produced as external to the operations of systems, that
eludes the attempts of power to organise and codify it. In their nature, these movements
of life do not retaliate directly against state power – though doubtless they do not dwell in
a state of unawareness in relation to it. But they challenge power by speaking and acting
outside of the common institutional and normative boundaries. One example of this resist-
ance is the Boycotts, Divestments and Sanctions movement (BDS), led by Palestinian civil
society since 2005. BDS weakens the dominance of the normative discourse about Israel-
Palestine in the international arena because it refuses to engage with the traditional topics
and assumptions of that discourse while at the same time it confronts Israel’s violence on a
new terrain of action in which Israel finds itself struggling.70 The Palestinian efforts to build
economic and social self-sufficiency and independence in the West Bank and Gaza is yet
another example of civil resistance that does not face Israeli power directly, and in fact, it is
a form of resistance that forces Israel to react.71 Yet, these forms do not exhaust the
entirety of forces misaligning with state power; the two remaining forms of resistance
gesture their motion as countering forces. Resistance ‘B’: these are displays of resistance
compelling majoritarian forces to adjust and at times to redefine themselves, even if
this is a countering operation still functioning within the space of interiority of state
power. In the Palestinian case, Supreme Court appeals countering unjust laws and policies,
is a classic attempt to actualise this type of resistance. Resistance ‘C’: these displays of
resistance become actualised in the way Wolfe conceives it, that is, they remain locked
in the space of interiority of state power (or other systems) without affecting bodies in
any significant way.72 For instance, the main aspects of the actions led by the Zionist
left in Israel fall into this category. These operations take the name of resistance in vain.
Whether we produce lines of flight or adjacent existential territories to the system (resist-
ance ‘A’), or we force it to deflect (resistance ‘B’), we create dis-alignments in relation to the
arrangements of power. It is in this way I suggest listening to Deleuze in L’Abécédaire, seven
years after the publication of A Thousand Plateaus, when answering Claire Parnet’s question
(‘what do we resist exactly?’): ‘whenever one creates, one resists’.73 A caveat and a con-
clusion in regard to this model of resistance are of relevance at this point: we should not
see the three modes as each corresponding to a different homogenous and shut-off oper-
ation of resistance. That is, the three modes of affection of resistance are not mutually exclu-
sive, and in fact, are to be found always-already intermingling at different and changing
intensities and degrees in any action that at prima facie is claimed to challenge power.
We rarely find a pure operation of resistance. For instance, elsewhere I have analysed the
operations of resistance of the Arab-Jewish bilingual schools in Israel and there I noted
that while some aspects of these assemblages invest in weaving new forms of cooperation
and lifestyles, these are being partially stifled by the interests of identity and ethnicity.74 The
history of the Palestinian armed struggle is replete with lines of flights and reterritorialisa-
tions; the undertakings of legendary leader Izz al-Din al-Qassam who in the early 1930s
called for armed revolt were ground-breaking both in creating alternative territories of lea-
dership (i.e. rural vs. urban), and in organising farmers displaced by Zionist takeovers of
land.75 More generally, Yezid Sayigh’s thesis is that the armed struggle was pivotal in the
building a national Palestinian persona, even though it proved many times to carry a too
high price for the Palestinian people to bear.76
Therefore, acts of resistance need to be analysed in their complexity to diagnose how
and to what extent they submit to, confront or evade power. In other words, betrayal, con-
frontation, and escape are forms of affection specific of forces misaligning with state
power. In addition, we can already see where this model of resistance is taking us in
terms of conducting a full analysis of social formations: for such an analysis not to be
deficient, it must take account of resistance in all its forms, of the organisations of
power, and of the dynamics between the two forms of arrangement.
How can various ‘phenomena of resistance’ be positioned in relation to Patrick Wolfe’s
axiom (‘settler invasion is a structure not an event’)? Wolfe’s axiom is accurate in the
sense that settler invasion is in no way an episode, or a single event. Yet, a structure,
Deleuze explains, is defined ‘by the nature of certain [ … ] elements which claim to
account both for the formation of wholes and for the variation of their parts’.77 As Deleuze
and Guattari explain, the ‘word “structure” may be used to designate the sum of these
relations and relationships, but it is an illusion to believe that structure is the earth’s last
word’.78 The question is then, what are the forces that bring about the variation of the
parts of the structure and their relations, redefining it anew? From this point of view,
there need be little hesitation in granting that it is wrong to assume that the forces respon-
sible for the structure are to be sought in a uniform series of unidirectional power strategies
conceived as always already signifying domination, as if settler colonialism were a smooth
logarithmic function asymptotic to elimination. Furthermore, it is not that a structure has
things as its extremities – a categorical organised body – since a ‘structure is a living part
of things’.79 If a structure can be seen as the symbolic resultant of a series of combinations
of relations that give life to practices, institutions, subjectivities, imaginations, and so forth,
then it is crucial to understand that ‘there are always more combinations beyond those that
have happened’.80 This is what makes a structure the necessary condition for the transform-
ation of things, rather than a structured thing.81 Alongside its endurance and consistency, a
structure is always traversed by movements of excess, deficiencies, withdrawals, displace-
ments, and bifurcations. Theory must account for them. The significant questions, then,
12 M. SVIRSKY
concern what the limits of the structure are, where the structure is forced to bifurcate, and
where old determinacies lose their consistency and endurance such that they have to be
replaced or changed. In other words, taking a cue from Veracini’s point about ‘intention’,
we should ask: what are the forces causing the logic of elimination to fail, and how do
they operate?82 Strictly speaking, a structure is defined by what escapes it, not by its vio-
lence. This is because what the structure fails to capture, discipline and codify is what
defines its thresholds, its limits, or more exactly, the limitations of its functions. And ‘meth-
odologically’, as Srnicek explains, ‘this entails that we look not to classify political entities by
their characteristic qualities, but rather by the processes which produce and continually
function to sustain them’.83 For instance, more can be learnt (in terms of political work
done and to be done) from a study that classifies Israel as a settler system affected by boy-
cotts and other modes of resistance than from approaches that portray it in terms of some
sort of supreme settler violence. The political ontology that provides the necessary infra-
structure to take account of this method of study of structures is given by the model of resist-
ance elaborated above, one that complicates the study of the arrangements of power with
that of the different modes of resistance. From this methodological viewpoint, for example,
education in Israel is defined not only by Zionist forces of militarism and segregationism but
by the fragile forms of Arab–Jewish education struggling to create shared spaces of life that
trouble these forces and compel them to readjust.84 It is by looking into such leakages that
we learn more comprehensively about the ordinariness and upheavals of the functions of
the system.
Notwithstanding the capacity Zionist politics has had to shape, regulate and articulate
life in the region for more than a century, this capacity has had to struggle to overcome
Palestinian popular resistance both before and after the British Mandate.85 No less,
Zionism had to compete with the repertoire of everyday practices shared by Palestinians
and Jewish settlers that from the end of the nineteenth century shaped an alternative to
the segregationist impetus of the Zionist machines until these practices were shattered by
the constitutive violence of 1948.86 The Zionist capacity has always had to renew itself to
cope with both the non-violent and the armed forms of Palestinian resistance. A full list
would fill a library.87 Writing in the later 1970s, Rosemary Sayigh said, ‘resistance inside
occupied Palestine and outside it, in spite of Israeli power, the 1970 massacres in
Jordan, and the bloody two years’ war in Lebanon, has not been snuffed out’.88
To exclude resistance from the analysis of Palestine is tantamount to excluding Pales-
tine from the analysis. Resistance – coming from the exteriority of the state apparatus or
from its space of interiority – is part of the structure, not an event. Palestinians are there to
stay no less than the Jewish settlers are. Resistance has a place and a historical and political
role in modern Palestine. As Joseph Massad diagnoses, resistance by the Palestinian
people ‘is the only remaining obstacle to a complete Zionist victory, one that seeks to
be sealed by Zionism’s rewriting of both Palestinian and Jewish histories’.89 Or as Mazin
B. Qumsiyeh states: ‘the first thing to know about Palestinian resistance is that it is a
symptom of the aetiology of colonisation and ethnic cleansing’.90
Elimination reframed
As I see it, the political benefit that the methodological perspective outlined above
conveys, lies in its ability to see the contours and thresholds of the structure, in addition
to diagnosing its more obvious power arrangements. That is to say, fundamentally, the
perspective of resistance is not just a perspective accounting for acts of resistance (of
whatever kind). Rather, such a perspective is the key to unveiling the historical coordinates
of settler colonialism in Palestine, as well as their strength and fragility today. In other
words, such a perspective highlights the problem to which settler colonialism is the
answer. In sum, the perspective of resistance is the perspective of the problem. ‘True
freedom’, says Deleuze, ‘lies in a power to [ … ] constitute problems themselves’.91
Together with Wolfe, I argue that the problem of settler colonialism expresses itself in elim-
ination, though this last section shows that elimination explains more than what so far
have been acknowledged. In reframing elimination, we find it possible to connect full
circle between the object of elimination and that of resistance.
As both Wolfe and Veracini have rightly pointed out, settler colonialism is not a type of
colonialism driven by the exploitation of indigenous labour and by profit: ‘settler colonies
were not primarily established to extract surplus value from indigenous labour. Rather,
they are premised on displacing indigenes from (or replacing them on) the land’.92 Yet,
it is not enough to claim that ‘territoriality is settler colonialism’s specific, irreducible

element’, as Wolfe insists;93 territoriality or territorialisation involves a particular relation
to land, specific vectors, judgements, and meanings, selected openings and impossibilities
– in sum, particular organisations. Settler colonialism defines its paramount relation to the
land in terms of two operations, capture and exclusive appropriation. According to Wolfe,
the cultural logic organic to this paramount relation of settlers to the land ‘is one of elim-
ination’;94 or, in Veracini’s words, settler colonialism ‘simply wishes indigenous people to
vanish’.95 Let me stress this again: it is not land but a particular relation to the land that
explains the cultural logics of settler societies – their principles of organisation, settler
everyday life, and settler common sense, to borrow Mark Rifkin’s valuable notion.96 And
consequently, not land but that particular relation to the land is what explains elimination.
Though race is the obvious link between the craving for land and elimination, the ways
race structures elimination in settler colonialism are yet to be explored; particularly,
how race structures not only subjects but, necessarily, ways of life.
As Deleuze and Guattari explain,
racism never detects the particles of the other [ … it] operates by the determination of
degrees of deviance in relation to the White-Man face [ … and] it propagates waves of same-
ness until those who resist identification have been wiped out.97
Racism is about self and sameness, about the life of the racist. Operationally, racism
targets the other only as a result of the desecration the other inflicts on the self: from
‘the viewpoint of racism, there is no exterior; there are no people on the outside. There
are only people who should be like us and whose crime it is not to be’.98 In settler colo-
nialism, racism informs the capture of the land as a derivative of the historical sentiment
of European supremacy that propels territorial expansion. But crucially, it organises exclu-
sive appropriation as the pure logical conclusion to avoid impurity (for Deleuze and Guat-
tari, ‘a race is defined not by its purity but rather by the impurity conferred upon it by a
system of domination’),99 and the necessary condition ‘for the cultivation of another
culture’, as Robert Young put it.100 In principle, capture does not preclude sharing. Yet,
in settler colonialism, exclusion derives from an essential internal rejection: settlers segre-
gate because they cannot bear the idea of sharing ‘their’ world with indigenous people. In
14 M. SVIRSKY
Palestine, by exonerating itself from the dynamics of reciprocity with the indigenous Pales-
tinians, Zionism refused the gift of the encounter – its immanent alterity. That is to say,
racism makes void the impulse for sociability presented by the colonial encounter,
turning the encounter always into a ‘settler colonial non-encounter’, to use Veracini’s
phrase.101 In rejecting contiguity, proximity and familiarity, Zionism materialised a
certain version of what is not in common as a mode of engagement with the concrete
other. The exemption of a universal commitment became a commitment to a particular
exemption. Given the ways by which race structures settler colonialism, the logic of elim-
ination needs to be redefined.
Wolfe rightly explains that the ‘logic of elimination not only refers to the summary liqui-
dation of Indigenous people, though it includes that’.102 In its ‘positive’ aspect, so to speak,
‘elimination is an organizing principle of settler-colonial society rather than a one-off (and
superseded) occurrence’.103 Elimination then, has at least two aspects: the liquidation of
indigenous people and elimination as an organising principle of the settler colonial
society. The second aspect stressed by Wolfe begs the question: what does elimination
organise? Elimination, I suggest, crystallises in the liquidation of indigenous people as a
concomitant operation with the racial rejection of sociability, of shared life. Both oper-
ations intertwine to organise the settler colonial society. This is what characterises the
unconscious impulses of settler colonialism, the double elimination of shared life and indi-
genous life. Thus, the physical and symbolic elimination of indigenous Palestinians is here
assumed to have grown in tandem with its repressed historical counterpart – the collective
Zionist desire to prevent Palestinian-Jewish shared life to develop beyond the fragile nor-
mality it had acquired already by mid-1920s, in order to inhibit it as a social horizon. It is a
repressed dimension in the sense that today it is not explicit in discourse and conscious-
ness though it is thoroughly active in the constitution of the Zionist architecture of life and
its subjectivities. So, for instance, we cannot fully understand the Israeli land policies
towards Palestinian towns and cities in the Galilee except in connection with the segrega-
tionist popular sentiment of Jewish-Israelis to prevent universal housing in what they call
‘Jewish communities’.104 If elimination shapes the struggle, the logic of double elimination
paves the way to reformulate what resistance needs addressing.
Before the devastating violence of 1948 remade Palestine, three landscapes of visibili-
ties and fields of sayability inhabited the Palestinian space. Against the background of his-
torical Palestinian indigenous life – both urban and rural, two other social formations grew
on the petri dish of the colonial encounter – the emergent settlerist Jewish Yishuv, and
forms of Palestinian-Jewish sociability. The story goes back as far as the time of the late
Ottoman administration, as Michelle Campos explains, arguing that ‘the Arab-Jewish con-
flict in Palestine was not immanent, but rather erupted in dialectical tension with the
promises and shortcomings of civic Ottomanism’.105 A process centred on ideas of collec-
tive belonging and identity was in the making up to 1914, but
this occurred hand in hand with the growth of the Zionist movement, which itself actively
sought to segregate [ … ]. Ultimately [ … ] separation in Palestine between Jews and Arabs
came about as the result of the Zionist-Palestinian conflict – it was not the cause.106
For a while at the very least, segregation was not the default. As Pappé narrates, the
British Mandate remained, for a while, an arena of confrontation between cohabitation
and settler segregation:
[t]he Mandate created a space in which a basic human urge towards cohabitation and
cooperation could exist. It surfaced at times that nationalists considered mundane and unim-
portant, such as when natural disasters like earthquakes occurred (1926), and when businesses
were declining at times of economic crisis or booming in times of prosperity. Such calamities
or blessings engendered human responses that transcended national identities. In Palestine
these joint responses occurred where people who lived with occupational hazards realized
trade union options, shared anti-government sentiments, coped with bad harvests, or faced
famine and epidemics; these, and many other, circumstances led people to coexist and
cooperate on non-national levels of class solidarity, common occupations, or common pro-
blems such as employers and unemployment.107
Narratives of inter-communal relations and cohabitation in almost all areas of life are
told about pre-1948 Haifa.108 A similar account for Jerusalem is to be found in Amy
Dockser Marcus’s Jerusalem 1913:
Muslims and Jews were business partners in the various markets of the Old city. They lived in
the same buildings [ … ]. Families from different religions made loans to one another, or
vouched for one another at the banks [ … ]. People often got their news together – in
flyers pasted up on the walls and gates of the city, or at ‘reading nights’ held periodically in
the most popular cafes.109
Ariella Azoulay has recently related the story of the conjoint efforts of Jews and Pales-
tinians who, between November 1947 and May 1948, entered into hundreds of agree-
ments to prevent the rising violence from taking over their lives.110
In invoking the historicity of shared life in Palestine I bring to the surface its role and
place in the constitution of the Zionist settler society, not to romanticise the past. This pro-
blematisation answers Pappé’s call to investigate the reasons for the extinction of the
desire to cohabitate.111 It is the genealogy of separatism that needs to be traced. Once
a viable possibility, a sort of normalcy, shared life is today a counter-normative ideology,
something seen by most Jewish-Israelis and Palestinians as a deformation of the natural
course of things. It is this historical devaluation that it is important to emphasise: from a
normal course of life to an ideology. Here lies a significant aspect of the catastrophe
that the Zionist project has inflicted upon Palestine. Even if it was not practised by
most, and at times proved fragile, the question is not only how sharing life as an everyday
practice loses its grip on actual life to become an idealistic formula, but how the urge for
cohabitation may be recuperated in resistance.
Think of the emergence of the kibbutz as a segregated (land, housing, labour, and
community life) settlement that became a ‘decisive organisational innovation which
provided the infrastructure of effective Jewish colonisation, that is, the method of
Israeli state formation’, as Gershon Shafir explains.112 Think of the purchasing of
land by the Jewish National Fund from Arab absentee landowners, involving the for-
cible removal of the fellaheen tenants – a method that irreversibly excluded non-Jews
from control of land once acquired and effectively removed the land from the open
market by virtue of being held in ‘perpetual trust’ for the ‘Jewish people’.113 Further-
more, one should contrast the perspective of the Palestinians who conceived Palestine
‘as one undivided entity and one market’,114 able to house about ‘1400 commercial
partnerships between Jews and Arabs [ … ] forged on what the [British government
in Palestine] government defined as inter-racial basis’,115 to the bifurcation of the
labour market and the economy fuelled by the Zionist leadership that had crystallised
16 M. SVIRSKY
by the end of the 1920s.116 Think of the Zionist practice-idea of ‘Hebrew labour’, which
entailed the displacement of Palestinian labour and the separatist policies of the His-
tadrut (Jewish Federation of Labour), encouraging Jewish workers to part ways with
their Palestinian co-workers in industrial action and collaboration.117 Think of the
impetus to build new neighbourhoods separate from the old Palestinian ones in the
urban centres of the early twentieth century.118 Thinking these historical develop-
ments through the lens of the double elimination of indigenous life and of cohabita-
tion helps us to understand settler colonialism as an attempt to erase the idea of a
political community, and to conceive sharing life as a form of resistance.
Rather than having a deterministic structuring effect, double elimination has a ‘directive
power’ or ‘piloting role’ in settler colonialism.119 It is, to borrow from Fredric Jameson, a
kind of political unconscious of settler colonialism.120 Once the method of settler colonisa-
tion is re-conceptualised, the redefinition of the method of decolonisation follows. Thus,
decolonisation involves rendering ineffective the elimination of indigenous life and of
shared life. This is how shared life becomes a political operation of resistance and not
just an ideological horizon of visionaries. We contrast then, the opposition to an unaccep-
table state of affairs implied in the bookkeeping of power, against a militant theory of
settler colonialism eager to discuss futures. This position is gaining momentum; in his
most recent book, Veracini addresses the need to transcend the settler colonial present:
‘Even if ‘invasion is a structure’ and even if this structure pervasively constitutes the
settler colonial present, this should not be the end of the story. Structures can be torn
down; hegemonies can be superseded’.121 By all accounts, there is no theoretical
impasse in settler colonial studies.
Acknowledgements
I’d like to express my gratitude to the anonymous reviewers who helped me correcting and improv-
ing this article, as well as to Lorenzo Veracini for his invaluable comments and editing. Thanks also to
Ronnen Ben-Arie and Ian Buchanan for their comments on early versions.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.
ORCID
Marcelo Svirsky http://orcid.org/0000-0001-9811-3887
Notes on contributor
Marcelo Svirsky is a Senior Lecturer at the School for Humanities and Social Inquiry, University of
Wollongong. He researches on questions of social transformation and subjectivity, decolonisation,
settler-colonial societies and political activism. He focuses on Israel-Palestine by drawing from the
works of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Giorgio Agamben and Michel Foucault. He has published
several articles in the journals Cultural Politics, Subjectivity, Intercultural Education, Deleuze Studies,
and Holy Land and Palestine Studies among others, and various books and edited collections:
Deleuze and Political Activism (Edinburgh University Press, 2010); Arab-Jewish Activism in Israel-Pales-
tine (Ashgate, 2012); Agamben and Colonialism with Simone Bignall (Edinburgh University Press,
2012); After Israel: Towards Cultural Transformation (Zed Books, 2014), and he recently edited a
special issue of Settler Colonial Studies under the title Collaborative Struggles in Australia and
Israel-Palestine.
Notes
1. As Lorenzo Veracini has recently proposed; see his The Settler Colonial Present (London: Pal-
grave Macmillan, 2015). Patrick Wolfe, Settler Colonialism and the Transformation of Anthropol-
ogy (London: Cassell, 1999). In relation to Israel and Palestine, see earlier usages of the term
‘settler colonialism’ by Fayez Sayegh, Zionist Colonialism in Palestine (Beirut: Research Center,
Palestine Liberation Organisation, 1965); and Maxime Rodinson, Israel – A Colonial-Settler
state? (USA: Pathfinder Press, 1973).
2. The need for interdisciplinary dialogue between settler colonial studies and borderland studies
was emphasised by Altenbernd and Young; see: Erik Altenbernd and Alex T. Young, ‘The sig-
nificance of the frontier in an age of transnational history’, Settler Colonial Studies 4, no. 2
(2014). The need for similar dialogue between settler colonial studies and critical Indigenous
theory and critical race and whiteness studies was pointed out by Macoun and Strakosch;
see: Alissa Macoun and Elizabeth Strakosch, ‘The Ethical Demands of Settler Colonial
Theory’, Settler Colonial Studies 3, nos 3–4 (2013).
3. Patrick Wolfe, ‘Nation and Miscegenation: Discursive Continuity in the Post-Mabo Era’, Social
Analysis 36 (1994): 93–152. See also: Patrick Wolfe, ‘Settler Colonialism and the Elimination
of the Native’, Journal of Genocide Research 8, no. 4 (2006): 387–409; and ‘Introduction: Recup-
erating Binarism – A Heretical Introduction’, Settler Colonial Studies 3, nos 3–4 (2013): 257–9.
4. Alex Trimble Young, ‘Settler Sovereignty and the Rhizomatic West, or, the Significance of the
Frontier in Postwestern Studies’, Western American Literature, Spring Summer (2013): 115–40.
5. In today’s Australia the elimination of the Native and the settler-colonial constitutional regime
of expropriation, according to Wolfe, are premised on a series of complementary practices of
brute exclusion and controlled inclusion that take the form and content of a strong protection
of settler territoriality juxtaposed with assimilation by way of two key strategies: firstly, by
making Aboriginality just another magnitude in the state discourse of multicultural orders;
and, secondly, by means of a welfare bureaucracy in which ‘the political is rendered technical’.
See Wolfe, Settler Colonialism and the Transformation of Anthropology, 166, 205, 209; and Wolfe,
‘Recuperating Binarism’, 259. As Wolfe explains:
[T]he logic of elimination, most crudely manifest in the initial massacres, has persisted
into the present by way of a number of strategic transformations. This continuity pro-
ceeds from Australian society’s primary determination as a settler-colonial state [ … ].
So far as the present is concerned, over the key question of land, Australian policy con-
tinues to be exclusive rather than inclusive in that, at the price of a minimal enfranchise-
ment, the bulk of the Indigenous population is eliminated from the reckoning. (Wolfe,
Settler Colonialism and the Transformation of Anthropology, 204)
6. Wolfe, Settler Colonialism and the Transformation of Anthropology, 163–4.
7. Wolfe, ‘Recuperating Binarism’, 257.
8. Lorenzo Veracini, Settler Colonialism: A Theoretical Overview (Houndsmills, Basingstoke: Palgrave
Macmillan, 2010).
9. Wolfe, Settler Colonialism and the Transformation of Anthropology, 214.
10. Ibid.
11. Ibid., 167.
12. Ibid., 166.
13. Ibid., 212.
14. Ibid., 213.
15. Ibid., 4.
16. Ibid., 178.
18 M. SVIRSKY
17. Ibid., 3.
18. Ilan Pappé, The Idea of Israel – A History of Power and Knowledge (London: Verso, 2014), 21.
19. Francesca Merlan, ‘Reply to Patrick Wolfe’, Social Analysis 40 (1997): 16.
20. Wolfe, Settler Colonialism and the Transformation of Anthropology, 167. This line of work aligns
with the legacy of the ‘whites should work on white problems’ strategy encouraged by some
indigenous and black activists in the West since the civil rights struggle in the US. See Marcelo
Svirsky ‘On the Study of Collaborative Struggles in Settler Societies’, Settler Colonial Studies 4,
no. 4 (2014): 434–50.
21. Macoun and Strakosch, ‘The Ethical Demands’, 438.
22. See http://blog.gaiam.com/quotes/authors/lilla-watson (accessed December 10, 2015).
23. Wolfe, Settler Colonialism and the Transformation of Anthropology, 210, 212.
24. Alissa Macoun and Elizabeth Strakosch, ‘The Ethical Demands’, 438.
25. Macoun and Strakosch, ‘The Ethical Demands’, 434–5.
26. Altenbernd and Young, ‘The significance of the frontier in an age of transnational history’, 131.
See also Henry Reynolds, The Other Side of the Frontier: Aboriginal Resistance to the European
Invasion of Australia (Sydney: University of New South Wales Press, 1981); and Wolfe’s discus-
sion in Settler Colonialism and the Transformation of Anthropology, 166–7.
27. Francesca Merlan, ‘Reply’, 10–9, 16.

28. Elizabeth Povinelli, ‘Reading ruptures, rupturing readings: Mabo and the cultural politics of acti-
vism’, Social Analysis 40 (1997): 26.
29. Lisa Ford, ‘Locating indigenous self-determination in the margins of settler sovereignty: an
introduction’, in Between Indigenous and Settler Governance, ed. Lisa Ford and Tim Rowse
(London and New York: Routledge, 2013), 11. See also: Lisa Ford, Settler Sovereignty: Jurisdiction
and Indigenous people in America and Australia, 1788–1836 (Cambridge, MA, and London:
Harvard University Press, 2010); and Tim Rowse, ‘The Reforming State, the Concerned Public
and Indigenous Political Actors’, Australian Journal of Politics and History 56, no. 1(2010): 66–81.
30. Tate A. LeFevre, ‘Representation, resistance and the logics of difference: indigenous culture as
political resource in the settler state’, Tate A. LeFevre, ed., Difference, Representation, Resistance
– Settler Colonial Studies 3, no. 2 (2013): 138.
31. Marcelo Svirsky, ed., Collaborative Struggles in Australia and Israel-Palestine – Settler Colonial
Studies 4, no. 4 (2014).
32. Lorenzo Veracini, ‘What Can Settler Colonial Studies offer to an interpretation of the conflict in
Israel–Palestine’, Settler Colonial Studies 5, no. 3 (2015): 268–71.
33. See Omar Jabary Salamanca, Mezna Qato, Kareem Rabie, and Sobhi Samour, ‘Past is Present:
Settler Colonialism in Palestine’, Settler Colonial Studies 2, no. 1 (2012).
34. Pappé, The Idea of Israel, 312 (emphasis added).
35. Veracini, ‘Defending’, 311.
36. Ibid.
37. See Wolfe, ‘Recuperating Binarism’, 258.
38. Macoun and Strakosch, ‘The ethical demands’, 432.
39. Nadera Shalhoub-Kevorkian, Security Theology, Surveillance and the Politics of Fear (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2015).
40. Mazin Qumsiyeh, Popular Resistance in Palestine – A History of Hope and Empowerment (London
and New York, NY: Pluto Press, 2011), 228.
41. Veracini, The Settler Colonial Present, 9.
42. Ibid., 5.
43. James Williams, Understanding Poststructuralism (Chesham: Acumen, 2005), 123 (emphasis
added).
44. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, ‘Can the Subaltern Speak?’ in Marxism and the Interpretation of
Culture, ed. C. Nelson and L. Grossberg (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1988), 271–315.
45. Deleuze entered the arena of the Palestinian struggle with a critique of Israel in an article in Le
Monde in April 7th 1978, 10 years before Spivak’s critique of his work. In October 1981, he co-
founded with the Palestinian scholar and activist Elias Sanbar the Revue d’Études Palestiniennes
in Paris, and since then Deleuze published numerous articles and essays on the Palestinian
case. In an interview with François Dosse, Elias Sanbar speaks of Deleuze and Guattari’s works
as ‘essential’; ‘these texts are always with me’ – he said. Guattari became active with the Pales-
tinian cause in France via a close friend, Ilan Halévi, a Jewish-Israeli writer and member of the
PLO. As Ian Buchanan also recounts, ‘In the late 1950s and early 1960s he [Guattari] carried cash
for the Front de liberation Nationale Algérien’. Gilles Deleuze, ‘The Troublemakers’, Discourse
20, no. 3 (1998): 23–4; Gilles Deleuze and Elias Sanbar, ‘The Indians of Palestine’, Discourse
20, no. 3 (1998): 25–9; Gilles Deleuze, ‘The Grandeur of Yasser Arafat’, Discourse 20, no. 3
(1998): 30–3; Gilles Deleuze, ‘Wherever They Can See It’, Discourse 20, no. 3 (1998): 34–5; Fran-
çois Dosse, Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari – Intersecting Lives, trans. by Deborah Glassman
(New York: Columbia University Press), 261, and Ian Buchanan, Dictionary of Critical Theory
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), 214. In 1976 Guattari was involved in setting up
secret meetings between Palestinians and well-known Israelis; in 1978 he visited the West
Bank, and in 1979 he and Halévi organised a colloquium on the Zionist-Palestinian conflict
in Paris. See: Dosse, Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, 258.
46. Gilles Deleuze and Michal Foucault, ‘The Intellectuals and Power: A Discussion between Michel
Foucault and Gilles Deleuze, Telos no. 16 (1973): 103–9.
47. Spivak, ‘Can the Subaltern Speak?’, 292.
48. Andrew Robinson and Simon Tormey, ‘Living in Smooth Space: Deleuze, Postcolonialism and
the Subaltern’, in Deleuze and the Postcolonial, ed. Simone Bignall and Paul Patton (Edinburgh:
Edinburgh University Press, 2010), 24.
49. Robinson and Tormey, ‘Living in Smooth Space’, 33.
50. Spivak, ‘Can the Subaltern Speak?’, 287.
51. Andrew Robinson, ‘Spivak Critique’, http://andyrobinsontheoryblog.blogspot.com.au/2004/11/
spivak-critique.html (accessed December 21, 2015).
52. Eyal Weizman’s engagement with A Thousand Plateaus illustrates how no author can be held
responsible for successive misuses of her work. The fact that the IDF took inspiration from
Deleuze and Guattari does not mean their work is pro-IDF, in the same way we can’t possibly
blame Nietzsche for the Nazi idea of a master race. As for Weizman’s own use of Deleuze and
Guattari’s vocabulary, again, whether we call material and discursive movements and forces
‘rhizomatic’, ‘elastic’, ‘flowing’, or otherwise, it is not really important. What really matters is
if we are providing useful tools for understanding how power and resistance work in specific
circumstances.
53. Young, ‘Settler Sovereignty and the Rhizomatic West’, 119.
54. Jodi Byrd, The Transit of Empire: Indigenous Critiques of Colonialism (Minneapolis: University of
Minnesota Press, 2011), 13. Both Byrd and Young focus on the following passage from A Thou-
sand Plateaus: ‘But there is the rhizomatic West, with its Indians without ancestry, its ever reced-
ing limits, its shifting and displaced frontiers’. See: Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand
Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. B. Massumi (Minneapolis, MN: University of Min-
nesota Press, 1987), 19.
55. Young, ‘Settler Sovereignty and the Rhizomatic West’, 123.
56. Ibid., 118 (emphasis added).
57. Ibid., 127.
58. Ibid., 121.
59. Deleuze and Guattari, Anti-Oedipus, 259.
60. Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 220.
61. Ibid., 361.
63. For a discussion of Deleuze’s questioning of the communicational model of language (desig-
nation, manifestation, and significance) in his The Logic of Sense, see Brian Massumi, A Shock to
Thought: Expression After Deleuze and Guattari (London: Routledge, 2002), xvii.
64. For a discussion of sense as the fourth dimension of the proposition see Gilles Deleuze, The
Logic of Sense, trans. by Mark Lester with Charles Stivale (New York: Columbia University
Press, 1990), 22.
65. Deleuze, ‘R for Resistance’.
20 M. SVIRSKY
66. Gilles Deleuze, ‘Desire and Pleasure’, in Gilles Deleuze Two Regimes of Madness, ed. by David
Lapoujade, trans. by Ames Hodges and Mike Taormina (New York: Semiotext(e), 2007), 129.
67. Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 531, n39.
68. Ben-Arie, The Concept of Resistance, 64.
70. Marcelo Svirsky, ‘BDS as a mediator’, Concentric 41, no. 2 (2015): 45–74.
71. Qumsiyeh, Popular Resistance in Palestine, 30.
72. I have studied these forms in my Arab-Jewish Activism in Israel-Palestine (Farnham: Ashgate,
2012).
73. Gilles Deleuze and Claire Parnet, ‘R for Resistance’, in L’Abécédaire de Gilles Deleuze (dir. by
Pierre-André Boutang, 1996).
74. Marcelo Svirsky, Arab-Jewish Activism in Israel Palestine (Farnham: Ashgate, 2010), 146–65.
75. Qumsiyeh, Popular Resistance in Palestine, 82; Ilan Pappé, A History of Modern Palestine (Cam-
bridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 103–4.
76. Yezid Sayigh, Armed Struggle and the Search for State (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997).
77. Deleuze, ‘How Do We Recognize Structuralism’, 173.
79. Williams, Understanding Poststructuralism, 54.

80. Ibid., 59.
81. Ibid., 54.
82. Veracini, ‘Defending’, 311 (emphasis added).
83. Nick Srnicek, Assemblage Theory, Complexity and Contentious Politics – The Political Ontology of
Gilles Deleuze, MA Thesis (University of Western Ontario, 2007), 28.
84. See Aura Mor-Sommerfeld, ‘Bilingual Education in Areas of Conflict – Bridging and Sharing’,
Race Equality Teaching 2, nos 4–1 (2005): 31–42; and my Arab-Jewish Activism, 156–62.
85. See Rashid Khalidi, ‘Palestinian Peasant Resistance to Zionism before WWI’, in Blaming the
Victims: Spurious Scholarship and the Palestinian Question, ed. E. Said and C. Hitchens
(London: Verso, 2001), 207–34; and Qumsiyeh, Popular Resistance in Palestine, 20–89.
86. See Zachary Lockman, Comrades and Enemies: Arab and Jewish Workers in Palestine, 1906–1948
(Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1996); Debora Bernstein, Constructing Boundaries:
Jewish and Arab Workers in Mandatory Palestine (New York, NY: State University of New York
Press, 2000); Ilan Pappé, A History of Modern Palestine (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 2004), 108–15; Mahmoud Yazbak and Yfaat Weiss, Haifa Before & After 1948 – Narratives
of a Mixed City (The Netherlands: Dordrecht, 2011); Michelle Campos, Ottoman Brothers (Stan-
ford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2011); and Ariella Azoulay, Civil Alliances: Palestine 47–8 (film,
2012).
87. See. for instance, Rosemary Sayigh, The Palestinians: From Peasants to Revolutionaries (London
and New York: Zed Books, 1979); Simona Sharoni, Gender and the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict: The
Politics of Women’s Resistance (Syracuse Studies on Peace and Conflict Resolution: Syracuse Uni-
versity Press 1995); Ramzy Baroud, The Second Palestinian Intifada: A Chronicle of a People’s
Struggle (London: Pluto Press, 2006); Mary Elizabeth King, A Quiet Revolution: The First Palesti-
nian Intifada and Nonviolent Resistance (New York: Avalon, 2009); Nasser Abufarha, The
Making of a Human Bomb: An Ethnography of Palestinian Resistance (Durham, NC: Duke Univer-
sity Press, 2009); Noam Chomsky and Ilan Pappé, Gaza in Crisis – Reflections on the US-Israeli War
on the Palestinians (Canada: Haymarket Books, 2010); Gabi Baramki, Peaceful Resistance: Building
a Palestinian University Under Occupation (New York: Pluto Press, 2010); Qumsiyeh, Popular
Resistance in Palestine; and Caitlin Ryan, Bodies, Power and Resistance in the Middle East: Experi-
ences of Subjectification in the Occupied Palestinian Territories (London: Routledge, 2016).
88. Rosemary Sayigh, Palestinians: From Peasants to Revolutionaries (London: Zed Press, 1979), 7.
89. Joseph Massad, The Persistence of the Palestinian Question – Essays on Zionism and the Palesti-
nians (London and New York: Routledge), 142.
90. Qumsiyeh, Popular Resistance in Palestine, 228.
91. Gilles Deleuze, Bergsonism, trans. Hugh Tomlinson (New York: Zone Books, 1991), 15.
93. Wolfe, ‘Settler Colonialism and the Elimination of the Native’, 388.
96. Mark Rifkin, ‘Settler Common Sense’, Settler Colonial Studies 3, nos 3–4 (2013): 322–40.
98. Ibid.
99. Ibid., 379.
100. Robert Young, Colonial Desire (London and New York: Routledge, 1995), 172.
101. Lorenzo Veracini, ‘Negotiating a Bicultural Past: A Historiographical Revolution in 1980s
Aotearoa/New Zealand’, Occasional Papers Series, 7 (Wellington: Treaty of Waitangi Research
Unit), 2.
102. Wolfe, ‘Settler Colonialism and the Elimination of the Native’, 388.
103. Ibid.
104. See Marcelo Svirsky, Arab-Jewish Activism, 94–109.
105. Campos, Ottoman Brothers, 7.
106. Ibid., 19.
107. Pappé, A History of Modern Palestine, 109.
108. Yazbak and Weiss, Haifa Before & After 1948.

109. Amy Dockser Marcuse, Jerusalem 1913 – The Origins of the Arab-Israeli Conflict (London: Penguin
Books), 45–6.
110. Azoulay, Civil Alliances.
112. Shafir, Land, Labor and the Origins of the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict, 146.
113. Ibid., 155. In addition, no non-Jews could be employed on this land, which was leased to Zionist
settlers; see Barbara Smith, The Roots of Separatism in Palestine (London: Tauris, 1993), 135.
114. Bernstein, Constructing Boundaries, 38.
116. Smith, The Roots of Separatism in Palestine.
117. Lockman, Comrades and Enemies. See also, Nadeer Aboud, ‘Jewish-Arab Union Cooperation in
the Early Mandate’, in Jewish-Arab Relations in Mandatory Palestine – A New Approach to the His-
torical Research, ed. Ilan Pappé (Haifa: Giv’at Haviva, 1995), 125–40 (Hebrew); Deborah Bern-
stein, ‘Jews and Arabs in the Nesher Cement Enterprise’, Cathedra 76 (1995): 82–102
(Hebrew); Lev Luis Grinberg, ‘The Jewish-Arab Drivers Organization Strike – A Contribution
to the Critique of the Sociology of the National Conflict in Palestine’, in Jewish-Arab Relations
in Mandatory Palestine, ed. Ilan Pappé (Haifa: Giv’at Haviva, 1995), 157–78 (Hebrew). According
to Pappé,
[T]he communist party as well as the history of joint industrial action in mandatory Pales-
tine, and to a certain extent – also this is much rarer – in Israel, is part of the history of
collaboration in resistance in Palestine and it was achieved through short periods in
which joint spaces of action were created. (Ilan Pappé, ‘Collaboration in struggle in Pales-
tine: the search for a thirdspace’, Marcelo Svirsky, ed., Collaborative Struggles in Australia
and Israel-Palestine, Settler Colonial Studies 4, no. 4 (2014): 399)
118. See Bernstein, Constructing Boundaries; and Yazbak and Weiss, Haifa Before & After 1948.
119. See Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 142. Deleuze and Guattari would see this
double elimination as the ‘abstract machine’ of settler colonialism.
120. Fredric Jameson, The Political Unconscious – Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act (New York:
Cornell University Press).
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Resistance is a structure not an event

suggest that as a settler colonial project Zionism historically

The state of the art in settler colonial studies

CONTACT Marcelo Svirsky msvirsky@uow.edu.au

Challenging the epistemological status of oppositionality that empirically characterises

To properly understand Wolfe’s methodological strategy, we should take seriously his

Structure, power, forces

Explaining strategic and tactical changes in the continuing implementation of elimin-

and competition in a perpetual ﬁeld of interaction, that we must conceive of exteriority

it is not enough to claim that ‘territoriality is settler colonialism’s speciﬁc, irreducible

27. Francesca Merlan, ‘Reply’, 10–9, 16.

79. Williams, Understanding Poststructuralism, 54.

108. Yazbak and Weiss, Haifa Before & After 1948.

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