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Areej Sabbagh-Khoury. Colonizing Palestine: The Zionist Left and the Making of the Palestinian Nakba. Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2023. 376 pp.

Review by Amahl Bishara

3 July 2026

Colonizing Palestine is an important work of historical sociology that transforms how we think of the who, when, and how of the Nakba, or the Palestinian catastrophe of settler-colonial displacement. It tracks how three kibbutzim that were part of the left wing of the Zionist movement, purportedly committed to a socialist spirit of brotherhood of peoples, contributed to the larger Zionist settler-colonial project of dispossession. This history of the frontier examines how Zionists forged semi-sovereignty in and through the kibbutzim preceding the establishment of the state of Israel in 1948. The book thus challenges the assumption that 1947–1948 is the starting point for Palestinian dispossession. It also powerfully demonstrates how the Zionist left played a key and sometimes violent role in settler colonialism in contradiction with their universalist values.

The chapters offer rich argumentation and stirring details of settler entitlement and Palestinian dispossession. Chapter 1 addresses the existing system of land tenure—including collective, village-based ownership (musha‘a), private ownership (mulk), Islamic waqf, and state-owned lands (miri)—into which the settlers of the kibbutzim were able to intervene. As elsewhere, privatization of land ownership was an instrument of indigenous dispossession. Violence played a “cardinal role” in colonization before the Nakba—not only in times of historically recognized resistance and counterinsurgency, such as 1929 and 1936–1939 (p. 49). Chapter 2 examines how settlers pushed residents out of four Arab villages through a variety of methods including purchasing, occupying, cultivating, and fencing land; using it for livestock; and destroying agricultural land and homes when they lay vacant. Again, this chapter echoes historically with other settler-colonial histories in which enclosure and agriculture were a means of dispossession. Chapter 3 explores relationships between settlers and Palestinians, often grounded in one another’s different views of land rights—Jewish settlers tended to see political difference as culturally rooted. This chapter also includes haunting descriptions of interactions between Arab and Jewish children that illuminate the settlers’ sense of superiority. Chapter 4 looks at the stage of dispossession that happened through warfare. Even as violence escalated, settlers failed to appreciate the power of their position and there developed a racialized view of Palestinians, rendering some as “deserving of expulsion” in their eyes (p. 190).

The final two chapters shift to a study of settler-colonial memory. Chapter 5 examines how settlers remembered Palestinian villages and lands in ways that ultimately justified their dispossession. For example, settlers “remember” that Arabs were not truly connected to the land, and some believed that kibbutzim could better the lives of Arab populations. Chapter 6 analyzes settler memories of the Nakba. Here as elsewhere in the book, we read what might be characterized as “‘settler moves to innocence.’”[1] But we also learn of troubled Jewish Israeli reflections on the costs of dispossession, and how some connected Jewish refugee status and Palestinian refugee status. As one settler is quoted as saying, “in general, being a refugee. I don’t wish it on anyone” (p. 238).

Overall, this meticulous and moving book contributes to an understanding of how socialist values played a role in colonization: they offered a reasoning for establishing “ethnically exclusive communities that were separate and separable from their Arab surroundings” (p. 266). It is gutting to read this work at a time when Palestinians continue to be dispossessed and threatened through a similar combination of legal developments and outright violence—no longer with socialist justifications.

[1] Eve Tuck and K. Wayne Yang, “Decolonization Is Not a Metaphor,” Decolonization 1, no. 1 (2012): 1.