Colonialism by Purchase: Coercion and Replacement in Rural Palestine

This article conducts a microhistorical sociological analysis of land grab in the Jezreel Valley/Marj Ibn 'Amer of northern Palestine during the British Mandate, examining purchase and coercion that functioned as mechanisms of settler colonization. Drawing on original archival research in local colony and national movement archives, it reconstructs how socialist Zionist settlers from the Hashomer Hatzair movement, in coordination with land-purchasing institutions and the British imperial government, displaced indigenous peasants who held long-standing usufruct rights. Assessing the dialectical processes between settlers and the indigenous population, the article traces how the protracted colonization of fertile lands and villages unfolded in rural Palestine, culminating in the gradual transfer of territorial sovereignty to the Zionist movement. Challenging dominant Zionist narratives centered on the 1948 war, it foregrounds an extended settler colonial process, showing how village destruction and land seizure took place both before, during, and after the Nakba. It highlights how indigenous removal and elimination are central to the settler colonial logic, operated through violent, legal, and administrative means, while also attending to indigenous local resistance as a key feature of the evolving settler colonial landscape.