Settler colonialism in Palestine constitutes one of the most violent forms of domination in modern history. The structural separation of Palestinians was strategically imposed by the Israeli state to prevent any collective reaction. What forms of resistance can emerge in such a context? How has it evolved since October 7, 2023?During her travels in the occupied territories and Israel, Federica Stagni collected first-hand testimonies from Palestinians, activists and those who lived through the Nakba. The result is a collaborative narrative that embodies the essential multiplicity of these struggles: instead of a rhetoric of victimhood or a rhetoric of heroism, the author focuses on the actual role of those who choose, daily, how to resist, recognizing the equal dignity and importance of all.The book “Palestinian Resistance - From the Nakba to October 7,” recently published in Milan by Federica Stagni, is not just an academic work based on field studies spanning about ten years inside Palestine. Through its pages, it carries the Italian reader from the beginnings of Palestinian resistance work in the first half of the twentieth century until October 7, but rather a courageous, radical research that delves into the roots of Western colonial thought and places the Zionist movement and its replacement project in Palestine within colonial projects. SettlerWhich the world knew was similar to French colonialism in Algeria, and colonialism in America, Australia and South Africa.
Meta-roots
The writer was keen to distinguish between it and settler colonialism based on the plundering of wealth, such as British colonialism. While settler colonialism focuses on seizing land, displacing residents, and changing the demographic structure of the occupied country.This terminological classification, as the author mentions, is new to the Western cognitive system, which has only recently begun to recognize it. Therefore, the author opened her work with a chapter in which she defined the most important terms used in the work, most notably “settler colonialism,” on which the scientific hypothesis of the study is based.Here, the researcher returns to historical references that traced the roots of Israeli colonialism, as Staniye stops at Ilan Pappé’s book “Ten Myths About Israel,” a work that the same researcher translated in 2022 into Italian, in which Pappé emphasizes that the establishment of Israel falls within the effort to empty the Holy Land of Muslims.This was due to Islamophobia emerging in Britain, which was then bitter about the loss of the Crusades, along with deep-rooted anti-Semitism as Britain wanted to expel the Jews from its lands to solve the “Jewish question”, all of which fell within the British imperial agenda that was seeking to weaken the Ottoman Empire from within by strengthening the Jewish presence.
