A Whitewashed Home

On the road to Khirbet Zanuta, a Palestinian village in the West Bank, there is a small whitewashed house and, drilled into the ground, a blue and white flag. The majority of people who pass this spot on Route 60 barely spare the structure a second glance. Yet the guide on our solidarity tour, anti-occupation activist Becca Strober, rendered its politics of violent displacement visible as she recounted a story: up until August 2024, this house had been the property of a Palestinian family before a family of Israeli settlers evicted and replaced them. On their expulsion, the settlers lifted an Israeli flag – a symbol of their bloodless conquest – and erected a sign as a monument, reading: ‘all visitors are welcome’. How many years had that Palestinian family lived on, and from, that plot we do not know. How quickly their history had been erased by the Israeli settlers that, unfortunately, we do. 

With that image weighing on our minds, we soon reached Khirbet Zanuta, the site of a protracted Indigenous struggle against ethnic cleansing. Palestinian residents who call this place home have been resisting the destructive system of Israeli occupation in the West Bank whose pillars: settlers, the police, an occupying army, and an impossible court system, uphold a violent structure of domination and dispossession. In Khirbet Zanuta, the members of our solidarity tour (consisting of Jewish Israelis) listened to the leader of the village council, Fayez, as he shared stories of his village’s experiences of settler violence. Speaking under a late summer sun, Fayez recounted how Israeli settlers had expelled the residents of Zanuta in late October 2023 before entering the village to rip the shared toilet from the sewage system, vandalise the school and tear off its roof, and leave a ring of broken and wasted olive trees at the edge of the plot. And yet the Palestinian community, in part, had returned to their homes on Wednesday August 21, 2024, despite ‘devastation everywhere’. This was not the final sentence, Israeli courts made sure that the residents’ return was harsh and difficult. By declaring Zanuta a ‘firing zone’, this meant that whilst Palestinians could return to the village, they were barred from rebuilding anything permanent. In practice, residents of Zanuta could not even replace the roofs on their homes. I documented this ongoing destruction and legal denial of home(land) in the photographs below, on the day we visited on September 6^th, 2024. This took place only weeks before the cold would set in: a strategic weaponisation of winter within Israel’s system of ethnic cleansing.

The ethnic cleansing of Zanuta is representative of the broader systematic transfer of land from Palestinian to Jewish-Israeli hands, a process which has been ongoing since the Zionist settlement of Palestine began in the New Yishuv. It is a regime of land theft framed and obscured as purchase, expropriation, allocation, or dispute, and is rooted in ethno-nationalist ideology, and more specifically, Jewish supremacy. Such land theft has been institutionalised through the formation of the Israeli state. Consider that, since 1948, not one Palestinian locality has been authorised for construction. In that same period, the Israeli state has granted building permits to over 900 Jewish localities. The overarching doctrine here is what Rabea Eghbariah refers to as ‘Jewishness as property’. In other words, the right to produce a legal claim to land has been constructed as a Jewish, not universal, right, grounded in the exclusion of Palestinians. When the law on which a society depends is borne of supremacism, each act upholding it becomes an act of apartheid. 

Visiting Khirbet Zanuta was an experience which struck deep in my heart. As I felt the stories and experiences of Palestinians in Zanuta, the wall which had separated my world from theirs, my freedoms from their displacement, collapsed. This experience shattered for me my already fractured sense that Israeli-settler violence was a phenomenon separate from my own family’s story. My family’s heritage is in Eastern Europe. Most of my ancestors arrived in the territory that is now the green line through different means. Some escaped persecution; for example, we have an ID card of my great-grandfather from 1930s apartheid Nazi Germany before he fled to South Africa. Some of my extended family were not able to flee, and they were murdered in the Holocaust. In another branch of my family genealogy, my great-grandparents chose to leave their homes in Transnistria for an ideological settlement of Palestine and arrived via Odessa on boats. All strands of my lineage ended up in Central Israel, within the green line, and my birth was a result of that. That makes my family, and me, active figures in the linked historical processes of Zionism’s fulfilment and the execution of the Nakba.

When I re-entered the green line on the way back from Zanuta, I saw a thousand whitewashed homes like the one by the road near Zanuta. But now I saw them differently; those white walls, flags, and scripts were the same as those which lined the street of my childhood home in Tel Mond. The land which my childhood home sits on was acquired through purchases made by the British businessman Sir Alfred Mond, between 1917 – 1929 and was established as a citrus-farming settlement before the Nakba. This is a process which Areej Sabbagh-Khoury (2023) conceptualises as colonisation-by-purchase. The transactional nature of land purchase in Mandatory Palestine has been used to portray a form of ethical commerce. In turn, this is used to cover up and provide legitimacy for this historic process of territorial expansion. These acquisitions still resulted in ethnically homogenous Jewish settlements built on Palestinian land.

These purchases formed the material substrate for the early Jewish state and thus are tied to the industrialisation and growth of the New Yishuv, which in 1947-49, violently birthed the historical process of the Nakba. Whilst the Nakba is commonly spoken of as referring to the mass expulsion of 1947– 49, Mariam Barghouti reminds us that the Nakba is ongoing. This means acknowledging that each instance of Israeli colonisation is a yet another iteration of the Nakba. This same overarching fascist ideology currently drives Israeli military occupation, settler violence in the West Bank, and Israel’s ongoing war crimes in Gaza. To isolate any of these as its own separate event or process is an artificial and political cleaving of history. The Nakba has been perpetrated through means such as colonisation by purchase, settler violence, genocide incitement, collective punishment, extrajudicial killing, starvation and siege, and the cultural normalisation of occupation and genocide. These processes are not fractured, but aspects of the same structure. Each embodiment of colonial violence forms a facet of that interface where the construction of Israel and the destruction of Palestine are contested. That interface originates from the idea of a state for Jewish people at the exclusion of Palestinians. It is thus the fundamental tenets of Zionism which are at the root of the ’48 massacre of Palestinians in Tantura; the ‘82 massacres in Sabra and Shatila; the expulsion of Palestinians from Zanuta last year; and of the genocide of Palestinians in Gaza today. The specific forms of violence have ultimately evolved; the perpetrators bear different uniforms, but the principle of Jewish supremacy and the tools of organised militia and state terror underscore them all.

Ultimately, settler-colonial projects seek to erase Indigenous people and culture. In this respect, Zionism is no different. To understand this requires reckoning with the fact that Israeli violence is not limited to extremist settlers or fascist politicians. The Israeli state, and consequent society, is built on stolen land ruled by a historic and ongoing territorially-expansionist ideology. If we want to understand this violence, we must recognise it as more than acts of physical and material destruction and erasure, but also as an assault on the collective histories and memories of Palestine. This is the weapon of amnesia, brandished to destroy the memory of Palestine as whole. Rather than bend to its secondary erasure, it is incumbent on us to resist the settlement and annexation of our minds. This means continuing to listen, read, and learn from Palestinians about Palestine, and cultivating a recognition of the ongoing process of Nakba in every act of colonisation. This creates a coherent understanding in our minds of the interconnected nature of the multiple ways Zionism enacts violence against Palestinian land, bodies, and minds. In every act of construction under Zionism – home, wall, checkpoint, blockade, quadcopter, drone, and fighter jet, there is an act of destruction. Yet beneath, amidst, and above each lies a rich history of Palestinian life, culture and resistance that must not be forgotten. Refusing this ideological violence offers a new path, one of steadfast solidarity with Palestinians, towards their liberation from oppression. 

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Guy Zilberman is an antizionist activist and writer based in the UK. He has written articles on fossil fuel divestment, the right to protest and Israeli colonialism in Palestine.