Settlement and Resistance in Israel/Palestine: A Long-Term Perspective on Select Issues and Historical Events offers a new, dynamic and contextual view of Zionist settlement and Palestinian resistance to it over the course of a century. The articles in the book are the fruit of discussions in a thinking group that was active at the Van Leer Jerusalem Institute from 2017 to 2019 and included scholars in the fields of sociology, history, geography, economics, law, political science, and urban planning. The group focused on the dynamics of Jewish-Palestinian relations, paying particular attention to historical turning points, while attempting to address the limitations of many of the colonial-settlement analyses, which view the social structure as largely stable and permanent.

The anthology includes an introduction that presents a broad theoretical outline and eight historical articles, starting with the article by Daniel De Malach and Lev Grinberg on the response to the establishment of the British Mandatory regime, continuing with the articles by Areej Sabbagh-Khoury and Himmat Zoubi on the transition from the British colonial state to the Jewish settler state, and concluding with articles on the subsequent decades: Erez Tzfadia describes three waves of settlement in development towns; Oren Shlomo analyzes the subjugation of the Palestinian population in East Jerusalem in the 2000s; and Gadi Algazi, Mansour Nasasra, and Naaman Tal present three different and complementary perspectives on Jewish settlement in the Negev/Naqab and Palestinian resistance to that settlement from the 1950s to the 1970s.

The book is appearing at a time when the Zionist project is experiencing a deep rift, and the form of its future development is unclear. Of course the book does not pretend to have the last word on the issue of the dynamics of Zionist settlement and Palestinian resistance, on either the theoretical or the historical levels. Rather, it should be seen as a call for a new look at the Zionist project—in the past, the present, and the future—and an invitation for research to examine, from a critical approach, the settlement and resistance to it as interrelated phenomena that are, justifiably, at the heart of public discourse.