Political Geography 53 (2016) 20–29

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Political Geography
j o u r n a l h o m e p a g e : w w w. e l s e v i e r. c o m / l o c a t e / p o l g e o

Ethnic cleansing and the formation of settler colonial geographies

Neve Gordon a,*,†, Moriel Ram b,†
a Department of Politics and Government, Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, Beer-Sheva 84105, Israel
b
Faculty of Architecture and Town Planning, Technion, Israel Institute of Technology, Israel

A R T I C L E I N F O A B S T R A C T

Article history: Taking into account that ethnic cleansing not only undoes the legal and spatial formations within a given
Available online territory but also is a productive force aimed at securing and normalizing a new political order within a
contested territory, we examine its impact on settler colonial geographies. We show that the relative com-
Keywords: pleteness or incompleteness of ethnic cleansing helps shape the specific configuration of two intricately
Settler colonialism tied sites of social management – spatial reproduction and legal governance – within settler colonial regimes.
Colonial geography
We claim that complete ethnic cleansing produces a ‘refined’ form of settler colonialism resembling the
Ethnic cleansing
colonial geographies of North America and Australia and is more readily normalized, while incomplete
Israel/Palestine
The West Bank ethnic cleansing produces an ‘intermediate’ form of settler colonialism similar to the colonial regime in
The Golan Heights Rhodesia before the settlers lost power and is impossible to normalize due to a series of contradictions
stemming from the presence of the ‘indigenous other’. To uncover this less acknowledged feature of ethnic
cleansing we compare two territories that were colonized by Israel during the 1967 War: the Syrian Golan
Heights and the Palestinian West Bank.
© 2016 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

Introduction emphasis added). Normal for Shalev means uncontested, familiar,

or as one Israeli journalist once said, more Israeli than Israel itself
Jon Stewart’s The Daily Show was well-known for its left leaning (Shalev, 2010). Nachum Barnea, a prominent Israeli journalist, offered
political satire. Although the program focused on the United States, an interesting account of why the Golan Heights became ‘normal’.
from time to time Stewart broadened the coverage and examined ‘In the beginning there was fear’, he wrote. ‘The Syrian plateau posed
political events in other countries. Over the years, the policies a tangible threat to the [Israeli] valley. Then the remaining [Syrian]
adopted by the Israeli government had been among his satirical residents were removed. Their expulsion was necessary. The [Israeli]
targets. A section dealing with Israel’s 2014 military campaign in Labour movement does not occupy anything other than empty land;
Gaza caught our eyes, since in the map suspended behind Stewart where the emptiness was not complete, it took care to make it com-
Israel’s borders were not drawn according to the internationally rec- plete…’ (Barnea, 1994). If one juxtaposes these two vignettes
ognized 1949 armistice agreements (Fig. 1). The map is accurate in alongside the map used in The Daily Show, then an important ques-
the sense that Israel’s borders do not encompass the Palestinian West tion arises: Did the removal of the Golan’s Syrian population help
Bank and Gaza Strip, but its depiction of the Golan Heights as an produce its perceived Israeliness?
integral part of Israel is flawed. The fact that Stewart’s team chose Building on existing research into ethnic cleansing, in the fol-
this map is, however, hardly coincidental, since many existing maps lowing pages we examine how the relative completeness or
have erased the line separating the Golan from Israel. incompleteness of ethnic cleansing helps shape colonial geogra-
Reflecting on the difference between the West Bank and the Golan phies. We claim that there is a relation between the relative
Heights, two areas that Israel occupied in the June 1967 War, Meir completeness of the ethnic cleansing and the type of settler colo-
Shalev, one of Israel’s most popular authors, remarked that ‘The holy nialism that is produced. Relatively complete ethnic cleansing
sites of the West Bank represent today the pinnacles of lunacy, evil- produces a ‘refined’ form of settler colonialism resembling the co-
ness and stupidity… The Golan, on the other hand, is the only normal lonial geographies of North America and Australia and is
territory we have left. It has no holy tombs, sites of religious frenzy characterized by the ability to normalize the contested space. In this
or a large downtrodden and rebellious population’ (Shalev, 1994, form of settler colonialism, contradictions and excesses are less
obvious since the indigenous population was almost completely
cleansed and the landscape was reproduced through comprehen-
sive destruction of indigenous spaces. By contrast, incomplete or
* Corresponding author. Department of Politics and Government, Ben-Gurion
University of the Negev, Beer-Sheva 84105, Israel. Tel.: +972 558879487.
less complete ethnic cleansing produces an ‘intermediate’ form of
E-mail address: ngordon@bgu.ac.il (N. Gordon). settler colonialism similar to the colonial regimes in Rhodesia and
† The authors acknowledge equal contribution. South Africa before the settlers lost power and is characterized by

http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.polgeo.2016.01.010
0962-6298/© 2016 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
 N. Gordon, M. Ram/Political Geography 53 (2016) 20–29 21

In order to advance this argument, we tap into the existing lit-

erature on settler colonialism. We espouse Patrick Wolfe’s (1999,
2006) claim that settler colonialism is a structure, and embrace
Caroline Elkins and Susan Pedersen’s (2005) position that the struc-
ture is not homogeneous and can take on different forms and operate
in diverse ways according to the circumstances that produced it
(Elkins & Pedersen, 2005). Yet, unlike Elkins and Pedersen who high-
light different structural manifestations of settler societies such as
the level of settler control and settler privilege, we contend that the
relative completeness or incompleteness of the ethnic cleansing plays
a vital role in determining the particular makeup of the colonial ge-
ography and the legal framework that are introduced in the region.
More precisely, the relative completeness or lack thereof of ethnic
cleansing configures the actual structure – refined or intermedi-
ate – of the colonial geography by shaping 1) the specific way space
is reproduced and 2) the legal regime that is instituted within that
space. It is important to add, however, that insofar that ethnic cleans-
ing is not a ‘one-off occurrence’ (Wolfe, 2006, 388), then these settler
colonial structures are to a certain extent fluid, changing overtime
according to the quantity and proportion of the cleansing within
a given period.
In order to uncover this less acknowledged – because pro-
foundly disturbing – feature of ethnic cleansing we compare two
territories that were occupied by the same state during the same
military campaign (the June 1967 War): the Syrian Golan Heights
and the Palestinian West Bank. Out of a population of 128,000 Syrians
living in the Golan Heights before the war, only 6500 or five percent
remained in the territory after the war (Golan Archive [GA], 1969;
Kipnis, 2013, 56–60). In the West Bank, by contrast, out of a pop-
ulation of approximately 850,000 before the war, about 600,000 or
seventy percent remained in the region in its aftermath (Ennab, 1994;
ICBS, 1967, at Perlmann, 2011). Focusing on the two intricately tied
Fig. 1. Map of Israel similar to the one that appeared behind Jon Stewart. The West sites of social management – spatial reproduction and legal gov-
Bank is depicted as a separate entity, while the Golan Heights, which were occu- ernance – we argue that the relative completeness or lack thereof
pied by Israel during the same war, are presented as an integral part of Israel. of ethnic cleansing not only shapes colonial geographies but also
influences the ability to normalize colonial spaces. More specifi-
cally, we show how the scope of the ethnic cleansing carried out
in the Golan Heights helped produce a refined form of settler co-
a series of contradictions stemming from the settler’s inability to lonialism, while the partial ethnic cleansing carried out in the West
totally prohibit the indigenous population’s access to the territory Bank produced an intermediate form of settler colonialism. The com-
– the primary objective of settler colonialism (Rose, 1991).1 parison of governing techniques employed by the same state in the
By ethnic cleansing we do not mean a genocidal campaign, but two territories that it occupied during the same war enables us to
rather ‘a purposeful policy designed by one ethnic or religious group understand the impact of ethnic cleansing on settler colonial ge-
to remove by violent and terror-inspiring means the civilian pop- ographies and the forms of spatial and social management.
ulation of another ethnic or religious group from certain geographic The paper is divided into four main parts. Following an over-
areas’ (United Nations, 1994). Accordingly, the violence of ethnic view of the literature on ethnic cleansing, we briefly outline our
cleansing is directed at emptying a space of certain populations methodology. Next, we concisely compare the degree of ethnic
(ethnic or religious groups) and has a spatial dimension that is vital cleansing carried out in the Golan Heights and West Bank. In the
to the definition of the violence. Genocidal violence, by contrast, third and main part, we expose how the relative completeness or
focuses on the extermination of populations, and its object is the incompleteness of ethnic cleansing created two forms of colonial
human body, while the spatial dimension exists but is incidental. geographies: refined and intermediate. To do so, we compare the
Interestingly, most of the scholarly literature has emphasized how movement of settlers to each region, the layout of the settlements
ethnic cleansing is associated with the collapse of governing ap- and the modes of legal governance in the two regions. By way of
paratuses, and is both a driving force and a product of human created conclusion, we examine the relation between the form of the co-
catastrophes, but has dedicated only scant attention to the implic- lonial geography and its normalization.
it objective of the cleansing: the effort to secure and normalize a
new political order within a contested or colonized territory. Our
claim is that the degree of ethnic cleansing is vital for understand- Ethnic cleansing
ing the new political order since the presence or absence of the
“indigenous other” (Veracini, 2008) helps determine the spatial and During the brutal and prolonged civil war in the former Yugo-
legal configurations produced within the territory where the cleans- slavia (1992–1995), western commentators translated and
ing took place. This, in turn, has an impact on the territory’s popularized the Serbo-Croatian phrase ‘etnicko ci scenje’, thus ren-
normalization, where normalization means the construction of the dering the term ethnic cleansing familiar to international audiences
space in question as ordinary, familiar and, indeed, uncontested in (Petrovic, 1994, 343). Notwithstanding the succinct definition
the eyes of the majority of the population whose side is responsi- provided above and the fact that ethnic cleansing is always
ble for carrying out the cleansing. achieved by violence, fear and terror, the reasons leading to its
22 N. Gordon, M. Ram/Political Geography 53 (2016) 20–29

implementation, the way it is carried out, and the scope and extent ing a series of distinct instruments. It too is continuous and spread
of its execution vary greatly from case to case (Mann, 2005). out, but if discipline seeks to administer the individual subject,
Ethnic cleansing can take place within a state or across inter- biopower manages the individual only insofar as he or she is a
national borders, and unfold within a short span of time or during member of a population. Biopower employs an array of institu-
a slow and painful process of expulsion (Bell-Fialkoff, 1996). Re- tions that coordinate and regulate medical care, welfare services,
gardless of how, when, where and by whom ethnic cleansing is the economy, and so forth, while configuring and circumscribing
carried out, it is based on the premise that a certain ethnic group the political sphere and normalizing knowledge. In order to manage
must be expelled from a certain space, while the space, in turn, is the population, biopower uses statistical devices and scientific
often reified as part of another ethnic homeland (Naimark, 2001). methods as well as mechanisms of surveillance. It measures and
Expulsion, however, is only one aspect of the cleansing. Another intervenes in a set of processes relating to mortality rate, longev-
prominent feature involves the intentional plan to wipe out any proof ity, the fertility of the population, hygiene, vaccinations, prevalent
of the displaced population’s presence. This is often achieved through illnesses in a population, birth rates, unemployment rates, the dis-
the destruction of the latter’s lived environment, and the erasure tribution of labor in terms of age, gender, and sectors of occupation,
of any signs of their culture and history (Doel & Clarke, 1998; Tyner, per capita income, and so on. Our claim is that the relative com-
2014). As we show below, the ability to erase the culture and history pleteness or incompleteness of the ethnic cleansing and demolition
and to reshape the geography is also dependent on the relative com- of the built environment, which are forms of sovereign violence,
pleteness of the ethnic cleansing that is carried out. shaped the ways through which biopolitics was exercised in each
Ethnic cleansing also tends to be tied to settler colonialism, since region.
this form of colonialism is premised on gaining access to territory We exemplify our claim by drawing on a large corpus of em-
by removing the ‘indigenous other’ from their land (Rose, 1991; pirical evidence about Israel’s occupation of the Golan Heights and
Veracini, 2010; Wolfe, 1999), while the depleted area is often re- the West Bank. Our sources include archival material from The Israeli
settled by other ethnic groups. Settler colonialism may be carried State Archive (ISA), the Israeli Defence Force Archive (IDFA), the
out through the forceful relocation of the colonizing state’s citi- Central Zionist Archive (CZA) and the Golan Archive (GA) as well
zens, the movement of willful settlers, or a mixture of both (McGarry, as the 1967 census carried out by Israel in the West Bank a few
1998). Usually, the act of resettlement is conducted in order to weeks after the war. In addition, we examined scores of military,
prevent the return of the expelled population (O’Tuathail & Dahlman, United Nations and human rights reports published from 1967
2006). The settling act commonly aims to undo the demographic onwards, and perused the archives of four daily newspapers: Davar,
cavity that was created during the cleansing and is rationalized Ha’aretz, Yediot Achronot and Ma’ariv as well as several public opinion
through a narrative that emphasizes a (frequently constructed) his- polls. Finally, we also use the findings and insights of the massive
torical relation between the settlers’ ethnic identity and the cleansed body of scholarly literature that has been published on these two
space (Kaufman, 2001). regions over the years.
Although the term only became widely used in the 1990s in re-
lation to the Balkans, Nagorno-Karabakh (Rieff, 1997) and Rwanda Ethnic cleansing in the Golan Heights and the West Bank
(White, 2009), the concept of ethnic cleansing has gained signifi-
cant traction as a growing number of scholars have applied it in their While our analysis focuses on the period that followed the 1967
analysis of various historical events featuring forceful population war, the ensuing investigation cannot be adequately understood
removal. These, to name a few, include the expulsion of Native without acknowledging the link between Israel’s policies in the West
Americans from their indigenous lands (Anderson, 2005), the trans- Bank and Golan Heights and the ethnic cleansing that took place
fer of Ottoman Muslims from the Balkans (McCarthy, 1995), and the during and in the aftermath of the 1948 war (Abu-Lughod, 1971;
displacement of European Jewry and Roma communities from Khalidi, Elmusa, & Khalidi, 1992; Sa’di & Abu-Lughod, 2007). It was
various locations in Europe during the Second World War (Solonari, then that about 750,000 out of 900,000 Palestinians who were living
2010). As Michael Mann (2005) cogently argued in his monumen- in what became Israel either fled or were forcefully displaced across
tal study of ethnic cleansing and democracies, ethnic cleansing is international borders (Morris, 1987, 1988; Pappe, 2006a, 2006b).
the outcome of the national drive to create a construable and con- Several researchers have discussed the removal of Palestinians from
trollable territory for a specific demos that is based on a specific the space that became Israel (Falah, 1996, 2003) and situated the
ethnos. In addition, one finds a growing debate on the exact char- act within the larger context of Zionist ideology (Shafir & Peled, 2002)
acterization of ethnic cleansing and its relation to other forms of and the Judaization policy that guided Israeli decision-makers
systematic violence such as genocide, ethnocide or politicide (Sjoberg, (Rishmawi, 1987; Yiftachel & Rumley, 1991).
Gill, Williams, & Kuhn, 1995). This policy included several components, including the expro-
Within this vast literature there is one crucial methodological priation of Palestinian land and the confinement of the Palestinians
observation that is particularly relevant to us. Following O’Tuathail that remained in Israel into demarcated and circumscribed areas
and O’Loughlin (2009), we maintain that ethnic cleansing should (Falah, 1991; Forman & Kedar, 2004; Robinson, 2013; Shai, 2006;
be regarded as a form of geopolitics that strives to shape an exist- Yiftachel & Yacobi, 2004). Scholars further stress Israel’s effort to
ing spatial order (see also Wood, 2001). We accordingly propose that preserve a viable ethno-centric democratic regime, which some have
the relative completeness or lack thereof of ethnic cleansing informs defined as an ethnocracy (Yiftachel, 2006) and others as a colonial
the structure of a settler colonial regime since it influences the pro- democracy (Gordon, 2010). Hence, the spatial reconstruction of Israeli
duction of space, the forms of population management (Foucault, space before 1967 was already based upon a settler colonial par-
Senellart, Burchell, Ewald, & Fontana, 2009) and the structures of adigm whereby the indigenous other is reduced to a ‘manageable’
violence that are imposed, thus providing an explanation why in remnant (Veracini, 2011).
different regions different biopolitical techniques are imposed. Dif- It is, accordingly, not altogether surprising that when Israel oc-
ferent degrees of ethnic cleansing, in other words, tend to produce cupied the Golan Heights (or the Syrian plateau, as it was referred
different colonial geographies and biopolitical regimes. to in Israel at the time), it dramatically reduced the indigenous pop-
By biopolitics (Foucault, 2003) we mean a form of governance ulation (Harris, 1978; Ram, 2014, 2015). Israel’s main tactic was
that operates on the population as a whole. Biopolitics does not intimidation and, occasionally, forceful removal of the civilian pop-
replace the deployment of sovereign or disciplinary power, but as ulation who remained in the Golan after the fighting subsided
opposed to the latter, it operates on a different scale while apply- (Harris, 1980; Murphy & Gannon, 2008). Furthermore, Syrian
 N. Gordon, M. Ram/Political Geography 53 (2016) 20–29 23

residents of the area who were caught attempting to return to their the Jordan valley – almost all of the over 300 Palestinian villages,
villages were brought before a military tribunal and deported (Israel refugee camps and towns were not fully vacated (ICBS, 1967 posted
Defence Force Archive [IDFA], 1967a). Thus, within a couple of in full at Perlmann, 2011) and remained standing after the war. Avi
months after the Golan Heights’ occupation, only 6404 Syrians re- Raz (2012, 103–136) does, however, document several instances of
mained in an area that had been populated by about 128,000 people spatial destruction. More than 40 percent of Qalqilyah’s dwellings
before the war (Kipnis, 2013, 56–60; Israel Defence Force Archive – some 850 houses – had been demolished, while in Zeita, a village
[IDFA], 1967b; Israel State Archive [ISA], 1967a, 1967b), indicating located near the Green Line, about one-third of the buildings were
that almost 95 percent of the population had been removed. This torn down. These examples of demolitions were part of a broader
created the conditions for implementing a refined form of settler policy aimed at clearing the area adjacent to the western border
colonialism and, as we will see, the introduction of more liberal of as many inhabitants as possible. Even though Israel ended up de-
biopolitical techniques of population control, by which we mean, stroying hundreds if not thousands of houses, almost all of the towns
following Foucault, less interference, allowing free movement, and and villages close to the border ultimately remained intact due to
letting things ‘follow their course so that the [colonial] reality de- the fact that they were not completely depopulated.
velops and follows its own course according to the laws, principles, The demolitions in each area served different purposes. In the
and mechanisms of the reality itself’ (Foucault et al., 2009, 70). Liberal West Bank the destruction was carried out primarily in order to
biopolitical techniques, as Foucault underscores in a different context, propel the population to leave certain areas; and, in the case of the
can be a correlative of the deployment of apparatuses (dispositif) Latrun enclave, in order to ensure that those who had been ex-
of security, where security means the management of the life of pelled would not return. In the Golan Heights, it was executed not
populations as opposed to disciplinary practices that are exer- only in order to guarantee that the Syrian population would never
cised on the bodies of individuals. return but also in order to shape the colonized space in a new way.
By contrast, an estimated 850,000 Palestinians lived in the West More importantly, the varying degrees of demolition had a direct
Bank before the 1967 war (Ennab, 1994; based on extrapolation from effect not only on the colonial geography of each region but also
the 1961 Jordanian census), while an Israeli census, carried out in on the legal framework and biopolitical technologies that were in-
the summer of 1967, indicates that 599,000 Palestinians were still troduced. Insofar as the establishment of settlements and the
in the region after the war (ICBS, 1967, posted in full at Perlmann, relocation of settlers to colonized spaces are techniques of biopolitics
2011). Accordingly, approximately 250,000 inhabitants or thirty (as we show below), then one can also appreciate how ethnic cleans-
percent of the population fled or were expelled to Jordan during ing determines the settling processes and in this way partly shapes
the 1967 war and its direct aftermath, while only 17,000 were ul- the biopolitical regime that is instituted.
timately allowed to return (Gazit, 1995). Hence, in this area the form The Golan Heights was the first of the territories to be settled
of settler colonialism that was produced was intermediate and, as by Israeli civilians after the June 1967 war. As early as July of that
we will show, the biopolitical techniques that were utilized were same year, a group of settlers from the Labour Party affiliated United
predominantly illiberal. Kibbutz Movement moved into abandoned Syrian barracks
We now turn to demonstrate how the difference in the degree (Gorenberg, 2006, 72–98). Within the next decade and a half, 30
of ethnic cleansing shaped the two colonial geographies by outlin- settlements were established housing several thousand Jewish set-
ing the differences in the production of space and the character of tlers (currently there are 34 settlements). In the West Bank the
the legal regime in each region. colonization process also began not long after the war. During the
first years, three kinds of settlements were created: civilian mili-
Ethnic cleansing and colonial geographies tary bases (i.e., military outposts that were established on Israel’s
frontiers and gradually converted into civilian agricultural com-
Spatial reproduction munities), religious settlements and neighbourhoods in East
Jerusalem (built on land that had been an integral part of the West
The production of space in the Golan Heights commenced Bank prior to the war). Military bases were established in the Jordan
through a process of wholesale destruction, as is often the case in Valley and other strategic sites and were later converted into ci-
refined forms of settler colonialism. Immediately after the war, a vilian settlements, usually populated by secular Jews affiliated with
list of abandoned Golan villages designated for preservation was the Labour Party (Zertal & Eldar, 2007). These were considered stra-
compiled by the Israel Nature Reserves Authority and handed over tegic settlements. Religious settlements were created in the heart
to the Land Authority (Israel State Archive [ISA], 1967a, 1967b, 1967c, of the West Bank. These were considered political settlements, since
1968). Of the 139 Arab agricultural villages and 61 individual farms in contrast to the strategic ones the motivation behind them is not
registered prior to the war, only seven villages were designated to military but rather messianic (Zertal & Eldar, 2007). Thirdly, Israel
remain (Golan Archive [GA], 1967; Israel Defence Force Archive built Jewish neighbourhoods in East Jerusalem in order to under-
[IDFA], 1967a). The almost complete removal of the Syrian popu- mine the city’s east/west divide and alter the demographic balance
lation from the Golan Heights during the war created the conditions between Jews and Palestinians in the city (Mattar, 1983).
for the systematic demolition of these villages, farms, and houses, By the late 1970s, Israel initiated a fourth kind of settlement often
while the extensive destruction facilitated the reproduction of space. referred to as ‘suburban settlements’, catering to middle-class Israeli
This initial act of destruction was similar to the destruction of Pal- citizens who worked in urban centres and wanted to improve their
estinian built environment after the 1948 war and the shaping of lifestyle (Newman, 1996). And, then, in the early 1990s it founded
Israeli landscape in the pre-1967 borders (Leshem, 2013). In other two ultra-orthodox cities in the West Bank (Mnookin & Eiran, 2005).
words, the Golan’s landscape underwent a process of “violent It was precisely these two newer types of settlements that at-
erasure” (Tyner, 2014) because, as Patrick Wolfe (2006, 388) points tracted the post-Oslo mass movement from Israel proper to the West
out, ‘Settler colonialism destroys to replace’. Bank (Gordon & Cohen, 2012). Finally, at the dawn of the new mil-
Unlike the Golan Heights, the West Bank remained populated lennium religious settlers began creating outposts throughout the
and therefore the extent of destruction during and in the imme- West Bank, and while most outposts house only few people, they
diate aftermath of the war was considerably more restricted, actually substantially improve Israel’s control of the occupied ter-
characterizing, as it were, an intermediate form of settler colonial- ritory (Mnookin & Eiran, 2005; Sasson, 2005) (more on this below).
ism. According to Israel’s 1967 census – except for the three villages Currently, there are about 120 Jewish settlements and about the same
in the Latrun enclave, several hamlets, as well as refugee camps in number of outposts in the West Bank (Peace Now Settlement Watch).
24 N. Gordon, M. Ram/Political Geography 53 (2016) 20–29

While it may appear intuitive that the production of empty land 2014). Put differently, the same colonial rationalities that shaped
– through the depopulation and wholesale destruction of the Golan Israel’s internal frontiers after 1948 (Yiftachel & Segal, 1998) were
Heights – would lead Israel to build more settlements in that region, also evident in the territories the state colonized after 1967.
actually at least four times as many settlements were built in the
West Bank, a difference that becomes crucial insofar as settle- Colonial settlements
ments are not merely architectural edifices but part of a biopolitical
regime aimed at managing the indigenous other. Hence, the dif- Not only the settler population and the number of settlements,
ferent degree of demolition in each territory had a profound impact but also the layout of the settlements across the terrain and even
on the colonial geographies as well as on the legal framework and the architecture of the buildings have been informed by the act of
biopolitical techniques employed by the state. ethnic cleansing. In the Golan Heights, the layout of the settle-
ments was initially determined by economic considerations (Harris,
Settlers 1980; Kipnis, 2013). Kibbutzim were erected mainly in the north
and moshavim in the south where the terrain was more condu-
The variance relating to the number of settlers in each region cive to agriculture (Ram, 2015). Only at a later stage were a number
is also worth noting. In 2013, 21,000 settlers lived in the Golan of settlements established in the region’s centre and close to the
Heights (ICBS, 2014), while in the West Bank there were 356,000 border where agriculture was limited due to the topography.
settlers (ICBS, 2014) and an estimated 200,000 in occupied East Je- Freddy Kahana, the architect who planned kibbutz Merom Golan,
rusalem (Gordon & Cohen, 2012). Two reasons are usually offered the first settlement established on the Golan Heights, said in a 2000
to explain the disparity between the two settlement projects: es- interview that people initially wanted to build the kibbutz on top
chatological and geographic. Unlike the Golan, the West Bank is of a volcanic hill, but he decided to embed the kibbutz in the ‘earth
believed to be the heart of the biblical land of Israel, and certain as close as possible to the slopes’ and in this way shield the built
sectors among the religious Jewish population considered Israel’s environment from possible Syrian shelling (Azoulai, 2000; see Fig. 2).
victory in the 1967 war as the ‘beginning of redemption’ and as an Kahana explains:
opportunity to realize the vision of a Greater Israel through a massive
Merom Golan was definitely not based on the idea of a for-
settlement project (Feige, 2009). Geographically, the Golan Heights
tress. It was a normal settlement, in normal conditions whose
– when compared to the West Bank – is far from Israel’s economic
defences are not in its own hands. The region was not hostile,
centre, and it is presumed that the distance serves as an obstacle
the enemy was located five kilometres from the border, and facing
for relocating a large number of people to that region (Kipnis, 2013).
the enemy there were a series of Israeli tanks. We did not es-
The West Bank’s eschatological importance and its geographi-
tablish a settlement with a wall around it that could be counted
cal proximity to the centre of Israel surely help explain the
on to defend itself with a few guns; we just thought how people
quantitative difference between the two settlement projects. But we
and children could reach a shelter if the settlement was shelled
would like to add that ethnic cleansing also explains the differ-
(Azoulai, 2000, 45).
ence in settler population in the two regions. In the Golan Heights,
the indigenous population does not have the required mass to mount Kahana’s underlying assumption is that the Golan Heights is
an effective separatist campaign, and the transfer of 21,000 set- empty of an indigenous other. The enemies he refers to are the
tlers was enough to secure a demographic balance in the region. Syrians who are located across the international border. Hence, the
Therefore, the state has had less incentive to transfer more citi- settlement is not conceived as a biopolitical technology aimed at
zens to the Golan. By contrast, in the West Bank the movement of managing or controlling an indigenous population. Moreover, the
large numbers of settlers was consciously geared towards coun- Golan’s open landscape devoid of checkpoints is characteristic of
tering the will of the indigenous Palestinians to establish their own a refined form of settler colonialism.
state within this region (Ministry of Agriculture, 1983), while si- The function of settlements in the West Bank has been very dif-
multaneously the Jewish settlers have been used – wittingly or not ferent. Unlike Merom Golan, they were almost always built on
– as a civilian technology of biopolitical control (Gordon, 2008a, hilltops overlooking Palestinian villages (note that the topography
2008b). of the two regions is also different) so that they could serve as
While one might assume that ethnic cleansing would spur the mechanisms of civilian surveillance (B’Tselem, 2002). In and of
relocation of populations from the core state to the ‘empty terri-
tory’, the two cases suggest that an opposite dynamic can also
materialize: the existence of an indigenous population can also drive
the core state to transfer its citizens to the newly colonized region.
Hence, at least in the Israeli case the degree of ethnic cleansing has
had an inverse impact on the efforts of the core state to settle it.
Insofar as the settler population is conceived of as a technology of
indigenous control (and not merely a vehicle for exploiting re-
sources) then the more a space is depleted of its indigenous
inhabitants, the less the effort to populate it. It is here that one can
identify a direct link between the policies within the Green Line and
the post-1967 colonized areas. As mentioned, throughout the 1960s
and 1970s, the government made a concerted effort to move Israeli
Jews to the Galilee where Palestinians (who remained following the
1948 war) had a large majority (Falah, 1991), but at the time there
was less of an effort to settle the Negev because its Bedouin pop-
ulation had been depleted during and after the war from an
estimated 110,000 to 11,000 people (Nasasra, 2012). Currently,
however, the effort to Judaize the Negev has accelerated not least
because the birth rate of the Bedouin population is very high and Fig. 2. Merom Golan on the Golan Heights.
the population has increased substantially to over 220,000 (ICBS, Source: Photo: Yuval Nadel.
 N. Gordon, M. Ram/Political Geography 53 (2016) 20–29 25

themselves the settlements’ built-up areas comprise less than two of the settlements (and roads), and governed the way in which they
percent of the West Bank, but their regional and municipal bound- were laid out, their topographical setting, and even the design of
aries comprise almost 42 percent of the land. These boundaries were the architectural edifices within and outside the settlements. In the
created to restrict Palestinian movement and undermine their de- Golan Heights, the settlements’ location was determined primari-
velopment. Simply put, Palestinians are banned from using ly by economic concerns and issues relating to topographic access
‘settlement land’ for agriculture or for extending their lived envi- and the position of an external enemy (i.e., Syria) and was never
ronment, and they are even prohibited from entering large parts conceived as a biopolitical technology developed to control the in-
of this area, thus hindering their ability to move freely even within digenous population. By contrast, in the West Bank, settlements were
the West Bank (B’Tselem, 2002, 116). Already in 1980, the settler designed as biopolitical tools aimed at facilitating control of large
movement explained that ‘[Their] control of a region is a function swaths of land and monitoring the indigenous Palestinians. Inter-
not only of the size of the population which resides within the region, estingly, the spatial configuration of the settlements in the West Bank
but also of the size of the area in which this population exercises was shaped according to similar parameters that guided the estab-
its influence’ (Ministry of Agriculture, 1983). lishment of mitzpim and towns in the Galilee between the 1950s
The settlements in the West Bank have provided, according to and 1970s. For example, the town of Kiryat Arba that overlooks
Eyal Weizman (2007, 139–161), three strategic assets: greater tac- Hebron was modelled on the Jewish town Upper Nazareth, located
tical strength, self-protection, and a wider view. The distribution, above the Palestinian city in the Galilee (Zertal & Eldar, 2007, 22).
layout, and architectural design of the settlements were deter-
mined by strategic military principles so that, in Weizman’s words, Rule of law and modes of governance
the “simple act of domesticity, a single family home shrouded in
the cosmetic façade of red tiles and green lawns, conforms to the Following the war, Israel reinstated the Ottoman, British Man-
aims of territorial” and social control. The settlements’ strategic func- datory, Egyptian, and Jordanian laws that had been in place prior
tion was integrated into their distribution and topographical location to the war in each of the regions it had captured, and over the years,
so that they created a ‘network of observation’ that overlooks the added an array of military orders either to replace existing laws or
main traffic arteries of the West Bank (Segal & Weizman, 2003, to add new ones (Ben-Naftali, Gross, & Michaeli, 2005). The differ-
85–86). The desire to maximize the visibility of the indigenous Pal- ence between the Golan Heights and the West Bank is that in the
estinian population dictated the mode of design of the settlements, former, where ethnic cleaning was almost complete, the military
down to the positioning of windows in houses, thus transforming commander focused on law-making, issuing decrees that de facto
settlements into ‘optical devices, designed to exercise control through imposed Israeli civilian law on the Golan and almost completely
supervision and surveillance’ (Segal & Weizman, 2003, 24). ignored the Syrian laws that existed prior to the occupation (Murphy
The West Bank’s colonial geography is, accordingly, made up of & Gannon, 2008). In the West Bank, where most of the indigenous
biopolitical artefacts that aim to render the occupied inhabitants population had remained put, we witness the importance of law-
visible and docile. The settlements are used to monitor the Pales- preserving; a decree imposing civilian law was never issued, and
tinians who work in the fields below or travel on the adjacent roads the Ottoman and Jordanian laws were used alongside military orders
and in this way function as panoptic towers. Indeed, as Ariel Handel (Gordon, 2008a, 2008b).
(2013) demonstrates, the roads connecting the settlements also func- Hence, there appears to be a relation between the degree of ethnic
tion as a complex mechanism of social control. Ironically, the cleansing and the precise configuration of law-preserving and law-
settlements and roads are a more exact model of Foucault’s notion making in the colonized space (Benjamin, 1978). The rationale
of surveillance than the panoptic tower (the example he uses) since informing the application of civilian law through military decrees
their gaze is not centralized; like Foucauldian power they are not in the Golan Heights (law-making), which was part of the normal-
located in one identifiable site but are rather capillary, scattered ization strategy, was grounded on the assumption that the Golan
throughout the terrain supervising the local inhabitants from nu- Heights was an empty space, free of inhabitants. As a way of jus-
merous spots (Foucault, 1977). tifying the law-making strategy, official representatives claimed that
Finally, it is important to mention that as is often the case with the Golan Heights had had in place only minimal governmental or
intermediate forms of settler colonialism, the West Bank’s land- legal provisions (Levi, 1982, 104). The claim about the absence of
scape is riddled with checkpoints, concrete blockades, and dirt law in the Golan echoed the notion of ‘emptiness’ referred to in the
mounds, while a 617 kilometre barrier separates between the colo- beginning of this article and helped obfuscate the very dynamic that
nized territory and pre-1967 Israel (Sorkin, 2005). The significance transformed the plateau into a space with no trace of rules.
of these obstacles in the context of this article is that the rationale In the West Bank, there was no intention of incorporating the
justifying the deployment of checkpoints and the construction of residents into Israel proper (the pre-1967 borders) because the
the barrier (which are, in and of themselves a form of violence) was 600,000 Palestinians residing in the region threatened the Jewish
the need to protect Israeli Jews from the indigenous other (Amir, demographic majority that the Zionist leadership was determined
2013). Part of the West Bank barrier was built on the internation- to preserve. Consequently, Israel never imposed its own civilian laws
al border, but part of it was built deep inside the colonized Palestinian on the Palestinian inhabitants and instead used Ottoman and Jor-
territory. Hence, the barrier is also a technology for expropriating danian laws as well as literally thousands of orders issued by the
Palestinian land, as it cuts-off Palestinians from their agricultural military commander to manage them (Shedadah, 1985). Israel also
fields, schools, work place, and hospitals (Hatuka, 2012). It is a prime established military courts as opposed to the civilian courts in the
example of how the degree of ethnic cleansing continues to inform Golan (Hajjar, 2005, 132–154). This law-preserving and law-
the production of space and the structures of violence even decades making military legal system served as the foundation for almost
after the cleansing was carried out. In this sense, it corroborates all of the governing apparatuses and practices, and in many ways
Simon Springer’s (2009) claim that acts of violence are not limited shaped their operations (Gordon, 2008a, 2008b).
to enclosed and delimited places or restricted to a circumscribed Each legal system was established according to the degree of
time. Indeed, ethnic cleansing, like other forms of violence, not only ethnic cleansing, while it, in turn, shaped the modes of gover-
occurs within place and supersedes place, but also helps deter- nance that were established in the two colonized territories.
mine the (re)creation of space over an extended period of time. Generally speaking, when a large proportion of the population within
This cursory comparison reveals how the completeness or lack the colonized area is indigenous, we can expect the imposition of
thereof of ethnic cleansing in each area determined the function a less liberal legal system and biopolitical technologies. This is also
26 N. Gordon, M. Ram/Political Geography 53 (2016) 20–29

what characterizes an intermediate form of settler colonialism, as civilian law is imposed in the West Bank but only in relation to the
opposed to a refined one. Jewish settlers. Thus, as opposed to the Golan Heights where there
Unlike the Palestinians in the West Bank, the Syrian Druze were is one set of laws that is applicable to all the people, in the West
immediately allowed to become Israeli residents and received many Bank two legal systems operate simultaneously, one for the Pales-
benefits associated with full citizenship. By February 1968, the permit tinian inhabitants and the other for Israeli citizens. This, again,
regime in the Golan was considerably eased. Syrian residents no characterizes an intermediate form of settler colonialism and
longer needed formal authorization to enter Israel or move, and were produces an obstacle for Israel’s efforts to normalize the colonial
allowed to sell their agriculture products to Israelis without gov- project.
ernmental mediators while their wages were made commensurate This structural difference between the two colonial projects is
with their Israeli counterparts (Dar, 1968; Haaretz, 1967). In addi- informed by the degree of ethnic cleansing carried out during the
tion, the Golan’s residents were incorporated into the national health war. The legal duality in the West Bank sustains the difference
insurance and social security schemes, and they enjoyed a series between settler and indigenous inhabitants, and consequently Isr-
of political rights such as the ability to join different organizations ael’s colonial project in this region is both apparent and cannot
like trade unions and political parties (Dar, 1973). supersede itself. By contrast, in the Golan Heights the distinction
For the first fourteen years the Syrian Druze continued to live between the colonizer and colonized is legally obscured, and this
under a military government, which occasionally confiscated their alongside the reproduction of space helps obfuscates the colonial
lands and deployed coercive strategies like administrative deten- reality and thus helps normalize Israel’s colonial project in this region.
tion, but was nonetheless much more liberal than the military It is not a coincidence that most of the scholars (e.g., Gordon, 2008a,
government in the West Bank.2 As one reporter declared in 1971 2008b; Veracini, 2008, 2011; Wolfe, 1999, 2006; Yiftachel, 2006)
‘the military government [in the Golan Heights] was so far the most who have examined Israeli settler colonialism have hardly even men-
liberal of all the [Israeli] military governments in the [occupied] ter- tioned the Golan Heights.
ritories. It has respected the Druze, allowed them total freedom of
movement and provided them with vocational opportunities inside Conclusion: normalization and forms of settler colonialism
Israel, supplied electricity to the villages, paved roads and provid-
ed health services’ (Tzidkoni, 1971). Because only a few thousand While our case study has its unique traits (like all case studies
Syrians had remained on the Golan they did not constitute a de- do), it reflects two different prototypes of settler colonial struc-
mographic threat to the Jewish character of the State. Consequently, tures, which we have characterized as refined and intermediate. In
Israel was ultimately willing to pay the price of granting them cit- the refined form of settler colonialism, the contradictions and ex-
izenship in exchange for normalizing the incorporation of the region cesses are less apparent since the indigenous population was
into the state. In December 1981, Israel unilaterally annexed the completely or almost completely cleansed and the landscape was
Golan and formally extended its own civilian law (this time not reproduced through comprehensive destruction of indigenous spaces
through military decree) to the Syrian residents who were then (for an example of the inability to completely erase the material-
offered full citizenship even though, at the time, most of them de- ity of the indigenous past, see Tyner, Alvarez, & Colucci, 2012; for
clined to accept it (Mara’i & Halabi, 1992; Yishai, 1985). The forms a specific discussion regarding the Golan Heights, see Ram, 2015).
of control deployed in the Golan Heights and the process of inte- Intermediate settler colonialism is characterized by a series of con-
gration of the Syrian residents were very similar to the processes tradictions because, as we mentioned in the introduction, the access
used in relation to Palestinians within Israel following the 1948 war to the territory – the primary objective of settler colonialism – is
and characterize a refined form of settler colonialism. Not unlike never complete so long as the indigenous population stays put. Ac-
the Palestinians within the pre-1967 borders, the Syrian Druze in cordingly, intermediate settler colonialism is informed by two
the Golan were placed under a military rule that slowly inte- oppositional forces: the elimination drive (Wolfe, 2006), which aims
grated them within the state apparatus, and they too were offered to finalize the settler colonial project by doing away with the in-
an opportunity to obtain a formal, yet in some respects nominal, digenous population and thus rendering the whole territory
Israeli citizenship (Robinson, 2013; Sa’di, 2013). accessible – a refined form of settler colonialism; and the repel-
In the West Bank there was never any intention of incorporat- ling drive, characterized by indigenous resistance aimed at forcing
ing the population into the Israeli demos. Accordingly, the population the settlers to retreat – the intermediate form. The struggle between
was managed through a military bureaucratic apparatus and did not these oppositional forces continuously exposes the settler project
enjoy many of the basic rights granted to Israelis or even the oc- for what it is, thus rendering it difficult to achieve normalization.
cupied Syrian population, such as the right to freedom of movement, Among Israel’s citizenry the relation to each territory is indeed
speech, and association (Gordon, 2008a, 2008b). Since we cannot very different, even though both regions were colonized during the
really capture the modes of governance deployed in the West Bank same war. In a 1974 public opinion poll, 86 percent of the Jewish
in this article, we will only note that Israel established in this region population regarded the Golan as ‘too important’ to be returned,
an elaborate permit regime, not unlike the one implemented in South and believed that the government should finance the Golan’s set-
Africa (Dayan, 2009), which was characterized by its ubiquitous tlement project. In the West Bank, by contrast, the same poll revealed
nature, creating a grid that extended across every part of Palestin- that only 45 percent supported the colonization project (Israel
ian life, leaving no space untouched. Defence Force Archive [IDFA], 1974), this despite the fact that re-
The permit regime, for example, restricted movement and helped ligious Jews consider the West Bank to be part of the biblical land
constrain the development of an independent Palestinian indus- of Israel, while the Golan has hardly any biblical significance. In a
try and agriculture and impeded Palestinian construction (Military poll carried out almost four decades later, in 2012, over 75 percent
Advocate General, 1975, 65, 88), operating also in complex ways to of Israeli Jews either strongly disagreed or moderately disagreed with
ensure that the Palestinian workforce would be made up of mostly the question: ‘In the framework of a peace agreement that in-
unskilled labour (Roy, 1995). It is in this context that we should cludes appropriate security arrangements, the Golan Heights could
mention that our earlier claim about Israeli civilian law never being be returned to Syria’. By contrast, only 38 percent of Israeli Jews
imposed in the West Bank is not entirely accurate. The Jewish set- either strongly disagreed or moderately disagreed with the ques-
tlers, who currently comprise about nine percent of Israel’s Jewish tion: ‘In the framework of a peace agreement that includes
citizenry (Gordon & Cohen, 2012), are extraterritorial citizens who, appropriate security arrangements, one should agree to the estab-
like diplomats, carry Israeli law on their back. In other words, Israeli lishment of an independent Palestinian state’ (Peace Index, 2012).
 N. Gordon, M. Ram/Political Geography 53 (2016) 20–29 27

These polls reveal that for many Israelis the Golan Heights has to be a more “friendly” population to its rule. An assumption that was based on the
form of rapport that developed between Israel’s state authorities and its own Druze
come to be regarded as an integral part of Israel, so much so that
citizens. For a discussion on the fate of the Syrian population from the Golan who
for them the colonial project has been supplanted. The fact that the fled to Syria, see Abu Fakhr (2000) and Szanto (2012). For a discussion on the con-
colonization project was erased from the map hovering over Jon voluted relationships between Druze and the Israeli state, see Firro (1998).
Stewart (as well as from scores of other maps) underscores that the
colonization of the Golan Heights has been normalized. The ability References
to normalize colonial violence and render it invisible is, we main-
tain, the outcome of the refined form of this settler colonial structure. Abu Fakhr, S. (2000). Voices from the Golan. Journal of Palestine Studies, 29(4), 5–36.
There are many reasons why Israel’s colonial project in the West Abu-Lughod, I. A. (1971). The transformation of Palestine: Essays on the origin and
development of the Arab-Israeli conflict. Evanstone, IL, USA: Northwestern
Bank has remained intermediate and resisted normalization, but they University Press.
all have to do with the fact that the ethnic cleansing in this region Amir, M. (2013). The making of a void sovereignty: Political implications of the
was only partial. While the reproduction of the colonial landscape military checkpoints in the West Bank. Environment and Planning D: Society and
Space, 31(2), 227–244.
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