Indigeneity, Resistance, and Imagination

Abstract

Zionist settler colonialism is grounded in the interoperating oppressive structures of capitalism, heteropatriarchy and racism. These function alongside Zionist narratives to construct a regressive “native” whose dispossession is justified to realise a Zionist goal of an ethnic nation-state, fashioned after its Euro-American counterparts. This paper comprehends Palestinian resistance to its colonisation as embedded in the opposition to these global oppressive structures, relating them to anti-colonialism movements across the world. Not just this, but Palestinian resistance is also grounded in its dreams of emancipation from these structures. These liberating imaginations draw upon indigenous knowledge and ties to the land, community and body, and in the process, reconstitute the structures on which this world is built. Through this, the paper aims to bring together a vast corpus of literature on Palestine to argue that in combining resistance, liberation and indigeneity, these imaginations present a truly “decolonial” vision for the world.