Settler colonial and Indigenous studies have become influential frameworks in the study of the Middle East, and the Middle East has become increasingly interesting to scholars in those fields. By and large, Palestine has been the quilting point of Middle East studies, Indigenous studies, and settler colonial studies (Barakat 2018) The contemporary intellectual question has been: What do settler colonial studies and Indigenous studies bring to the study of the Middle East? This essay reverses the direction of the question to provide some initial observations on what the study of the Middle East and its peoples can contribute to and amplify in the fields of Indigenous and settler colonial studies.

The first observation is on the question of and nativity in the Middle East. Indigeneity, we know from scholars in the field, is not an ontological object or subject position. Instead, like race, is something that happens to you in the context of a colonial encounter. People in what are now the United States and Canada were not identifying as Indigenous before the arrival of settlers from elsewhere in those geographies. They became Indigenous through a process of colonial dispossession, dehumanization, removal, sequestration, replacement, and refusal (Kauanui 2016), and by being able to situate themselves within a historical and lived chronology that precedes and exceeds what Mark Rifkin has called “settler time” (Rifkin, 2017). Likewise, indigeneity is not a zero-sum game. Many Indigenous peoples can exist in any one location—this is pronounced when studying the historical present of the Middle East, as is a potentially useful analytic distinction between the terms native and Indigenous. 

The history of Palestine and Palestinians are inextricable from the history and historical experience of people who are from the states that now border them. Colonial, mandate borders severed families as they separated land into “South Lebanon” and “Northern Palestine,” for example. Lebanese and Palestinians had been native to that same land, a land now segregated into different nation states. My grandfather in Beirut experienced the loss of Palestine and in particular, northern Palestine as the loss of his land and history. This was and is a common feeling among many, on both sides of the new border (Bishara 2024). However, Palestinians are indigenous to Palestine because they continue to be the target of settler colonial, Zionist expansion and dispossession, because they have been targeted for removal and replacement for generations, a historical experience that people who became Lebanese do not (yet?) share. Settlement, after all, is a structure, not an event.

Some try to deny the usefulness of settler colonialism as an analytic because of the origin and history of Judaism in the Middle East, the birthplace of all three Abrahamic religions. This logic fundamentally, and perhaps purposely, misunderstands the history of the region, of Palestine before Zionism and before the era of transition from the Ottoman Empire to the nation-state more broadly: many separate and overlapping native peoples living together, unequally, but without ethnonationalist, eliminationist, and replacement logic, for centuries (Makdisi 2019). Settler colonialism, above all, is a practice, not an identity. The practice itself serves ideological goals. After all, when early Zionist writers characterized Palestine as empty or unpopulated, what they meant was what terra nullius has always meant: it was empty of people who mattered, people whom colonizers from elsewhere considered equal to themselves.

The contemporary history of the Middle East also demonstrates that one native people can be implicated in settler colonial practice, logic, and genocide, against another. During the Anfal campaign against Kurds in Iraq, Saddam Hussein’s regime removed tens of thousands in the Kirkuk region and replaced them with Arabs (Kirmanj and Rafaat 2021). The Iraqi state also ethnically cleansed, sequestered, and used chemical weapons against Kurds. The Anfal campaign was one chapter of a decades long policy that denied Kurds self-determination—a policy that was shared by other states in the region. Both Arabs and Kurds (and Assyrians, and others) are native to the land that is now Iraq, and all experienced and were shaped by British colonialism. The example of one native group benefitting from settler colonial policies against another in the modern, nation state era, as well as a focus on settler colonialism as a set of practices and indigeneity as a historical experience and claim to which those practices are central, may contribute to the debate on the role of binarism in settler colonial studies.

The second observation has to do with how scholars approach the study of Palestine. If we proceed from the observation that Palestinians have been forcibly and structurally separated from each other, and from their kin elsewhere in the Middle East, what does that mean for how scholars should approach the study of Palestine? What are the implications of writing about Palestine as if it were a black box? On the one hand, when Palestine is discussed or written about as if the historical present of its people begin with European Zionist settlement, this repeats a colonial epistemology that separates them from the region. On the other, it narrates Palestine and Palestinians through settler time, as if their history and that of the land began with Zionism.

Just as importantly, Palestine should not be severed from the political present of the larger region. Doing so obfuscates the role of U.S. empire in the dispossession of the Palestinian people as an exceptional part of a larger imperial project that spans from Lebanon to Iraq and from Egypt to Syria. The question of Palestine is also the question of the larger Middle East and the freedom of its people to live with dignity, undefined by the “security” concerns and expansionist goals and practices of America’s most central ally in the region. Palestine and Palestinians are central to the region’s future, not only its past. What does situating Palestine within a larger trajectory and geography, one that understands itself to be hyper-connected, bring to the field of settler colonial, or as Byrd (2011) might put it, settler imperial studies?

The epistemological separation of Palestinians from the fabric of a larger, symbiotic region has theoretical and methodological implications. It plays a role in what Palestinian anthropology collective Insaniyyat has called “impossible ethnographies.” Insaniyyat remind us that “Israeli restrictions have real material effects on scholars’ research agendas and indeed on the very possibility of undertaking research in Palestine. Closure and visa policies have wide implications for where and what is studied in the anthropology of Palestine, and who can conduct that research. Scholars face local limitations such as denial of movement and are thereby prevented from entering broader conversations. These restrictions thus have a quieting effect on scholarship in general when they shape what is researchable.

American and European scholars—including Indigenous scholars—may be able to conduct research in Palestine, but scholars from most Arab countries cannot. The only way for Lebanese, Syrian, or Iraqi scholars to conduct research in Palestine is with a foreign passport and even then, publishing their work would put them at risk in their home countries, regardless of content. Practically, this means that an American or British anthropologist can enter Palestine, but a Syrian one—one who may have family members they have never met across the border—cannot. Theoretically, this means that the anthropology of Palestine is dominated (in addition to scholars who are Palestinian, who themselves must contend with restriction on movement, different legal statuses than define mobility, and denial of research access) by scholars who are not native to the region, many of whom are citizens of states with direct imperial interests and histories in the Middle East. At the very least, the inability of non-Palestinian Arab scholars to go to Palestine shapes what questions are being asked, what key they are being asked in, and what publication and censorship practices dominate the field.

Finally, the field of Middle East studies may provide perspectives into what we might call the epistemological geopolitics of settler time. In large part the field constructs the ascendance of U.S. imperial influence in the region via the two world wars, and (with notable exceptions) does not address the contemporaneous histories of settler colonialism in the United States and in the Middle East. Nor does it contend with how the racist, colonial, expansionist logic of the United States informed their understanding of the world. After all, most universities and public schools in the United States were still segregated when the center of what was called “Oriental Studies” crossed the Atlantic following WWII. Not doing so effectively frames the United States in its current form as always already a fait accompli, or perhaps, as (manifest) destiny. Thus, the study of American Empire in the Middle East can normalize the timeline of American Empire in the United States.