Gender, Class and Race: Israeli Settler-Capitalism and Palestinian Bedouin Women’s Resistance in the Naqab

Abstract

Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork in the Naqab from 2014-2016, this article traces how Palestinian Bedouin women from the Nakba generation are impacted by, cope with, but also resist Israeli settler-colonialism, or as conceptualized here, settler-capitalism. Older women maintain alternative socio-cultural and political spaces by remaining at the margins of the Israeli settler-capitalist project, and, in doing so, are able to counter its eliminatory logics. A narrow conceptualization of settler-colonialism, which ignores wage labor as a form of positive elimination, cannot therefore capture the gendered, classed and racialized intersections through which the Israeli settler-capitalism functions in Palestine today.