Class Solidarity in Settler-Colonial Conflict

Introduction

Class solidarity in a settler-colonial conflict sounds like a fantasy. The ground is soaked in history. Identity is weaponized. Every handshake risks being labeled betrayal. Yet beneath the flags and funerals lies a quieter fact: workers on both sides wake to the same alarm clocks, pay rent to the same financialized landlords, and labor inside supply chains that extract value upward while feeding fear downward.

The dominant story insists the conflict is ancient, ethnic, insoluble. That story is convenient. It obscures the material architecture that keeps division profitable. Settler-colonialism is not only a matter of land and memory. It is an economic regime. It organizes labor, housing, water, and mobility in ways that stratify and monetize difference. If you want to challenge it, you must intervene not only at the level of slogans but at the level of daily life.

The strategic question is not whether unity is morally desirable. It is whether unity can be engineered through practice. Trust is not declared. It is built through shared risk, shared work, and shared wins. The thesis is simple: genuine collaboration between Arab and Jewish Palestinians will emerge only when movements design concrete, everyday acts of mutual aid and joint action that materially disrupt exploitation while rehearsing a post-colonial form of life.

You are not trying to persuade people to love each other. You are building a new structure of interdependence that makes division irrational.

Rethinking Solidarity Beyond Identity Politics

Most movements trapped in protracted conflict default to identity affirmation. They defend culture, language, history. This is understandable. But when identity becomes the sole organizing axis, strategy shrinks. You become predictable. Power knows how to manage identity claims. It funds some, represses others, and waits for exhaustion.

Class solidarity does not mean erasing national trauma. It means asking a harder question: who profits from the current arrangement, and how is labor organized to sustain it?

Settler-Colonialism as an Economic System

Settler-colonial analysis often focuses on land seizure and demographic engineering. Both are real. Yet land is valuable because it produces rent, agriculture, infrastructure corridors, and speculative capital gains. Checkpoints are not only security devices. They are labor management tools. Differential legal regimes are not only ideological. They shape wage levels and bargaining power.

When you shift the frame from identity to political economy, new alliances become thinkable. The port worker in Haifa and the construction worker in Ramallah may not share a national narrative. But they share exposure to subcontracting, precarity, and inflation. They both confront conglomerates that transcend communal lines.

The insight is strategic: if exploitation is integrated, resistance must be integrated.

The Limits of Symbolic Unity

Symbolic gestures of coexistence often fail because they do not alter material relations. Joint dialogue circles without joint struggle can become therapeutic bubbles. Cultural festivals are easily tolerated by the state because they pose no threat to revenue streams.

History teaches this harsh lesson. The global anti-Iraq War marches of 15 February 2003 mobilized millions across 600 cities. The spectacle of unity was breathtaking. The war proceeded anyway. Scale without leverage is choreography.

If Arab and Jewish activists meet only to issue statements, you are rehearsing virtue, not power. Solidarity must migrate from words to workflows.

The task, then, is to identify points where daily cooperation can both meet human needs and apply pressure to structures of domination.

Mutual Aid as Strategic Infrastructure

Mutual aid is often romanticized as kindness. In reality, it is counter-infrastructure. It builds alternative circuits of survival that reduce dependence on hostile systems. In a settler-colonial economy, that is inherently political.

The key is design. Random generosity does not scale. You need rituals, records, and reciprocity.

Paired Households and the Discipline of Reciprocity

Consider a simple architecture: paired households across identity lines. Not as charity, but as covenant. Each pair commits to a weekly exchange of one concrete resource or service. Childcare hours swapped. Fresh produce traded. Car rides coordinated. Language tutoring offered.

The discipline matters. A ledger is kept. Not to commodify care, but to ensure balance. Reciprocity dissolves the suspicion that one side is patron and the other client. Over months, this practice becomes muscle memory. Trust grows from reliability.

This is not sentimental. It is strategic. Every hour of childcare exchanged reduces reliance on privatized services. Every shared ride circumvents segregated transit patterns. The colonial order depends on separation. You are engineering interdependence.

Neighborhood Repair Brigades

Infrastructure is political. Water leaks, road neglect, uneven waste collection. These are not random inefficiencies. They often map onto racialized geographies.

Form mixed crews trained in basic repairs. Document every neglected pipe and cracked sidewalk. Fix what you can collectively. Publish bilingual reports detailing labor hours and estimated municipal costs. Send invoices to authorities.

You achieve three things at once. Immediate improvement of living conditions. Demonstration of cross-community competence. Public exposure of structural neglect.

In Québec in 2012, nightly pot and pan marches turned sound into participation. Entire neighborhoods joined from balconies. The lesson was not about cookware. It was about lowering the threshold for involvement. Repair brigades function similarly. They convert passive residents into co-producers of dignity.

Rent Defense as Collective Shield

Housing is a fault line in any settler-colonial context. Evictions often carry both economic and demographic consequences.

Create small, mixed rent circles. Each member contributes a modest monthly sum into a common fund. When one faces eviction or sudden arrears, the fund covers a critical payment while the group mobilizes public pressure.

The presence of Arab and Jewish tenants defending each other complicates the eviction narrative. It reframes housing as a shared class issue rather than an ethnic contest.

Landlords calculate risk. When eviction triggers collective scrutiny and possible boycott, the profit calculus shifts. You are inserting friction into a system that relies on isolated tenants.

Mutual aid, when designed with confrontation in mind, becomes a wedge.

Joint Action That Disrupts Extraction

Mutual aid builds trust. But trust must be tested in struggle. Without joint action that disrupts extraction, solidarity remains defensive.

The challenge is to select targets where cooperation is both possible and impactful.

Workplace Cells Across Divides

Many industries in the region employ both Arab and Jewish labor, often segmented by role or subcontractor. Map these sites carefully. Identify where grievances overlap: unpaid overtime, safety violations, wage theft.

Form discreet cross-identity committees focused narrowly on workplace demands. Start with winnable issues. A safety audit. A demand for transparent scheduling. Small victories prove efficacy.

Occupy Wall Street demonstrated how quickly a tactic can diffuse when it resonates. Within weeks, encampments appeared in 951 cities. The idea traveled faster than institutions could respond. Workplace coordination can spread similarly if initial successes are documented and shared.

Remember the principle of timing. Act in bursts. Crest and consolidate before repression organizes. The goal is not perpetual protest. It is cumulative leverage.

Coordinated Consumer Boycotts

Settler-colonial capitalism relies on consumption patterns that normalize inequality. Identify one corporation whose supply chain exploits both Arab and Jewish workers. Build a joint campaign exposing labor practices.

The narrative is crucial. Frame the boycott not as ethnic punishment but as worker defense. Publish testimonies from both communities. Use data, not only emotion.

The Diebold email leak in 2003 showed how mirroring suppressed information across networks can collapse legal intimidation. Transparency can be catalytic. When exploitation is documented bilingually and widely shared, it becomes harder to dismiss as partisan propaganda.

Ritualized Public Assemblies

Public space is contested. Yet ritualized, recurring assemblies that foreground class demands can gradually redefine who belongs.

Imagine a monthly open assembly focused exclusively on cost of living issues. Food prices. Transport fares. Utility bills. Speakers alternate languages. Childcare is provided collectively. Decisions are recorded and circulated.

This is prefigurative governance. You are rehearsing a borderless polity grounded in shared material concerns. The aim is not to petition existing authorities endlessly. It is to build a shadow capacity to deliberate and decide.

Joint action must escalate thoughtfully. Each confrontation should widen the circle of cooperation while narrowing the space for divide and rule tactics.

Guarding Against Predictable Failure

Movements decay when they repeat scripts. Predictability invites repression. Identity-based mobilizations in this context are heavily surveilled and easily framed as security threats.

Innovation is protection.

Avoiding the Trap of Permanent Mobilization

The voluntarist instinct says stay in the streets until victory. Yet in protracted conflicts, constant mobilization exhausts participants and normalizes repression.

Cycle in moons. Launch a burst of coordinated action. Then retreat into consolidation and care. Protect the psyche. Burnout is not heroic. It is strategic loss.

The Women’s March in the United States in 2017 mobilized roughly 1.5 percent of the population in a single day. The scale was historic. Policy outcomes were uneven. Why? Because spectacle was not sufficiently linked to sustained leverage.

Do not confuse catharsis with conquest.

Naming Structural Ripeness

Structural conditions matter. Inflation spikes, unemployment surges, political scandals. Monitor these indicators. They signal moments when cross-community grievances intensify.

The Arab uprisings of 2010 and 2011 did not erupt in a vacuum. Food prices were soaring. Youth unemployment was endemic. When Mohamed Bouazizi set himself on fire, the act resonated because material frustration was already combustible.

Your role is to prepare networks in advance so that when crisis peaks, cooperation is ready.

Protecting Against Entryism and Fragmentation

Deep divisions invite manipulation. State actors and partisan groups may attempt to infiltrate cross-community initiatives to redirect or discredit them.

Counter this through radical transparency in decision-making. Rotate facilitation roles. Publish minutes. Keep finances open.

Entryism thrives in opacity. When procedures are clear and collective, charismatic capture is harder.

The objective is not purity. It is resilience.

Putting Theory Into Practice

Design without implementation is fantasy. Here are concrete steps to begin building class-based solidarity across deep divides:

• Map Shared Material Grievances: Conduct confidential surveys in mixed workplaces and neighborhoods to identify overlapping economic pressures. Prioritize issues that affect both communities directly.

• Launch a Pilot Mutual Aid Covenant: Pair five to ten households across identities in a structured reciprocity program. Establish a simple agreement, a shared calendar, and a public but anonymized impact report after three months.

• Form a Mixed Rent or Utility Defense Circle: Start small with clear contribution rules and rapid response protocols. Document every intervention and share lessons learned.

• Create a Cross-Community Workplace Committee: Focus on one achievable demand. Win it. Publicize the victory in both languages to demonstrate that unity produces results.

• Institute Rhythms of Action and Rest: Plan campaigns in defined cycles. Include decompression rituals after high-intensity moments to prevent burnout and sustain long-term trust.

Each step should be evaluated not by how many attend a rally, but by how much sovereignty is gained. Did participants increase their control over housing, labor, or resources? That is your metric.

Conclusion

Building class solidarity in a settler-colonial conflict is not naive. It is audacious. It refuses the script that says history is destiny and division eternal. But audacity must be engineered.

Trust grows from shared labor. Collaboration deepens through shared risk. Political imagination expands when people experience small, concrete victories together. Mutual aid without confrontation is charity. Confrontation without mutual aid is brittle. The fusion of both is transformative.

You are not merely opposing a system. You are incubating a different one. A Palestine without borders will not be declared into existence. It will be rehearsed in kitchens, workshops, rent circles, and assemblies long before it is formalized in law.

The system counts bodies in marches. You must count degrees of self-rule gained. Each repaired pipe, each defended tenant, each won workplace demand is a fragment of sovereignty reclaimed.

The ruling order relies on the myth that cooperation across identities is impossible. Every successful joint action shatters that myth. The question is not whether unity can exist. The question is whether you are prepared to design it, test it, and defend it until it becomes the new common sense.

Where will you stage your first experiment in shared sovereignty?