Books Colonizing Palestine: The Zionist Left and the Making of the Palestinian Nakba (Stanford Studies in Middle Eastern and Islamic Societies and Cultures)  by Areej Sabbagh-Khoury (Author)

"Colonizing Palestine: The Zionist Left and the Making of the Palestinian Nakba" by Areej Sabbagh-Khoury offers a detailed microhistory of the Zionist left-wing Hashomer Hatzair movement and its role in the colonization of Palestine leading up to 1948, which Palestinians remember as the Nakba or catastrophe.

The book explores the apparent contradiction between the socialist, binationalist ideals professed by Hashomer Hatzair settlers and their active participation in land control, displacement, and violence against Palestinian communities near the Jezreel Valley/Marj Ibn 'Amer region. Sabbagh-Khoury draws on extensive archival research, local colony records, and Palestinian oral histories to examine the interactions between Zionist settlers and indigenous Palestinians, including trade, ambivalence, and resistance.

Rather than viewing 1948 as a singular rupture, the author situates the Nakba as a protracted process built on long-term settler colonial practices, including the exploitation of Ottoman and British land tenure laws and strategic violence. The book illuminates how socialist ideology shaped colonial domination strategies and how both Zionist and Palestinian memories and terminologies coexist in contested historical narratives.