The Distinction of Violence: Representing Lethal Cleansing in Settler Colonial Societies
by
Tom Pessah
Doctor of Philosophy in Sociology
University of California, Berkeley
Professor Loïc Wacquant, Chair
A widely read book by political sociologist Michael Mann suggests that a relationship exists between democracy in settler states and the massive cleansing of indigenous groups. Mann connects the two by assuming settlers shared a consensual ideology that denigrated indigenous groups and justified their cleansing. Through a reconsideration of Mann's primary example of this connection, nineteenth-century California, I outline three problems with his account: settler diversity, process conflation, and state representation. The chapter develops an alternative set of terms to make an alternative argument: that these settler societies were more diverse than Mann and others claim. To overcome this diversity, the initiators of the cleansing used indiscriminate violence towards indigenous groups, but were forced to present their actions as discriminate before state officials: they used one classification to overshadow another. The argument will be demonstrated in the following chapters through a series of comparisons between California and other settler democracies: 1864 Colorado, Queensland (Australia) between the 1860s and the 1880s, New Zealand in the 1860s, and Israel in 1948.
The following chapter contrasts the 1859 "expedition" against indigenous groups in Round Valley, California, to an 1864 clash in Sand Creek, Colorado. Although the violence in California was worse and more indiscriminate, it was the Colorado incident that was eventually labeled a "massacre" by state bodies, in contrast to the California "war." The success of the California militia's backers is explained as a result of the different structure of the colonial state in each location, and the differential role of indigenous resistance in amplifying critical settlers' voices.
Next, two contemporaneous cases of lethal settler cleansing in British colonies are compared: the ongoing efforts of Queensland, Australia's Native Police Force to "disperse the blacks" from the frontiers of white settlement between the 1840s and the 1890s, and the involvement of the British army in "suppressing rebels" in Maori regions of New Zealand during the 1860s. In Queensland cleansing was successfully represented as "dispersal" for decades. In New Zealand, stronger Maori resistance made the translation into "rebellion against the Queen" virtually collapse within a few years. The comparison yields a similar outcome to the one presented in the previous chapter: More autonomous state structures and weaker indigenous resistance routinely enabled the smooth translation of the cleansing into existing procedures. However, while there was some official recognition that what occurred in New Zealand violated official procedures, resistance there did not suffice to completely overturn the official definition - as occurred in Colorado. The resources of the British Empire prevented such an outcome.
The final empirical chapter discusses the 1948 expulsion of Palestinians from the area that became the State of Israel. I argue that this lethal cleansing was carried out through a juxtaposition of two different types of classification: One was exercised at the sites of the violence, and was aimed to empty entire areas of all those considered by the Israeli army as Arab. According to the other, exemplified in the army procedures that appear in the operation orders, the enemy was primarily foreign armies from the neighboring Arab countries, against which targeted, local military operations were conducted. I then trace one general's development of a representational strategy which took advantage of this contradiction, and the institutionalization of such strategies in the form of operation orders. One remaining section explains how such strategies were used to maintain internal distinctions within the settler society. Another assesses the impact of Israel's bid to be accepted to the U.N. on the translation of the cleansing into state procedures. In addition to archival materials, this is the only chapter that relies upon interviews with veterans, enriching our understanding of how the translation process provided material and symbolic benefits for perpetrators.
Chapter Five concludes the discussion of the affinity between settler democracies and lethal cleansing, drawing lessons from the empirical chapters. It also highlights the contribution of the present work to historical studies of each of the cases, as well as to the literature on ethnic violence and settler states. The chapter is followed by one appendix on data and methods, and another on Zionism as a form of colonialism.
