Description:
This book provides a comparative historical study of the rise and evolution of anti-colonial movements in South Africa and Israel/Palestine. It focuses on the ways in which political movements and activists conceptualized their positions vis-a-vis historical processes of colonial settlement and indigenous resistance over the last century.
Review Quotes:
Greenstein details and compares the ways in which communists and indigenous nationalists in both territories have understood their respective societies and their political prospects and he considers the different ways in which they have sought to build mass support for their struggles. This is a text that overwhelmingly demonstrates the importance of social theory in shaping and guiding political strategy. Primarily a study of ideas and their application, Greenstein in this comparative treatment offers us fresh and invigorating ways of understanding these two struggle histories.
Tom Lodge, University of Limerick, author of Red Road to Freedom: A History of the South Africa Communist Party, 1921-2021 (Jacana, 2021)
Ran Greenstein has been ahead of many of us in studying Israel in comparison to South Africa and within the frame of settler colonialism in general. Greenstein knows both societies very well, lived in both countries and studied them thoroughly, and as such he is probably the best person to write about this subject. His book is thorough, nuanced, and full of insights. The book will become a must for anyone who wants to study Israel/Palestine and South Africa, comparative politics, settler societies and movements of resistance.
Raef Zreik, Senior Research Fellow, The Van Leer Jerusalem Institute