The introduction posits the main claims of the book: that the struggle over Palestine is a struggle over historical time itself and that Israel is a settler colonial project defined by its inability to move past the past, a project stuck at its foundational moment of conquest. To read the question of Palestine, we must read the camp as a political object; the camp is a kind of archive of the historical forces in play and is entangled with the colony from the start as its foil. The introduction also presents the concept of settlerness as a way of thinking about temporality and settler conquest. Rather than get bogged down in the debates about just what settler colonialism is, the concept pushes us to think about what settler colonialism does.