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Settler Innocence or What Really Happened on May 14
Abstract
Three events occurred in Palestine-Israel on May 14, 2018. On that day, residents and visitors of Tel Aviv celebrated Israel’s victory in the Eurovision Song Contest at an open-air party; the United States moved its embassy to Jerusalem; and the Israeli military killed 60 and injured over 2700 Palestinians protesting in Gaza. Israel’s dominant visual regime renders these events separate, accidental, and disparate, although they occurred on the same day within a 30-mile radius. In this paper, I analyze the events of May 14, 2018 through the lens of settler innocence. I contend settler innocence obscures how these events are politically entangled and are a result of what happened 70 years prior, on May 14, 1948, which marked the establishment of Israel and the concurrent and ongoing dispossession of Palestinians. Settler innocence is a discursive strategy that disappears signs of Indigenous displacement from the dominant visual field. Innocence produces a deliberate unknowing of the power differentials that allows settlers to deny continuous involvement in systems of domination. I argue that Israel utilizes settler innocence as an organizing principle of space production to disavow responsibility for Palestinian dispossession, justify the military occupation of Palestinian Territories, and derail the project of decolonization.
Discipline
Other
Geographic Area
Palestine
Sub Area
Visual Cultural