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Resistance, Resilience, and the Palestinian Experience or, Minding the Gaps of Settler Colonial Studies
Abstract
In this paper, I discuss the limitations of the settler-colonial paradigm in understanding the contemporary lives of Palestinians. I will argue that while the paradigm and the approach most often associated with Patrick Wolfe is critically useful for grasping settler practices, both with respect to the emergence and embodiment of an Israeli identity, and in its wake, the cruelty of displacement, dispossession, oppression of Palestinians, one is left to consider the extent to which Wolfe’s framing of the practices of settler colonialism “as structure not event” also performs a kind of “elimination” of Palestinian resistance. The argument emerges from an analysis of ethnographic research with Palestinians who live in Israel and who hold Israeli citizenship. While the world’s attention primarily focuses on the experiences of Palestinians living under military occupation in the West Bank and under political and economic siege in Gaza, it is only quite recently, with the reports on Apartheid, that the world's attention has begun to take seriously the lives and experiences of Palestinian citizens of Israel. While their existence and their very identities as Palestinians is continually repressed in the Israeli imaginary (which labels them "Israeli Arabs), Israel's legislative practices are structured by Palestinian resilience. Their experiences force us to reconsider not only the structure of settler practices and how embedded within them is an unsettled or existential anxiety but return us to the repressed and the need for greater understanding of “event”, that is the Nakba or Catastrophe of the dismembering of Palestine in 1947.
Discipline
Anthropology
Geographic Area
Israel
Sub Area
None