Inquiries into Economies of Violence in Israel/Palestine

Abstract

This dissertation examines the different regimes and economies of violence producing the settler colonial present in Israel/Palestine. That is, by theorizing ‘society’ as the effect of warlike relations whereby particular tactics and strategies are employed as a way of organizing and policing forms of life necessary for the continuation of a particular European/Western settler colonial body politic and its actualization in the state-form (statization), this thesis aims at pluralizing the sites of political violence and resistance. It argues that the so-called “Israeli-Palestinian conflict” is in fact the effect of Israel’s and European societies’ gendered, racial, and settler colonial politics as the continuation of war by other means. To do so, the thesis explores the culturally specific processes of social identification through various institutions, dispositifs, and practices that allow certain representations of Israeliness and Jewishness in general to become dominant while disqualifying and policing others. More specifically, it examines the intrications between discourses on the Modern Jewish self, racial and colonial histories/rationalities, and Jewish modes of self-writing that emerge together with/against the modes of socialization and production of the “self” and “other(s)”.