Feeling(s) of Occupation: Israeli Ciritical-left Feminist Activists Talk of Affects of Settler Colonialism/Decolonization

• In Event: 1284 - Section on Racial and Ethnic Minorities Refereed Roundtable Session
  In Refereed Roundtable 60min: Table 25. Impacts of Colonialism

Abstract

Some dozen years ago, Lisa Taraki (American-trained) Palestinian sociologist at Birzeit University presented an analysis in Contemporary Sociology (2006) of the way in which the use of the “conflict” paradigm obscures the ongoing settler colonial project in Palestine/Israel. USAmerican sociologists have yet to systematically engage settler colonialism as an analytical lens on Palestine/Israel, largely leaving such analysis to scholars in other fields (Anthropologists and scholars in the Humanities) or to Canadian, British or Australian Sociologists (in the Anglophone context). This paper combines a settler colonial framing and recent treatments of emotion by scholars working in that framework with developments in the sociology of collective emotions to advance understanding of the significance of emotions for both settler colonial and decolonization projects in Palestine/Israel as illuminated in analytic interviews with 21 critical-left Israeli feminist activists. These activists lend insight into the collective emotional orientation to fear in Israeli society rooted in a settler siege mentality and expressed through militarism and the group-based emotion of contempt for the Palestinian Other marking racism as a basis for settler colonial solidarity. The activists also reveal the challenges of unsettling collective emotions but suggest possibilities for producing alternative emotions such as empathy through relations of collaborative action. The conclusions put forward ways in which a settler colonial framing of the situation in Palestine/Israel might contribute to the decolonization of the neoliberal USAmerican university.

Author

• Gay Young, American University