Borderline Racism: Ethnoracial Domination in U.S. and Israel through the rhetorical production of “border security”

• In Event: 2129 - Section on Comparative-Historical Sociology Refereed Roundtables (1 hour)
  In Refereed Roundtable 60min: 8. Race, Ethnicity, and Migration

Abstract

The Palestinian “March of Return” in 2018, marked by Israeli government’s brutal attacks on Palestinians who allegedly attempted to cross the Gaza borders, nearly coincided with Trump’s administration’s “Zero Tolerance” policy in which the unauthorized border crossing of Latino immigrants came under an ever sever attack. This article offers a comparative analysis of the “border security” discourses and policies of the two settler colonial states of U.S. and Israel, and investigates the American and Israeli government officials’ framing of state violence at borders. We place this analysis within a settler-colonial framework to provide a historically grounded analysis of U.S. and Israel’s racial formation and the seemingly colorblind rhetoric of “border security.” Through a content analysis of the speeches, interviews, social media posts and press releases of the American and Israeli government officials around the two events of March of Return and the Zero Tolerance Policy, we identified a racial ideology shared by the two states composed of three distinct and overlapping discursive strategies: 1) obscuring settler colonialism, 2) vilification of “non-Natives,” and 3) glorification of the state. By linking racial ideologies to the imperialist objectives of U.S. and Israel, we argue that the racial ideology of “border security” is the means of securing white supremacy in the name of securing borders.

Authors

• Fae Chubin, Bradley University

• Manuel Ramirez, University of Connecticut