The Reign of the Petty Sovereign: Territorial and Vigilante Violence in the Palestinian Hinterlands

• In Event: Political Sociology Section Roundtables
  In Refereed Roundtable (60 minute): Nations and Nationalisms (Table 1)

Abstract

This paper examines the history of the outpost method for coercive territorial redistribution in the Occupied West Bank, as well as the contemporary practices of violence that outposts employ. It situates the rise of the outpost within the history of the settler–state compact that consolidated in the aftermath of 1967, as well as in pre-1948 repertoires. This paper draws on original archival research in Israeli state and military archives, as well as ethnographic and interview data gathered in the West Bank with Israeli settlers, soldiers, Civil Administration officials, and Palestinian residents of the rural frontier. The data is marshalled to map out two overlapping categories of settler violence: 1) Territorial violence constrains Palestinian usufruct and includes: surveillance and land patrol; restrictions on mobility; threats of violence or sanction; use of physical coercion; and use of coercion by proxies. 2) Vigilante violence is aimed at dismantling the conditions of livability, and entails: poisoning of wells, animals, and agriculture; theft of property; destruction of property; direct assaults on bodies; and debilitation (fear, exhaustion, wearing down). The paper further examines the mechanisms that gave rise to the figural “petty sovereign” settler.

Author

• Joseph Rafael Kaplan Weinger, University of California-Los Angeles