Summary
Ilan Pappe’s term, in his 2009 Electronic Intifada article ‘Israel’s righteous fury and its victims in Gaza’, as David Lloyd adopts it: the settler’s rage at the colonised as a constant phenomenon in the Zionist dispossession of Palestine, at once a legitimation of unconscionable violence, a shield from world opinion, and a measure of the Siege Mentality of all settler colonies (Settler Colonialism and the State of Exception: The Example of Palestine/Israel, PDF p.12 / printed p.70).
Details
- Lloyd places the term inside Albert Memmi’s analysis: the contradictions of settler colonialism produce in the ‘colonizer who accepts’ a ‘rage, a loathing, always ready to be loosed on the colonised’, and “[t]hat rage manifests what Ilan Pappé has termed the ‘righteous fury’ that is ‘a constant phenomenon in the Israeli, and before that Zionist, dispossession of Palestine’” (PDF p.12 / printed p.70, citing Pappé, 2009).
- Memmi’s emphasis, as Lloyd develops it, is the ‘disproportion’ in the settler’s response to any affront: such rage lay behind the Gaza killings Lloyd describes, the massacre of civilians in South Lebanon in 2006, and the repeated use of white phosphorus and DIME from Beirut in 1982 to Gaza in 2009; “[d]isproportionate response is by now the IDF’s official military doctrine” (PDF p.12; see Disproportionate Force).
- Its root, in Lloyd’s account: a psychic and material conflict within the settler’s predicament “that requires the annihilation and not merely the regulation or containment of the indigenous”; Zionist Messianism supplies distinctive fuel, but the pattern is not alien to the settler colonial mentality elsewhere (PDF p.12-13).
Related pages
Settler Colonialism and the State of Exception: The Example of Palestine/Israel, Ilan Pappe, Albert Memmi, Siege Mentality, Disproportionate Force