Summary
In David Lloyd’s account, following Albert Memmi and Ilan Pappe, the settler colony’s characteristic and hardening psychology: the settler remains perpetually on guard behind an ‘iron wall’, the initial colonising minority’s attitude is institutionalised within the state’s structures, and the society grows more militarised and draconian the more power and territory it appropriates, rather than more open (Settler Colonialism and the State of Exception: The Example of Palestine/Israel, PDF p.11-13 / printed p.69-71).
Details
- Its origin in Lloyd’s sequence: settler colonialism initially invokes civilising ideals, but their fate “is finally determined by the hardening of the siege mentality that equally typifies setter colonial societies from the start” (“setter” as printed) (PDF p.11 / printed p.69).
- “The settler remains perpetually on guard, poised for real and imaginary resistance behind an ‘iron wall’ whose institutionalisation preserves the attitude of an initial colonising minority within the very structures of the state” (PDF p.11).
- Its dynamic: “Rather than expanding democratic freedoms and inclusivity, the more it appropriates in the name of security and development, the more deeply it becomes militarised, and the more it shapes draconian laws and restrictions on the rights of the colonised” (PDF p.11; Memmi quoted: ‘Every colonial nation carries the seeds of fascist temptation in its bosom’).
- Its issue in law: the siege mentality issues in the declaration of a ‘state of siege’ and, in the settler colony, in the increasingly generalised ‘state of siege’ that governs Palestinian life, always in the name of Israel’s security or of its settlers “who cultivate the sense of siege and existential threat” (PDF p.13-14 / printed p.71-72; see State of Exception).
- Pappé’s ‘righteous fury’, which Lloyd adopts, is “a measure of the ‘siege mentality’ that characterises all settler colonies, even in the moment of their absolute ascendancy” (PDF p.12 / printed p.70; see Righteous Fury).
Related pages
Settler Colonialism and the State of Exception: The Example of Palestine/Israel, Albert Memmi, Righteous Fury, State of Exception, Fortress Israel, Garrison State