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Settler Colonialism and the State of Exception: The Example of Palestine/Israel

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Summary

David Lloyd argues that the apparent contradiction in discourse on Israel — represented at one moment as a normal Western democracy and at others as exceptional, uniquely embattled and exempt from the norms of human rights and international law — is explained by understanding Israel’s occupation of Palestine as an exemplary settler colonial project whose contradictions are embedded in the early framing of Zionism (Settler Colonialism and the State of Exception: The Example of Palestine/Israel, PDF p.1 / printed p.59). Palestine cannot be thought by itself: it is denied Weberian sovereignty and its people hold a partial citizenship — in Israel, formal citizenship (ezrahut) without nationality (le’om), which is reserved for Jews — while Israel affirms its membership of the privileged network of Westphalian states, for which non-European territory was ‘land free to be occupied’ (PDF p.1-3 / printed p.59-61). Following Albert Memmi and other theorists of settler colonialism, Lloyd traces how the settler colony’s focus on permanent appropriation of land, its constitutive racism, its Siege Mentality and disproportionate ‘righteous fury’, and its hardening rather than liberalising over time produce a permanent State of Exception: the Palestinians are the incorporated outside, the present-absentee writ large, and the exception is governed not by a suspension of law but by its proliferation — Hyperlegality, in Saree Makdisi’s ‘5,000 Israeli military orders, regulating Palestinian life’ (PDF p.17 / printed p.75). Supplementing Giorgio Agamben with that colonial genealogy, Lloyd concludes that Israel, having incorporated the Occupied Territories within its undeclared borders as an included excluded and divided their populations along Apartheid lines, offers “the most pertinent and precocious model” of the state of exception becoming the neo-liberal norm globally — its techniques of repression developed in the laboratory of occupation and exported to the Western democracies that purchase them (PDF p.18-19 / printed p.76-77).

What the file is

  • The file is David Lloyd’s article in settler colonial studies 2, 1 (2012), the special issue Past is Present: Settler Colonialism in Palestine, ISSN 1838-0743; printed pages 59-80, PDF p.1 carrying printed p.59 and PDF p.22 carrying printed p.80, so printed page = PDF page + 58 throughout. The running head is Lloyd, ‘Settler Colonialism and the State of Exception’.
  • The byline is David Lloyd, University of Southern California (PDF p.1). The Biographical Note (PDF p.19 / printed p.77) describes him as Professor of English and Comparative Literature there, working primarily on Irish culture and on postcolonial and cultural theory.
  • Structure: continuous prose in one unheaded essay (PDF p.1-19 / printed p.59-77) moving from the norm/exception framing through Zionism’s European nationalist and messianic formation, the settler colonial model in Memmi’s terms, disproportion and the settler’s psychic responses, colonial emergency law and the topology of the exception in Agamben, to the hyperlegality supplement and the global-model conclusion; then the Biographical Note (PDF p.19) and 48 Notes (PDF p.20-22 / printed p.78-80). There are no internal section headings.
  • The PDF file’s internal metadata gives the title in the reversed form ‘The Example of Israel/Palestine’; the printed title, used here, is “The Example of Palestine/Israel”. The discrepancy is recorded under Open questions.
  • Access basis given with delivery: open-license (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0), downloaded from the URL in the frontmatter.
  • Text copy: the supplied text copy (raw/2012-lloyd-settler-colonialism-and-the-state-of-exception.txt) is clean and complete for all 22 pages, with PDF page markers at the head of each page, about 8,548 words in the copy as delivered. No passage required reassembly from the original; a number of slips in the printed text and notes are recorded under Open questions.

Section by section

Thinking Palestine, sovereignty denied, and the present-absentee (PDF p.1-3 / printed p.59-61)

The article opens with its thesis in prose (PDF p.1, summarised in Summary above), then with the impossibility of thinking Palestine alone: “I was trying to think Palestine, Palestine for itself, ‘itself alone’, as the Irish say. But instead, I found myself thinking, and writing, ‘Palestine/Israel’, as if Palestine cannot be thought of and by itself” (PDF p.1). That gesture has been imposed by proponents of Zionism as a condition of thinking Palestine at all: it may not be thought “as an autonomous sovereign entity, giving the law to itself”, and Palestinian statehood can be proposed only by permission of Israel and its patrons. A nation achieves sovereignty, in the Weberian sense Lloyd invokes, only as a state maintaining the monopoly of legitimate violence in its territory — the status successive Israeli governments have unilaterally denied Palestine, reserving it as a space subject to “a labyrinthine proliferation of laws” while lacking the capacity to give itself the law or offer its subjects full citizenship (PDF p.2 / printed p.60). For Palestinians in Israel the correlative is “the malicious shell-game of holding formal citizenship (ezrahut) while being denied the right to nationality (le’om), which is reserved for Jews only and which grants the most substantial rights, including that of return”. The denial indirectly affirms Israel’s sovereignty and its membership of the modern network of privileged Westphalian states, through which ‘sovereignty has been established as the central institution of the international system’ (note 1, to Dario Battistella). Battistella’s corollary, quoted: after Westphalia, non-European territories continued to be perceived as ‘land free to be occupied’ while war within European international society had become a ‘resort to arms among personae morales’, entities recognising each other’s right to exist as sovereign units (note 2). This dyadic structure constitutes the oscillating relation between norm and exception, and makes Israel’s claim to be a ‘normal’ or ‘civilised’ Western state inseparable from its status as a settler colonial state. Thinking Palestine is thus faced immediately with “the paradox of the ‘present absentee’, of the one whose identity is shadowed by non-identity” (PDF p.3). Edward Said, over thirty years before: ‘All the constitutive energies of Zionism were premised on the excluded presence, that is, the functional absence of “native people” in Palestine’ (note 3). Lloyd poses the article’s questions through the formulation ‘the present-absentee’, “both an actual designation and a resonant metaphor for the perpetual predicament of the Palestinians” (note 4): a condition of being absent when present and outside when inside, which follows the spatial logic of ethnic cleansing and occupation and conforms to “the logical space of the exception, that space where the constitutive force of law or state is manifested in its suspension”. Is the condition singular, making Palestine/Israel an exception to the rule of nations, or exemplary — of settler colonial states, or even of states of exception? The contradictory claims to exemplarity and exceptionality saturate the discourse “to what one is tempted to call an exceptional degree”.

Exemplary normality, exemplary settler colony (PDF p.4-5 / printed p.62-63)

Israel presents itself as exemplary and therefore normal, a historical people seeking a homeland of a kind common in the Europe of Zionism’s foundations; it is at the same time “no less an exemplary settler colony”. In its early days, as Said pointed out, there was nothing exceptional in this: “Zionism never spoke of itself unambiguously as a Jewish liberation movement, but rather as Jewish movement for colonial settlement in the Orient” (note 5, quoting Said). Early Zionists admitted the colonial dimension — and correspondingly the legitimate existence of the Palestinians as a people — more willingly than Israel’s contemporary defenders, despite the claim to have located ‘a land without people for a people without land’; Herzl’s Jewish state would ‘form a portion of a rampart of Europe against Asia, an outpost of civilization as opposed to barbarism’ (note 6). The supporters’ framing of a normal nation state securing itself against an external threat — “‘Any civilised nation would have done the same’ is the appeal that is reiterated every time Israel assaults Gaza or invades Lebanon” — requires the invocation of the ‘state of necessity’ that Denise Ferreira da Silva has explored, which displaces the objects of its violence into subjection to nature or impulse, absenting them from the community of the civilised (note 7). The claim to normality collapses into a claim to domination predicated on the Westphalian distinction between the civilised and those not understood as moral actors, whose lands are therefore expropriable. Read instead as a settler colonial regime reducing — “in both senses” — the indigenous population, the paradox appears: “the more fervently it presses its exemplary status, the more evident becomes its anomalous condition as a permanent state of exception” (PDF p.5).

Zionism’s European formation: ethnic nationalism and messianism (PDF p.5-7 / printed p.63-65)

The Westphalian model Israel invokes is double-edged given Zionism’s origins among the largely assimilated, predominantly secular Jewish communities of Central Europe, of whom its founder Theodor Herzl was typical. Zionism is imbued with European nationalisms’ contradictory pulls — inward self-determination, outward expansion through colonisation of others considered inferior — and Herzl’s trajectory embodies them: insisting on European Jews’ equivalence to other European nationalities while negotiating with the German Kaiser, British Colonial Secretary Joseph Chamberlain and the Ottoman sultan in turn for a land to colonise (note 8, to Avi Shlaim). Its nationality lay in Europe’s ethnic but largely secular nationalisms, founded on belief in a people’s historical destiny to self-determination and sovereignty — a belief inseparable, as Benedict Anderson argued in the work cited in note 9, from secularisation, yet accompanied by a quasi-religious, almost mystical link between people, land and language descending from Herder through Fichte; European nationalisms generally harboured “a deep prejudice against racial mixing” that belies their Enlightenment legacy (PDF p.6 / printed p.64). In these respects Zionism is a typical European nationalist formation. But it was also imbued with Messianism: the return from diaspora to Zion associated with the Messiah’s return and the end of times. As Jacqueline Rose has shown (note 10), secular Zionism could not repress that inheritance: “the language of secular Zionism bears the traces and scars of a messianic narrative that it barely seeks, or fails, to repress”. The result was “an apocalyptic strain of divinely-sanctioned destructive violence” whose counterpart is the conviction that every conflict involves an existential threat, and the messianic strain sanctions ‘a Jewish state for a Jewish people’ and justifies the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians “in order to make way for the ‘ingathering of Jews’ in preparation for the Messiah’s return” (PDF p.6-7, note 11). This exceptional conjunction long predates the Holocaust, “itself an embarrassment to Zionists like Ben Gurion until the 1960s” and their recognition that European Jewry’s fate could be exploited to political effect; the ethno-nationalist demand was rooted in Zionism’s formation itself, and produces an irresolvable contradiction within the liberal secular state: “the institutions of Israeli secular democracy rest upon the most extreme claim to a divine or messianic exception no longer allowed to any other state in the world” (PDF p.7, note 12, instancing Benjamin Netanyahu’s 24 May 2011 speech to the US Congress). The contradiction’s terms are nonetheless explicable from another perspective: the settler colonial model, which Said sketched and which, as Uri Ram documents, has been current even within mainstream Israeli sociology (note 13).

The settler colonial model: land, labour, elimination (PDF p.8-9 / printed p.66-67)

The early Zionists’ predicament — “the anomaly of a nation-people who lacked a land that they had occupied continuously at any point in recent history, could only be resolved by colonisation” — made identification of a land to occupy paramount, though at first its location was not critical to secular Zionists: Herzl initially considered Argentina (note 14). What distinguishes a settler colony from an administrative or extractive one is “the settlers’ focus on the permanent appropriation of land rather than the political and economic subordination of the indigenous population, the monopolisation of its resources, or the control of its markets”. Expropriation for a permanent colonial population demands, as Patrick Wolfe argued, one of two relations to the indigenous population: exploitation as a subordinated labour force (much of Latin America, Algeria, South Africa) or more or less rapid extermination (Australia, North America, the Caribbean) (note 15). “Israel has clearly engaged in both tendencies”: initial dependence on Palestinian labor, mitigated by importation of Jewish labor from Yemen and North Africa, has given way to systematic if gradual exclusion and displacement of Palestinian workers and residents and their replacement by immigrants from South and South East Asia denied citizenship rights (note 16, to Ram). Neve Gordon has similarly detailed the post-1967 occupation’s shift from a bio-political model incorporating a subordinated, laboring population to a sovereign-power model aiming at enclosure and eventual displacement (note 17). The slogan ‘A land without people for a people without land’ “has proven to be a performative rather than a descriptive statement, spelling the gradual ejection of a people whose persistent presence has been a perpetual obstacle to the completion of the Zionist project” (PDF p.8-9).

Memmi’s racism, the iron wall made concrete, and the demographic imperative (PDF p.9-10 / printed p.67-68)

Both modes of subordinating the indigenous population require, as Memmi’s pioneering work suggested, assumption of a racial hierarchy: the settlers’ prestige and legitimacy depend on conviction of their superiority, and racism is not incidental but consubstantial: ‘Racism sums up and symbolizes the fundamental relation which unites colonialist and colonized’ (note 18, quoting Memmi). Its three ideological components, quoted from Memmi (note 19): “one, the gulf between the culture of the colonialist and the colonized; two, the exploitation of these differences for the benefit of the colonialist; three, the use of these supposed differences as standards of absolute fact”. The components form a self-reinforcing loop that intensifies over time: “Precisely as the coloniser becomes more established, the rigor of the divisions, the state of apartheid, between the settler and the colonised becomes deeper”, to walls and barriers, separate areas and “tightly controlled bantustans”. “The ‘iron wall’ that was for Ze’ev Vladimir Jabotinsky a metaphor becomes eventually realised in concrete form” (note 20): where Vladimir Jabotinsky envisaged unchallengeable military strength to bring the Arab population to despair of regaining their lands, “the Occupation has literally erected a segregation wall that fragments the West Bank, encloses its population in fragmentary islets of territory, and with dire literalism, separates Israelis and Palestinians” (PDF p.10). The coloniser’s displayed material superiority within reserved zones is secured through discriminatory access to the colony’s social goods, and “the consequent and inevitable impoverishment of the indigenous becomes the sign of their innate backwardness”. Yet the indigenous will not disappear: they present an ‘existential threat’, a ‘demographic time-bomb’, in a post-Holocaust world where traditional genocide against native peoples is no longer publicly acceptable, so the settler proportion must be maintained by continuing Jewish immigration combined with gradual ethnic cleansing or ‘silent transfer’, increasing expropriation, and confinement “into ever-dwindling spaces whose conditions of life become more and more insupportable”. The daily abuse of human rights and the steady state violence required produce the “profound and insuperable contradiction” between the aspiration to normality and practices “essential to and constitutive of its existence rather than merely contingent responses to external threats”. The colony’s claimed superiority rests on representing ‘Western civilisation’ in a ‘backward region’ — Memmi’s reference back to the ‘mother country’ become diffuse (note 21).

Perpetual siege, institutionalised racism, and the hardening colony (PDF p.11 / printed p.69)

Maintaining ‘a Jewish state for a Jewish people’ has in practice demanded laws eschewed by ‘civilised’ nations: the citizenship/nationality distinction itself, denial of free movement and assembly, and of access to water and agricultural land; “in the end, it requires the state of perpetual siege in which the lives of the majority of Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank are spent”. The normalisation of low-level violence, apart from regular disproportionate violence now accepted in Israel’s strategic posture, finds legitimation in an institutionalised racism: “Its very existence depends upon the denial of fundamental rights to the indigenous population of Palestine purely on account of their ethnic identity as non-Jews.” The contradiction unfolds over time: settler colonialism initially invokes civilising ideals — Herzl ‘viewed the natives as primitive and backward looking’ but ‘hoped that economic benefits would reconcile the Arab population to the Zionist enterprise in Palestine’ (note 22) — but their fate is determined by “the hardening of the siege mentality” (see Siege Mentality). The settler remains on guard behind an ‘iron wall’ whose institutionalisation preserves the initial colonising minority’s attitude within the state’s structures; as the society appropriates more in the name of security, it militarises further and shapes draconian laws. Memmi: ‘Every colonial nation carries the seeds of fascist temptation in its bosom’ (note 23).

Disproportion, righteous fury, and the two colonizers (PDF p.12-13 / printed p.70-71)

David Grossman, in 2004, before the second invasion of Lebanon, Operation Cast Lead, and the laws against commemoration of the Nakba or sanctioning BDS advocates: ‘it is impossible for a state to maintain true democracy while simultaneously upholding a regime of occupation and oppression’ (note 24). In Memmi’s terms the contradictions produce in the ‘colonizer who accepts’ a ‘rage, a loathing, always ready to be loosed on the colonised, the innocent yet inevitable reason for his drama’ (note 25). That rage manifests what Ilan Pappe has termed the ‘righteous fury’ that is ‘a constant phenomenon in the Israeli, and before that Zionist, dispossession of Palestine’ (note 26; see Righteous Fury): a legitimation of unconscionable violence, a shield from world opinion, and a measure of siege mentality even in absolute ascendancy. The settler’s rage is the antithesis of the colonised’s internalised rage in Fanon’s account (note 27, to Frantz Fanon as cited). Memmi’s emphasis is the constant ‘disproportion’ in the settler’s response: such rage lay behind the Gaza massacre Lloyd describes as resulting in “one hundred times the numbers of Palestinian dead to those killed on the Israeli side”, behind the massacre of civilians in South Lebanon in 2006, and in the repeated use of illegal weapons like white phosphorus and DIME, from Beirut in 1982 to Gaza in 2009. “Disproportionate response is by now the IDF’s official military doctrine”, designed to create the impression Israel is ‘crazy’ (note 28; see Disproportionate Force). Its acceptance derives, following Memmi, from a conflict requiring “the annihilation and not merely the regulation or containment of the indigenous”. For Memmi’s ‘colonizer who refuses’ — the leftist colonizer who shares collective responsibility by membership of the oppressor group, wants dialogue (Lloyd’s parenthesis: “(the interminable dialogue industry of the ‘peace process’)”) but cannot relinquish his privileges or the settler project — the consequence is Grossman’s ‘unease of a moral dilemma’, knowing he is ‘committing or colluding with an injustice’ (notes 29-30). “What was true for the French in Algeria, the Unionists in Northern Ireland, the Afrikaners and other whites in South Africa, is proving daily more true for Israel” (PDF p.13).

Emergency law as the settler norm: Ireland, South Africa, the Mandate regulations (PDF p.13-14 / printed p.71-72)

“If Israel is a settler colony, it is indeed exemplary, normal and normative, in almost every respect. Yet we cannot overlook the fact that Israel’s exemplarity includes the fact that the ‘state of exception’ is an exemplary practice of settler colonies.” Siege mentality issues in a declared ‘state of siege’ under many names, from Jim Crow legalisms to martial law; suspension of law in face of the indigenous people’s resistance — “or, indeed, even the very persistent presence” — is a given of every colonialism, and the intimacy of the settler-native interface makes it a virtually constitutive element, “much as a deep geological formation shapes the permanent features of a landscape”. Ireland: civil rights activist Michael Farrell, as the main text names him, is quoted: ‘In Ireland, from 1800-1921, the British Government brought in 105 Coercion Acts dealing with Ireland. That means that Habeas Corpus was as often suspended as in force in 19th-Century Ireland’ (note 31, which names the quoted activist Michael O’Farrell; the discrepancy is recorded under Open questions). The Coercion Acts survived in the permanent Special Powers Act in Northern Ireland, 1922-1972, affirming the state’s settler colonial nature despite democratic pretensions; that Act “was in turn the envy of South African Prime Minister and architect of Apartheid Hendrik Verwoerd, who would have swapped one clause of it for every anti-apartheid law” (note 32, wording as printed). “Israel similarly maintained in force the British Mandate’s indispensable ‘Emergency Regulations’ that have regularly and continuously been deployed for purposes of censorship, house demolitions or deportation of Palestinians” (note 33, to Gordon and to Nasser Hussain’s jurisprudence of emergency; see British Emergency Regulations). Such continuities make what appears as an exception actually a norm. Palestinians occupy, within the siege imaginary, “the peculiar topological location of being the incorporated outside”: Said on Palestinians who remained after 1948 — ‘everything that did stay to challenge Israel was viewed not as something there but as a sign of something outside Israel and Zionism bent on its destruction – from the outside’ (note 34) — a condition extended to occupied Palestine as annexation proceeds: “Palestine is incorporated within Israel as a perpetually alien entity, as a proliferation of folds within its still undeclared borders. And yet these besieged territories are envisaged as themselves besieging.”

The topology of the exception: Agamben, the camp, and the colonial genealogy (PDF p.15-17 / printed p.73-75)

Naomi Klein, quoted: ‘[a]n entire country has turned itself into a fortified gated community, surrounded by locked-out people living in permanently excluded red zones’ (note 35). This excluded interior — visible on every contemporary map of Occupied Palestine, segmented by illegal settlements “into an archipelago of disconnected compartments” — conforms to the topology of the exception in Agamben’s classic formulations, quoted: “The state of exception represents the inclusion and capture of a space that is neither inside nor outside […]. Being-outside and yet belonging: this is the topological structure of the state of exception” (note 36). Drawing on Carl Schmitt on sovereignty and the ‘decision’, Agamben’s topology poses the constitutive role of the law’s suspension in the law’s foundation: the exception is at once in and outside the law, ungoverned by judicial procedure, and repeats the founding violence the law prefers to forget — “the state of exception is the truth of the law, its unacknowledged absent but ever-present foundation” (PDF p.15; note 37, on Agamben’s Schmitt-Walter Benjamin dialogue). Agamben materialises the topology in the ‘camps’, the Holocaust extermination centers, concentrating those reduced to ‘bare life’ (see Bare Life). Lloyd’s critique: “in focusing on the Nazi destruction of European Jewry and on the specific instance of Auschwitz, Agamben ignores the long history of colonial genocide and domination in which the techniques and spaces of the Holocaust were first developed” (note 38, to Achille Mbembe). Agamben expressly dismisses the concentration camp’s origins in settler colonial and plantation societies, treating camps as occasional effects of a ‘state of exception linked to colonial war’, and so “ignores the absolute normality of the state of exception under colonial regimes”. His camp passage is quoted: “The camp is the space that opens up when the state of exception starts to become the rule” (note 39), a territory ‘captured outside, that is, it is included by virtue of its very exclusion’ (note 40). Against that singularity: the state of exception and the excluded inside “have been constitutive elements of colonialism, and in particular of settler colonial formations, from the Indian reservations to Bantustans and pass laws, from the regular use of concentration of the Philippine population by both Spain and the US to slave plantations and their precociously modern architectures”; colonial and plantation law had long deprived colonised and enslaved populations of rights ‘to the point that committing any act toward them would no longer appear as a crime’ (note 41). The Nazi camps were “forged in colonial … laboratories even more than in modern disciplinary institutions”, and the camp was not the only trajectory of settler colonial evolution. Mbembe: ‘the links between modernity and terror spring from multiple sources’.

Hyperlegality: the exception by proliferation of law (PDF p.17-18 / printed p.75-76)

Lloyd’s supplement to Agamben: in the settler colony the emergency declaration justified a generalised, effectively permanent state of exception, but “the exception was governed less by the absence or sheer suspension of law than by innumerable legal and quasi-legal protocols instituted for its regulation”. In Israel/Palestine, Israel’s urgent desire to normalise the occupation regime in accord with law means “in the absence of an actual declaration of emergency, what results is a proliferation rather than a suspension of law”: permits, closures, controls, dispossessions, demolitions proceed under “a labyrinthine web of civil law and military decree, the ‘5,000 Israeli military orders, regulating Palestinian life’”, painstakingly detailed by Makdisi (note 42). Makdisi’s ‘Israel’s hyperregulation of everyday life’ conforms to what Hussain has termed Hyperlegality, the regime typifying the contemporary counter-terrorism state: multiplication of laws and legal categories rather than Agamben’s anomie (note 43). Hyperlegality combined with the self-enfolding topology of ‘zones of exclusion’ constitutes an exemplary new state of exception that has become globally the increasingly generalised norm. Agamben, quoted: ‘the voluntary creation of a permanent state of emergency (though not declared in the technical sense) has become one of the essential practices of contemporary states, including the so-called democratic states’ (note 44) — but for Agamben the generalised model is the Nazi one.

Israel as the model for the global norm, and the closing hope (PDF p.18-19 / printed p.76-77)

Klein suggests another model: Israel as exemplary of the generalised state of exception, furnishing ‘the cutting-edge homeland security state’ (note 45). West Bank and Gaza have had to become the ‘laboratory’, as Eyal Weizman puts it, of a ‘territorial and urban conflict that can take place in other places’, furnishing surveillance technologies and the spatial organisation of political control: settlements model ‘the design of a closely knitted fabric of homes and infrastructure – as acts of spatial exclusion creating wedges that separate the habitat of a population marked as a political “outside”’ (note 46). The genealogy of this topology traces to Algeria, South Africa and, Lloyd adds, Northern Ireland, and demonstrates “the continual importation of colonial practices to the metropolis, from urban counter-insurgency techniques forged in nineteenth-century Algiers to surveillance technologies developed in Belfast that are now current in London and Birmingham” (see Imperial boomerang). The contradiction resolves ominously: “Israel permanently imposes that state of exception that Benjamin found to be the historical norm for the oppressed” (note 47, to Benjamin’s Theses). Israel is no longer exceptional, but it offers other states a more advanced model of future sovereignty in which the Westphalian distinction becomes a relation of exclusion by inclusion: as neo-liberal states manage corporate appropriation and confront the redundancy of large segments of their own populations, “the topologies and protocols of the state of exception will become ever more the norm”. “For this new norm, … Israel offers the most pertinent and precocious model: having succeeded in incorporating the Occupied Territories within its undeclared borders as an included excluded, it has divided the populations over which it exercises de facto rule along apartheid lines, between the utterly privileged settlers and the redundant Palestinian remainder” (PDF p.19). The techniques, “far from causing scandal to the Western democracies, are coveted and purchased by them”: Israel’s economic prosperity is predicated on developing the technologies of repression in the occupation’s laboratory and exporting them; “virtually every major police department in the United States has benefited from its instruction in racial profiling and other counter-terrorist methods” (note 48, to Klein). Close: “Our fear may be that that historical norm is being projected from the exemplary state of exception that is Israel/Palestine to the generalised form of our collective future. If so, it ironically legitimates Israel’s claim to be a normal western state, though not in the sense that its proponents mean. Our hope may be that the continuing and insurmountable resistance of the Palestinian people to their transfer, dispossession and colonisation offers a counter-model and an inspiration within which the seeds of an alternative future may emerge.”

Biographical Note and Notes (PDF p.19-22 / printed p.77-80)

The Biographical Note (PDF p.19) gives Lloyd’s USC post and fields and lists Nationalism and Minor Literature (1987), Anomalous States (1993), Ireland After History (1999), Irish Times: Temporalities of Irish Modernity (2008), and the then most recent Irish Culture and Colonial Modernity: The Transformation of Oral Space (Cambridge University Press, 2011), with two books in progress (on Samuel Beckett’s visual aesthetics, and on aesthetics, race and representation), and co-published works with Abdul JanMohamed, Paul Thomas, Lisa Lowe and Peter D. O’Neill. The 48 Notes (PDF p.20-22) are recorded in the reading notes at each marker: framework citations to Battistella, Said, Shlaim, Anderson and Kedourie, Rose, Ram and Veracini; the Memmi citations (notes 18-19, 21, 23, 25, 30); Pappé’s ‘righteous fury’ (note 26) and Fanon (note 27); the Ireland and emergency-law citations (notes 31-33); and the exception apparatus — Agamben (notes 36-37, 39-41, 44), Mbembe (note 38), Colin Dayan on slavery and carceral law (note 41), Makdisi (notes 42-43), Hussain on hyperlegality (note 43), Klein (notes 35, 45, 48), Weizman (notes 28, 46) and Benjamin (note 47).

Key passages

  • “these apparent contradictions, over and above their value to public relations opportunism, can best be explained by understanding Israel’s occupation of Palestine as an exemplary settler colonial project whose contradictions are embedded in the early framing of Zionism and whose unfolding follows a logic long ago analyzed by Albert Memmi and other theorists of settler colonialism” (PDF p.1 / printed p.59)
  • “I was trying to think Palestine, Palestine for itself, ‘itself alone’, as the Irish say. But instead, I found myself thinking, and writing, ‘Palestine/Israel’, as if Palestine cannot be thought of and by itself.” (PDF p.1 / printed p.59)
  • “the malicious shell-game of holding formal citizenship (ezrahut) while being denied the right to nationality (le’om), which is reserved for Jews only” (PDF p.2 / printed p.60)
  • “the paradox of the ‘present absentee’, of the one whose identity is shadowed by non-identity” (PDF p.3 / printed p.61)
  • “the more fervently it presses its exemplary status, the more evident becomes its anomalous condition as a permanent state of exception” (PDF p.5 / printed p.63)
  • “the language of secular Zionism bears the traces and scars of a messianic narrative that it barely seeks, or fails, to repress” — Jacqueline Rose, quoted by Lloyd (PDF p.6 / printed p.64)
  • “Ultimately, the institutions of Israeli secular democracy rest upon the most extreme claim to a divine or messianic exception no longer allowed to any other state in the world.” (PDF p.7 / printed p.65)
  • “A land without people for a people without land’, has proven to be a performative rather than a … descriptive statement” — the slogan as quoted with Lloyd’s continuation (PDF p.8-9 / printed p.66-67)
  • “Colonial racism is built from three major ideological components: one, the gulf between the culture of the colonialist and the colonized; two, the exploitation of these differences for the benefit of the colonialist; three, the use of these supposed differences as standards of absolute fact.” — Albert Memmi, quoted by Lloyd (PDF p.9 / printed p.67)
  • “The ‘iron wall’ that was for Ze’ev Vladimir Jabotinsky a metaphor becomes eventually realised in concrete form.” (PDF p.9-10 / printed p.67-68)
  • “Its very existence depends upon the denial of fundamental rights to the indigenous population of Palestine purely on account of their ethnic identity as non-Jews.” (PDF p.11 / printed p.69)
  • “Being-outside and yet belonging: this is the topological structure of the state of exception.” — Giorgio Agamben, quoted by Lloyd (PDF p.15 / printed p.73)
  • “the state of exception is the truth of the law, its unacknowledged absent but ever-present foundation” (PDF p.15 / printed p.73)
  • “in the absence of an actual declaration of emergency, what results is a proliferation rather than a suspension of law” (PDF p.17 / printed p.75)
  • “For this new norm, … Israel offers the most pertinent and precocious model” (PDF p.18-19 / printed p.76-77)
  • “Our hope may be that the continuing and insurmountable resistance of the Palestinian people to their transfer, dispossession and colonisation offers a counter-model and an inspiration within which the seeds of an alternative future may emerge.” (PDF p.19 / printed p.77)

Evidence the work relies on

  • This is a theoretical and interpretive essay, not an archival or empirical study presenting new documents: its evidence is the published work it cites, article by article in its 48 notes, and its historical claims are carried by those citations rather than by new data.
  • For the Westphalian frame and sovereignty: Dario Battistella, The Return of the State of War: A Theoretical Analysis of Operation Iraqi Freedom (ECPR Press, 2008), pp.5, 85 (notes 1-2, the second quoted at length).
  • For Zionism’s origins and self-understanding: Edward W. Said, ‘Zionism from the Standpoint of its Victims’, Social Text 1 (1979), pp.21-29, 23, 29, 33 (notes 3, 5, 21, 34); Avi Shlaim, The Iron Wall: Israel and the Arab World (Norton, 2000), pp.1-27 and passim (notes 5-6, 8, 14, 20-22); Theodor Herzl, The Jewish State, as cited in Bashir Abu-Manneh, ‘Israel in the U.S. Empire’, Monthly Review 58, 10 (2007) (note 6); Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities, revised edition (Verso, 2006), pp.9-36, and Elie Kedourie, Nationalism (1960) (note 9).
  • For messianism in secular Zionism: Jacqueline Rose, The Question of Zion (Princeton University Press, 2005), pp.1-57, 33, 42-47, 48-52 (notes 10-11, 28); instanced by Benjamin Netanyahu’s speech to the US Congress, 24 May 2011, as reprinted in the Jerusalem Post (note 12).
  • For the settler colonial paradigm in Israeli sociology and comparatively: Uri Ram, ‘The Colonization Perspective in Israeli Sociology’, in Ilan Pappé (ed.), The Israel/Palestine Question: A Reader, 2nd edition (Routledge, 2007), pp.53-79 (notes 13, 16); Lorenzo Veracini, Israel and Settler Society (Pluto, 2006) (note 13); Patrick Wolfe, ‘Race and the Trace of History: For Henry Reynolds’, in Studies in Settler Colonialism (Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), pp.275-77 (note 15); Neve Gordon, Israel’s Occupation (University of California Press, 2008), pp.11-21, 36, 52 (notes 17, 33).
  • For the settler’s psychology and racism: Albert Memmi, The Colonizer and the Colonized (Beacon Press, 1967), pp.38-9, 62, 66-67, 67, 70, 71, 74 (notes 18-19, 21, 23, 25, 30); Ilan Pappé, ‘Israel’s righteous fury and its victims in Gaza’, Electronic Intifada (2009) (note 26); Frantz Fanon, ‘Concerning Violence’, in The Wretched of the Earth (Grove Press, 1968), pp.54-55 (note 27); David Grossman, Writing in the Dark (Picador, 2008), pp.103, 115 (notes 24, 29); Eyal Weizman, Hollow Land (Verso, 2007), p.197, citing Brigadier General Shimon Naveh, for military thinking ‘like serial killers’ (note 28).
  • For colonial emergency law: Michael O’Farrell as quoted in Mike Tomlinson, ‘Imprisoned Ireland’ (1995), p.196 (note 31); Ed Moloney, Mondoweiss, 24 January 2011, for the Verwoerd comment (note 32); Nasser Hussain, The Jurisprudence of Emergency: Colonialism and the Rule of Law (University of Michigan Press, 2003) (note 33).
  • For the state of exception and its critique: Giorgio Agamben, State of Exception (University of Chicago Press, 2005), pp.2, 35, 52-64 (notes 36-37, 44) and ‘What is a Camp?’, in Means without Ends (2000), pp.37-40 (notes 39-41); Walter Benjamin, ‘Critique of Violence’ (1921) and ‘Theses on the Philosophy of History’, p.257 (notes 37, 47); Achille Mbembe, ‘Necropolitics’, Public Culture 15, 1 (2003), pp.11-40 (note 38); Colin Dayan, The Law is a White Dog (Princeton, 2011) (note 41).
  • For hyperlegality, the laboratory and the export of repression: Saree Makdisi, Palestine Inside Out: An Everyday Occupation (Norton, 2008), p.6 (notes 42-43); Nasser Hussain, ‘Hyperlegality’, New Criminal Law Review 10, 4 (2007), pp.514-531 (note 43); Naomi Klein, The Shock Doctrine (Picador, 2007), pp.549-558 (notes 35, 45, 48); Eyal Weizman interviewed by Philipp Misselwitz (2003), pp.195-6, and Hollow Land, chaps 4-5 (note 46); Denise da Silva, ‘No-Bodies: Law, Raciality, and Violence’, Griffith Law Review 18, 2 (2009), pp.214-219, for the ‘state of necessity’ (note 7).
  • For ‘present absentee’ as a designation: Ilan Pappé, A History of Modern Palestine, 2nd edition (2006), p.157, and The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine (2006) (note 4).

Analysis

The article’s method is theoretical synthesis: it takes the settler colonial model — sketched by Said, documented for Israeli sociology by Ram, and given its psychology by Memmi — and uses it to dissolve an apparent contradiction (normality versus exceptionality) by showing each term to imply the other, then extends Agamben’s state of exception in two directions Agamben himself resists: backwards, to a colonial genealogy in which the exception and the excluded inside were normal and constitutive long before the Nazi camp, and sideways, from suspension of law to its proliferation, through Hussain’s hyperlegality and Makdisi’s hyperregulation. Its perspective is openly diagnostic and present-directed: the 2012 essay reads the occupation’s spatial forms — the wall, the settlements’ wedges, the archipelago of compartments — as the topology of the exception made concrete, and projects that topology forward as the likely general form of neo-liberal sovereignty, with Palestinian resistance held out as the counter-model. Its strongest internal support is the chain of continuities it assembles from its cited literature: citizenship without nationality, the retained Mandate Emergency Regulations, the 5,000 military orders, and the Ireland and South Africa emergency-law parallels all instantiate the same claim — exception as norm — at different scales. Its limits follow from its form: it is a programmatic essay whose empirical claims (the Gaza casualty ratio of one hundred to one, the claim that virtually every major US police department has benefited from Israeli instruction, the economic-prosperity claim taken from Klein) are asserted through single citations or none at the point of assertion, whose figures are few and carried by the works cited, and whose engagement with Agamben proceeds by his texts as quoted rather than by the historians of the camp he dismisses, who are represented here by Mbembe and Dayan as cited. The messianism argument rests on Rose’s reading, and the Holocaust point — that the conjunction predates it and that it was “an embarrassment to Zionists like Ben Gurion until the 1960s” — is stated without a note at the sentence itself. The Ireland parallel is the author’s own field, and the Biographical Note’s Irish specialism is part of the essay’s framing, not an external fact about it.

People, organizations, places and events

David Lloyd, Albert Memmi, Giorgio Agamben, Dario Battistella, Denise Ferreira da Silva, Jacqueline Rose, Neve Gordon, Naomi Klein, Nasser Hussain, Achille Mbembe, Walter Benjamin, Carl Schmitt, David Grossman, Edward Said, Theodor Herzl, Avi Shlaim, Benedict Anderson, Patrick Wolfe, Saree Makdisi, Eyal Weizman, Ilan Pappe, Frantz Fanon, Vladimir Jabotinsky, David Ben-Gurion, Benjamin Netanyahu, Mahmoud Darwish, Special Powers Act, British Emergency Regulations, Algeria, South Africa, West Bank, Gaza

Concepts

State of Exception, Hyperlegality, Bare Life, Siege Mentality, Righteous Fury, Messianism, Settler Colonialism, Present Absentees, Apartheid, Ethnic Cleansing, Transfer, Disproportionate Force, Separation wall, Bantustans, Imperial boomerang, Zionism, Racism, Self-determination

How it relates to other sources

Open questions

  • The PDF file’s internal metadata titles the article ‘Settler Colonialism and the State of Exception: The Example of Israel/Palestine’, reversing the printed title’s “Palestine/Israel” (PDF p.1). The printed title is used throughout the wiki; the reversal matters to the article’s own opening argument, which turns on the ordering and coupling of the two names, and is recorded here rather than resolved.
  • The civil rights activist quoted at PDF p.14 for Ireland’s 105 Coercion Acts is named “Michael Farrell” in the main text and “Michael O’Farrell” in note 31 (PDF p.21), where he is quoted in Mike Tomlinson’s ‘Imprisoned Ireland’. Both spellings are kept as printed; the file alone does not settle which the cited source gives.
  • The Verwoerd sentence (PDF p.14) says he “would have swapped one clause of it for every anti-apartheid law”, as printed. The comment as Lloyd presents it is sourced in note 32 only to a Mondoweiss article of 24 January 2011, described in the note as the place to see “this widely disseminated comment”; the file gives no primary source for the remark.
  • Slips kept as printed: “setter colonial societies” for settler colonial societies (PDF p.11); “though” for through in the camp passage (PDF p.16); “the peculiar destructive violence of Zionsim” in note 28 (PDF p.21); “The iron Wall” with a lower-case W in the second Shlaim reference in note 6 (PDF p.20); and the punctuation of the Ram citation in note 13, “(London and New York, Routledge 2007)” (PDF p.20).
  • The Gaza passage at PDF p.12 — “the unconscionable massacre of civilians in Gaza that resulted in one hundred times the numbers of Palestinian dead to those killed on the Israeli side” — names no operation and gives no dates or figures at the sentence itself; note 26 cites Pappé’s 2009 Electronic Intifada article on Gaza, and note 28 cites Weizman and Rose, but the ratio as stated cannot be tied from this file alone to a specific operation’s toll, and it is recorded as Lloyd’s formulation, not as a verified figure.
  • Lloyd’s statement that the Holocaust was “an embarrassment to Zionists like Ben Gurion until the 1960s” (PDF p.7) carries no note at the sentence; note 12, at the paragraph’s end, instances only Netanyahu’s 2011 speech for the religious-claims point. The claim stands as Lloyd’s assertion in this file.

Coverage

PDF p.1-22 of 22, read in full

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