Nomos aversion and the art of being somewhat governed among Jewish outpost settlers in the West Bank

Abstract

Since the mid‐1990s, in clandestine co‐operation with state agencies, West Bank settlers have been establishing what have become known as the illegal outpost settlements. These are typically rustic communities located deep inside the frontier. Publicly, outpost residents insist that they want the state to retroactively legalize their communities. This is also the long‐sought goal of the leaders of the settlement movement. However, this article exposes how, in fact, many ‘outpost people’ actively resist and subvert the efforts of their leadership to legalize and subsequently enlarge their communities. They do so, I argue, from a sense of ‘nomos aversion’, which at its heart is a rejection of the law and the state. This article shows how, in this context, with the aim of keeping the state at a safe distance, the on‐the‐ground settlers – who are at the frontlines of settler‐colonial expansion – navigate their ambivalent relationship with the colonial centre by constantly reshaping their social structure between anti‐statist and statist modes. I conceptualize this social technique in terms of the ‘art of being somewhat governed’. By introducing these terms, this article offers an analysis of how an internal rivalry that latently underlies a settler colonial society shapes colonial expansion.