The Colonizing Self: Or, Home and Homelessness in Israel/Palestine

Like Albert Memmi did in the 1950s, Hagar Kotef offers a “portrait” of the colonizer. Two intuitions inform this book about the Israeli “colonizing self ”: one is about home, the other about violence. Taken together, these two intuitions converge on the understanding of the specific ways in which the settler’s identity consolidates, which is a crucial question and has been overlooked by scholars so far. Indeed, Kotef responds to a glaring gap in the scholarly literature on Israel and Palestine and in activist practice and offers a comprehensive portrait and an analysis that involves theory (Part I), a focus on past violence, that is on violence that can be assigned to the past if you are not Palestinian (Part II), and the observation of violence that is ostensible and contemporary and cannot be disavowed (Part III). On home: Kotef observes that homemaking in someone else’s place, what settler colonizers by definition do, is a territorializing practice—a practice that involves territory, obviously, but also, and crucially, processes of identity formation. It is not a coincidence that “territorialization” (pp. 67, 122) is a term that has a specific psychoanalytic meaning concerning the consolidation of an autonomous self, and while there are libraries dedicated to the processes that have led to the consolidation of Zionist and Israeli control over territory, we know relatively little about the psychological territorialization of the settler. And yet we should, because knowing about the settler self and developing a “theory of the dispossessor” (p. 5), as The Colonizing Self: Or, Home and Homelessness in Israel/ Palestine attempts, will determine the effectiveness of decolonial action. Thus, Kotef ’s scholarly intervention is especially important because it may lead to another type of intervention, a reckoning. If the former is useful, the latter is indispensable, because the violence of settler colonialism is unacceptable, and also because the settler is unwell (the author of The Colonizing Self is more diplomatic than my interpretative summary may suggest, and an inclination to understate is understandable, but this is a conclusion that emerges clearly from the evidence that is offered). On violence: Kotef contends that the violence of settler colonialism generates a particular identity because it generates affirmative investments and attachments—that is, that the settler is made as a settler by violence, that the settler did not exist as such before violence, and that he cannot exist as such without it (I use this pronoun advisedly, as both the settler-colonial and the household orders Kotef explores have crucially gendered implications, a point she aptly emphasises). That the Israeli home and, by extension, homeland are premised on violence, and that the settlers have material interests that are inherent to colonization, we knew, but that they also have a deep-seated emotional attachment to the