Settler Nostalgia: Colonizing Temporalities and the Genre of Coexistence

Abstract:For Jewish Israelis in the West Bank settlement of Alfei Menashe, nostalgia for the early years of settlement entails a fantasy of coexistence with Palestinians. This fantasy responds to contemporary peacemaking discourses, reimagining the role of settlement from a practice engendering conflict to one that is an integral part of the peacemaking project. Settler nostalgia is thus a temporal orientation with important political consequences. Scholarly debates have focused on the universalizing, modernizing temporality of settler colonialism, but neither this nor the state-centered historicity of hegemonic accounts of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict may be the only or even the most relevant temporal frames for contemporary Zionist settlement in the West Bank of Palestine. This article examines settler temporal strategies as a crucial part of how one settlement has not only survived but also has grown and flourished in the nearly forty years since its founding.