UC Santa Cruz

This dissertation explores the possibility of alternative political formations in historic Palestine by employing a Fanonian understanding of decolonization as a historical process of ‘destroying’ the settler’s position of dominance, or “settlerness.” Contemporary scholarship concerning potential political solutions to the Palestinian-Israeli impasse is most often grounded in one of two competing trends. The first is the long-dominant “peace orthodoxy,” a discourse rooted in the tradition of liberal peacemaking that, while significantly shaping scholarship, policy, and public opinion, largely strips the Palestinian-Israeli impasse of its crucial historical and political contexts. The other is the settler colonial paradigm, a framework that has become the leading analytic for critical study of Zionism, the Israeli state, and Palestinian resistance to such enterprises. While immensely helpful in understanding the nature of the Israeli settler colonial project, and therefore the impasse more generally, this approach features its own deficiencies, especially in its underwhelming engagement with the question of decolonization.

Confronting these frameworks and the analytical gaps they leave, the dissertation first examines the contemporary form of the Israeli settler colonial frontier along with the historical foundations of a specific settlerness that has developed there. It then mobilizes the aforementioned conception of decolonization to consider the role of political violence in relation to additional methods for ‘destroying’ settlerness, also accounting for an Arendtian liberal Zionism that contradictorily moralizes non-violence and attempts to delegitimize Palestinian resistance in all forms. Finally, I examine refugee return as an exercise in decolonial Indigenous resurgence and material method of ‘destroying’ Israeli settlerness, a practice that could contribute to a decolonial future in historic Palestine.