Necropolitical Debris: The Dichotomy of Life and Death

Abstract

This article examines the Nakba Bill as a site to uncover dispossession, surveillance and control over Palestinians. To begin, the article argues that the Palestinian Nakba is both a historical event in which the majority of the Palestinian nation was forced into exile, and a larger, ongoing settler colonial structure that continues to mark the everyday lives of Palestinians inside Israel, the Occupied Territories and in exile. My examination of the Nakba Bill suggests that the Bill represents a harmful weapon that operates to distinguish between a human group that has the right to commemorate its losses and a non-human group that has no right to historical memory or commemoration. The Nakba Bill carries with it the power to provoke psychological damage, as it aims at erasing Palestinian history and rejecting the right to mourn the unacknowledged and continuous injustice and abuses against the Palestinian nation. The article concludes by arguing that the Bill is a continuation of the Zionist legal history that has evicted Palestinians from their homeland, both physically and psychologically, and as such, it attempts to deny a Palestinian narrative of exile, dispossession and collective trauma.