Race and surveillance in the settler colony: the case of Israeli rule over Palestine

Abstract

This article begins by outlining a three-pronged critical theory of the state of Israel as, following Giorgio Agamben, a state of exception, following David Theo Goldberg, a racial state, and, following Patrick Wolfe, a settler colony. Elia Zureik’s work on the role of surveillance used by the state of Israel in controlling the Palestinians both in Israel proper and in the territory occupied by Israel in 1967 is then outlined. Since theories of exception and settler colonialism often fail to specifically foreground race, the paper continues by following African American theorist Alexander Weheliye who critiques westocentric work on exception and biopolitics as not foregrounding race, placing race front and centre in this analysis of Israel’s war against the Palestinians. Following Zureik’s work on the centrality of surveillance to Israel’s racialized settler-colonial control of Palestine and its citizens, occupied and exiled populations and Agamben’s insistence that the line separating citizens and non-citizens is very thin indeed (2008), the article focuses on the extension of strategies of surveillance to Israel’s critics, including Israeli Jews, international critics and diaspora Jewish people. In conclusion, the article focuses on Israel’s highly funded surveillance campaign against supporters of the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions campaign, to demonstrate the crucial role played by discourses of security and practices of information gathering and harassment in maintaining what Patrick Wolfe has termed the Israeli settler colony’s “logic of elimination”, which, as he argued in his last book, is highly racialized. This paper is published as part of a collection on racism in counter-terrorism and surveillance discourse.