Elite and popular contradictions in security coordination: overcoming the binary distinction of the Israeli coloniser and the colonised Palestinian

Abstract

Settler colonial theory has made a hugely significant contribution to the theorisation of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict, but there is a danger that its application to the specific practice of security coordination could simply render the practice as an instrument of settler colonial rule. In this article, we would like to propose the important qualification that Coordination is, in practice, deeply conflicted and subject to multiple internal pressures, which extend from elites to public opinion. In accepting that Coordination can be appropriately viewed through a settler colonial lens, we would like to argue that it can also be viewed from ‘below’, and as an object of domestic political struggle that is implicated in legitimisation processes. Coordination is therefore simultaneously renounced and retained as part of the survival strategy of assorted elite groups. In order to demonstrate this, we reference Elite theory, interviews and online materials. Moreover, internal Palestinian divides suggest that opposition is more incomplete, partial and reactive within the neoliberal and settler colonial context.