Palestine/Israel and State Criminality: Exception, Settler Colonialism and Racialization

Abstract

This article critically engages with Israel's settler-colonial racial regime in Palestine as an Agambenian state of exception. The first part reiterates the author's argument that the Israeli state extends its laws to rule occupied and besieged Palestine while excluding itself and its Jewish citizen-colonists from legal instruments of oppression, occupation and siege. Positioning itself above and outside domestic and international law as far as Palestinian citizens and occupied and besieged subjects are concerned, Israel is theorized as a textbook example of state of exception, racial state and settler colony. The second part follows Weheliye in placing race front and centre in theorizing political violence as a socio-political process of differentiation and hierarchization that differentiates between the human, the not-quite-human and the non-human, employed by the State of Israel in dehumanizing and racializing Palestinian citizens, occupied and besieged subjects.