Contemporary Israel/Palestine
Shourideh C. Molavi
The Oxford Handbook of Contemporary Middle-Eastern and North African History, 2018
This chapter provides an intellectual and political guide to further our understanding of the ongoing Israel/Palestine conflict and how power, violence, exclusion, and the law shape its various transformations and contemporary realities. Rather than fully covering the assemblage of historical and current policies and practices that make up the conflict, this chapter outlines major theoretical and legal tenets and political starting-points that any serious and honest scholar or observer of Israel/Palestine might consider. Placing together an emphasis on Jewish ethnic privilege, demographic dominance, and a geographic continuity of exclusion, this chapter examines contemporary Israel/Palestine as a Zionist incorporation regime. Here relations and categories of inclusion and exclusion are shaped by a settler-colonial Zionist ideology that work in conjunction, intersect, and fuel one another. Together, they shape the racialized contours of a unitary Zionist incorporation regime that exposes all Palestinian Arabs, as a non-Jewish indigenous population, to a settler-colonial exclusion regardless of their particular legal and political status.