INQUIRIES INTO ECONOMIES OF VIOLENCE IN ISRAEL/PALESTINE A DISSERTATION SUBMITTED TO THE GRADUATE DIVISION OF THE UNIVERSITY OF HAWAI‘I AT MĀNOA IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE OF DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY IN POLITICAL SCIENCE DECEMBER 2016 By François-Xavier Plasse-Couture Dissertation committee 1. Michael J. Shapiro, chairperson 2. Kathy Ferguson 3. Jairus Grove 4. Samson Okoth Opondo 5. Laura Lyons Keywords: Israel, Palestine, violence, race, settler colonialism, biopolitics To Anouk, Romy, Mimi, and Laurence, generous, intelligent, unique and loving women who thought me the most and have always been with me, even in difficult times. You are my inspiration. ii Acknowledgements I would like to thank the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC) for the financial support that made this research possible. Additionally, I want to thank my supervisor and true friend Michael J. Shapiro for his patience, dedication, generosity, support, numerous and precious advices, his friendship, for nurturing such a young and inspiring scholarly open mind and be such a great inspiration. I am grateful to Samson Opondo for his time and generosity, for his wise comments, suggestions, discussions and encouragements on the various projects’ steps, from the proposal to the submission. I am thankful to Jairus Grove, Kathy Ferguson, and Laura Lyons for their useful and constructive comments on the various steps that lead to completion of this dissertation. I am also indebted to Philippe Beaulieu-Brossard, Samuel Vaillancourt, Joan Deas, David Grondin, Ben Schrader, Breanne Gallagher, Katie Brennan, Sharain Naylor, Rex Troumbley, Julia Guimaraes, Akta Kaushal, Noah Viernes, Nicole Grove, John Sweeney, Simon Hogue, Tani Sebro, Jimmy Weir, Yair Geva, Shiri Hornik, Amit Friedman, Avner Peled for their friendship, support, useful comments, suggestions, and generous help at various stages of the project be it during a seminar, a conference, or around a pint. My most profound debt of gratitude goes to my parents, Micheline Plasse and Norman Couture, for their dedicated care and support during my entire education, wandering and journeys of contemplation. I dedicate this project to Anouk, Romy, Mimi, and Laurence whose support, courage, strength, love and care remain my inspiration for this dissertation, for becoming a better son, husband, father, men, and for all the projects and becomings to come. iii Abstract This dissertation examines the different regimes and economies of violence producing the settler colonial present in Israel/Palestine. That is, by theorizing ‘society’ as the effect of warlike relations whereby particular tactics and strategies are employed as a way of organizing and policing forms of life necessary for the continuation of a particular European/Western settler colonial body politic and its actualization in the state-form (statization), this thesis aims at pluralizing the sites of political violence and resistance. It argues that the so-called “Israeli- Palestinian conflict” is in fact the effect of Israel’s and European societies’ gendered, racial, and settler colonial politics as the continuation of war by other means. To do so, the thesis explores the culturally specific processes of social identification through various institutions, dispositifs, and practices that allow certain representations of Israeliness and Jewishness in general to become dominant while disqualifying and policing others. More specifically, it examines the intrications between discourses on the Modern Jewish self, racial and colonial histories/rationalities, and Jewish modes of self-writing that emerge together with/against the modes of socialization and production of the “self” and “other(s)”. iv Tables of Content Acknowledgements ...................................................................................................................... iii Abstract ......................................................................................................................................... iv Tables of Content .......................................................................................................................... v List of Figures .............................................................................................................................. vii Dissertation Introduction ............................................................................................................. 1 Introduction ............................................................................................................................................. 1 Subjectivity, Violence, Modernity: A Theoretical Framework .......................................................... 5 Methodology: or the Intuition of Doing Away with Method ............................................................ 16 Foucault and Genealogy .................................................................................................................... 17 Chapters Outline ................................................................................................................................... 22 Chapter 1: From European Estrangement to Settlerness: A Brief Genealogy of the Sabra 25 Introduction ........................................................................................................................................... 25 The Sabra .............................................................................................................................................. 32 Colonial Desire: Enlightenment, Imperialism, Reform Judaism ..................................................... 36 Imperialism and Superfluity ................................................................................................................ 45 The Birth of Zionism: Nationalism and Settler Colonialism ............................................................ 48 On Settlerness ........................................................................................................................................ 51 Planting the Sabra Seeds in Palestine: Pioneers and the Yishuv ...................................................... 54 Frontiersmen: Sabra Aesthetics and the Aesthetics of the Land ..................................................... 57 The Sabra in Contemporary Israel and Zionist Cultural Governance ........................................... 64 Conclusion ............................................................................................................................................. 68 Chapter 2: The Barracked Jewish Body, Shmoks, and Modernity’s Phallus ....................... 71 Introduction ........................................................................................................................................... 71 A (Very) Short Genealogy of the Jewish Body: Between European Estrangement and Self- Fashioning ............................................................................................................................................. 75 Rejuvenating the Jews’ “Shmok” to its Phallic Status ...................................................................... 85 The “Chosen Body”: The Sabra and the Policing of the Bio/Necro-political Boundaries in Contemporary Israel ............................................................................................................................ 91 Eugenic Anxieties ............................................................................................................................... 92 Military Grade Incitement ................................................................................................................ 102 Conclusion ........................................................................................................................................... 105 Chapter 3: Pornotroping and the Bio/Necropolitics of Israel’s Racial Libidinal Violence 109 Introduction: Biopower, Necropolitics, and Pornotroping ............................................................. 109 Pornotroping: Expenditure, Transgression, and Sovereignty ........................................................ 112 War, the Gendering, and Ungendering of Bodies ............................................................................ 116 Gendered Bodies .............................................................................................................................. 116 Ungendered Palestinian/Arab/Terrorist Flesh ................................................................................ 125 Conclusion: Eroticism and Life Beyond Sovereignty ...................................................................... 140 Chapter 4: Effective Abandonment: The Neoliberal Economy of Violence in Israel and the Occupied Territories ................................................................................................................. 146 Introduction ......................................................................................................................................... 146 v Biopolitics, Race and Sovereignty in Israel/Palestine ...................................................................... 153 Biopolitics , Neoliberalism and Security ........................................................................................... 155 Abandonment and Neoliberalism ...................................................................................................... 159