Settler colonial studies goes mainstream: Yannick Giovanni Marshall, ‘Israel’s American dream: Settler white supremacy everywhere shares one dream’, Al Jazeera, 09/07/24 | settler colonial studies blog

Settler colonial studies goes mainstream: Yannick Giovanni Marshall, ‘Israel’s American dream: Settler white supremacy everywhere shares one dream’, Al Jazeera, 09/07/24

10Jul24

Excerpt: The settler colonists’ dream for Palestine is its Americanisation. Their dream is to achieve the American dream. This dream is not suburban white picket fences and golden retrievers catching frisbees in the back yard. It is not of leafy socialist kibbutzim and a haven from murderous European anti-Semitism. It is the dream of the elimination of the natives. And as the native is never fully eliminated, settler colonialism must work out an intricately maintained, collective hallucination about the land. Imposing a new language, renaming beloved places and expelling the populations who cling on to them and still speak their names. Settler colonialism is the permanent cascade of delusions over indigenous land. A papier-mache castle built on homes wrested away, fortified and patrolled by genocidaires who oblige all, using napalm or ideology, to accept the occupation as a “country”, that is, a permanent structure that shall not be moved. The dream of settler colonialism in Palestine, as is the dream of settler colonialism in every place it invades, is to rid the natives of their claims and where feasible rid the land of the natives itself. It is the dream of replacement, in fits and starts, of indigenity with whiteness. This, in fact, is how the white supremacist’s “theory” of the “great replacement” should be read – as a projection of settler fantasy rebounded as settler anxiety.

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