Threatened? Elian Weizman, ‘Thresholds of Threat: Processes of Criminalisation and Repression in the Israeli Settler State’, in Anna Di Ronco, Rossella Selmini (eds), Criminalization of Dissent in Times of Crisis, Palgrave, 2024, pp 333-355 | settler colonial studies blog

Threatened? Elian Weizman, ‘Thresholds of Threat: Processes of Criminalisation and Repression in the Israeli Settler State’, in Anna Di Ronco, Rossella Selmini (eds), Criminalization of Dissent in Times of Crisis, Palgrave, 2024, pp 333-355

29Dec24

Abstract: This chapter investigates processes of criminalisation and repression of dissident political activism of Israel’s citizens, both Palestinians and Jews, given the state’s particular political formation as a ‘liberal’ settler state. I argue that the operational logic of the settler state that guarantees the rights and privileges of the Jewish citizenry dictates the strategies used to tolerate, contain, limit or crush dissent altogether. This depends on the idea of threat that—for the settler state—is anyways always grounded in racial hierarchies. By unravelling the shifting threshold of threats, state vulnerabilities and fragility are exposed, in this way allowing us to gain a window into the precarity of such system of power as well as into the ways it can be challenged and transformed.

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