« On the racing of settler colonialism in Palestine: Shaira Vadasaria, ‘The Racial Question of Palestine and the Question of Anti-Racism in Palestine’, Journal of Palestine Studies, 2025
The settler art of anthropology: Martin Crevier, ‘Anthropology and Settler Nationalisms in the Art of Emily Carr, Irma Stern, and Margaret Preston’, The Journao of Imperial and Commonwealth History, 2025 »

Capitalising on settler colonialism in Palestine: Amir Reicher, ‘The settler-colonial ethical outlook in the West Bank settlement project: Or, how a settler-colony fell apart when money entered the frontier’, HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory, 15, 1, 2025, pp. 146-160

29Apr25

Abstract: Applying an anthropology of ethics approach to the study of settler-colonialism, this article discloses the settler-colonial ethical outlook that animates the most activist circles in West Bank settlement society. By “settler-colonial ethical outlook” I mean the set of proper and improper motivations for appropriating land (according to the settlers). Such an analysis reveals how in the West Bank settlement project, making a profit from the land is taboo—a taboo that, against the backdrop of the rise in land value, came to haunt a community of settlers and eventually led to its implosion when settlers holding two distinct ethical frameworks (deontological vs. ethics of the “good life”) turned against each other. Tracing this case of “moral breakdown” within the ethical outlook of settler-colonizers, this article shows how in the case of the West Bank settlement project, for-profit imaginations and capitalism more broadly sit in an uneasy relationship with settler colonial expansion.


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