The settler colonial dilemma: Maya Zebdawi, ‘Zionism in Disarray: An Interrupted Continuum’, Kohl, 10 No. 1, 2024 | settler colonial studies blog

The settler colonial dilemma: Maya Zebdawi, ‘Zionism in Disarray: An Interrupted Continuum’, Kohl, 10 No. 1, 2024

15Jul25

Excerpt: The struggle to erase settler consciousness within a settler colonial project is also the struggle to build a nationalist imagination that is hyphenated: anchored in national identity while simultaneously dependent on transnational infrastructures of power. Both the Israeli citizen and the settler live a double existence, as national subjects loyal to the state, and as cosmopolitan actors embedded in global systems. This hyphenation is not incidental; it is essential for the survival of the settler colony against the ongoing militant resistance of the indigenous population. For Israel, this tension points toward two possible futures: either the eradication of the unifying antagonist (the Palestinian), or the dismantling of the settler condition itself through the creation of a sovereign Palestinian state. This is why belonging to the state of Israel is marked by a fundamental contradiction: the demand for rooted national belonging collides with the necessity of sustaining a transnational identity. It is within this contradiction that post-Zionism emerges, grappling with the unresolved question of how to mend the split between national loyalty and global dependence. Post-Zionism does not offer a singular solution to this crisis; instead, it is fragmented into multiple strategies, each attempting to negotiate the contradiction in different ways. Some versions lean toward neoliberal globalization, seeking to dissolve national tensions into market cosmopolitanism. Others turn inward, reimagining Jewish identity through cultural critique or diasporic pluralism, loosening the settler state’s exclusive territorial claims. Yet, each of these strategies remains haunted by the same structural dilemma: how to sustain a national project whose infrastructural and material survival depends precisely on transcending its own nationalist foundations. The settler identity has to be resolved to emancipate the settler colony from its structural nature into the modern nation state. The family is where the imaginary (keeping Anderson’s imagined communities in mind) travels, and the “woman” serves to homogenize the settler society in front of the so-called “hand of terror.” To echo Jie-Hyun Lim’s “victimhood nationalism” (2014), gender is added to the matrix of epistemic consciousness. The modus operandi of victimhood nationalism in Israel shows a linguistic and historical (narrative) consumption of victimhood on a gendered basis. Once the victims are gendered, they become a call for collective union in order to reimagine militarist functionality. The woman victim is the epistemological binary of collective guilt and innocence; she is where Zionism resuscitates victimhood as a historical culture of self-confrontation. She is the family where collective guilt and innocence become a homogeneous entity for the modern post-settler to seep through. Ultimately, the complexity of victimhood nationalism is in direct confrontation with liberation movements, its colonized subject, and the “post-colonial” nation-states surrounding it.

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