« The settler local state and its representation: Karen Bird, Abbey Forbes, Gloria Liu, Maïa Rousseau, ‘Talk matters: local council debates over electoral reform for Indigenous representation in Canada and New Zealand’, Commonwealth Journal of Local Governance, 30, 2025
Indigenising Argentina’s settler history: Robert Christensen, ‘Ethnohistory and Indigenous People on Argentina’s Southern Frontier: Pampas-Patagonia, 1810-1885’, History Compass, 2025 »

Žižek’s settler colonialism: Jamil Khader, ‘Universalizing Capital, Foreclosing Necro-Imperialism: Žižek’s Liberal-Zionist Response to the Gaza Genocide’, Middle East Critique, 2026

05Jan26

Abstract: This article offers an ideological critique of Slavoj Žižek’s recent interventions on the Gaza genocide, beginning with his October 2023 Project Syndicate article. It argues that by appropriating the post-Oslo liberal-Zionist position he once criticized, Žižek forecloses the real antagonism – necro-imperialist Zionist settler colonialism – and recodes it as a tragedy of mutual victimhood within the universal logic of global capitalism. At the same time, he re-integrates this antagonism into his symbolic universe through mythic, geographical, and ethical disavowal strategies. Consequently, Žižek reframes the Gaza genocide and Israeli war crimes as an ethical impasse grounded in David Ben-Gurion’s notion of an unbridgeable ‘abyss’ between Zionist and Palestinian claims to Palestine. This culminates in a ‘pragmatist realist’ politics of hope that imagines solidarity between 1948 Palestinians and Israeli Jews through their ‘weird similarities’, without confronting how Zionist colonialism structurally precludes working-class solidarity. The article concludes by asking whether Žižek’s Hegelian notion of the universal singular can still generate new conditions of intelligibility for Palestinian liberation in the necro-imperial world.


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