Indigenous bodies are shaped by settler colonialism (this is why resistance is invincible): Rami Salameh, ‘Palestinian anti-colonial violence and conditions of non-being’, Race & Class, 2026 | settler colonial studies blog

Indigenous bodies are shaped by settler colonialism (this is why resistance is invincible): Rami Salameh, ‘Palestinian anti-colonial violence and conditions of non-being’, Race & Class, 2026

21Oct26

6Abstract: This article examines Palestinian anti-colonial violence from within the lived experience of colonisation, starting not with the act itself, but from the oppressive spaces that have already formed the colonised perception of being-in-the-world. Unlike juridical, liberal and security-centred approaches, it starts from how the Palestinian body has been produced as conditionally recognisable, by drawing on Fanon, Palestinian studies, settler-colonial theory and critical phenomenology. Checkpoints, walls, starvation, forced displacement and the destruction of liveable infrastructures are inscribed on the body, shaping everything from space and time to grief and desire. Gaza is neither an exception nor a turning point, but reveals, in concentrated form, an eliminatory logic that has structured colonisation since the Nakba in 1948. The author argues that spatial control and the destruction of the conditions of life are not successive stages but entangled registers of a single project in which Palestinians are rendered hyper-visible to colonial power as bodies to be counted, monitored, displaced or killed, while denied the authority to appear as world-making subjects. The question that remains – for debates on violence, decolonisation, settler colonialism and political ontology alike – is how a people can inhabit a world that attacks the very conditions of their being.

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