On 20 January 2017 Ibrahim Saïd defended his PhD thesis in Anthropology and Sociology of Development, entitled “Politics of Life in a Colonial Space: An Extended Case Study of East Jerusalem”. Associate Professor Grégoire Mallard presided the committee, which included Professor Riccardo Bocco, Thesis Director, and Professor Ahmad Sa’di, from Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, Israel. Israeli civil and human rights organisations critique Israel’s oppressive practices towards the Palestinians in East Jerusalem and advocate for equal rights as long as Israel occupies the City. Mr Saïd’s thesis questions the notion of rights itself, both as a discourse and as a practice that materialises on the ground within a settler colonial reality, to shed light on Israel’s settler colonial “politics of life” and its effect of rule. Interview.
Can you describe your research and its major findings?
The thesis explores Israeli settler colonial rule in East Jerusalem through the lens of “politics of life”. In other words, it attempts to answer the question, How does the materialisation of settler colonial power over life and death come into play through the “politics of life” and what is its effect of rule? Politics of life is understood here as an intervention in lives oriented around rights, development and progress. It comes to incorporate both a moral dimension, that is, the meaning and values attached to life as such, and a governmental one, that is, the institutions, rationalities and tactics of government that govern both individuals and the population, the coloniser and colonised. The argument presented in this thesis moves beyond the common statist analysis of the settler colonial power in Israel Palestine as oppressive, to portray a more complex picture of its nature and modes of operation. This form of power, the thesis argues, entraps the Palestinians in what can be described as a “death dance” with the Israeli Zionist colonial enterprise, subjugating and incorporating them into the regime structure through far more subtle means than is commonly documented.
The starting point of this research is the notion of “rights” itself. The “rights” that the Palestinians were awarded when East Jerusalem was occupied and annexed, as a field of inquiry, were hardly questioned in academic arenas, let alone problematised. On the contrary, they were largely incorporated within the larger discourse of human rights, both by academics and by human rights activists, and as such normalised and/or overlooked, at the expense of illuminating other exclusionary, discriminatory and violent aspects of the Israeli settler colonial rule and power in East Jerusalem. This narrow perspective normalises the problem space of the settler colonial present and limits, as a result, the sphere of questions and critiques possible when examining such a present.
The thesis comes to deconstruct these normalising processes by destabilising the power-knowledge-truth relationship that is predominant in Israel Palestine and that subjugates the Palestinians to the pre-existing conditions created by the settler colonial regime. It first critiques the Israeli critical literature on the nature of the State of Israel for failing to provide a comprehensive understanding of how power operates in a settler colonial society such as Israel Palestine. This literature, as a form of knowledge in itself, is subjected to the settler colonial forms of power and constituted by it. Secondly, it deconstructs the discourse on “Palestinian rights” advocated for by two Israeli civil rights and human rights organisations, the Association for Civil Rights in Israel (ACRI) and B’Tselem respectively, arguing that both ACRI and B’Tselem maintain the settler colonial structure and reinforce the hierarchies of life values between the Palestinians and the Israelis. Third, the thesis empirically examines the materialisation of Israeli settler colonial politics of life in the form of social welfare institutions in East Jerusalem.
Overall, the thesis argues that the Israeli settler colonial politics of life constitutes a form of moral economy and as such is instrumentalised by the State of Israel to claim a higher moral ground compared to the Palestinian Authority and other Arab regimes in the region and to assert its democratic values. This moral discourse, as a form of power, shapes the relationship between the Palestinians and the regime,. Building on this observation, the thesis further problematises the relationship between the Palestinians and the Zionist regime. In doing so, it moves beyond the notion of steadfastness that has thus far characterised this relationship to explore what is described as the “ideologies of collusion”, which, as product of the settler colonial regime politics of life, deepen the Palestinian predicament with the regime.
How did you come to study Israeli settler colonial rule?
The questions that I raise in the thesis are mainly driven by my personal experience, having been born and raised in the region. The violence has always been there, it is an integral part of the reality experienced by the Palestinians in their relationship with the regime. Palestinian residents of Jerusalem and Palestinian citizens of Israel, however, as I have noticed, experience another form of encounter with the regime and its institutions, one that has been largely overlooked. I was not so interested in the spectacle of violence as in the normalising processes, the “invisible” forms of power that subjugate the Palestinians and govern their conduct to achieve similar ends.
Do you hope that your research will somehow benefit the Palestinians?
This thesis has modestly attempted to contribute to the academic literature on Israel Palestine by describing the complexities of the settler colonial matrix of control, beyond its sovereign power. It is also an attempt to open new spaces to understand the Palestinians’ relationship with the regime, and to contribute to the internal Palestinian debates on the nature of their engagement with the regime and its institutions.
How will you remember your doctoral experience?
It was certainly an enriching experience, both personally and academically. For my first year I was a Swiss Confederation Excellence Scholarship holder, which allowed me to kick-start my PhD in the most comfortable way and focus on exploring my research project. For the next three years I was a teaching assistant at both the Department of Anthropology and Sociology of Development and the Interdisciplinary Masters in Development Studies and International Affairs of the Graduate Institute. The research project itself, the fieldwork and the writing process, was a personal and intellectual journey. The academic freedom and support I was granted to explore such a politically charged topic is also well worth praising.
Full citation of the PhD thesis: Saïd, Ibrahim. “Politics of Life in a Colonial Space: An Extended Case Study of East Jerusalem”. PhD thesis, Graduate Institute of International and Development Studies, 2017.