A National Project with Colonial Outcomes: A Socio-Cognitive Analysis of Israeli Settler Colonialism

In a predominantly postcolonial world, Israel sets itself apart as its domination over the Palestinian people is still underway. How is such domination possible, from a socio-cognitive point of view? Based on a structural analysis of political autobiographies published in English by Israeli Jewish politicians and activists between 1993 and 2015, this paper develops a sociology of Israeli commonsense knowledge articulating its dominant relation to ethnonational otherness. This doxic knowledge – which stresses Palestine as an exclusive Jewish property, the Nazi genocide as a recurrent threat that justifies any military response and Western civilizational belonging as a guarantee of moral superiority – fosters a relationship to the world centered on intra-Jewish solidarity that prevents any identification with Arabness. The colonial consequences of this national doxa are analyzed, contributing to the development of the sociocognitive aspect of the settler colonial paradigm.