Becoming Anti-Zionist: A Feminist Shaking off of Settler Colonial Violence

Accounts of Jewish-Israeli anti-Zionists over the last two decades have shown that entering the anti-Zionist political margins is bound up with a radical and revolutionary process of (trans)formation of consciousness. What makes anti-Zionism a radical position is its understanding of Israeli state violence as structural to political Zionism. Anti-Zionism thus takes political Zionism as the root of violence in Palestine as settler colonial. This article contributes to the compelling studies of anti-Zionist political activism by exploring how Jewish Israelis adopt anti-Zionism through the reading of radical feminist theories. Through the analysis of the subjectivities of settlers who have broken with Zionism during the decade that followed the Second Palestinian Intifada, the article engages in conversation with Sara Ahmed’s work on feminist becoming to examine the (trans)formative processes of first unbecoming Zionist and then becoming anti-Zionist. This article shows that for a small minority of Jewish-Israeli anti-Zionists, the Second Palestinian Intifada, and the possibility to join Palestinians in their process of shaking off settler colonial violence, was an event that allowed making life livable by shaking off embodied settler violence. Theorizing the settler from precise (dis)orientations is thus not merely part of an academic commitment, but also a political path and moral obligation to engage in a critical and radical understanding of the historicity of my own social formation, as settler colonial ab initio.