Perugini 2014 the Moral Economy of Settler Colonialism-libre

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History o the Present: A Journal o Critical History,Vol. 4, No. 1, Spring 2014.Copyright 2014 University o Illinois Press

The Moral Economyo Settler Colonialism:

Israel and the evacuation traumaNicola Perugini

Trauma does not in itsel legitimate a political claim [ . . . ]. Trauma

does not produce entitlement [ . . . ]. In a reactive relation to trauma,

the trauma determines us unilaterally, even as we operate within its

horizon and by way o its internal logic [ . . . ]. Trauma presents us with

a specific responsibility precisely because it threatens to render us pure

victims who, by definition, cannot take responsibility for the conditions

we impose on others.

Judith Butler,Parting Ways: Jewishness and the Critique o Zionism

At the beginning o October, 2012 the Israeli newspaperJerusalem Postpub-

lished an article entitled Peace-Traumatic Stress Disorder. In it the author,

Michael Freund, diagnosed a widespread patholog among Israeli politi-

cians: a psychological disorder whose roots, according to Freund, could be

traced back to the period o the Israeli-Palestinian Oslo peace agreements(19931999), and the successive unilateral measures adopted by diferent

Israeli governments as a result o what their leading figures usually refer

to as the absence o a Palestinian partner for peace. Freund describes the

syndrome as an anxiety condition: the will o the Israeli leadership to re-

linquish the Land o Israel through unilateral stepsthe evacuation o

some o the colonies established ater the 1967 occupation o the West Bank

and the Gaza Strip. The direct target o his article is former Israeli Defense

Minister Ehud Barak who, in one o his speeches at the Israeli Institute forNational Security Studies, advocated for more Israeli unilateral action in

order to put an end to the conflict, and an end to mutual claims.In his

column, Freund accused Baraktogether with the right-wing Netanyahu-

led Israeli governmento promoting the conditions for the emergence o

what the author calls new Arab terror and fueling intra-Jewish conflict

by proposing the unilateral measure o new disengagements from some

non-strategic outposts o the West Bank: What about the 2005 unilateral


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[Israeli] pullout from Gaza [implemented by the Sharon government] and

the expulsion o the Jews from Gush Kati [the block o Israeli settlements

in Gaza evacuated in 2005], which brought Hamas to power and exposed

southern Israel to unprecedented rocket fire? [ . . . ] Israel implemented a

policy o unilateral withdrawal, and it blew up in our faces. [ . . . ] The cur-

rent government seems to be determined to recreate the trauma o forcibly

removing Jews from their homes.

From the start, the non-ironic piece defines the diference between Post-

Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) and Peace-Traumatic Stress Disorder

(PETS) as a mental health expert would when compiling a pathological in-

dex: Whereas most o those who sufer from stress disorders seek to avoidany reminders o the original ordeal, victims o PETS ironically follow a

diferent path. Indeed they seem compelled to embrace the trauma, and

even to relive it.The author concludes his description o the patholog by

asserting that the only therapy against this chronic evacuation syndrome

consists in reinforcing the Israeli hold on every part o Greater Israel and

substantially pleading for more conquest o territory and the further rein-

forcement o colonial sovereignty.

What Freund describes as a Jewish will to expel a Jewish population is an

idea that has been mobilized by many Israeli social and political actors on

the occasion o the evacuations o Jewish settlements. The efort to classify

this sort o immoral patholog has to be understood as part o a pecu-

liar form that the utilization o the language o trauma has taken within the

Israeli-Palestinian situation in relation to the question o the settlements

evacuation and decolonization. During the last two decades, several Israeli

scholars have focused on how political violence has been interpreted re-

peatedly through the lens o trauma and how political dynamics have oten

been filled with clinical meaningson the occasion o the various Israeli

wars against its neighbors; with the progressive emergence o the figure o

the traumatized soldiers; and especially during and ater the violence o

the Second Intifada.But the role o the politics o trauma and its inherent

regime o meaning in relation to central questions within the Israeli-Pales-

tinian settler colonial situationsuch as the politics o settling, patterns o

evacuation, and territorial redeploymentall remained widely unexplored. This tension between deployment o trauma and dispossessionat least

in the way I analyze it in this articleis oten disavowed in the debate on

Israel-Palestine. And this is especially true when it comes to the politics

Israel and the Evacuation Trauma


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o the

o settling, which is oten reduced to saturated images o settler violence

against the Palestinians in the West Bank, or to a caricatural image o the

settler as an illiberal religious fundamentalist.This caricatured image

puts all responsibility on the settlers themselves, thus denying or cover-

ing over the role played by the states oficial policy o expansion through

settlementa policy that started with the creation o the state and was

systematically and indiscriminately fostered, through diferent plans and

techniques o colonization, by all the Israeli governments. To be sure, I do

not aim to deny the intrinsic relationship between the politics o settling and

settler practices and violence. Rather, I want to analyze a wider apparatus

o meaning produced during the evacuations o Jewish settlements, an ap-paratus that is informed by the production o two intertwined socio-political

constructs: trauma and morality.

The instances o the dismantling o Jewish colonies are for the settler body

politic moments o political instability in which the material infrastructures

and the afective foundation o the settler colonial koin seem to be at risk. A

certain kind o familiar universe o experience seemsfrom a settler per-

spectiveto be under threat. In fact, on these occasions, the settler system

o meanings enters a state o vertigo which has to do with the underlying

premises o the colony: it is the vertigo o the potential return o the colonized

Palestinian in a physical, cognitive and mental space from which he or she

was erased as well as the potential loss o what has been acquired through

conquest, expulsion and dispossession. Many diferent interpretations and

experiences o these vertiginous events may potentially emerge within a

settler colonial polity, but what is striking in the case o the two main mo-

ments o evacuation in the history o Israelthe state-orchestrated 1982

disengagement from Sinai, and the 2005 withdrawal from the Gaza Strip

and some settlements o the West Bankis the crystallization, during both

evacuation events, o a common sense understanding translated into the

vocabulary o a nationally shared trauma.

How does this afective glue operate in the framework o settler colo-

nialism?What kinds o epistemic and political forces converge to produce

settler subjects as traumatized victims and to call upon the nation to rec-

ognize the trauma o the evacuated settlers? How does it come about thatan act like un-settling, that might be considered one o reparation for the

Palestinians ater decades o dispossession by military occupation and con-

struction o civilian structures o colonization, could instead be interpreted


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and experienced by various members o the settler colonial polity as one o

trauma, victimization and Jewish dispossession?How does trauma become

a moral frame in the sense in which this notion is articulated by Judith

Butler, enabling a series o operations o power whose ultimate efect is the

re-legitimation o a regime o violence and displacement o the native?

I propose to answer these questions by exploring the specific ways in

which diferent Israeli social actors have relied upon a series o clinical

terms and tropes with which the Israeli public has become quite familiar

to mobilize a set o moral feelings and values. The political valence o this

mobilization efectively reproduces both the Jewish settler colonial morality

and the polity. I argue that the evacuations are relatively unexplored mo-ments in which a certain kind o settler colonial ethos emerges, one in which

a particular political utilization o trauma becomes clearly manifest. Indeed,

defining and experiencing the evacuations (the potential end o the colony)

as traumatic and thus morally illegitimate corresponds to reafirming the

legitimacy o the entire colonization enterprise and re-tracing the moral-

political limits o a settler community based since 1948 on the dispossession

o the Palestinians. In this moral economy, to frame the evacuation o the

colonies as an act lacking o morality and producing trauma is to afirm the

moral value o settler colonialism.

This re-legitimization takes place through a twofold utilization o the

register o traumaa socio-political register that has a global dimension,

as many o the cases described by Didier Fassin and Richard Rechtman in

Empire o Traumashowin a way that allows the perpetrators o violence

(the traumatized settler) to become victims and thus to find legitimiza-

tion for their activities o dispossession.The first utilization involves de-

historicization: trauma and victimhood are claimed by erasing the fact that

the settlers initially dispossessed the Palestianians. Then it is as i the land

they settled was their own from the beginning. The second usage consists in

the transformation o the clinical register o trauma into a moral one, whose

ultimate aim is the legitimization o settling as an act o justice, and the iden-

tification o certain acts o un-settling with injustice. We could define this

twofold utilization o the register o trauma in the context o Palestine/Israel

as the moral economy o settler colonialismthe social production, mobilizationand circulation o moral values and norms politically functional to the perpetuation o

settler colonial dispossession. Here the trauma discourse acquires three main

functions: it is describes an experience o sufering; it erases the historical



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o the

conditions that led to that experience; and it fuels a twofold moral claim

about the justness o the colony and the un-justness o its end.

In his proposition to revisit the notion o moral economy and to develop

an anthropolog o the relationship between morality and politics, Didier

Fassin stresses the heuristic relevance o those eforts o investigation that

try to understand the political valence o the articulation, mobilization, and

socio-political organization around the deployment o moral feelings and

values.In the case o the Israeli evacuations o Jewish settlements, this

notion is relevant both to the analysis o the dynamics o the evacuations

and to the theorization o their implications as a way o understanding the

broader settler colonial situation o Palestine/Israel. Analytically, Fassinsformulation reveals the political implications o the deployment o trauma

by the various actors involved in the evacuations. Living and interpreting

the experience o the evacuation as a trauma inscribed in a linear sequence

o Jewish expulsion and victimization can be understoodin light o the

fact that the evacuations are ontologically related to an original dispos-

session o the nativeas a specific moral and political history that relies

upon a trauma discourse to erase the moment o inception and its historical

repetition. Hence, the moral economy I focus on corresponds to a mecha-

nism o constructing a particular settler colonial political subjectivity that

is based on the disavowal o native presence. This specific configuration

o trauma produces a shared understanding or an afective gluea belie

that the evacuations are a violation o the fundamental values and norms

constituting the Jewish-Israeli settler colonial sel and body politic.

From a theoretical point o view, the notion o moral economy also seems

appropriate for grasping another fundamental specificity o the political op-

eration displayed during the evacuations. In fact, my central argument here is

that what takes place during the evacuations is a form o moral inversion. It is

a moment in which what would be commonly understood within the frame-

work o a moral economy o political reparation (the recognition o a practice

o colonial dispossession) instead takes on the contours o an experience o

victimhood: a traumatization o the national settler community and a violation

o what Kareem Rabie and I defined as the human right to the colonythe

claim to the right to colonize based on the argument that preventing coloniza-tion would correspond to a violation o the human rights o the settlers.

In the moral economy that I investigate, the potential end o domination

is experienced and interpreted fundamentally as the beginning o a regime


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o oppression against the Jewish settler polity. The evacuations in 1982 from

Sinai and in 2005 from Gaza are two crucial moments in the emergence o

this political deployment o inverted moral values. In the moral economy o

settler colonialism, the dispossessor or the settler-evacuee is represented as

the dispossessed victim and the potential return o the expelled native Pales-

tinian becomes an experience o settler national trauma. The moral inversion

in which this economy is rooted does not merely legitimate the original act

o settler dispossession; it also provides legitimacy for a renewed policy o

colonization. In a context in which the ideological, normative, and practical

axioms o settler colonialism are not a problem o history but rather a con-

temporary presence, the evacuation trauma does not merely help erase theNakbathe systematic and organized expulsion o hundreds o thousand o

Palestinians in 1948 and the stratification o injustice the Palestinians experi-

enced during the following decades o the last century. More fundamentally,

the discourse o trauma consolidates the existing settler colonial state and

its expansion. During the evacuations, therefore, and in these moments o

decolonization manque, trauma becomes a discourse by which settler colo-

nialism is re-legitimated, reproduced, and ultimately re-enacted.

Painful concessions and the price o peace

Land, particularly colonized territory, occupies a singular place in the Israeli/

Palestinian debates, and maintains a special relationship to the moral econo-

mies o settler colonialism. In 1982, ater the Yom Kippur War with Egpt

and the subsequent peace agreement, Israel was forced for the first time in its

history to prepare and implement the evacuation o its Sinai settlementsa

move that was presented by the leadership to the Israeli public as a costly

one, the price o peace. Since then, a discursive tension has dominated the

Israeli debate on evacuations and territorial pullouts: the cost o peace

and the painful concessions represent the degrees o trauma involved in

conceding occupied territory in the hopes o achieving better neighborly

relations. Israeli hawks and doves have historically agreed together that

any form o peace, any form o agreement implies something painful and

traumatic for the Jewish population o Israel and for Jews at large. What is

radically at stake in this alchemy o territory and painful peace is an evalua-tion o the correct balance between territory and painhow much territory

can or cannot be relinquished in order to minimize the pain for the Israeli

public. Here the notion o evaluationhas to be taken in its twofold dimension:



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o the

it identifies both a quantitative-territorial and a moral value, one in which

the spheres o geopolitical-cartography and settler morality intermingle.

The semantic sphere o painful concession relates to a tension that is

articulated, ultimately, in the areas o sufering and morality. In the difer-

ent stages o negotiations with the Palestinians and the Arab neighbors, the

notion o painful concessions is evoked by the Israeli negotiators revealing

a tension between land/territory and values, between a settler colonial con-

ception o sovereignty and a specific form o articulating the value o peace.

One article on the Sinai evacuation defines this tension as an anxiety over

the reversibility o Zionismthe potential end o the settler project.

Despite the fact that the Israeli public, as some journalists and punditshave suggested, has presumably overcome the trauma o Yamit, the main

Sinai settlement evacuated in 1982, the disengagement from and physical

destruction o the settlements have remained impressed in the memory o

some Israelis as a trauma.Even today there are some journalists, mem-

bers o the settler movement, and Sinai evacueeswho are still depicted as

pioneers who transformed the desert into a lost paradisewho continue

to refer to the 1982 evacuation as an open wound.

In 2012, the Knesset dedicated a ceremony to the thirtieth anniversary o

the evacuation. At the event, Knesset Speaker Reuven Rivlin described the

evacuation as a persisting trauma: Today too, 30 years ater the evacua-

tion o the Sinai region, the memories and sights make our hearts tremble.

The State o Israel needs to rectify the injustice o having forgotten you. It

needs to remember you as the ones who paid the price o peaceand Israels

commitment to democracy.The register o trauma allows the evacua-

tion to be described as a presumed proo o the democratic nature o the

state and more fundamentally as an open woundin this sense, the moral

economy o trauma subsumes a sphere o judgment on and an assertion o

the democratic history o the polity, erasing its settler colonial nature.The

evacuation is still remembered as a painful historical injustice.

The science o the evacuation trauma

Both the discourse on the trauma o Yamit and the price o peace have

involved diverse scholars from the Israeli academic community, some owhom directly took part in the evacuation operations. Significantly, the Si-

nai evacuation was the first occasion where diferent specialists attempted

to analyze the first government-led removal in Israeli history o part o the


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settler population. In 1987, theJournal o Applied Behavioral Sciencededicated

an entire issue to the evacuation, publishing the articles o various Israeli

scholars including sociologists, social anthropologists, political scientists,

geographers, clinical psychologists and psychiatrists. The authors analyzed

the disengagement under a title that evoked the moral dimension o the

dismantlement o the settlements: The Price o Peace: The Removal o the

Israeli Settlements in Sinai.

Several contributors to the special issuefrom diferent political back-

grounds and employing diverse but mainly behavioral approachesfocused

on the traumatic components o the evacuation, in what can be considered

the first attempt to examine scientifically the evacuation trauma. Almostall the contributors, to varying degrees, related their understanding o the

evacuation from Sinai to some kind o experience o psychological sufering.

Sociologist Baruch Kimmerling identified the evacuation with the emergence

o a social and political condition o anomiea clash o values, halfway

between the sociological and the psychological versions o this notion.Ge-

ographer Nurit Kliot defined the disengagement as geo-cultural trauma,

describing the evacuee as an alienated person who witnessed the burial o

the garden.In this image the dismantled garden in the colony becomes a

living being that is buried, in a further articulation o the process through

which the register o psychological sufering overlaps with possession o

the land. Kalman Benyamini, a professor o clinical psycholog, analyzed the

psychologists behavior outside the clinicand within the new experimental

empirical context o the disengagement from Sinai. Mental health special-

ists themselves who provided care to the settlers during the evacuations are

described by Benyamini as existing in a state o disorientation during their

relie operations; the trauma o the settlers thus becomes a vicarious trauma,

and the victimhood o the group extends to those who treated them.

Echoing the rhetoric o the pioneering settlers, other authors including

professor o psychiatry Haim Dasberg and clinical psychologist Gabriel

Shefler, combined their specific approach to trauma with an alleged Israeli

psychological specificity: Israelis tend to identify with their common past

o uprooting, persecution and continuous exposure to Arab hostility. There-

fore, the typical Israeli looks for social acceptance and feelings o belongingwithin a hostile world.According to the authors, the 1977 visit o Egptian

President Anwar Sadat to the Knesset, a year before the ratification o the

peace agreement with Israel that led to the 1982 Sinai evacuation, was one



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o the

o the main pre-evacuation stressors for the settlers. The settlers responded

to this stress by starting to drain the natural resources o the region in which

they were settled before being evacuated: During the time before the evacu-

ation, they [the settlers] began to exploit intensively the restricted sources

o ground water [o the desert] so that they could increase the harvest o

out-of-season crops; they felt they had nothing to lose by doing this. Thus,

the settlers began destroying natural resources, in contrast to their original

idealistic intentions.

The two mental health specialists diagnose a peculiar form o neurosis:

the emergence o a kind o anti-natural conduct in contrast with the ideals

o development o Zionism, a unique form o neurosis, consisting in makingthe desert bloomexcessivelyin order to leave it in a condition o sufering.The

trauma o the evacuation, the price o peace, is identified by these authors

as a series o pathological behaviors in which the clinical and the moral

overlap. Neurosis, depressions and psychosomatic complaints are read as a

broader danger o interruption for the whole Zionist project, and as a crisis

in the continuity between past, present and future o the nation. It is also

through these discursive constructions, in the spaces between the clinical

and the moral, that the politics o trauma display their specific politics o

history on the occasion o the Israeli evacuations. Here clinical, moral and

political sufering are welded together.

From Sinai to Gaza

The 1982 Sinai evacuation produced many diferent public and social dis-

courses about trauma. In particular, the debate on the painful concessions,

as well as the specific ways in which scholars have recounted their experienc-

es o their involvement in an event without precedent, could be interpreted as

indicative o an experimental moment in the history o Israelone in which

multiple actors dealt with an unusual event such as the state-orchestrated

evacuation o some colonies through the lens o trauma and sufering. The

language o the politics o trauma became the shared terminolog with which

diverse social groups met, struggled, and expressed their moral positioning

and their understanding o the relationship between the past, present and

future o the polity and the state. Twenty years later, in 2005, ater the failure o the Oslo peace process

and the Second Intifada, the politics o trauma reacquired a central role in

the public debate on the evacuation from Gaza and the northern West Bank.


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Significantly, settlers read the evacuation from Gaza as a new Yamit, a new

traumatic event in a long chain o Jewish sufering. But, in a certain sense,

Gaza had already become Yamit immediately ater the evacuation from Si-

nai, well before 2005. In fact, immediately ater the 1982 Sinai evacuation,

one o the first decisions taken by the Israeli government was to approve

construction o new Israeli settlements in the Gaza Strip.

Disengagement was thus followed by re-engagement. This governmental

decision led the territorial dimension o trauma to reemerge in a new settler

colonial form: the governmentally planned colonization o Gaza provided

new territory, a new space o memorialization, in which the settlers inscribed

the memory o the trauma and the pain o the evacuation: Some [new]settlements [in Gaza] were given names attesting the desire o their resi-

dents to return to Sinai, such as Mitzpe Atzmona (Overlooking Atzmona)

or Elei Sinai (Toward Sinai). [ . . . ] The yeshiva o Yamit was moved into a

new building in Neve Dekalim, in the Gaza Strip. The new concrete building

[the Yamit Yeshiva] was constructed like a giant Star o David with one

point buried in the ground in remembrance o the destruction o the Yamit

region settlements.It is in this sense that Gaza became a new Yamit well

before 2005. The evacuation from Sinai was followed by the colonization o

new territories in the Gaza Strip (and in the West Bank), transforming parts

o the colonized territories into a memorial o the painful evacuation from

Sinai, and the un-settling o Sinai into the settling o new territories. The

displacement o the trauma o Sinai coincided with the new displacement

o the native.

The destruction o the home(land)

In 2003, Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon announced unilateral dis-

engagement from the Gaza Strip and the evacuation o 8,000 Jewish set-

tlerswhat those settlers considered the destruction o the home.New

narratives o traumawhose ultimate meaning was the representation o

the evacuation from the colony as a trauma that would result in the end o a

Jewish homelandwere triggered before, during and ater disengagement.

The disengagement plan was announced in 2003 and implemented by the

Israeli security apparatus in summer 2005. The decision to evacuate Jewishsettlers was presented by Sharon as an exit strateg from the peace process

stalemate with the Palestinians, as well as a security imperative resulting

from the impossibility o continuing to protect the small number o Jewish



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o the

Israeli settlers within the Gaza Strip, a territory populated by around 1.5

million Palestinians.

In reality, the plan was intended to redesign the broader geopolitical con-

tours o the occupation and colonization. Sara Roy has explained that the

withdrawal was the result o a decade-long project to isolate Gaza within a

wider plan to strengthen the Israeli regimes control over Palestine. It was a

tactical move undertaken during consolidation o Israeli settlement expan-

sion in the West Bank, where many o the Gaza settlers were redeployed.

Ilana Feldman described the disengagement as another step in the con-

struction o a fictional Palestinian sovereigntyan illusory sovereignty

constrained by the political, social and economic conditions imposed bythe occupation forces.

In order to grasp the foundations o the politics o trauma displayed during

and ater the Gaza disengagement, we should pay particular attention to the

colonial configuration o the regime and the political context in which these

events occurred. As Eyal Weizman has shown, the disengagement created

a type o state o architectural emergency: the architectural components o

colonization, the settlingpractices, the physical structures o settlements, and

their infrastructures were all under threat, and with them the contours o the

Israeli settler colonial subjectivity. Benjamin Netanyahu, at that time Minister

o Finance, let the Sharon government in protest over the potential scenario

o Palestinians dancing on the [evacuated Jewish] rootops o Gaza.Thus,

the evacuation took place in a state o settler colonial emergency. Depicting a

doomsday scenario for Zionism, an alarmed law expert wrote at the time: I

the status o the Gaza settlements is temporal, what prevents us from seeing

[the Israeli cities] Ashdod, Ashkelon, Ramla, Lydda, Beer-Sheva, Eilat or

Karmel as occupied territories, which would have to be evacuated eventu-

ally?In other words, the entire state o Israel was in danger.

On the ground during the evacuation procedures, the Gaza settlers pro-

duced a series o practices explicitly referencing the Holocaust. Some tat-

tooed their ID numbers on their arms, protesting against being placed in

ghettos.Many wore orange clothes and orange and yellow stars while

being evacuated; a father, in front o the cameras, carrying his daughter in

his arms, was filmed while shouting to soldiers Expel her! Expel her!

Stillothers locked themselves in their houses. Discourses and practices knitted

together into a moral economy o traumatization and victimization that

represented the evacuations as an endless repetition o the Holocaust, with


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which many o the Gaza settlers had had no direct experience. The reinscrip-

tion and reenactment o the evacuations as i they were in a relationship o

continuity with the Holocaust produced a specific sense o the enduring

quality o trauma, one that was performed in front o television cameras

and in public spaces.Indeed, this public display o continuity o trauma

constitutes the performative dimension o the moral economy I have been

describing. The memory o the original extermination is mobilized for the

Jewish nation as a way to impede the physical detachment from the infra-

structures o dispossession.

On one level, the withdrawal constituted a rearticulation o the Israeli

colonial regime in the West Bank and Gaza. But on another level, the verymateriality o the unsettling triggered a discursive mechanism in which the

procedures o unsettling acquired the form o collective trauma on a national

Jewish scale, but this time in a much more articulated shape than in Sinai.

Before, during, and ater the disengagement the settler movement added

language for this kind o traumatization: terms like expulsion, deportation,

displacement, demolition, and destruction appeared in newspapers, televi-

sion programs, magazines, websites, public discussions, and political de-

bate throughout Israel. The material dimension o this localized evacuation

helped produce images and perform scenes o trauma that were adopted as a

moral discursive framework not only by the settlers in their resistance to the

evacuation but also in widespread popular representations o the disengage-

ment in the Israeli media. All three levelspractice, public discourse, and

popular representationworked to form the fundamental texture in which

diferent Israeli social actors have inscribed their politics o trauma.

The Costs o the Evacuation

At this stage o our analysis, we have to further complicate our problema-

tization o the moral economy o the evacuations and try to understand its

twofold nature. In fact, one o the grounds on which the struggle occurs is

that o defining the good government and the bad government o the

disengagement. These terms are articulated within a broader moral eco-

nomic framework which employs the common language o the costs o the

evacuation from Gaza. At first glance, governing the disengagement may seemto involve consensus and cooperation only for those who ultimately support

the evacuation in spite o its traumatic nature and who want to take part

in a discussion on the best administrative, bureaucratic and operational



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o the

practices to implement it. This view accepts the fact that an evacuation must

take place. But, as we will see, the discussion o the good and bad govern-

ment o the disengagement also progressively involved those settlers and

non-settlers who initially objected to and boycotted the evacuation, and, at

a later stage, started to challenge the state and the actors who implemented

the evacuations, through legal action and advocacy, on the basis that the

evacuation from Gaza was badly governed.

Here, what is relevant is that the language o costsspecifically the costs

o the evacuationepitomizes a double register in the moral economy o the

evacuation: there is the monetary economic register, which administers

the material costs o the evacuation and the compensation system set upfor the evacuees by the state, and the non-monetary economic register,

which administers the trauma and the psychological efects o the evacu-

ation. These two levels can hardly be separated in our analysis, since the

struggles surrounding the costs o the evacuation and those surrounding

the trauma o the disengagement are tied to one another. Governing the

disengagement is exactly the way in which the diferent actors came together,

spoke about, or clashed over the proper or improper oikonomia o the material

and afective costs o the disengagement. I we look more carefully at what

happened in the process o administering the dynamics o evacuation and

post-evacuation, we find that the monetary economy o the disengagement

was subsumed into the broader moral economy o the evacuations and its

regime o settler colonial political morality.

The Disengagement Administration

One year before the 2005 evacuation, Prime Minister Ariel Sharon an-

nounced the creation o an ad hoc state body for the planning and admin-

istration o the disengagement. Ater the oficial announcement o the

evacuation, the prime minister and his cabinet formulated a model o man-

agement for the withdrawal, one with diferent military, administrative,

and legal implications. The administrative architecture o the evacuations

translated into the creation o the Disengagement Administration (Hebrew

acronym SELA), a governmental body temporarily charged with planning

and implementing the disengagement in coordination with the prime min-isters ofice and various Israeli ministries. The temporary administration

was responsible for two levels o planning and intervention: the first was a

monetary one involving the negotiation o compensations for material loss


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relating to the disengagement with the 1,700 settler families, along with the

private companies who, in coordination with the state, had taken part in the

colonization in depth o the Gaza Strip.The second level consisted o a

non-monetary form o aid comprised o social and psychological assistance

to settlers during the evacuation operation and their relocation in new ac-

commodations set up by the government.

From its inception, the Disengagement Administration became one o

the central areas o struggle between government and settlers. A consis-

tent percentage o the settlers refused to engage in any kind o negotia-

tion with SELA as a sign o protest. An attorney for the Legal Forum for

the Land o Israel, a right-wing Zionist NGO active in the defense o thehuman rights o the settlers, stated on the eve o the evacuation ater the

rejection by the Supreme Court o Israel o one o his petitions against

the creation o SELA: The idea was to show [the court, thus the state]

that we do not accept the legitimacy o throwing us out o our homes.

Parallel to the settler boycott against SELA, some organizations ofered

psychological support services for the evacuees. In 2004, the Israeli Social

Workers and Union o Psychologists proposed to the government a plan

o psychological assistance to the Gaza settlers. The Knesset rejected the

plan, since the settlers refused to interact directly with the government

and its disengagement mechanisms, thus refusing all forms o assistance

as sign o rejection o the evacuationper se.

Broadly speaking, the settlers reproached Prime Minister Ariel Sharon

for using the Disengagement Administration as an instrument for split-

ting the settler community and obtaining consensus for the evacuation.

Besides these political accusations, it is however interesting to note that

the claims o the settlers were grounded on monetary compensation from

the very inception o the SELA process. Indeed, from the beginning o the

evacuation planning, the destiny o the monetary mechanism devised

by the state was subsumed into a broader discourse onand o trauma.

In December 2004, the Legal Forum for the Land o Israel had already

warned the government that it should do everything in its power to see to

it that the communities stay together, wherever they are relocated. Every

significant study, especially those regarding what happened when peoplewere moved from Sinai [an explicit reference to the 1987 special issue o

theJournal o Applied Behavioral Science] indicates that keeping communities



15/26

o the

intact helps to prevent post traumatic stress disorder, which can result

in serious emotional disability.Hence, governing the disengagement

seemed to involve struggling within its very specific afective regime. The

political ecolog o the disengagement proved more complicated than a

quick and unambiguous negotiation between settlers and state on the

material costs o evacuation. What was at stake, it turned out, was a much

more complex order o morality concerning the place o the event itsel in

the Zionist conception o history.

The Costs o the Encounter

As we have seen, many settlers refused to negotiate the material price othe disengagement as a way o refusing the rules put in place to regulate

the costs o the evacuation. Given the framework o a pre-evacuation no-

contact policy, the only possible encounter between the settlers and the

state was between the tens o thousands o soldiers and the police involved

in the physical implementation o the evacuation. This encounter was a

key moment in the politics o trauma o the evacuation. The boycott o the

monetary discussion by many settlers as a sign o moral integrity paved the

way for another kind o interaction:

The nature o the encounter between the soldiers and the settlers was revealing. Be-fore the events, the soldiers received training and rationales in order to withstandthe mental stress o facing the settlers. They were to deaden their senses, or at leasttheir reactions, and absorb passively whatever logical arguments or foul languagethe settlers would throw at them. Their only response was to refer the settlers to thedecisions o the political authorities. To the annoyance and open anger o the set-tlers, their attempts to persuade their interlocutors met an impenetrable blockade,

without responding subjects on whom they could exercise their discursive strategies.In response, the settlers attempted to reindividualize the soldiers standing in fronto themthey wanted the soldiers to see themselves as being responsible for theiractions. They called specific male and female soldiers by name, alternately luringand threatening them. They sobbed to the troops that the soldiers were war criminalshiding behind anonymi like the Nazis before them.

The majority o the settlers, maintaining their line o boycott, rejected any

kind o preparation for this encounter including governmental mental health

preparations. The Israeli army, however, provided its soldiers with some mental health

training, in view o the strength needed for implementation o the evacuation


16/26

and the encounter with the settlers. The pre-evacuation mental health train-

ing consisted o a sort o moral-political preparation o the soldiers:

A month-long orientation program which included the following two main elements:(1) reviewing, discussing, and reinforcing the democratic values o as well as the legalaspects inherent in the particular political situation the country was facing; and (2)simulation exercises to anticipate every possible development in the evacuation pro-cess. The first element contributed to the legitimation o the task, which was apicalin a military context and, moreover, was to be carried out in a situation o absence oa political consensus. The second element involved analyzing and resolving conflictsolutions vis--vis a civilian population o men, women, and families with children.Exercises in various pes o behaviors and responses were carried out, including using

the right wording to try to persuade and calm the evacuees. The task demanded bothsensitivi and assertiveness.

The echo o the encounter between soldiers and settlers, and the nature o

the psychological preparation received by the soldiers and police in order to

make the settlers accept the cost o the evacuation, would occupy a relevant

position in the post-evacuation debates and struggles conducted through

the register o the politics o trauma.

In 2008, ater an investigation was conducted by a team o scholars andpsychologists sympathizing with the evacuees, a complaint was sent to the

ethics committee o the Israeli Board o Psychologists against two o the psy-

chologists who had taken part in mental health preparations including the

use o the Mental Preparations for the Disengagement Mission, the kit distributed

by the Israeli Army to its soldiers on the eve o the disengagement. Some

excerpts from the complaint submitted to the Israeli Board o Psychologists

can help us understand another important chapter in the articulation o the

politics o trauma during the Gaza disengagement: The expulsion o theJews from twenty-one settlements in the Gaza Strip and four settlements in

northern Shomron [northern West Bank], and the transformation o these

settlements into piles o destruction, was a calamity for those who were

expelled, a blow for those faithful to the return to Zion, and a national trauma

for Israel and the entire Jewish nation.As already stated, the register o the

politics o trauma is articulated by diferent actors in terms o destruction o

the homeland, a settler-national calamity. The report-complaint continues:

How was the IDF [the Israeli Army] transformed into an army o expulsion?

[ . . . ] It was done by releasing the soldiers from their conscience, by carrying



17/26

o the

out exercises in emotional disconnect, so that they would be transformed

into obedient robots.

A long series o interviews and enquiries into the nature o these prepa-

rations, combined with the analysis contained in an article entitled The

Disengagement Mission, A Look from Within, published by the two psy-

chologists who collaborated with the army in the pre-evacuation period,

resulted in an accusation o brainwashing against the army and the state

and pushed the authors o the report to the following conclusion:

The psychologists instituted a silent revolution within the army, without the knowl-edge o the soldiers and the citizens o Israel. The IDF [the army] was transformed

from a protecting fighting force into a postmodern army. [ . . . ] The IDF became anarmy which instead o concentrating and protecting the citizens o the country and

fighting the enemy centered its attention on expulsion o citizens and destroyingtheir homes. The soldiers were told that i the army did not succeed in the mission oexpulsion, the result would be tantamount to the destruction o the Third Temple.

The cost o the evacuation is depicted as traumatic for the history o the

Jewish people, and the trauma o the evacuation is imagined as a potential

dissolution o the foundations o the settler colonial citizenship. Fundamen-

tally, one o the efects o the moral economy o the evacuation is precisely

that o extending to the whole political and moral community a specific

sufering associated with the potential end o the settler colonial project.

State Word

Once we have understood the relevance o such debates and tensions for our

broader reflection on the politics o trauma, we must continue exploring the

political field o force we defined as thecosts o the evacuation

and its inherent

moral economy in relation to other dynamics that went on ater the Gaza

withdrawal. The debate and the practices related to the administration o

the evacuation progressively included other new actors, further expanding

the field o force o the costs o the evacuationfar beyond the reductionist

polarization o state versus settlers.

Immediately ater the evacuation, various Zionist Israeli NGOs and

non-governmental actors progressively entered the debate and continued

to attack the Disengagement Administration and the larger government ondiferent fronts, rearticulating their traumatic register and readapting it to

the post-evacuation setting. Some newspaper articles based on information


18/26

gathered through these non-governmental organizations reported on the

governmental mismanagement o the evacuation as follows: Mere days

before the date o evacuation, however, SELA authorities realized that the

1,000 hotel rooms they had reserved [in Israel, for the evacuees] were insuf-

ficient for the 1,700 families that were to be moved out: 2,500 were necessary.

[ . . . ] There were no government-provided social workers on the scene at

the various hotels to assist with the trauma o relocation and to give practical

logistical advice.Warning o the risk o a humanitarian disastera notion

used by some settler spokespersons already during the evacuationsome

civil society organizations, individuals, and NGOs such as the Legal Forum

for the Land o Israel andLemaan Achai(For my brothers, an NGO workingin the field o mental health) mobilized and provided various forms o assis-

tance to the evacuees. In spite o their harsh critiques o the Disengagement

Administration, these organizations coordinated with it in order to facilitate

accommodation o the evacuees in hotels, school dormitories, caravans and

tents.

Lemaan Achaidelivered immediate psychological assistance and coun-

seling to the evacuees, while also launching an emergency campaign on

their behalf. Immediately ater the evacuation, the chairperson o the NGO

launched the initiative with a critical open letter to the Israeli civil society:

9,000 Israeli citizens have become displaced persons overnight. [ . . . ] Many are stillwearing the clothes they were evicted in. [ . . . ] Friends, it is our privilege to help themcome to terms with their trauma and begin to rebuild their lives. [ . . . ] The Govern-ment Disengagement Authori (SELA) and the Statutory Welfare Services, who aretechnically responsible for the care o the evacuees, have already proven themselvesto be incapable or uninterested in providing efective care. [ . . . ] Lemaan Achai will

now use our expertise to separately provide mental health and crisis services to theevacuees o Gush Katif.

Concurrently with these advocacy initiatives, the Legal Forum for the Land

o Israel and other legal organizations continued to denounce governmen-

tal negligence through legal actions and constant monitoring. The main

accusation o negligence revolved around a general governmental lack o

compassion for the evacuees: Oficial sensitivity to the humanitarian needs

o the displaced residents is non-existent.

The initiatives in support o theevacuees translated into regular media coverage focusing on how badly the

situation o the evacuees had been managed by the state authorities. Many

media reported on the issue o the evacuees through the double register



19/26

o the

o trauma and lack o compensation for those evacuees that were housed

in caravans and other temporary forms o accommodation. The pressure

o these initiatives against governmental humanitarian and operational

negligenceresulted in the creation in February 2009, by the newly es-

tablished Netanyahu government, o an ad hocState Commission o Inquiry

charged with evaluating the authorities treatment o the evacuees o Gush

Kati [the name o the settlements block in Gaza] and Northern Samaria

[the West Bank].

The commission, led by the deputy president emeritus o the Supreme

Court, released its final report in June 2010. The report, which expressed

harsh condemnation for the treatment o the evacuees by the state institu-tions allows us to further grasp the settler colonial nature o the state and,

more fundamentally, another key level o the moral economy o the evacua-

tions. The report condemned the way the state handled the evacuation, high-

lighting a series o governance problems, such as the lack o pre-evacuation

communication between settlers and state and the mismanagement o the

community relocations. As well, the commission diplomatically criticized

Ariel Sharons choice o SELA as the administrative body for the evacuations:

The commission believes that the decision to establish SELA adminis-

tration as one entity that centralizes the handling o all matters connected

with the evacueeswas the right one. [ . . . ] However, because o the SELA

administrations lack o experience in settlement related matters, the task o

resettling the evacuees should have been implemented by the Settlement Division [o

the World Zionist Organization].

Administration o the evacuation is inscribed by the commission o in-

quiry within the competence framework o the highest existing Zionist body,

the World Zionist Organization, identified as the most competent institution

for dealing with Zionist matters related to settling and unsettling the Land

o Israeland the morality or immorality o these policies. In parallel and

together with the identification o the best possible bodies to handle any

future evacuations, the report discussed the issue o the costs o the dis-

engagement and praised the eforts o non-governmental organizations

like the Legal Forum for the Land o Israel in alleviating the sufering o the

evacuees. The monetary and moral costs are taken to be interdependent:The commission also criticized the prolonged stay in transitory residences

o hotels [ . . . ], which caused the evacuees great sufering, and also cost

the state treasury a great deal o money. The commission praised social


20/26

organizations and volunteers that mobilized to help the evacuees during

this dificult time and ease their sufering.

The commission report continued by recommending that the state, in

the case o future evacuations, create a team o experts and professionals,

at least some o whom have a connection to socio-psychological treatment

in crisis and disaster situations [and] combine the rehabilitation [o the

evacuees, called rehabilitees] with a general national objective, such as

strengthening settlement in [and transferring the evacuees] areas o national

priority.According to the list released by the Netanyahu government in

2009, the areas o national priority include those areas o Israel with a

major demographic presence o Palestinians and the main colonies blocksin the West Bank. Thus, one o the suggestions o the state commission,

expressed in the form o a policy recommendation, is to compensate the

injury o the evacuations by increasing and strengthening colonization

o other priority territories for the nation or, colonization as rehabilitation:

reengagement ater disengagement, similarly to what happened ater the

disengagement from Sinai.

The moral economy o settler colonialism is precisely this consolida-

tion and expansion o colonization as a form o healing. In a way, this

reenacts the act o dispossession that sanctioned the birth o the State o

Israel. But it does so by inscribing dispossession in a specific discourse

o trauma related to the events o the disengagementsa discourse that

emerged ater Sinai 1982 and has been made more manifest only in Israels

relatively recent history.

In light o this, the state commissions policy recommendations ater

the evacuation from Gaza are not surprising i we consider the broader

semantic and moral framework in which the commission o enquiry in-

scribed its final report. In fact, the members o the commission resorted

to a vocabulary o metaphors related to the semantic and discursive field

o sufering. Talking about the identity crisis o the settlersdescribed

in the report as pioneers exiled from their homes uprooted from a blos-

soming region (the occupied Gaza Strip)the juridical experts overlapped

their technical and normative recommendations with an afective register:

Contrary to their beliefs and their life plans, with a seething heart andmelancholy soul, choked with tears o grief, humiliation and pain, the set-

tlers evacuated bustling settlements.



21/26

o the

The panel o judges portrayed the settlers as victims o a cumulative

trauma:

They contended with an unstable securi situation and for years they bore the brunt othe shelling, attacks by terrorists, attacks on the roads and all kinds o calamities. Theprice was high [ . . . ] but their spirit never flagged. The scars o their bodies strength-ened their commitment [to colonization]. [ . . . ] Gush Kati was a unique region. [ . . . ]The settlers took upon themselves national missions [such as] making the regionbloom [and] absorbing large numbers o immigrants [new settlers]. The evacuationhurt all o these. [ . . . ] People who perceived themselves as implementing Zionismostensibly became a burden and a millstone. [ . . . ] The sense o betrayal experiencedby the evacuated settlers was shared by more than a few among the general population

o Israel. [ . . . ] It was a shining page o civics in the annals o the state, when [ . . . ] thesettlers behaved with responsibili and restraint, with the aim o avoiding a civil war.The heroes o the settlements became the heroes o the evacuation.

The commission concludes its report saying that it does not intend to take

a position on the question o the justice o the disengagement.

But a state body composed o members o the Supreme Court who cel-

ebrated its settlers as pioneers who made the desert bloom and accused the

settler colonial state o disrespect for human rights can hardly be consideredan entity in which the justice o the disengagement is not at stake. On the

contrary, the report is an illuminating document, a state word sanction-

ingthrough the language o good and bad government o the disen-

gagementthe intrinsic moral justness o Zionism and the settler colonial

enterprise. By judging the history o Zionism as an illuminating history o

settlement, the commission inscribed the evacuation as a historical wound.

And in so doing it also presented a renewed argument for colonization as

compensation for this wound. The commission, in the end, makes the dis-course o trauma the foundation for a renewed legitimacy for settlement.

Conclusion

Neither o the evacuationsfrom Sinai or from Gazaresulted in the con-

struction o a decolonized relationship between Israelis and Palestinians.

On the contrary, both disengagements can be understood as moments in

which what is performed by an array o state and non-state actorsfrom

the political analyst to the journalist; from the settler to the scholar; from

the prime minister to the parliamentary speaker; from the soldier to the

mental health practitioner; from the NGO operator to the Supreme Court


22/26

judgeis the reafirmation o the moral justness o the inherent relationship

o dispossession on which the settler colonial order is constituted. In the

moral economy o settler colonialism, trauma is mobilized as a discursive

apparatus whose political efect is the disavowal o Israels colonial history

o settler dispossession. This history began in 1948 with the creation o the

state, and continued with the reenactment o the settler colonial project as

one o moral justice that further obliterates the Palestinian experience o

dispossession and resistance to Israels colonial project since its inception.

It is also, perhaps more decisively, the source o legitimacy for a renewed

cycle o evacuation and settlement. Indeed, it is this reenactment that makes

the language o trauma more than just a disavowal o the founding momento dispossession, but also an argument for new settlements.

What I have attempted to demonstrate is that one o the constitutive

elements in the moral economy o Israels settler colonialism is the produc-

tion o a moral inversionthe social construction o settler moral tropes

representing the dispossessor as traumatized victim and the evacuation

as a settler-national trauma. The efects o this inversion are twofold: a

delimitation o the boundaries o the settler political community, and an

efort to avoid a rethinking o the settler colonial relationship and prevent

an opening up to the decolonization o Palestine. Fundamentally, the evacu-

ations are moments in which settler colonial dispossession and violence

are reenacted. In fact, the state-led 1982 movement o evacuated Jewish

settlers from Sinai to Gaza and the West Bank showed that the settler dis-

placement o the Sinai trauma coincided with the new displacement o the

native. More than twenty years later, the 2005 evacuation from the Gaza

Strip resulted in the increase o colonial control and humanitarian siege on

the inhabitants o the Gaza Strip. The last Israeli military operation,Pillar

o Defense (November 2012), was legitimized by the Israeli Army also in

terms o trauma prevention among the Israeli population, and thus the

argument o trauma prevention was applied as an alleged legitimization o

the sovereign right to kill the colonized.

There is no doubt that an interrogation o dispossession must analyze the

various ways that dispossession is systematically enacted on a daily basis,

with its diferent degrees o violence and institutionalization o the regime oinequality that provides the scafolding o settler colonialism. But when this

interrogation is carried out in a context o moral tension between victori-

ous victims and dominated victims, the study o the moments o rupture



23/26

o the

and inversion o this relationship o dispossession can decisively aid our

understanding o both the moments o intense violence which receive a wide

media coverage (oten without adequate historicization o the events) and

the very nature o the settler colonial relationship itsel in Israel/Palestine.

The inversions I have analyzed embody the will to reproduce the moral

legitimacy o an array o operations o power whose ultimate objective is

settling and dispossessing. This is achieved by the states embrace o the

peculiar moral economy o settler colonialism that I have described. The

multiple protagonists o the evacuations I have focused on do not conform

to the most widespread images o the settlers (religious, fundamentalist,

violent, conservative, living in the occupied West Bank or Golan Heights).Rather, the value o analyzing these operations consists precisely in the fact

that such analysis tells us about a moral economy shared by a conspicu-

ous number o diferent Israeli social and political actors. It is an economy

thatbecause it establishes repeated cycles o evacuation and resettle-

mentimpedes, within the settler colonial body politic, the conditions for

achieving the end o settler colonization. Indeed, it is a moral economy that

perpetuates Israels policy o settler colonization in an ongoing process that

appears to have no end.

I am grateful to the School o Social Science o the Institute for Advanced Study for awarding methe 20122013 fellowship that made possible the writing o this article. While I was a RichardB. Fisher Member at the Institute, I benefited from the precious suggestions o many colleagueswho read and commented on diferent versions o this article: Lorenzo Alunni, Lucas Bessire,Vincent Dubois, David L. Eng, Sara Farris, Didier Fassin, Neve Gordon, Laurence Ralph, andCatherine Rottenberg.

Nicola Perugini is assistant professor and director o the Human Rights and Inter-national Law Program at the Al Quds Bard Honors College (Jerusalem).

Notes

1. Ehud Barak in his speech at the Institute for National Security Studies, May 30

2012, quoted in Michael Freund, Peace-Traumatic Stress Disorder, Jerusalem Post,6 June 2012.

2. Freund.

3. Freund.

4. Baruch Kimmerling, Patterns o Militarism in Israel,European Journal o Sociol-ogy2 (1993): 128. Yoram Bilu and Witzum Eliezer, War-Related Loss and Suferingin Israeli Society; An Historical Perspective,Israel Studies5:2 (2000): 131. 5. Keren Friedman-Peleg and Yoram Bilu, From PTSD to National Trauma:


24/26

The case o the Israeli Trauma Center for Victims o Terror and War, TransculturalPsychiatry48 (2011): 616436. 6. Joyce Dalsheim, Unsettling Gaza. Secular Liberalism, Radical Religion, and the Israeli

Settlement Project (2011). 7. Sara Ahmed, The Cultural Politics o Emotions(2004). 8. We could argue, with Idith Zertal, that trauma is the language through which the

Zionist project has given itsel a legitimacy to inscribe and geographically transfer

a combination o memory and oblivion o the European Holocaust to this region.

What is interesting in the case o the evacuations is that trauma is not mobilized

in order to legitimize settler dispossession, but rather to prevent its end. See Idith

Zertal,Israels Holocaust and the Politics o Nationhood(2005). 9. Judith Butler,Frames o War(2005).

10. Rechtman and Fassin, in their description o the global landscape o sufer-ing, explore diferent cases o mobilization o the moral economy o trauma: U.S.

veterans, Israeli and Palestinian NGOs during and ater the Second Intifada, refugees,

asylum seekers, migrants, the Balkan conflicts and other situations o humanitar-

ian intervention. In many o these situations, the appropriation and deployment o

trauma discourse reproduces and naturalizes a variegated array o inequality and

domination relationships. See Didier Fassin and Richard Rechtman, The Empire oTrauma(2009). 11. Didier Fassin, Vers une thorie des economies morales, inconomies morales

contemporaines, ed. Didier Fassin and Jean-Sbastien Eidelman (2012), 1947. 12. Nicola Perugini and Kareem Rabie, The human right to the colony, in Shit-ing Borders. European Perspectives on Creolisation , ed. Tommaso Sbriccoli and StefanoJacoviello (2012), 3556.

13. Joshua Mitnick, History Foreshadows Gaza Pullout, Christian Science Monitor,21 July 2005.

14. Gideon Allon, Thirty Years On, Yamit Is Still an Open Wound,Israel Hayom,18 May 2012, http://www.israelhayom.com/site/newsletter_article.php?id=4390

(italics mine).

15. The Knesset speaker deploys the tactical evacuation and the painful territorialconcession as evidence o the democratic nature o the state.

16. Baruch Kimmerling, Exchanging Territories for Peace: A Macrosociological

Approach,Journal o Applied Behavioral Science23:1 (1987): 1333. 17. Nurit Kliot, Here and There: The Phenomenolog o the Settlement Removal

from Northern Sinai,Journal o Applied Behavioral Science23:1 (1987): 44. 18. Kalman Benyamini, Professional Behavior During Conditions o Extreme

Community Turmoil: The Case o the Removal o Settlements from Sinai,Journal oApplied Behavioral Science23:1 (1987): 132.

19. Haim Dasberg and Gaby Shefler, The Disbandment o a Community: A Psy-chiatric Action Research Project,Journal o Applied Behavioral Science23:1 (1987): 92. 20. Dasberg and Shefler, 93.

21. Making the desert bloom is one o the foundational slogans through which



25/26

o the

Zionist pioneers legitimized, using a developmentalist and modernist rhetoric, the

colonization o Palestinian lands and the Israeli state-building process.

22. Michael Feige, Settling in the Hearts. Jewish Fundamentalism in the Occupied Territories

(2009), 203. 23. Idith Zertal and Akiva Eldar,Lords o the Land. The War Over Israels Settlements inthe Occupied Territories (2007), xi. 24. Sara Roy,Failing Peace. Gaza and the Palestinian Israeli Conflict (2007), 325327. 25. Ilana Feldman, Waiting for Palestine: Refracted Citizenship and Latent Sov-

ereignty in Gaza, Citizenship Studies12:5 (2008): 459460. 26. Benjamin Netanyahu, cited in Eyal Weizman, Hollow Land. Israels Architectureo Occupation(2007), 225. 27. Haim Misgav, cited in Eran Shor, Utilizing Rights and Wrongs: Right-Wing,

the Right Language, and Human Rights in the Gaza Disengagement, SociologicalPerspectives51:4 (2008): 812. 28. Nir Hasson, Settlers tattoo ID numbers on their arms,Haaretz, 15 July 2005,http://www.haaretz.com/print-edition/news/settlers-tattoo-id-numbers-on-their

-arms-1.163928.

29. Gershom Gorenberg, The Accidental Empire: Israel and the Birth o the Settlements(2006), 375.

30. Shor (2008); Keren Tenenboim-Weinblatt, We Will Get Through This To-

gether: Journalism, Trauma and The Israeli Disengagement From The Gaza Strip,

Media Culture & Socie30 (2008): 495513. 31. For instance, the Israeli Electric Company was reimbursed by SELA in 2008 for

losses resulting from the destruction o its electric infrastructures. See Lior Baron,

IEC To Be Reimbursed for Gaza Equipment, Globes, 8 December 2008, http://www.globes.co.il/serveen/globes/docview.asp?did=1000405452.

32. Yitzhak Meron, Chairman o the Legal Forum for the Land o Israel, cited in Nir

Hasson, Kati Heads to Start Talking to Disengagement Administration,Haaretz,27 July 2005, http://www.haaretz.com/print-edition/news/katif-heads-to-start

-talking-to-disengagement-administration-1.162270.

33. Yitzhak Meron, Chairman o the Legal Forum for the Land o Israel, cited inDavid Bedein, Gush Kati Lawyers Rebu Govt Claims,Arutz Sheva, 25 August 2005,http://www.israelnationalnews.com/News/News.aspx/88678#.UIB9da7WTNQ.

34. Feige, 267268.

35. Ora Gilbar, Hasida Ben-Zur, and Gadi Lubin, Coping, Mastery, Stress Ap-

praisals, Mental Preparation, and Unit Cohesion Predicting Distress and Perfor-

mance: A Longitudinal Study o Soldiers Undertaking Evacuation Tasks, Anxie,Stress, & Coping23:5 (2010): 549550. 36. Ruth Eisikovitch, Gadi Eshel, Amira Dor, Boaz Haetzni, Aviad Visoli, Rachel

Tassa, and Moshe Libler, The Mental Preparation for Disengagement and its Atermathin the Israel Defense Forces, Preliminary Abstract, published on Israel Resource NewsAgency, 20 December 2009, http://www.israelbehindthenews.com/bin/content.cgi?ID=3842&q=1.


26/26

37. Ibid.

38. Ibid.

39. Arlene Kushner, The Situation o the Evacuees from Katif, Israel Resource

News Agency, 6 September 2005, http://www.israelbehindthenews.com/bin/content.cgi?ID=2325&q=1.

40. David Morris, Chairperson o Lemaan Achai, Emergency Campaign for Gush

Katif, public appeal published onIsrael Resource News Agency, 22 August 2005, http://www.israelbehindthenews.com/bin/content.cgi?ID=2304&q=1.

41. Eviction Through Negligence, Israel Resource News Agency, 24 August 2005,http://www.israelbehindthenews.com/bin/content.cgi?ID=2312&q=1.

42. Ibid.

43. State o Israel, Governmental Commission o Inquiry Regarding the Authorities Treat-

ment o the Evacuees o Gush Kati and Northern Samaria (2011). 44. Ibid., 13 (italics mine).

45. Ibid., 19.

46. Ibid., 30.

47. Ibid., 35.

48. Ibid., 35.

49. Lorenzo Veracini, Settler Colonialism: A Theoretical Overview (2010). 50. Nicola Perugini, Weaponising Trauma: Israels Operation Pillar o De-

fence,Al Jazeera English, 25 November 2012, http://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/

opinion/2012/11/201211251255497766.html. 51. Mahmoud Darwish, La Palestine comme mtaphore(1997), 29.


Documents

Perugini 2014 the Moral Economy of Settler Colonialism-libre