On the monopoly of violence: Ideal types of settler colonial violence and the habitus of sumud

Abstract

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French

Political sociologists have articulated state-making as the concentration of power and violence within state apparatuses. However, classical theories have often overlooked the distinctive characteristics of settler colonial nation-state formation, whose raison d’état is the preservation of settler sovereignty and supremacy, accumulated largely through practices of dispossession, appropriation, subjugation, and elimination, and whose power is dispersed at times to settler-citizens. Examining the case of Israel, and identifying divergent ideal types of settler colonial violence, the article pinpoints the unique features that define Israel as a settler colonial state. Moreover, it explores how the monopoly on violence is variably applied depending on contingent dynamics, and dialectical interactions with the indigenous and their habitus of sumud (steadfastness). The analysis delves into the themes of state violence and the state of exception, examining the case of the ‘Dignity Intifada’ in May 2021, alongside the genocidal war since October 7, 2023. By comprehending the material and symbolic processes shaping the persistence of settler colonialism in its different formations, the article contributes to a nuanced understanding how ‘war-by-other-means’ and indigenous resistance both endure.

Keywords

Habitus of sumud ideal type indigeneity monopoly on violence Palestine/Israel political sociology popular resistance settler colonialism sovereignty

Political sociologists have long debated what constitutes the type of state that emerged in Europe some centuries ago, but that has become the container of power through which governing processes are mediated (Bishara, 2023; Lachmann, 2020; Saouli, 2014; Tilly, 1985). Perhaps the most oft-cited qualifier of the state comes from Weber (1978: 54): the nation-state, a compulsory political organization declaring binding authority, claims a ‘monopoly of the legitimate use of physical force’ within delimited territorial boundaries (Mann, 1986, adds sole legislative authority of the state). Bourdieu (1994) argues that the state, which holds statist capital, is the culmination of the process of concentration of different forms of symbolic capital: physical or coercive capital (e.g. the army or police), economic capital, cultural or informational capital, and juridical capital. For Bourdieu, the state’s monopoly on symbolic capital entails its capacity to make the arbitrariness of its power mis-recognizable (Bourdieu, 2014; see also Riley, 2015).

Paired together, I see the state both as a culmination of multiple processes and also as a force that must uphold its monopoly, lest the risk of forfeiting its power. Bishara (2023) cautions that the insistence on considering violence as only a single component in the definition of the modern state marginalizes, to some extent, the legitimacy of the state represented by its recognition by the subjects.¹ ‘The state’ is no singular entity or totality, but a concatenation of actions and institutions, which is to say patterned ways of thinking alongside material infrastructures of rule (Clemens and Lu, 2020). Portraying the state as a unified force with all intentions and agents working together for a common goal is overly simplistic. So too, taking the colonial state of Europe’s historic empires as endogenous to state formation disregards the constitutive role that colonialism had on the metropole.

The specific features of the ‘settler colonial state’ have been largely absent in classical sociologies of the state. The ideal-type state by which comparative historical sociologists most often articulate nation-state formation elides the particularities of settler colonial state formation (Mamdani, 2020). This, likely, results from the parochial focus of the discipline’s classical cases, and from largely dislodging Europe’s colonial projects from state formation. Arendt (1973), Bhambra (2016), and Mamdani (2020), among others, provide valuable insights into the influence of colonialism and imperialism on shaping the metropole. Steinmetz (2008), using a Bourdieusian approach, explores the colonial state as a distinct field, highlighting its unique practices. Even so, we lack a comprehensive account of the settler colonial state, which exercises authority uniquely. Weber’s state theory and a Bourdieusian field approach, if articulated with the settler colonial paradigm, may offer valuable tools for explicating a settler colonial state’s attainment of power. But this entails attending to how the monopoly on physical and symbolic violence is applied differently.

The animating force of a settler colonial state is the preservation of settler sovereignty in the face of internal and external challenges to its binding authority (Sabbagh-Khoury, 2022b). A settler state iteratively enacts a process of frontierization, wherein political violence is performed through ‘biospatial’ tactics that ‘demarcate, control, manage, shape, and ascribe signification to space’ (Cohen and Gordon, 2018: 200). Notwithstanding the crucial recognition of the concatenated and often conflictual nature of a ‘state’, we should not disregard the striking consistency in aims across apparatuses of a settler colonial state to preserve colonial domination, the web of relations that together ascertain the conditions for settler supremacy, and the patterned behaviors that reproduce hierarchies and the attendant rights, benefits, and mobilities. I pose that a settler colonial state not only operates through arbitrary governance, bureaucratic aloofness, and racialized rule (as Shenhav [2013] argues in the case of imperial states), but also as one (a) whose statist capital is, at least partially, constituted by enduring dispossession, and (b) whose claims to legitimate violence include expropriation, plunder, ethnic cleansing, ‘liquidation’, and displacement. Weber’s definition of a state, alongside Bourdieu’s assertion that the state dominates all other fields, fall short in comprehending the complexities of imperialism and settler colonialism. ‘The state may well have the ambition to become a meta-field governed by a form of meta-capital’, Steinmetz (2008: 607) writes in his critique of Bourdieu. However, adopting a field-theoretical approach prompts us to recognize the multitude of other social actors, particularly settlers and indigenous communities.

In these ways, it is important to recognize the variable dynamics of subjugation, control, erasure, and elimination of indigenous communities. Drawing on Marcel Mauss’s (2004) concept settler colonialism can be understood as ‘a total social fact’, in the Durkheimian vein, it represents a social formation with implications across social, political, economic, cultural, and attendant institutional dimensions (p. 100). It shapes a whole range of social structures; with its forms of violence operating along a spectrum, ranging from cultural assimilation to outright genocide, and understanding the intersections of these forms is crucial to sharpening the settler colonial framework.

In this article, I posit that the settler colonial state is buttressed by a civil society of citizen-settlers. My analysis relies on the case of Israel, delving into a comparative examination of violence and resistance within Israel (within the 1949 Armistice borders), the West Bank, Gaza, and East Jerusalem. Recognizing the diverse manifestations of settler colonialism, and expanding the Weberian sociological approach, I aim to establish distinct analytical categories, identifying the ideal types of settler colonial violence that represent different patterns of domination and resistance within Israel/Palestine. Due to the specific focus of this paper, I do not undertake a comparative analysis across other settler colonial cases. However, despite differences in several notable ways,² I do not view Israel as an entirely exceptional case. Arguments presented here could be easily applicable to other settler colonial cases, with further empirical research.³

Settler colonialism is not a unified, substantive entity or process; it consists of manifold agents, desires, and mechanisms unfolding dialectically and through contingency (Sabbagh-Khoury, 2022b). It is articulated through contradiction, ambivalence, and competing interests. This is why the analytic designation ‘settler colonialism’ operates, in the Weberian sense, according to ideal-types, or frame of perception and organizing. I designate each geographic/temporal entity an ‘ideal type’ as an analytical approach to diagnose and elaborate four different forms of settler colonial violence by highlighting the certain essential characteristics of each form.

While the four forms of settler colonization share common elements like dispossession, domination, and elimination, the mechanisms of population management vary. Of course, all real types exhibit divergence. In Israel, the variegated symbolic and material mechanisms of settler colonialism, share the common objective of eliminating the native from desired space, ensuring the permanence of settler sovereignty. This process can be understood as the continuation of ‘war by others means’.

Histories of colonization abound with instances of non-state actors engaging in violence, sometimes with the state’s support, and ultimately reinforced by state institutions. Colonialism operates within a framework of gradated sovereignties (Stoler, 2006), where settlers may hold a portion of the monopoly on legitimate violence. How, then, is the state’s monopoly on violence qualified by the collusion of a state and its citizen-subjects in a settler colonial context? To address this question, I turn to the case of Israel. The recognition that power in a settler colonial state is dispersed, rather than exclusively monopolized by state institutions, becomes crucial (see Janoski et al., 2020: 4–5; Mitchell, 1991).

Israel: the settler colonial nation-state⁴

Like any state, Israel has grasped a claim to the monopoly on legitimate use of violence. In Bourdieusian terms, the Israeli state has effectively accumulated forms of statist capital. It first accumulated capital by enacting violence upon an indigenous national population initially excluded from the Jewish national ethnos (Bishara, 2022b). This accumulation occurred through a range of practices, including military, legislative, juridical, cultural, and economic, all significantly backed by imperial force. The early state sought to eradicate the national-collective existence of Palestinians as a group with sovereign territorial claims – through both state-making and nation-building – and to secure settler permanency and a Jewish national homeland in the face of indigenous resistance. In other words, Jewish nation-building through Palestinian nation-displacement.

Israeli state violence operates on two produced frontiers, a ‘first’ and ‘second colony’ (El-Sakka, 2024), each of which is animated by a project of population replacement taking variegated forms. The overriding essence is a demographic and territorial project to minimize Palestinian presence. Taken together, these ideal types constitute Israel as a case of settler colonialism ‘of a special type’: apartheid (alluding to the South African Communist Party’s description of South Africa).⁵ Over decades of settler colonial rule, the Israeli state has conceived of four ideal types of colonial governmentality, each according to temporal and geographic specificity and responding to varying conditions (Table 1). Each site has its own political field (cf. Steinmetz, 2008). Each, also, is shaped dialectically by indigenous Palestinian social action and resistance, which shapes the contours of the settler colonial project. And each has different policies and practices, while similarities and differences partially reflect the ongoing processes of settler nation-state building.⁶

Table 1.

Ideal types of settler colonial violence in Israel/Palestine.

	Political status of Palestinians	Forms of settler colonial violence
East Jerusalem	Permanent residency	Military occupation, displacement and dispossession, frontierization, settler violence, ethnic cleansing, land theft
West Bank	Statelessness	Military occupation, displacement, frontierization, dispossession, ethnic cleaning, settler violence and land theft
Gaza	Statelessness	Siege, enclosure, ghettoization, privation, mass displacement, ethnic cleansing, destruction, mass killing
1948 Israel	Settler-colonial citizenship	Racial discriminatory laws, de jure and de facto discrimination, ‘Judaization’, frontierization, dispossession and ethnic cleansing in al-Naqab, second-class treatment

Before delving into the four ideal types of settler-colonial violence, I shall note that this article does not address the Palestinian refugee population. While Israel’s ongoing settler colonial violence against the 1948 and 1967 refugees, particularly through the denial of their ‘right of return’ to their home/land, remains a critical issue, it falls outside the scope of this article as I focus on the management of the settler colonial population within historic Palestine (Map 1). Refugee management, in this context, is primarily exercised through the systematic prevention of return, which serves as a broader mechanism of settler colonial demographic control and territorial dispossession. This prohibition is integral to maintaining the settler-colonial structure but lies outside the primary scope of this article, which emphasizes ‘internal’ population management strategies.

First, within an internal frontier ( ‘Israel proper’ or ‘within the Green Line’), Palestinians granted Israeli citizenship are subject to continued forms of territorial colonization, articulated often as ‘Judaization’ (Falah, 1991). This has entailed, among other elements, the 1948–1966 military rule regime, which enabled the accrual of land through legalized tactics of dispossession (the consolidation of lands by the Land Administration and Custodian of Absentee Property); events of spectacular violence, such as the Kafr Qasim massacre in 1956, Land Day in 1976 where six Palestinian citizens were killed, or the extrajudicial killings of nearly a dozen Palestinian citizens in October 2000; quotidian forms of violence, such as economic deprivation, urbicide, and the destruction of the built environment (Gordon and Ram, 2016); and political violence, exemplified by around 76 discriminatory laws and de facto discriminatory practices (Adalah, 2017). These culminated in the 2018 Basic Law: Israel as the Nation-State of the Jewish People, a de jure practice of the sovereign to preserve 1948s constitutive colonial violence of Jewish supremacy. Since October 7, 2023, Palestinians in Israel have faced a resurgence of military rule, echoing the oppressive period from 1948 to 1966, seemingly nullifying their citizenship. My focus is on how militarized Jewish citizens assert their own monopoly on violence. This pattern, existing before, has become more institutionalized since the Dignity Intifada in May 2021, and has significantly intensified since October 7. This escalation has led to the militarization of the public sphere.

Violence takes place in and through a strategically nebulous external frontier, beyond the 1949 Armistice borders, reflecting the ongoing process of colonization. The settler colonial state apparatus underpins settlement expansion in the 1967 ‘frontier’ through military occupation. Following 1967, colonial violence has been continuous in the Occupied Palestinian Territories, which faces belligerent military occupation and a robust bureaucracy of colonial domination (Beinin and Stein, 2006). Each site instantiates what, for the Israeli state, is an ideal type of domination. In the West Bank, an assemblage of martial, bureaucratic, political, and economic systems reproduces the conditions for colonization by state and non-state actors (Azoulay and Ophir, 2012; Peteet, 2017; Weizman, 2007). The occupation has, in certain regards, been outsourced to the Palestinian Authority since the mid 1990s (Gordon, 2008; Haddad, 2016). Palestinians there are stateless, lacking citizenship but subject to Israeli mobility restrictions. Since the deterioration of the Oslo process, Israeli settlements have encroached on and appropriated Palestinian land, around 40% of the West Bank is under the direct control of settlements (B’Tselem, 2019; Fields, 2017). And fluctuating military and settler practices define the arbitrariness of violence (Gazit and Grassiani, 2023). This ideal type of violence encapsulates settler aggression against Palestinians, who find themselves nearly defenseless. The settlers’ violent actions are conducted with the implicit backing of the army and the police. In a collaborative effort involving security forces and regional councils, authorities go to the extent of confiscating herds from Palestinian shepherds, subsequently demanding substantial sums from them.⁷ Amid these challenges, a handful of Israeli activists stand beside Palestinians, accompanying shepherds and farmers in their daily tasks, aiming for their presence to act as a protective shield. At times, these activists remain with the families around the clock. Since October 7, facing heightened pressure on local communities, left-wing activists have been amplifying their efforts.

In East Jerusalem, Israel’s implementation of a systematic regime of apartheid is marked by pervasive discrimination and segregation against Palestinian residents through urban settler colonial governmentality. This form of governance has taken a distinct character in East Jerusalem, particularly following the construction of the separation wall in 2002. The majority of Palestinians in East Jerusalem hold Israeli permanent residency status, not citizenship, exposing them to a unique form of governmentality designed to ‘integrate’ them into specific spheres, including labor market participation, the Israeli educational system, and the land registration processes. East Jerusalemites are confronted with the constant threat of displacement, primarily orchestrated by private settler organizations backed by the municipality and juridical system. This form of governmentality aims to de-politicize collective political claims and foreclose the possibility of Jerusalem as the capital of a future Palestinian state. In Jerusalem, violence is orchestrated by settler-citizens who reside in Palestinian localities and exert control over the land, as exemplified by the situation in Sheikh Jarrah. To understand the unique structure of settler colonial states, it is crucial to factor in settler violence. In the West Bank and Jerusalem since 1967, settlers hold a piece of the monopoly on violence, reinforced by state support.

I shall briefly mention the case of the Occupied Golan Heights, the southwest portion of Syria occupied by Israel in 1967 which also falls under the settler colonial regime. Israel’s form of control here constitutes another type of domination that incorporates various practices employed across occupied territories in the Green Line, East Jerusalem, and the West Bank. But its annexation policies and governmentality vis-à-vis the Jawlani population also is distinct (see Dajani et al., 2022; Ibraheem, 2023).⁸ The focus of this article is on Israel’s practices toward Palestinians, so except for this mention I do not attend to the Golan.

And fourth, Gaza, subjected to an escalating siege since 2007, represents another ideal type of violence, in many ways dissimilar to the other three. There, blockade, bombardment, enclosure, and, more recently, a genocidal war define settler colonial violence. Population management takes the form of ghettoization, while the internal civil operations of Gaza are delegated. Israel exercises control over Gaza’s airspace, territorial waters, land crossings, water, electricity, electromagnetic fields, and civil infrastructure, in addition to the population registry. In addition, part of what constitutes this ideal type is the particular form that Palestinian resistance takes and the Israeli response to it. The intricate interplay of these factors delineates the complex landscape of violence within the Gaza context.

Across these types, however, the state’s monopoly on violence looks different. I argue that this is a defining feature of the settler colonial state. Settler-citizens have been actively sharing this monopoly. Recruited first by Zionist proto-state and the Israeli state institutions in the project of land appropriation, they have actively engaged in settling the frontier (Weizman, 2007). This involvement has included establishing historic Tower and Stockade settlements (1936–1939) for the labor movement by the Zionist movement prior to the institutionalization of the settler state and during the Great Arab Revolt (Sabbagh-Khoury, 2023), through the present establishment of outposts. They are implicated in the maintenance of political violence through compulsory military service and extended reserve duty. In addition, settler-citizens have actively perpetrated physical violence. While certain state actions, like those within the military or courts, may invalidate or penalize extremist non-state actors, writ large the settler state relies on the blurred distinction between citizen and settler.

For instance, in the wake of the Dignity Intifada in May 2021, then PM Naftali Bennett established a gendarme Israeli Guard unit of the Border Police. Months later, National Security Minister Itamar Ben Gvir called for a mass increase in the size of a national guard force, and a new armed national civilian force to ‘secure’ the country and re-establish meshilut (governance).⁹ Following the October 7 attack committed by Hamas, Ben-Gvir’s ministry furnished thousands of Israeli civilians with firearms and approved over 100,000 new licenses (Images 1 and 2).¹⁰

The expansionist nature of settlement engenders forms of extra-legal, extra-state violence. By extra-legal violence, I mean that this violence is beyond the legalized tools of the state’s military, and committed by non-state actors. And yet, I term this violence ‘legitimate’, in the Weberian sense, given that the settler colonial state has sanctioned said violence, condones it, fails to cease or penalize it, and fortifies its force with military backing and discursive support. Even upon a settler state’s emergence is the role of extra-state actors paramount to the maintenance of territorial sovereignty and its expansion. Settlerism, the term I propose as characterized by settlers having the legitimate authority to exercise violence in controlling territory, often involves the state’s empowerment vigilante settlers. In Palestine/Israel, settlers and volunteer militias have taken on the role of wielding violence independently from the state. While this analysis looks only to the case of Israel, nearly every other case of settler colonialism mirrors this pattern.¹¹

May 2021

In May of 2021, violence in Israel/Palestine erupted spectacularly. First, the systematic coordination between private settler organizations and the Israeli judiciary to displace Palestinian inhabitants of the Sheikh Jarrah neighborhood in Occupied East Jerusalem fomented a steady, popular protest the continuation of dispossession. These residents (or, for some, their elders) were originally displaced in 1948 (Beinin, 2013: 40–44). The Jordanian government attained custodianship of properties in Sheikh Jarrah in 1949 and collaborated with the United Nations Relief and Works Agency in 1956 to construct homes for Palestinian refugees. Those who moved in were required to cede their refugee ration cards and pay a 3-year rent to obtain ownership, which was never granted. Five years following the occupation of East Jerusalem, a 1972 Supreme Court case resulted in a tacit recognition of a Jewish group’s (the Sephardic Community Committee) claims of ownership – officially recognized in 2008 by the Jerusalem District Court – while the Palestinian residents received ‘protected tenant status’. From 2001 onwards, religious Jewish settlers initiated gradual occupation of Palestinian buildings, while further legal cases solidified Jewish rule and Palestinian eviction. Popular protest, mobilizing Palestinians alongside some Jewish-Israeli and international allies, have ensued in the face of creeping encroachment. The crisis of dispossession resurfaced when settler organizations attempted to evict Palestinians in 2021, and with street violence, especially during the month of Ramadan. The core issue here revolves around a pronounced asymmetry in rights and mobilities: Jewish Israelis can legally petition for the reclamation of property previously held prior to 1948, Palestinians (citizens and non-citizens alike) are not granted this right.

Second, the Al-Aqsa compound saw repeated incursions by Israeli police, causing injuries to numerous Palestinian worshippers.¹² These assaults held profound symbolic significance for Palestinians across historic Palestine, especially during the holy month of Ramadan.

A war ensued between the Israeli military and Hamas in Gaza from 10 to 21 May 2021, which resulted in 253 dead in Gaza and 12 in Israel.¹³ Violence erupted in the so-called ‘mixed-cities’ of Israel (Lydd, Ramle, Jaffa, Acre, Haifa), where skirmishes between religious settlers and ultra-nationalists broke out.

The wave of popular protest termed the ‘Dignity Intifada’, swept across Palestinian communities. The preceding violence, perhaps more than any other incident since the 1948 Nakba, came to represent the contiguity in a single moment of the colonization process against all Palestinians, a material and symbolic project which crisscrosses between the 1948 and 1967 temporalities and geographies. The Israeli state’s grasp on power is, demonstrably, feasible only through domination – that is, coercion, repression, and political violence.

The settler-state nexus that maintains the grasp on violence is clear through the words of the former Minister of Public Security, Amir Ohana, referring to a Jewish-Israeli settler that killed a Palestinian citizen in Lyyd during the May 2021:

The arrest of the shooter in Lod and his friends, who apparently acted in self-defense, is terrible. Even if there are things the public does not yet know, law-abiding [Jewish] citizens carrying weapons are a force multiplier in the hands of the authorities, for the immediate neutralization of threat and danger.¹⁴

‘Legitimate’ violence, both historically and today, has extended to vigilante civilians, underpinned by the state’s Public Security ministry and police. This, also, is no novel phenomenon. Palestinians classified as Israeli citizens do not enjoy the same protections granted to Jewish-Israeli citizens. This takes two forms. First, police apathy and neglect has long accompanied a deleterious increase in ‘intra-communal’ violence and crime that has beset Palestinian communities (Zoabi, 2017). And second, the state’s security forces, especially in May 2021, have worked alongside, rather than against, Jewish settler violence targeting Palestinians. Coinciding with and following Israel’s ‘Operation Guardian of the Walls’ in May 2021, Israeli police launched ‘Operation Law and Order’. All together, as of early-June 2021, 2142 ‘detainees’ had been recorded and 184 indictments filed,¹⁵ the vast majority of those arrested (91%) Palestinian.¹⁶

October 7, 2023

This paper originally centers the events of the May 2021 surge of violence and uprising. However, since then, a significant series of developments has reshaped the contours of violence: the October 7^th, 2023, Hamas attack and the Israeli genocidal war in Gaza had a profound impact. As of February 2025, nearly 48, 350 Palestinians have been killed in Gaza and close to 736 in the West Bank, including East Jerusalem, since October 7, 2023, while over 1;607 Israelis and forien nationals have been killed and some 63 hostages remain in Gaza.

While these developments are ongoing and it is too early for a comprehensive and nuanced analysis, it is undeniable that the violence perpetuated by the settler colonial state – intensified following the civilian massacre committed by Hamas – continues to disproportionately affect the opportunities and lives of Palestinians. Categorical boundaries between settlers and citizens have blurred, particularly between combatant and citizen. The Israeli government has also enlisted its Jewish-Israeli citizens, as evidenced by the increase in lawful firearms licenses within the country.¹⁷ Moreover, the state’s delegation of violence to citizens – promoted by Minister of Public Security Itamar Ben-Gvir – has deputized citizens to roam the streets with semi-automatic weapons, and has increasingly armed civilians in the West Bank, empowering them to commit vigilante violence as the police force has been instructed not to prosecute settler crimes against Palestinians.¹⁸ It is as if the pre-state militias (Irgun, Hagganah, etc.) have re-appeared in the wake of a weakened state, as the continuation of the project of creating a Jewish nation-state. These settler-citizens have become quasi-agents of the state. This is true not only regarding settlers in the Occupied Palestinian Territories, but mostly right-wing provocateurs within the ‘Green Line’ who, for instance, attempted to raid the Sde Teiman and Beit Lid military prisons after the military detained its own soldiers accused of sodomy and torture of Palestinian prisoners.¹⁹

There has been a noticeable trend of Jewish-Israeli citizens closely monitoring their Palestinian colleagues, peers, and public Arab figures, subjecting them to scrutiny, and even attempting to criminalize their ‘silence’ regarding the events of October 7 or any expressions of sympathy with Gazans. In some instances, Jewish Israeli citizens have essentially became thought police. The arrests of actress Maisa Abd Elhadi, singer Dr Dalal Abu Amneh, and others serve as vivid examples illustrating how violence is structured and monopolized by Israeli citizens.²⁰

Acknowledging the impact of October 7^th, 2023, it is crucial to note that understanding the evolving four ideal types, and especially that of Gaza and Palestinian citizens requires historical perspective to allow us to discern their contours. Studying these cases also reveals how indigenous agency dialectically shapes how the state imagines and then implements its monopoly on violence.

States of crisis and emergency

A key feature across all types of colonial ideal types is the imposition of states of emergency, which beget the paradoxical legalization of the suspension of juridical rights and procedures. This suspension of law also applies when the state fails to prosecute settlers for breaking the law. This suspension can entail either derogation or some extrajudicial move to withdraw rights from a population and further consolidate authority in the hands of government leadership (Agamben, 1998). Sovereignty becomes ever more accumulated in the hands of the institutions of the state of exception, reducing the subjectivity of the de-sovereignized to bare life – a state of total subjection to a sovereign’s decision making over life and death. The state of exception becomes sustained as both a space and time. Colonial societies can instantiate this paradigm in certain regards (Svirsky and Bignall, 2012). Scholarship has considered whether, and in what ways, the Israeli colonial state has operated through states of exception from its inception amid war (Abujidi, 2009; Berda, 2018; Ghanim, 2008; Lentin, 2018; Zreik, 2008). Emergency regulations, martial law, and surveillance are the clearest indications of its instrumentalization. The settler colonial state of exception is characterized not only by the suspension of law but also by its comprehensive invocation (see Erakat, 2019; Forman and Kedar, 2004; Jabareen and Bishara, 2019). This exceptional state of exception hinges on the creation of a condition of precarity that stems from the looming specter of displacement and dispossession.

In May 2021, Palestinian citizens in Israel, especially those in ‘mixed cities’, faced arbitrary Israeli governance reminiscent of the military rule from 1948 to 1966. During that period, Israel granted citizenship to the remaining Palestinians, a population already decimated by the 1948 Nakba. Concurrently it curtailed their rights, established legal mechanisms for further dispossession, suppressed resistance, and punished return attempts (Jiryis, 1976; Robinson, 2013).

The relationship between the newly sovereign Israeli state and Palestinian citizens first took on its contentious character in the early state years (Sabbagh-Khoury, 2022a). This moment entailed the imposition of hierarchized citizenship and marginalization, the invention and apprehension of Palestinians as socially Other; increasing expropriation and dispossession; and sustained de-sovereingization. A state of emergency was declared (Loevy, 2016), allowing the state apparatus to enact its sovereignty by designating resisting Palestinian indigenes to internal enemy-citizens, criminalizing their political struggle while reducing their subjectivity to ‘bare life’. This state of emergency endured, resurfacing in the violent proceedings of May 2021.

The 2021 efforts to dispossess Palestinians in Sheikh Jarrah were performed by settler-citizens, empowered by right-wing elites now in government, endorsed by state power, and upheld by the judicial system (Beinin, 2013; Hammami, 2012). Such aims contribute to the broader Israeli agenda of de-sovereignizing Palestinians and preventing Jerusalem as their capital (Nasasra, 2022). Judaization and creeping land confiscation processes have long been occurring across the history of the Zionist movement and Israeli state through settler agents, especially 1948 and 1967, and specifically in geographies like the Galilee, the Naqab, and East Jerusalem (Falah, 1991; Shafir, 2018). And the May 2021 attacks on Palestinian citizens in Lydd and other historically Palestinian cities, now called ‘mixed-cities’, by Jewish-Israeli settler citizens demonstrates how the frontier remains open as a place to conquer and exclude. These very cities where violence sprouted in May 2021 have been sites of urban land grabs (Sabbagh-Khoury, 2018), paired with surveillance practices, economic deprivation, and ethno-racial spatial separation. Yiftachel and Yacobi (2003), examining Lyyd, find that the patterns of separation and ethno-class fragmentation in the ‘mixed-cities’ resulted from planning policies, that created ‘ethnocratic cities’ in Israel. Lydd, for instance, was a predominantly Palestinian city until much of its population was displaced during the 1948 Nakba, when the remaining became subject to forced spatial concentration and martial law under the new military administration. It became an ‘internal frontier’ settled by Jewish immigrants in newly constructed housing blocs surrounding concentrated Palestinian communities. Palestinians faced disproportionately higher rates of building permit rejection and demolitions, befitting the Israeli government’s policy of demographic engineering. It is not incidental that a city like Lydd became a site of clashes in May 2021.

The state of emergency was renewed following October 7, 2023 – through a wartime government and special mobilization – effecting the lives of all Palestinians, who have been prohibited from protesting and facing severe social and economic repercussions for expressions about the war. And most significantly, Palestinians – especially those in Gaza – are reduced to the totalizing conditions of ‘bare life’ (Agamben, 1998). For Gazans, Israeli institutions determine access to the conditions of livability, and to premature death. However, unlike the situation in May 2021, where the state of emergency did not totally render Palestinians subject to pure bare life, presently Palestinians are limited in their capacity to politically organize and resist when up against the ostensibly insurmountable force of the settler state, backed by hegemonic geopolitical powers. The Palestinian citizens in Israel have been relatively silent since October 7 (they have organized sporadic and minor anti-war demonstrations, and annual commemorations), their expressions of empathy with Gazans forbidden. This period again is reminiscent of the military rule regime, with the suspension of rights for Palestinians. Repression, the effects of attempted ‘Israelization’ and ‘integration’, and fear play into this. Only time will tell if Palestinian citizens mobilize around a political project of decolonization, despite the social and political forces working to de-politicize their collective aims. There is, nonetheless, a clear pattern that emerges: when the settler colonial society fears the reversibility of its permanence, it clamps down on indigenous insurgency. This apparatus of surveillance and control is operated by both the state and its citizen-settlers; resulting in a diffusion of settler colonial power.

Moreover, given (pragmatically false) consternation of the reversibility of settler sovereignty, securitization has become perhaps the foremost mechanism to secure the raison d’eta. A key feature of Israel’s settler colonial rule, and that of many other settler colonial regimes, is the belief that the settler state can continuously perpetrate violence against the indigenous and maintain safety and security for the colony. In Israel, since 2011/2012, the Iron Dome has become both a symbolic and material defense system used to reassure the Israeli population that their safety is guaranteed even while occupying another people through violence. Israel can continue inflicting violence without consequence if it builds its security apparatus strong enough, the thinking goes. However, October 7 ostensibly shattered this notion, and Israel’s extreme response since has been to try to restore the dogma idea that Israel can remain safe while subjugating others.

Responses to emergency

The historical accounts of popular resistance under conditions of the state of exception highlight the necessity for sharper conceptions of agency. This is because the imposition of bare life has never been, nor is currently, accepted from below (Agamben, 1998; Foucault, 2009; Sa’di, 2012). It is imperative to acknowledge that agency is not merely a theoretical concept; it is actively practiced on the ground. Just as there are ideal types of settler colonial domination, there are also ideal types of resistance. In historic Palestine, we find patterned forms of resistance among each geographic group on a spectrum ranging from forms of armed resistance to non-violent civil disobedience and popular resistance. While this paper does not review all of these, I will gesture toward the dialectics of power and resistance by examining the 2021 popular uprising among Palestinians in Israel, a generative case that managed also to unite resistance across all of historic Palestine. As I underscore, the divergent ideal types of violence fomented a solidarity of resistance, instantiating the failure of settler colonialism as a totalizing project.

On 18 May 2021, Palestinian citizens in Israel initiated a mass strike, which quickly spread to the 1967 Occupied Territories, refugee camps in neighboring Arab countries like Jordan and Lebanon, and throughout the diaspora. This strike was a response to the ongoing dispossessions in Sheikh Jarrah, assaults at Al-Aqsa, incidents in the ‘mixed cities’, violence in Gaza, and the enduring deprivations imposed upon Palestinian life. Palestinians across historic Palestine organized public demonstrations and engaged in various forms of non-violent resistance, embracing the long-standing social action – popular protest – in Palestinian society (Darwish and Rigby, 2015; Qumsiyeh, 2011). There were notable bouts of violent uprising, as well.

For Palestinians in Israel the war against Gaza did not serve as the sole initial spark for mobilization. One representative survey (n = 405) of Palestinian citizens conducted in late-May 2021 by Mada al-Carmel (2021) following the May popular protests provides insights into the reasons behind their mobilization that month. The survey reveals that roughly 60% of the Palestinian citizens cited the incidents in Sheikh Jarrah and Al-Aqsa as the primary catalyst for the uprising. Fifteen percent pointed to police apathy and neglect concerning internal violence, while 21% attributed the mobilization to state discrimination against Palestinian citizens across various aspects of civil life. One percent responded ‘Judaization’ of the coastal cities and Lyyd and Ramleh; and the remaining 2% responded with ‘I do not know’. These data indicate that Palestinian citizens who primarily observed rather than directly experienced the events in Al-Aqsa and Sheikh Jarrah were galvanized by a shared sense of vulnerability to a common source of violence. Despite socio-cultural fragmentation, stratification across socioeconomic and status groupings, spatial separation, and segmentation of citizenship status and access to rights, we find that Palestinian citizens continue to ‘people’ themselves to other Palestinians (Mische, 2009), projecting a form of sociality where the fates of others are seen to be intertwined with one’s own. The popular protests in May 2021 were not led by political leaders. They represented a grassroots effort by Palestinian citizens of Israel, mainly by youth, who re-united dispersed Palestinians in one of the largest uprisings since the 1936 Arab General Strike (during the Great Arab Revolt) and 1976 Land Day strike.²¹ This, Bishara (2017, 2022a) contends, is ‘popular sovereignty’.

Testimony written by the Palestinian feminist activist Samah Salaime, reflects how the mobilization of Palestinians in Lydd during the May 2021 events came about:

I visited the burned and destroyed homes of citizens and the children in Eid clothes were playing among the ashes in complete innocence and talking about gas bombs and the night’s settler attacks as if they were adventures in a computer game. In the Al-Hinnawi family, in the Old City, more than 15 children learned about the meaning of Molotov cocktails and the M16 rifle that settlers carry while attacking them at night. In the Kaddoura family, a 14-year-old boy was shot by a policeman, and he is now detained and has not received proper treatment. In front of the mosque and the church, guard shifts, and an aid center, Tamer Nafar [a Palestinian singer] is in a state of national and artistic mobilization in defense of his family and the inhabitants of his city. Fidaa Shehadeh [a political activist and a member of the city council] is busy dealing with the arrests of young people. In the community center, the headquarters of humanitarian aid was opened, full of human provisions and energies [see Image 1]. The women and young women are working restlessly with the youth in ‘the factory of goodness’. . . .²²

Samah may be reflecting on the scale of destruction and ‘organized abandonment’ (Gilmore, 2011). But what her testimony identifies is the practice of popular resistance. The organization of care in the face of state abandonment and assault, or a response to the deleterious consequences of the state-settler alliance (Images 3, 4 and 5). She recounts not only the imagining of a different kind of sociality, but the enacting of it, through emergency committees and mutual aid. This mirrors the practices of others organizing amid the emergency, for instance, a group of pro-bono women lawyers in Haifa who worked diligently on the courthouse floor to secure the release of 38 Palestinian citizens arrested by the Israeli police on 13 May (Image 3). One of the lawyers, Soheir Asaad, offered the following testimony: But what we have seen out of great love for this balad [hometown/village/country] from young men and women is amazing in its simplicity and sincerity. Detainees from all the neighborhoods of Haifa and outside Haifa, brave souls and high aspirations despite brutality, solidarity and support for each other and adherence to our right to defend our balad and our people. Each of these people is able to give us hope that we carry for a lifetime. You will not break us, this balad has powerful people to protect it, and we will not abandon them.²³

Palestinians like those documented above, and historically before Israel’s establishment, reject the impositions of the state of exception, challenging the stripping down of their individual and collective subjectivities and status positions to bare life. Theirs is a habitus of sumud (steadfastness), wherein they accumulate – through their daily interactions – embodied knowledge structures for negotiating with quotidian violences (Sabbagh-Khoury, 2022a). The unprotected or ‘bare’ citizenship, which is structurally dispossessory, ironically sharpens their ability to employ strategies amid fragility. And the changing features of society – a strengthened professional Palestinian class in Israel, ostensibly rehabilitated from the Nakba – shapes the forms resistance can take.

A common liberal Zionist approach tends to depict Palestinian citizen protests as mobilizations against minority discrimination. Silencing the root of the issue – enduring settler colonial population management defined by dispossession and marginalization – the myopic attention to discrimination elides the undergirding historical processes that constitute the relations between the Israeli state and its Palestinian citizens. Such viewpoint also detaches those Palestinians holding Israeli citizenship from all other Palestinians, instantiating a form of epistemic violence. Meanwhile, the Palestinian population continues to live under ongoing violence in its different forms, ongoing emergency, and the fragility of ethnic cleansing.

Even despite the Israeli state’s claim to the monopoly on violence, some citizen-subjects continue to chip away at the forms of legitimate (i.e. legal-rational) rule held by the Israeli state, in essence a challenge to the field of power. The Dignity Intifada in May 2021 was the manifestation of the continuous efforts of resistance to the state’s grasp on domination and violence. Palestinian citizens, particularly, have cultivated a habitus of sumud, accumulating collective dispositions and practices – forms of capital consolidated within a habitus – to navigate and resist state violence (Bishara, 2015; Ghanem, 2001; Sabbagh-Khoury, 2022a). We have seen Palestinian citizens’ efforts to resist the state’s hold on physical capital, through combating police and military force, for instance. The state’s grasp of informational and cultural capital has been iteratively pulled apart by Palestinians, and internationally.²⁴ Just as violence has been constant, so too has the withering of the state’s monopoly on legitimate violence (which, for many Palestinians, never existed as legitimate) intensified.

It is essential to emphasize that the habitus of sumud in the Palestinian struggle in Israel has been shaped and grounded in popular resistance. The events of October 7 and the actions of attacking and killing civilians by Hamas have ushered in a new phase where Palestinians have been cast as perpetrators. This, coupled with the ongoing fear of possible displacement, has contributed to a silencing effect. Since October 7, political activism has become scarce. It is necessary to allow time and distance to comprehensively assess the political ramifications of that day on their struggle, the habitus of sumud, and how Palestinians will redefine the violence inflicted upon them.

Conclusion

Classical sociological conceptions overlook the distinct violence of settler colonial state, subsumed within theories of the nation-state. By bringing settler colonialism’s features – the enduring violence of a state-settler alliance, and the constitutive force of dispossession – into the discussion of state violence, this article seeks to better account for structures of domination and power in state and nation building. The alternative to the classical theories of the state I propose is that by making room in our political sociology for settler colonial cases and understanding how these cases change our over-simplified theories of the state as an overriding entity, we actually have a clearer sense of the ways that settler colonial state formation is unique. Foremost, that the monopoly on violence is extended to include citizen-settlers as key political actors. In so doing, my argument aligns with scholarship on coloniality and decoloniality in comparative perspective, which traces the inextricable connections between modernity, violence, colonial hierarchy, racialized brutality, and domination (Lowe, 2015; Mignolo, 2011). Simultaneously, attention to the quotidian and exceptional displays of insurgency amid emergency brings to light the enactment of alternative arrangements of sociality and agency.

Through the case study of Israel, the article poses a divergent lens through which violence in settler colonial states can be understood, not merely through the proposition of a state’s monopoly over violence. Drawing on critical theorizing of power, it asserts that the Israeli state’s maintenance of its accumulated statist capital, in its current configuration, is assured through conditions of coercion and violence, symbolic and physical, and through a dynamic collusion with citizen-settlers deputized with violent capacity. The Dignity Intifada in May 2021 in Israel/Palestine, albeit one thread of a continuous war that may simply have been temporarily invisiblized, posed multiple trajectories. It brought to light fears of further ethnic cleansing not seen on a mass scale since the 1948 Nakba for those who remained within the 1949 Armistice borders. For Palestinians, the fear is not derived solely from the violence of the state, but from the specter of a potentially antagonistic, dispossessory Jewish Israeli society. And this is why the state of exception warrants great attention. Ethnic cleansing and dispossession, among other violences, are at stake in settler colonial states. To be indigenous is to hold a subject position always threatened by possible expulsion, dispossession, and elimination.

For Palestinians, this fear is not theoretical, but lived out each day. The state of emergency is continuous, as the aftermath of October 7, 2023, demonstrates. But by challenging the impositions of bare life, social actors can unmask the arbitrariness of state and non-state actors in maintaining power and domination. Hope is a political channel; sharper sociology can help promote its instrumentalization.

Footnotes

Acknowledgements

This article is dedicated to the memory of Michael Burawoy, who tragically left our world in February 2025. Michael’s tireless dedication to the pursuit of justice through sociology will forever animate my commitment. I thank Michael Burawoy, Joseph Kaplan Weinger, and the anonymous reviewers for their generative feedback and support.

Funding

The author disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: I thank the H.F. Guggenheim Foundation for generous support through the Distinguished Scholars Award.

ORCID iD

Areej Sabbagh-Khoury

Notes

Author biography

Areej Sabbagh-Khoury is an assistant professor of sociology at UC Berkeley and associate professor at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. Author of Colonizing Palestine: The Zionist Left and the Making of the Palestinian Nakba (Stanford, 2023), she examines the dispossession of Palestinians by kibbutz settlers in the Jezreel Valley. Her work spans settler colonialism, political sociology, Zionism and Palestinian citizens in Israel, published in leading journals such as Sociological Theory, Current Sociology, and Politics and Society. A.S.-K. has received prestigious grants and fellowships from the H.F. Guggenheim Foundation, Fulbright, ISF-Israel Science Foundation, and more.

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On the monopoly of violence: Ideal types of settler colonial violence and the habitus of sumud

Abstract

Keywords

Israel: the settler colonial nation-state 4

May 2021

October 7, 2023

States of crisis and emergency

Responses to emergency

Conclusion

Footnotes

Acknowledgements

Funding

ORCID iD

Notes

Author biography

References

Israel: the settler colonial nation-state⁴