The Moral Economy of Settler Colonialism: Israel and the "Evacuation Trauma"

The evacuations of settlements in a colonial situation can represent moments of potential rupture and reversal of a political order rooted in dispossession. In the case of Israel/Palestine, however, such moments are characterized by the re-articulation and re-legitimization of the settler colonial enterprise. This takes place through the development of a specific moral economy founded on the political mobilization of trauma. Drawing attention to the multifaceted ways in which the evacuations of the colonies are translated by different social actors into a moral inversion –where the evacuated dispossessor becomes a traumatized victim– allows us to grasp one of the dominant moral imaginaries in Israel’s settler colonial model.