Abstract

Israel occupied the West Bank (WB) during the 1967 war, after which the WB maintained ambiguous liminality because its territory and population were neither annexed nor returned, and the army was left as the sovereign power. The non-annexation/non-withdrawal policy created "sovereignty gaps" (Shenhav, 2006), allowing the state to avoid annexation of occupied territories and exert full sovereignty while making sovereign decisions based on the state of exception and emergency regulations, such as segregation, checkpoints, restrictions on movement, and administrative detentions.

This policy and the "sovereignty gaps" it created were kept across political parties for years. However, far-right settler movements and initiatives, such as 'Tnuaat Haribonut' (The Sovereignty Movement), the 'Decisive Plan,' and 'Nahala' movement, all call to annex the occupied territories, expand Jewish settlements in the WB (and now, Gaza), and assert the Jewish claim on all the land. These plans aim not only at reclaiming the land but also to eradicate any Palestinian hope for independence.

Based on activism and fieldwork in the West Bank, the talk will point to evolving processes of masking and mimicry. I will explore three expressions of masking over a span of seven years: the first, of hilltop youth, masking their faces mimicking Palestinian Intifada protestors (Konopny-Decleve, 2018); the second, of the state and army, masking their aspirations and desires of ethnic cleansing as claims of marginal extremists; and lastly, after October 7, of armed settlers wearing army uniforms harassing Palestinian shepherds or protecting other settlers in doing so.

Through an assemblage of images and by employing the Lacanian psychoanalytical lance to trace the meaning of these three moments in time I will present a process of deterioration. I show how a socio-political unconscious process of decomposing the nodes between signifiers and signifies allow far-right actors to recompose and fasten new nodes.

Livnat Konopny-Decleve is a British Academy International Fellow at The School of Social and Political Science at The University of Edinburgh. She is a political anthropologist working on the Jewish radical left, and on alternative political imagination in Israel/Palestine and abroad. Livnat received her PhD from the Department of Sociology and Anthropology at Tel Aviv University (2022), and was a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Leonard Davis Institute for International Relations at The Hebrew University of Jerusalem (2023). She is a co-convenor of APeCS – Anthropology of Peace, Conflict, and Security network at EASA.