This article examines settler‐colonial visuality in West Bank Jewish‐Israeli settlements. It argues that settler visuality is attuned to a bourgeois ideal of domestic life, made possible by practices of unseeing. Reading Israeli encounters with the Wall and other artifacts of the occupation, I show that these visual encounters help settlers position themselves politically within Israel—and settlements, as Israel itself. Unseeing is a perceptual practice that makes and remakes space, one required to build the kind of settlements most Israeli settlers desire. This vision is oriented to the domestication of space, cohering with the demands of an extended military occupation.
In sum, I strongly recommend this book. The Naqab Bedouin enriches a growing critical scholarship that challenges the long-used modernization framework and its tendency to focus on Bedouin culture, folklore, and tribal law over the modalities of resistance and identity in constant negotiation as articulated by Bedouin voices themselves. It will be particularly useful to students and professors of history, sociology, anthropology, and political science who are interested in the Middle East, Palestine, Israel, tribal and indigenous communities, and modern state making.
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