Contextualizing Racialized Exclusion and Criminalization in Postcolonial Israel

Abstract

This chapter looks at the case study of Israel to demonstrate the racialized ways in which criminal subjectivities constructed and rooted in colonial racial hierarchies remain ingrained in national orders over time. The chapter focuses on exclusion, criminalization, and enforcement of state power upon two racialized groups—Ethiopian Jews, constructed as internal others, and Sudanese and Eritrean asylum seekers, constructed as external threats. Examining the treatment of these two groups in discussion of the criminal question—who the state chooses to police or detain, and through a postcolonial lens—enables us to trace a coherent line between them and populations racialized and criminalized before them and alongside them; principally Palestinians. Examination of state acts to differentiate and exclude racialized groups through structural and direct violence, using means developed from British colonial structures, indicates that colonial racism and control mechanisms still operate today. Distinct group exclusions thus emerge as reiterations of the same racialized colonial logics, over time and in evolving forms. Racialization, criminalization, and exclusion of non-white groups emanates from a Eurocentric postcolonial social order of racial differentiation that accompanied Jewish settlement in Palestine. The hierarchical order became ingrained in the state and has evolved over time to exclude different groups of ‘Others’: Palestinians, Ethiopian Jewish citizens, and African asylum seekers. State practices examined in the chapter demonstrate how racial formations and hierarchies animate both penal and citizenship regimes.