“to stop the earthquake”: Palestine and the Settler Colonial Logic of Fragmentation

Abstract

Fragmentation is a key colonial strategy to which Palestinians enact resistance, evident most prominently in the 2021 Unity Intifada. In this article, I take inspiration from such Palestinian resistance to theorise fragmentation as a central logic of Zionist/Israeli settler colonialism. I make three related points. First, I employ the metaphor of the earthquake to consider the fractality of settler colonial fragmentation across the dimensions of land, time, and bodies. Second, understanding the settler colonial logic of elimination as ultimately attempting to extinguish a Palestinian Indigenous sovereignty, I argue that the logic of fragmentation drives towards elimination. Finally, I demonstrate that, in fragmenting Palestine, Zionism seeks to render Israel a coherent entity. Ultimately then, the Zionist project works to fragment Palestine to eliminate Palestinian bodies from land and time, to render Israel a seamless nation across these dimensions. However, Palestinian Indigenous sovereignty is not something that can be broken or extinguished.