View from the Hilltop: Settler‐Colonial Visuality in Palestine

Abstract

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.

Jil Oslo Generation Palestinians and the Fight for Human Rights

“…Farmers are at the forefront of the occupation, with families having many children while receiving government subsidies (Al-Haq, 2008). Settlers embrace the dominant narrative of developing civilization and beautifying their land (Ellis, 2014; Maidhof, 2021). In 2019, while conducting research in Palestine, I learned that Israel had invested in a new exclusive cable car system in Jerusalem that only served settlements and outposts.…”