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Paper short abstract:

How do settlers come to understand their decision to make their homes on lands and landscapes dispossessed from natives as fundamentally moral? This paper argues that cultural memory provides the geographical location, historical grounding, and moral cover for displacing natives from their land.

Paper long abstract:

Creating a home and homeland for settler societies necessitates the “elimination of the native” and the occupation of natives' territory (Wolfe 2006). The “colonizing-self” (Kotef 2020) is thus shaped by the need to live comfortably with the violence of dispossession and to affirm homemaking and nation-building in the colony as fundamentally moral (Azoulay and Ophir 2013). Moreover, the moral and symbolic qualities of a home must be produced in situ—locally—through reshaping occupied indigenous land and landscape in the image of the settler (Bishara 2003; Stein 2010). This paper seeks to investigate how settlers come to understand their decision to take up residence and “dwell” (Ingold 2002) on lands and in houses taken from natives, a fundamentally moral act, and what socio-cultural conditions reproduce dispossession over time.

Drawing on interviews with Jewish-Israeli settlers, I argue that cultural memory provides the geographical location, historical grounding, and moral imperative for displacing Palestinians from their land. I focus on the City of David National Park, located at the heart of a Palestinian village that is both a highly popular tourist attraction and an illegal settlement. I examine how settlers narrate the ownership of land, based on archaeological findings embedded in the ground, as the object of religious desire and thus render its occupation a necessary step towards redemption (Abu El-Haj 2001). I reflect on the morality of the “colonizing self” vis-à-vis my own uncomfortable position on the spectrum of settler complicity to consider the difference between colonial “beneficiaries” and “dispossessors” (Rothberg 2019).