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Paper short abstract

This paper frames Israeli settlers as a human infrastructure of occupation. Through mundane, gendered, and affective practices—housing, childcare, schooling, marriage, and defence—they circulate people, goods, and ideology, normalising settler presence and sustaining colonial expansion.

Paper long abstract

If we are to interpret infrastructures as facilitating flows of people, goods, and ideas, and to emphasise the spectacular mundanity of infrastructures through the ethnographic gaze, I invite scholars of everyday infrastructures to consider the work of Israeli settlers as a human infrastructure of occupation. Motivated by both colonial intent to claim Palestinian land and aspirations for social and economic mobility, settlers circulate themselves, their resources, and their ideology to advance settlement. These political and violent goals, however, unfold within picturesque, leafy, upper-middle-class settlements, where everyday practices render occupation livable and durable. Settlers’ narratives of abandonment by the Israeli state further intensify these infrastructural labours, positioning self-organisation as both necessity and virtue.

Drawing on ethnographic research in the region and focusing on the lives of female settlers engaged in creating a ‘normal everyday’ for their families, I examine how settlement is sustained through state, military, and material infrastructures, as well as mundane, gendered, and affective domestic routines. Through these practices, settlers forge an ostensibly ordinary presence while reproducing settler-colonial violence and exclusion.

By foregrounding these mundane routines, the paper shifts attention from spectacular moments of violence or policy to the infrastructural work embedded in daily life. It shows how settler colonialism operates not only through force but through the ordinary maintenance of families, communities, and futures. Infrastructures of care, belonging, and domesticity thus become central mechanisms through which territorial expansion and Palestinian exclusion are normalised and sustained.