Raw Cuts: Palestine, Israel, and (Post)Colonial Studies

This chapter examines the long occlusion of Israel as a colonial state in the field of (post) colonial studies. It looks to the sharp division that occurred in treatment of Edward Said’s Orientalism and The Question of Palestine the following year as a diagnostic of the disconnect that was maintained between Israeli colonial practices and U.S. imperial pursuits. The chapter considers how our optics change when we consider Israel/Palestine not as an exception to colonial practice but as a crystalline contemporary exemplar of it.