A Disengagement: Evacuation Trauma, Colonial Vertigo, and National Reproduction

Chapter 6 begins with a curious, extreme relation made between Hurricane Katrina and the highly studied and exposed geographies of the Israeli occupation of Gaza. The chapter works through Israel’s 2005 experience of “disengagement” from its settler occupation of parts of the Gaza Strip, which involved the highly contested evacuation of Israeli settlers from the Gush Katif settlements. While demonstrating the workings of colonial structures of occupation and practices of control and displacement, evacuation moves with and against different habits of occupation, especially the contestation and semblance of related terms and meanings that revolve around evacuation’s suspension rather than its protection of reproductive futurities. The chapter picks up on the recursions of several evacuative tropes that are used to compare and justify Israel’s disengagement from Gaza with trauma, present and past, as the Nazi Holocaust and previous recursive moments of Jewish and Palestinian persecution and displacement are remembered and felt.