The Camp, Undone: Negation and Return in the Vanishing Horizon of Settler Permanence

Chapter 4 examines the place of the Palestinian refugee camp in Israeli politics. It relies on documents from the Israel State Archives relating to the series of plans, developed after the 1967 occupation of the West Bank and Gaza, to completely undo the camps and resettle their inhabitants. The chapter posits that Israeli state politics carried a deep, abiding anxiety about political claims from the very temporality of the camps as interim placeholders for the originary villages of their refugee inhabitants. Following the place of the camp in Israeli governmental plans illustrates how settler politics demands the work of negation—the refutation of that which is not entirely repressible and its rendering in negative form. Negation appears, beyond the strictly psychoanalytic, as a mechanism by which settler politics acts—both reflexively and causatively—on anticolonial counterclaims.