Vulnerability as a politics of decolonial solidarity: the case of the Anarchists Against the Wall

ABSTRACT

The contemporary turn to the settler-colonial framework has allowed an emerging and growing generation of activist-scholars working on Palestine-Israel to think about decolonisation as an alternative to the official conflict-management-focused peace process. This framing has allowed for the articulation of a range of rich and complex discussions concerning the making and unmaking of settler-indigenous relations in Palestine-Israel, as well as the possibility for decolonial cohabitation. This paper’s contribution to this ongoing conversation is to theorise the ways in which the widespread adoption of the settler-colonial framework by Israeli and international solidarity activists active in the nonviolent struggle against the West Bank Separation Wall has contributed to the evolution of a praxis of decolonial solidarity articulated through the strategic mobilisation of vulnerability vis-à-vis the violence, repression and dispossession of the settler-colonial state.

KEYWORDS:

• Vulnerability
• decolonial solidarity
• joint struggle
• settler colonialism
• West Bank Separation Wall
• Anarchists Against the Wall
• Palestine-Israel

Acknowledgments

Thank you to my anonymous peer reviewers and the editors for their thoughtful consideration of this article. Special thanks go to Dr Goldie Osuri and Dr Lana Tatour for their painstaking engagement with and generous feedback on numerous draft versions of this article. Thank you also to Dr Hannah Jones. I am immensely grateful to everyone, activist and scholar alike, who has inspired and helped to bring this critical reflection to life. Any outstanding errors are mine alone.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. Israeli settlement beyond The Green [Armistice] Line of 1949 contravenes Article 49 of the Fourth Geneva Convention which stipulates that: ‘Individual or mass forcible transfers, as well as deportations of protected persons from occupied territory to the territory of the Occupying Power or to that of any other country, occupied or not, are prohibited, regardless of their motive… The Occupying Power shall not deport or transfer parts of its own civilian population into the territory it occupies’.

Additional information

Funding

The original research for this article was made possible thanks to Doctoral Funding from the School of Modern Languages and Cultures, The University of Nottingham;University of Nottingham.