Kotef, Hagar. The Colonizing Self: Or, Home and Homelessness in Israel/Palestine.

In The Colonizing Self, Hagar Kotef examines the effects of the wide-ranging violence whose perpetration she sees as inherent to life in a settler-colony. Kotef zeroes in on home as a place where “the intimacies of public wrongs” can be seen, and where negotiations of sense of self, with all the political implications of self-image, play out (9). As Kotef points out, in a setter-colony like Israel where home is “entwined with the present or past of the Palestinian disaster,” “[t]he negotiations of a sense of belonging against the reality of this disaster gives rise to” a subject which is the topic of this book and which she labels “for the sake of brevity… ‘the colonizing self’” (ix-x). 

The idea of home is central to Kotef’s linking of the intimacy of belonging and self-image with violence that can seem distant physically or temporally, or simply of an exclusively ‘political’ and not personal realm.  Fundamentally, and in a formulation which clarifies the link between a sense of self and political violence, Kotef underlines the connection between questioning the legitimacy of a settler-colony and of questioning one’s sense of belonging there: “how can one point to the wrongs that are embedded in the very nature of their political existence?” (xi). She begins by drawing from Arendt, Locke, Aristotle, and feminist theory to point to the fundamental place of home in political theory. She then “develops a model of wounded attachments (following Wendy Brown) to the violence undergirding political belonging,” before, in a more specific examination of the dynamics of colonization, looking at two cases of the place of food in the above dynamics (25).

While Kotef focuses on the case of Jewish Israelis, her analysis would apply to other settler-colonies and situations where, as she asserts, “lives and selve[s’]…very being is a form of injury” (1). Her examination of this type of injury heeds Michael Rothberg’s call for more study of “insidious structural, everyday, and slow forms of violence,” asking how the perpetration or implication of the perpetration in that type of violence marks the colonizing self. 

Cited: Rothberg, Michael. “Trauma theory, implicated subjects, and the question of Israel/Palestine.” Profession 2 (2014).

Author of this entry: Hannah Jakobsen

Kotef, Hagar. The Colonizing Self: Or, Home and Homelessness in Israel/Palestine. Duke University Press, 2020.