The household, domesticity, and intimate ties were considered by classical Western political thought to be secondary and subordinate opposites of public life, politics, and collective self-rule. In contrast, the modern liberal tradition championed the private individual and saw its protection as the purpose of state power, but it effaced both women and the household by portraying the individual as self-authoring, self-sustaining, and male. Twentieth-century feminist theory torpedoed both sets of assumptions and elisions, revealing how hierarchical gender relations nourished men in private and allowed them to monopolize public life, and disclosing—under the natural appearance of those relations—their sociohistorical and hence politically contestable formation.

Although indebted to this feminist exposé, Hagar Kotef attacks from an entirely different direction the idea of the political insignificance and/or innocence of households, houses, and domestic intimacies—at least in the context of settler colonialism. Her specific aim is to highlight their centrality to the Zionist project of clearing out Palestine for the sake of providing Jews with secure homes in a permanent homeland. The violent founding of the Jewish state and the ongoing violence that has enabled Jews either to occupy houses from which Palestinian Arabs have been driven or to demolish those houses to clear a space for their own housing developments mean, Kotef argues, that the attachments Israeli Jews feel for their living spaces bespeak an investment in violence as well. Destruction is “woven into Israeli subjectivity” (p. 13), whether individual Israeli Jews embrace liberal democratic values or revel in ethnonational supremacy.

Kotef flips on its head the theory that subjectivity emerges through the injury done to it. She instead analyzes the self as “a source of injury,” in this instance, in its willingness to “accept, not object to, and even collaborate” with the state’s drive to replace one people in a homeland with another (p. 32, emphasis in original). She defines settler colonialism as a “political system defined by an attachment to space that rests on dispossession, on a primordial act of ethnic cleansing and the many forms of violence that follow” (p. 3), and the colonizing self as one who belongs to a place as the result of the history of that expropriation. Against critics who blame the plight of Palestinians on Israel’s political elites and military forces, Kotef contends that ordinary Jewish citizens have their own interest in Palestinian Arabs’ remaining subjugated denizens and refugees. Against those who think that most Israeli Jews would object to this violence against Palestinians if it were more visible, she insists that settlers who remain in the country “cannot but see,” given not only ongoing Palestinian evictions, land confiscation, and house demolitions but also the ruins left behind by past demolitions, the material traces of which still saturate the “visual field” (p. 170). Against those who believe that the attraction to violence is always sadistic, she insists that the love of homely things can lead people to “willingly and consciously embrace … disaster-making” (p. 187).

One of the most fascinating chapters in this provocative book deals with the right-wing settlement movement to put down Jewish roots on hilltops in and overlooking the West Bank. Zeroing in on an organic egg farm on the West Bank that was built early on by “almost a fantasy figure of the settler” (p. 219), Kotef exposes the internal connections and contradictions between settler concern for the rural landscape and community on the one side, and settler violence against Palestinians on the other, which occasionally is punished but more frequently is supported by the state. The egg farmer is diligent both in pursuing green agriculture and in annexing Palestinian land, working his way down from the hilltop he has claimed for himself by relocating his generator onto lower ground, destroying Palestinian water pumps, poisoning waters downstream with the effluent from his chickens, and viciously clubbing and shooting Palestinians picking olives on their nearby plots. He defends his vendetta against “irrelevant” (p. 242) Arabs to establish his sovereignty over “his” property while expanding Israeli sovereign territory in the process. At the same time, he touts his ethical approach to food and animals (at least, Israeli animals) and valorizes the healthfulness and localness of his products. Along with the customers who ingest his organic eggs, he thereby negates the supposed elective affinity between nonviolence and environmental care.

Two perhaps unavoidable lacunae prevent this book from being a sufficient treatment of its subject matter. First, Kotef’s analysis would be enhanced by being part of a larger, comparative study of dispossession, especially as her insights into settler colonialism have clear relevance for other types of expropriation projects, which in turn have relevance for her. These types include ethnonationalist movements bent on ridding their countries of minorities in the interest of majority peoples; the expulsions of populations that occur when one state becomes two; civil wars, with their “spoils to the victor” outcomes; modernizing states that bulldoze familiar landscapes to impose on their own peoples a putatively more advanced mode of life; the capitalist pursuit of profit through “creative destruction”; and even nationalist movements that seek to liberate colonized selves by expropriating the expropriators.

Second, Kotef’s case study calls for attention to a crucial conundrum. What primes a self to desire to dispossess and occupy the space of another, before both dispossession and occupation begin? To this question, different cases of settler colonialism will require different answers. In the case of the Jews, for all the willingness of Zionist activists to engage with officials in the British and Ottoman empires, for all the sense of Western civilizational superiority that many European Zionists displayed, and for all the work Zionist agitators did to persuade Jews to solve their problems in the diaspora by immigrating to Palestine, the persecution of the Jews as a perpetual minority in the age of the nation-state played a pivotal preparatory role. One of the most vexing aspects of the collective experience of discrimination, expulsion, and extermination is that, although it can inspire its surviving victims to fight for justice for all victimized groups, it alternatively can persuade them that it is more propitious to exchange the position of the slave for the position of the master, with the cruel powers of the master intact. To fully capture the dispossessing subject in Israel/Palestine, this dynamic—and the part that European ethnonationalism played in setting it in motion—would have to be confronted and fleshed out.

Nevertheless, Kotef’s book is an important contribution to the ever-growing body of critical literature on Israel/Palestine written by Israeli Jews. She details how homes, houses, and caring relationships can serve as both the building blocks and raison d’être of political domination. She challenges the notion that the ethical self is noncontradictory, and she shows us how ordinary people with affective ties to their localities and communities can have, as a consequence, affective ties to violence as well. She also shows us why it is extraordinarily difficult to think of a way out of the Israeli/Palestinian impasse, if it is greater justice that one seeks to achieve. How can dispossessing subjects desire to extirpate their attachments to their homes and homeland for the sake of the subjects they forcibly replaced? How can dispossessed subjects not desire to turn the tables on those who dispossessed them in order to recover their former properties, land, and cultural habitus? Kotef refuses to romanticize exile, forbidding that way out of the dilemma for either Israeli Jews or Palestinians. She leaves us only with a sadly unanswered and perhaps unanswerable question: how can the space of dispossession be shared in “just and non-violent ways?” (p. 51).