Contradictions like these don’t fit comfortably within the usual binaries of anti-imperialism (colonizer/colonized) or the binaries of identity politics (white/racialized)—but if Israel-Palestine teaches us anything, it might be that binary thinking will never get us beyond partitioned selves, or partitioned nations. None of this is intended as an apologia for Israeli settler colonialism. Rather, it is an attempt, as the British scholar Jacqueline Rose put it regarding her book The Question of Zion, to “go into the mindset of Zionism without blocking the exit.”
