A persecuted people can become oppressors in founding their own state

Evidence

But this civilizing mission and self-determining drive thus initiated through Jews in the name of European civilization is one with a twist. Israel was forged, of course, in the fire and fury of all those migrations, the experiences of expulsions and exiles, arrivals and starting over, assimilations and abjected evictions, wrongful convictions and threatened extinctions. The war of races in which the Jew is the hounded, the perennial foe and fugitive, becomes in Israel’s founding a protracted conflict in which the Jewish State, Herzl’s dream, is turned into oppressor, victimizer, and sovereign. Vulnerable, victim, and vanquished become pursuer, perpetrator, predator. The State is transformed, as Foucault says, into protector of the integrity, superiority, and more or less purity of the homogenizing group, what Foucault marks as “the race.” State sovereignty defends itself above all else so as to secure the group, its ethnoraciality, even to protect its purity, perpetuity, and power, for which it takes itself to exist and which it seeks to represent. — David Theo Goldberg, The Threat of Race, 569

Categorization

• XREF: This passage follows directly from the collected notes on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and ties to my interest in how victims of racialization reproduce racial statecraft. Also connects to the ‘moral panics’ material on how oppressed groups can adopt the mode of their oppressors. — connects to: Persecuted victims reproduce the power they fear against others; Identity adopted as liberation can harden into a new form of imprisonment — Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, 1078
• DEEPTHINKING: The inversion structure — the hounded becoming the hunter, victimizer, sovereign — is a dense, paradigm-level claim about state formation and racial modernity that resists simple summary.