Israeli and Palestinian national identities are mutually constituted as opposition

Evidence

Here, then, is the knotted dilemma facing the region: Israel’s sense of self, statehood, and security is predicated on restricting the scope of the same for those from whose landscape of life, loves, and longing the state of Israel was carved out. And Palestinian possibilities, in point of fact the very idea of a coherent Palestinian corpus, of Palestinian national aspirations, acquired a spirit, its very conception, as explicit resistance to and rejection of Israel’s stake, at the extreme, of its being as such. They need each other, at least rhetorically if not psychologically, as perpetual grounds and justification for their own existence as much as in seeking to undermine the possibility of the other. It’s as though existence of each is measured by the extent of the other’s demise. — David Theo Goldberg, The Threat of Race, 592

Categorization

• DEEPTHINKING: A dense, mutually-constitutive account of settler-state and colonized identity: each nation’s very existence is rhetorically the other’s negation, and the asymmetry of power makes this lopsided.
• XREF: connects to: Israel’s right-of-return discourse asymmetrically privileges Jewish over Palestinian claims. — David Theo Goldberg, The Threat of Race: Reflections on…, 582; Palestinian religious parties nationalized while Zionist national parties religionized — Nadim N. Rouhana and Nadera Shalhoub-Kevorkian, When Politics Are Sacralized:…, 2468