Mutual escalating contempt sustains the racialized Israeli-Palestinian dynamic

Evidence

The Israeli state and its political and military representatives continue to devalue, debilitate, denigrate, humiliate, exclude, and evict Palestinians morally and economically, legally, territorially. And it does so in the name of their ethno-naturalized or ethno-historicizing difference. Palestinians are all terrorists, hiding bombs to aim at Israel beneath their beds, lurking at the border ready to kidnap the stray Israeli soldier, scheming incessantly to obliterate the state of Israel (I am not making this up: these are positions expressed to me, at various levels of volubility, by family long living in Israel). Especially at politically fraught moments, Palestinians in particular, and Arabs more generally (non-Arab Muslims too, if Ahmadinejad is anything to go by), respond with equal contempt, and sometimes in explosive kind, each ratcheting up the anger and frustration of the other. — David Theo Goldberg, The Threat of Race, 692

Categorization

• QUESTION: The claim that Both sides respond with ‘equal contempt’ feels structurally asymmetric — Goldberg’s own evidence (state power vs civilian resistance) undercuts it. Worth noting how the symmetry framing smuggles in equivalence.
• XREF: The ‘hiding bombs beneath their beds’ trope parallels the paranoid racialization of minorities in US domestic politics (cf. Hasan Kwame Jeffries and the ‘Thug/Criminal’ frame), a bridge to Goldberg’s broader racial-neoliberalism thesis. — connects to: Israeli nationalist parades weaponize sensory dominance to confine Palestinians to invisibility — Nadim N. Rouhana and Nadera Shalhoub-Kevorkian, When Politics Are Sacralized:…, 1054