Racial Palestinianization projects ancient Philistine traits onto contemporary Palestinians to justify their exclusion

Evidence

Racial palestinianization is thus a conceit about contemporary conditions in terms of a projected past conceived in terms of the politics of the present. The Palestinian is a Philistine, with philistine values, interests, and desires, a primitive in the sense of never having evolved beyond ancient whims, drives, capriciousness, viciousness, and the irresponsible impulses to which they give rise. The Palestinian is driven by nothing but unprovoked hate and anger, incapable of a higher order of values, of deeper causation, of responsibility as a product of free choice. Palestinianization, like the projection of “Palestine,” in short, is a state of passion, its only rationality purely instrumental, crudely calculated and cruelly calculating, consequential, awe-ful. It is a state in which justification, reasonableness, freedom, and justice are feared, from which they have been expunged. — David Theo Goldberg, The Threat of Race, 613

Categorization

• DEFINE: This is the core definition of ‘racial palestinianization’ as a projected temporal conceit, stripping a people of rational agency.
• SEED: The move of projecting a ‘stuck in the past primitive’ frame onto a contemporary group is portable to many other racializing contexts — could sustain a comparative essay.