Mainstreaming a Genocidal Imagination in Israeli Society: Settler-Colonialism, Settler Anxiety, and Biblical Cues by Tamir Sorek

Regardless of the extreme differences in lifestyle and values, “Secular Zionists” and “Religious Zionists” share some basic assumptions about the necessity of a regime of Jewish supremacy and the illegitimacy of Palestinian resistance to their dispossession. Both Secular and Religious Zionists share their embeddedness in the structural context of settler-colonialism, which pre-disposes them toward a rhetoric of elimination, and they both experience fluctuating levels of existential anxiety, which influence the degree of their rhetoric violence and their inclination toward genocidal imagination. At the end of the day, it is the settler-colonial context that has both enabled the re-interpretation of Jewish religious texts as operative guidelines for genocidal violence, as well as provided the fertile ground for persistent anxiety among settlers.