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Abstract
This thesis examines Israel’s policies and practices in occupied East Jerusalem (EJ) through the lens of politics of life. It attempts to answer the question how the materialisation of settler colonial power over life and death comes into play through the politics of life and what is their effect of rule? Politics of life is understood in here as an intervention in lives oriented around rights, development and progress and incorporates both moral and governmental dimensions. It argues that the rights that the Palestinians were awarded when Israel occupied and annexed EJ has not been problematised. They were rather incorporated within the discourse of human rights and subsequently normalised while illuminating other exclusionary, discriminatory and violent aspects of Israeli rule and power. This narrow perspective normalises the problem space of the settler colonial present and limits, as result, the sphere of questions and critique possible when examining such present. This thesis comes to deconstruct these normalising processes by destabilising the power knowledge truth relationship that is predominant in Israel Palestine and that subjugate the Palestinians to the pre -existing conditions created by the settler colonial regime. The argument presented in here moves beyond the common statist analysis of the settler colonial power in Israel Palestine as oppressive to portray a more complex picture on its nature and modes of operation. This form of power, it argues, entraps the Palestinians in a “death dance” with the Israeli Zionist colonial enterprise, subjugating and incorporating them into the regime structure through far more subtle means than it is commonly documented