In the Open Time of Dispossession: Camp, Colony, Palestine

Settler colonialism is always as much an attempt to conquer time as it is to conquer land. This is nowhere clearer than in the struggle over Palestine. And at no point starker than in the ongoing genocide in Gaza. In this talk, I take as my primary object the Palestinian refugee camps created in the fallout of the eliminatory violence of Israel’s founding to show how these camps become the main place where settler colonial attempts to dominate space and time encounter Indigenous refusal. Seen from the camps, Israel becomes a settler colonial project defined by its inability to move past the past—a project stuck at its foundational moment of conquest. At the same time, the Palestinian insistence on return is a refusal to abide by the closure of the past into settler futurity. Palestinian struggle does not just happen in the open time of dispossession; it happens over this time. This struggle is a form of anticolonial refusal that draws its power not from any decisive finality, but precisely from irresolution and keeping time open.