Between "empty words" and ordinary silences : Palestinians' secret lives in contemporary Israeli settler colonialism

The article takes into account Palestinians’ ordinary silences and the “public secrecy” of their lives in the context of the Israeli military occupation and settler colonization of the West Bank. Besides the “empty words” of public discourse that nourish Palestinians’ cynicism, the article focuses on silence as the point of conjuncture of different forms of Palestinians’ inaudibility and unintelligibility, which are produced both by political violence and nationalism as the hegemonic frame for action. The pervasive dimension of silence in the Palestinians’ daily life is ethnographically analysed through the triple and controversial figure of Palestinian refugees-peasants-labourers in Israel. In the context of expanding Israeli settler colonialism and the fragmentation of Palestinian nationalism, the focus on silence is supposed to highlight the reconfigurations of memory, politics and affects in the threat of “normalization” and oblivion. Thus, the article proposes to examine silence as a locus for ethical and political subjectivation in conditions of political violence, structural uncertainty and asymmetric interdependence, where “dignity” and “humanity” become central values to oppose the Israeli “colonization of the mind”. Reflections are based on an ethnography of daily life, which was conducted between 2011 and 2014 among Palestinians living under total Israeli control in the occupied West Bank.