Palestinian Paranoia and the Colonial Situation

Evoking Palestinian paranoia comes with a risk. It could easily resonate with right-wing Zionists, confirming their racist depictions of Palestinians as pathological bodies, psychically and morally deficient, and thus unfit to join the community of civilized human beings. But paranoia does seem to mark the Palestinian condition. Uprooting and paranoia go hand in hand for Palestinians. The experience of collective displacement plunges the exilic Palestinian into a zone of precarity and hypervigilance, "where everyone not a blood-brother or sister is an enemy, where every sympathizer is an agent of some unfriendly power, and where the slightest deviation from the accepted group line is an act of the rankest treachery and disloyalty," writes Edward Said (2000, 178). For Palestinians, non-Palestinians are a priori an object of suspicion. As "paranoid subjects," Palestinians anticipate betrayal from others, that is, complicity with Israel. But not unlike "Black paranoia," Palestinian paranoia resists easy pathologization and rash dismissal. In fact, Palestinian obsession about a looming betrayal sounds more like reasoned extrapolation than irrational speculation.

If you are a Palestinian, you've witnessed first-hand the ideological sham of the "peace process." While promised "land for peace," as per the 1993 Oslo Accords, Palestinians in the Occupied Territories saw a massive expansion of illegal settlements, the uninterrupted ethnic cleansing of their neighborhoods, the strategic fragmentation of their people, a numbing increase in humiliating and dangerous checkpoints, devastating attacks on a besieged Gaza, Israel's flagrant defiance of international law, an uptick in serious talks of annexation of Palestinian land in Israeli political discourse, the passing of the Nation-State Law and the continuing disenfranchisement of Palestinian citizens of Israel, and the symbolic relocation of the U.S. Embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem.¹ To the betrayal from without, a betrayal from within also plagued Palestinians: the "Abraham Accords" (Goodman 2020), the premature normalization of diplomatic ties between a number of Arab countries and Israel, who self-interestedly suspended their demand for Palestinian self-determination as a precondition for such normalization.

And yet, there is something hermeneutically apt about drawing on the concept of paranoia as long as we locate paranoia's roots in politics rather than biology, in the violent and visceral world of what Fanon calls the "colonial situation" (2004, 233) instead of some abstract or ahistorical notion of a pathologized "Palestinian mind." The contemptuous accusation of "Palestinian paranoia," prevalent among political Zionists and far-right supporters of Israel, displays the latter's (mis)understanding of this psycho-pathology. In its Palestinophobic form, the accusation naturalizes the mental disorder, obscuring its socio-political origins, making the paranoia of the Indigenous population an ontological or essential problem, a permanent feature of their biological or cultural DNA, discounting and disregarding, in turn, their daily humiliation and land-based grievances. If, according to Israeli propaganda, Palestinians are so delusional, intolerant of Jewish difference, and prone to irrational bursts of violence, how, then, can you make permanent and meaningful peace with them?² In this ideological light, occupation is recast as an Israeli self-protecting policy (it is an existential question of survival) rather than an expression of the Jewish state's expansionist and imperialist desire.

The charge of "Palestinian paranoia" thus implicitly obfuscates another paranoia, a Zionist paranoia, whose origins lie in Western Orientalism. Said draws our attention to Orientalism's paranoid tendencies: "Psychologically, Orientalism is a form of paranoia, knowledge of another kind, say, from ordinary historical knowledge" (2003, 72). As a style of thinking, Orientalism is about the West's paranoid construction of the Orient as an object of knowledge and mastery, and in this respect, its racial stereotyping—exemplified in the figure of the bloodthirsty, irrational Palestinian—always tells us more about the anxious psyche of the Zionist/Western knower than its putative object of study. Israel traffics in paranoid knowledge, emblematized in its narrative about the imminent danger of coming undone, repeatedly framing the Palestinian people as an existential threat to its identity and its people. Wanting to end Israel as a Jewish state (a state only for Jews) means wanting to end of the Jewish...