Colonizing emotions: Death and sociopoliticide in a besieged society

What does it mean to live in the specter of death, both literal and symbolic? How does it feel to witness the plausibility of the destruction of one’s peoplehood? This paper investigates the multifaceted presence of death in the lives of Palestinian citizens in Israel, situating their experience within the broader sociological literature on death and structural violence, and the colonizing of emotions. While historical tactics in settler colonial cases have ranged from displacement to genocide depending on a convergence of factors, a persistent feature across colonized experience is the specter of death—felt and anticipated. The article examines four intersecting forms of death: (1) The proliferating crisis of intracommunal crime and homicide; (2) the imposition of social death through settler colonial practices in the wake of the war; (3) the affective and political experience of witnessing the genocide against Palestinians in Gaza since October 2023; and (4) the convergence of material and symbolic violences, including the constant threat of incidental death. Through a critical engagement with sociological theories of death—particularly as they relate to biopolitics, necropolitics, and indigenous survivance—the paper conceptualizes death not as an endpoint but as a sociopolitical condition under settler colonial rule. In doing so, it foregrounds how Palestinians confront the colonizing of emotions and articulate forms of endurance, refusal, and collective meaning-making amid conditions of ongoing elimination.