Sacralized Politics: The Case of Occupied East Jerusalem

The chapter explores how politics are sacralized in Israeli-occupied East Jerusalem, a colonized space. It analyzes the interlocking dynamics between Israel’s settler-colonial governance and religious and nationalist Zionism. The chapter closely examines Israel’s modalities of violence and the ways in which they form and inform the state’s policy, thereby uncovering Israel’s sacralization of politics in occupied East Jerusalem (oEJ). The chapter shares the political significance of such interlocking exchanges over three sites and experiences within oEJ: (1) law and legal practices; (2) a specific type of violence perpetrated by Jewish settlers against Palestinians known as “Price Tag” and (3) the “occupation of the senses” (Shalhoub-Kevorkian 2017). The chapter concludes by demonstrating the way global politics, local settler-colonial politics, and national laws, far from being neutral, are embedded in a biopolitical regime that subordinates the colonized. The sacralization of politics in Israel is supported by an ongoing global settler-colonial movement, which claims that the Jewish people have exclusive rights to the “promised land.” This movement has produced a Jewish state whose oppression, discrimination, exploitation, and cruelty against the Palestinians is essential to its governance.