The settler-colonial ethical outlook in the West Bank settlement project: Or, how a settler-colony fell apart when money entered the frontier

Abstract

Applying an anthropology of ethics approach to the study of settler-colonialism, this article discloses the settler-colonial ethical outlook that animates the most activist circles in West Bank settlement society. By “settler-colonial ethical outlook” I mean the set of proper and improper motivations for appropriating land (according to the settlers). Such an analysis reveals how in the West Bank settlement project, making a profit from the land is taboo—a taboo that, against the backdrop of the rise in land value, came to haunt a community of settlers and eventually led to its implosion when settlers holding two distinct ethical frameworks (deontological vs. ethics of the “good life”) turned against each other. Tracing this case of “moral breakdown” within the ethical outlook of settler-colonizers, this article shows how in the case of the West Bank settlement project, for-profit imaginations and capitalism more broadly sit in an uneasy relationship with settler-colonial expansion.