The wheel that lost its chair Or how they came to bomb Palestine

This paper reflects on what it takes and what it means to be interpellated as a threat. More specifically, it describes the European response to the success of Hamas in the 2006 Palestinian legislative elections. While you might recognise elements of securitisation in this paper, here the performative utterance of threat is a compressed history that relies on material and discursive histories of racism, sexism and colonialism to be successful. Securitisation is successful because it reiterates existing symbolic and material histories of permissible violence against racialised and sexualised subjects, normalised because the ‘securitised’ other has always been cast as threatening. This paper stresses the asymmetries of power that mark the encounter between the European colonialist and Hamas, and the consequences of being marked as threatening entail. The securitisation of Hamas delivered through boycott, sanction and siege meant the collective punishment and death of the Palestinians and a coordinated imperial effort to dismantle local resistance.

This paper interweaves excerpts from different performative texts: my interviews with European Union and Hamas representatives as they account of expectations of each other around the 2006 performance of democracy; theories of performativity and the questions of race and sex that shape contemporary developments this theory namely the works of Judith Butler and Sara Ahmed, and finally anti-colonial and anti-racist literatures and theories, notably Toni Morrison and Frantz Fanon that describe experiences of being marked as less than human and the resistances against this white supremacist fantasy.

Here security and securitisation are described as delusional fantasies that emerge from and reiterate white fantasies of black and Arab as threatening and in need of European intervention. This delusion is obvious in the confusing European Union utterances that try to fashion a justification for sanctioning the Hamas government and the Palestinian people after the 2006 Palestinian elections.