The Holy Waste Land: A theoretical discourse on Palestine and the settler-colonial state of inceptional exception

This doctoral thesis interrogates the colonial and juridical foundations of Israel through a new conceptual framework: the inceptional state of exception-a condition of permanent emergency inscribed at the very origin of Zionist settler-colonial sovereignty. Rather than viewing Israel as a democracy in decay or degeneration, the study reframes it as a state constituted through the routinisation of legalised violence, racialised exclusion, and bureaucratic domination. In this account, the state of emergency is not an aberration but the baseline structure of legal and political order-embedded from the outset and sustained through the colonial logic of exception.

The analysis proceeds through critical engagements with Hannah Arendt, Edward Said, and Giorgio Agamben, reread through the prism of Palestine. From Arendt's account of imperialism and bureaucracy, the thesis develops the concept of subaltarianism: a mode of domination that governs silently through legal-administrative routine, embedding violence in ordinary governance. From Said's confrontation with Orientalism and exile, it advances the claim of dehumanisation as the founding logic of empire, tracing how Palestinians are produced as illegible, expendable, and structurally unknowable-and how narration emerges as a form of resistance against erasure. At its conceptual keystone, the thesis builds on and extends Agamben's framework, elaborating Israel as a paradigmatic state of inceptional exception: a wholly unprecedented formation where emergency is foundational to sovereignty.

In its culminating gesture, the study turns to Dante Alighieri's The Divine Comedy, neither peripherally nor incidentally, but as the poetic horizon in which these conceptual trajectories converge. Dante's poetics of exile and redemption provide the necessary counterpoint to juridical foreclosure, reframing the waste land as a site of resistance and renewal.

By bridging settler-colonial studies, Palestine studies, political theory, socio-legal analysis, and the historiography of empire, this dissertation forges an integrated frame that makes visible what each field alone cannot: how juridical suspension, bureaucratic domination, and erasure form the structural core of colonial sovereignty. This interdisciplinary intervention reframes sovereignty, law, personhood, and hope through the colonial crucible-pressing beyond description toward conceptual innovation, confronting the evasions of canonical theory, and generating the conceptual resources necessary to name Israel's singular condition.