What does decolonization of settler colonialism look like? The article re-examines the relationship between “classic” colonialism and settler colonialism and challenges the binary concept between settlers and indigenous population. We ask to consider settler colonialism as an organized situation of “violent dwelling”: a monopolistic mechanism over the right to build a personal or national home, the sense of home, and the question of home “ownership” – while denying these rights to the indigenous population.

In Israel/Palestine, different configurations of settler colonialism exist simultaneously. Therefore we will suggest thinking also about decolonization as not just one thing. It will have to be unsettling and settling at the same time: in parallel with the necessary changes to the concept of citizenship, legislation and spatial structure in settlements and in the shared public space; it will have to settle issues of reparations and unequal history in order to settle people together and create a sense of home, security and a future for both populations. Precisely now, when hundreds of thousands of homes in Israel/Palestine are ruined, burned, plundered or unsafe to live in, the thought of home allows us to rethink the necessary conditions for ontological security, for the future and for the creation of a space where both populations have a place in the deepest sense – a space that allows for striving for the end of violent dwelling, and not for the end of either the indigenous or settlers.

https://doi.org/10.70959/tac.60.2024.105127