On Targeting an Arab Woman: Settler Colonial Outposts with Intent to Harm

Lara Sheehi

This talk has been developed into an article: Lara Sheehi, “Intent to Harm: Settler Colonial Outposts in Psychoanalysis,” Middle East Critique 33, no. 3 (July 2, 2024): 419–34.

I began thinking about what I call settler colonial outposts, which I’ll define in the second part of this piece, since January of 2023, when I became the next target of choice, subjected to a racist, sexist, xenophobic, and anti-Arab smear campaign by pro-Zionist attack groups and their partners in the right-wing media. Conveniently, but not surprisingly, these two groups find ideological affinity with each other. Having been in the struggle for the liberation of Palestine for decades, and also being an abolitionist Arab woman in the fields of psychology and psychoanalysis, I am accustomed to demands to prove that I am not antisemitic as a precondition to engaging relationally with everyone. This process, or demand, really, is also known to the right-wing Zionist group who fabricated claims against me and who worked alongside right-wing sites to create a global campaign of harassment against me. 

This tactic was not individualized but, rather, followed a specific logic, as in cases before mine. Of course, I am not alone in pointing out how these attack groups unambiguously showed their intention to manufacture controversy by relying on easily accessible, hackneyed racist and sexist tropes to distort my scholarship and activism around Palestine. Because I have been engaged in the struggle for Palestinian liberation, the attack itself seemed banal in its logics and yet vicious in its intent to harm. This is where I started thinking about settler colonial outposts and, more importantly, the logic of violence they follow. Thinking about settler colonial outposts in this way–rather than understanding them as arbitrary attacks–allowed me to think more texturally about how we might refuse the psychic intrusions that outposts mobilize. Learning to read this logic is important theoretically, but also strategically so as not to succumb to what Stephen Sheehi and myself have named “settler colonial reality bending.”¹ I understood my situation was not extraordinary but, rather, one that followed a very familiar logic, one that others before me, especially women, and especially Arab and Palestinian women, had endured time and again. Rather than individualize the act of refusal in which I engaged, I felt the need to remain grounded in the systemic nature of these attacks, the logics of which match the larger aim of settler colonialism and its intent to harm, degrade, displace, dispossess, and disappear.

As a clinical psychologist with specific expertise in psychoanalysis, I felt the need to think through, dissect, unpack, and analyze my own experience as a target of this vicious smear campaign. I found myself particularly drawn to David Lloyd and Patrick’s Wolfe’s 2016 article, “Settler colonial logics and the neoliberal regime,”² with specific focus on where they refer to settler colonialism as also including “a psychic state of siege.” As a psychoanalytic psychologist, I want to underscore the centrality of the psychic province as central to the work and space of attack of what I call “outposts.” The psychic is an increasingly important texture for us to attune to. As we are thinking about strategies, especially during this conference, I want us to really focus on this psychic state of siege, using my own “case study” as a departure point. 

If we are to work at every encounter to disrupt settler colonial logics and to abolish all forms of domination in the name of name of liberation for all peoples, whether in Turtle Island or Palestine, we also have to resist understanding smear campaigns as merely a symptom that is an after-effect or just a distasteful side project of Zionist settler colonialism. Rather, we must center that, in the case of Zionism, pro-Israel vigilante groups and organizations mobilize ideological givens, what Heike Schotten has referred to as “settler colonial eliminationist ideology,”³ in the form of and through smear campaigns. These smear campaigns rely heavily on the shoring up of civilizational discourse and work both psychically and affectively to activate always-already sexist, racist, anti-Arab, and anti-Palestinian sentiment to harm those who are militant in their clarity about and speak up against Zionist settler colonial logics. I want to especially refocus us on how these smear campaigns can come to act as one of the psyops arm of an ever-expansive push for settler colonial sovereignty, a reminder that these campaigns are not merely a symptom. 

I refer to these pro-Zionist groups and their campaigns as settler colonial outposts: ideological formations, outposts that intend not just to defend, but to increase the spread of settler colonial power and crush or make a pariah of those who oppose or denaturalize Zionism. Settler colonial outposts that take the form of smear campaigns punish those who insist that Zionism is not an uncontested, natural extension of Jewishness, but rather an ideological position. In this way, we can understand these outposts as spaces of condensation, places for the convergence of both state-sponsored hasbara campaigns and non-state sponsored ideologues, organizations, and individuals in the United States and increasingly, of course, in Europe and the United Kingdom. These outposts operate at well-known junctures where right-wing media, pro-Israel interest organizations, and Zionists and Islamophobic activists and their social media counterparts meet to mobilize racist, anti-Arab, and anti-Palestinian sentiments and tropes. 

Here are some of the important aspects that I am focusing on as a psychologist: we should be attuned to the ways that the “psychic state of siege” that Lloyd and Wolfe⁴ speak of operates on a psychic and affective plane, finding traction even among non-ardent ideologues. This happens often, though perhaps tellingly, by spotlighting what is posited as a creeping and all-encompassing “identity politics,”⁵ which is often blamed for getting in the way of meaningful dialogue. Identity politics warfare of this nature acts as a foil to backdoor, crypto-fascist discourse. It has psychic and affective impact because it at once activates the crudest version of annihilatory anxiety and invites a non-critical nostalgia for a fantasied, pre-identity era. We can understand this as a fantasy of a time of unchecked normativity, under which settler colonialism thrives. 

In its abstract manifestations, the discourse includes prominent dog whistles, such as sloppy analogies to left-wing authoritarianism or the promulgation of horseshoe theory, whereby revolutionaries, anti- Zionists, and decolonial thinkers and activists are one side of the same coin with white supremacist fascists because of their so-called dogmatism. This is an important piece for us to reckon with because, in my experience, this is the very site of convergence where liberals—who are psychically invested in humanist discourses about good democratic values—enthusiastically join forces with right-wing ideologues and fascists to excise militants whom they label identity politics “extremists” or (disparagingly, of course) “woke members.” 

By severing militants from their quarters, they capitalize on the psychic state of siege central to settler colonial outposts, outposts that themselves, not incidentally, often operate in a very similar, familiar settler colonial milieu. In the United States, the tactics include slandering, maligning, and, at the very basic level, creating confusion that equates racist and xenophobic discourse with fact. Settler colonial outposts, through their intent to harm, are also intent on legitimizing such discourse as viable modes of intellectual engagement. In this way, fascist discourse is invited into academic spaces, and in my case, into psychoanalytic clinical spaces, as though it has intellectual merit or equitable standing in academic knowledge production. 

The danger here is that once the discourse is “in,” it is rapidly regularized  as a counter force to anti-imperialist, anti-capitalist, anti-racist and, in our case as well, anti-Zionist thinking, theorizing, training, and activism. It is here where we also see the ease with which anti-Arab and anti-Palestinian sentiment becomes prominent, used as a strategic tripwire to entice liberals into collaborating with fascists and right-wing talking points, ultimately closing ranks against anti-Zionist reality testing underway. 
I could go into the specifics of psychoanalysis, but instead I will just say a couple things before I end. I want to underscore here how the field of clinical psychoanalysis was both primed for this type of attack—in my case, many psychoanalysts joined forces with these smear campaigns. But also, the field was strategically targeted. It is important to highlight this not just because I am using psychoanalysis and myself as a case study. Rather, we can understand the mechanisms by which this particular smear campaign happened as a blueprint for settler colonial outposts writ large. For example, there were multiple interferences by non-psychoanalytic, non-clinical “academics” (a generous description of their functioning and role in the world) who crashed professional clinical listservs, attempted to disrupt professional events, including clinical talks where I was sharing sensitive clinical material, mounted pressure campaigns to have me fired from my job at George Washington University and from leadership positions within psychoanalysis, filed “ethical complaints” against me to the American Psychological Association and my local licensing boards, and directly communicated with leadership in psychoanalytic organizations to set the parameters of a libelous discourse. In all these scenarios, my political affiliations were what drove the charge, with specific focus on how my explicitly anti-Zionist positions intersected with my anti-American and anti-capitalist beliefs. More importantly to the work of psychic siege, these targeted campaigns vociferously insisted that these political positions, especially regarding Palestine, underscored my distinct ability to cause destruction.