Intent to Harm: Settler Colonial Outposts in Psychoanalysis

Abstract

This autoethnographic article unpacks a highly publicized, Zionist, and right-wing smear campaign. Rather than individualize this process, the article discusses this smear campaign to outline the mechanics of what are referred to as “settler colonial outposts” that extend the sovereignty of the Israeli settler state. The article maps out how settler colonial outposts are ideological formations and thus also spaces of convergence for fascists and liberal Zionists. Finally, it attends to the psychic and affective features of settler colonial outposts.

Keywords:

• Fascism
• ideology
• settler colonialism
• palestine
• psychoanalysis
• zionism

“settler colonial violence is at once law-making, and therefore constitutive of a certain kind of sovereignty, and a ‘free and ruthless’ use of force…The corollary to this perpetual reconstitution of law-making violence, which does not allow the ‘forgetting’ of the law’s origins in appropriation, is the persistence of a psychic ‘state of siege’: the representation of the world as a surround populated by uncivil peoples who pose what, in the language of neoconservatism as of Zionism, is understood as an ‘existential threat’ to civil subjects. With the impeccable logic of the paranoid, the ‘free and ruthless force’ inflicted on those evicted ‘beyond the line’ is projected onto its objects.” (Lloyd and Wolfe 2016, 114)

Settler colonialism is a structure of power constitutively intending to harm (Coulthard 2014). Organized around the logic of domination, exploitation, and racial and ethnic hierarchies, settler colonialism necessitates a persistent repetition-compulsion consisting of harmful practices that displace indigenous life, intrude on physical and psychic sovereignty, and physically maim or create debility (Puar 2017). The repetition compulsion is key, and yet, unlike its Freudian origins, is not unconscious, but rather pointed, purposeful, and shored up by juridical, social, political, economic, and relational processes and structures (Erakat 2020). The settler colonial repetition-compulsion is organized around a constellation of actions that aim to turn the settler into native (Wolfe 2006), while invading the psychic province of being (Shalhoub-Kevorkian and Wahab 2021). One such action is political intimidation and repression of academics and activists in the settler colony of the US and across Europe in what, since October 7, 2023, has been called “a new McCarthyism” (see Conro and Oliver 2023; Levin 2023).

In this paper, I utilize autoethnography to unpack my own experience of being targeted in a highly publicized, Zionist, and right-wing smear campaign. More specifically, I dissect the spurious Title VI complaint that StandWithUs (SWU), a right-wing pro-Israel advocacy group, released to the right-wing press before filing with the Department of Education against my previous employer, the George Washington University, US. I discuss the professional and personal attacks against me and pay special attention to the ways that right-wing and liberal actors, especially within my profession, “closed ranks” through readily available racist, sexist, and anti-Arab tropes.

Rather than individualize their approach, I discuss this smear campaign for several reasons: First, to outline the mechanics of what I call “settler colonial outposts” that extend the sovereignty of the Israeli settler state (especially in its settler colonial counterpart, the USA); second, to map out how settler colonial outposts are ideological formations and therefore also spaces of convergence for fascists and liberal Zionists; and third, to explicate the psychic and affective features of settler colonial outposts. I begin with an overview of the civilizational matrix that undergirds Zionist settler colonial ideology, discuss how smear campaigns exploit “the psychic state of siege” (Lloyd and Wolfe 2016), and provide a close reading of the mechanics of my own targeting. I close with concrete professional examples, using the “crisis” within the field of psychoanalytic psychology as a cautionary tale.

The Disciplinary Civilizational Matrix of Zionism

The swiftness with which the settler colonial state of Israel could marshal brute force, civilizational discourse, and institutional disciplinary tactics both “at home” and in other settler colonial conditions (such as in the US) post-October 2023, alerts us to a pre-established setter colonial logic primed for activation. Settler colonialism relies on structures and acts of violence as its primary functioning, legitimizing this violence through the valiance of virtues. This legitimization process is often actualized through mission civilisatrice or spreading “democratic values”—relying on moralism and codes of civility, what Heike Schotten (2020, 287) highlights as “settler colonial eliminationist ideology.” The codes are ideological, contouring larger processes such as who has indisputable sovereignty; who acts in self-defense; and who is enabled to enact violence with impunity, as we see happening right now in Palestine. In smaller, yet still consequential ways, these codes also determine who can speak, about what, and, most importantly, how that speech is delivered, especially in the case of Palestine vis-à-vis Zionism. While many of the mechanics of these codes operate undetected, many are also blatant, operating in painful clarity, such as through the justification of genocidal warfare in Gaza.

For Schotten, Zionism is an ideology that is constructed in an “unmarked” matrix of “savage” vs “civilized” in which “settler colonial ideology smuggles a highly normative value system into the polity, whereby only settler life qualifies or is properly recognized as life ‘itself’”, simultaneously constructing “its ‘opposite’, that which refuses ‘life’ in an unthinkable or utterly unconscionable manner” (Ibid.). “Life” comes to represent normative being, a nod to Sylvia Wynter’s (2003) “ethnoclass of man” and the referential point upon which the normative boundaries of existence, and therefore, who threatens it, are constituted. These are the ideological givens that have been brazenly exploited to genocide more than 30,000 Palestinians in a matter of months in the Gaza Strip; to intensify administrative detentions and torture of political prisoners (including sexual torture) in the West Bank (see Bajec 2023); and to ratchet up the ferocity of what I am calling settler colonial outposts.

Pro-Israel vigilante groups and organizations often mobilize these ideological codes through smear campaigns that rely heavily on the construction of Schotten’s “opposite”, both psychically and affectively. The explicit intent is to silence, intimidate, and harm those who speak up against Zionist settler-colonial logics. I refer to these campaigns as settler colonial outposts to help us think of them as ideological formations—“outposts” that intend not just to defend, but to increase the spread of Zionist settler colonial power and sovereignty. They also aim to crush or make a pariah of those who oppose or denaturalize Zionism, punishing those who insist that Zionism is not an uncontested, natural extension of Jewishness, but rather an ideological position. We can understand these outposts as spaces of condensation, places for the convergence of state-sponsored (hasbara) and non-state sponsored (ideologues) organizations and individuals. This includes otherwise progressive individuals and organizations conscripted to defend Zionism through various unexamined subject positions (e.g. what Françoise Vergès terms, “civilizational feminism”). In the United States (and especially since October 2023, increasingly in Europe and the UK) these outposts also operate on well-worn junctures where right-wing media, pro-Israel interest organizations, Zionist and Islamophobic activists, and social media meet to mobilize racist, Anti-Arab and anti-Palestinian sentiments and tropes (see Plitnik and Aziz 2023; Sheehi 2011; Kumar 2021).

The ideological nature of these campaigns and the transparency of their pretense to fight antisemitism has increasingly become evident in part because of the shifting positive popular opinion toward Palestine (Plitnick and Aziz 2023), the increasing critical study of Zionism (e.g. the newly constituted Institute for the Critical Study of Zionism), and the overwhelming recognition of Israel as an apartheid, settler-colonial state (see Human Rights Watch 2021; United Nations Human Rights Office of the High Commissioner 2022; The Israeli Information Center for Human Rights in the Occupied Territories 2021; Amnesty International 2022). There has also been mounting evidence that details how the Israeli settler state considers these campaigns as central to its psychic warfare (see Bradford 2023). With the disintegration of the valence of liberal virtues, these outposts have resorted to red-baiting and doxing trucks, and targeted “firing” campaigns. In psychology, and specifically clinical psychoanalysis, therapists and clinicians who critically engage settler-colonialism, white supremacy, anti-blackness, gender (especially trans issues), sexuality, disability, and reproductive rights have also been targeted.¹

More specifically, settler colonial outposts have used the red herring of Palestine to create entry points to fields and disciplines, and, as we have seen, entire campuses (Wilson and Kamola 2021). They have done so by manufacturing crises and fanning moral panic—that is, activating “codes” of purity and spectres of infiltration by the “pro-Palestine illiberal left.”

Mobilizing the “Psychic Stage of Siege”

Zionist fear-mongering smear campaigns have psychic and affective impact because they activate the crudest version of annihilatory anxiety and invite a non-critical nostalgia of fantasied pre-identity times, i.e. times of unchecked normativity.²

While it is easier to understand how right-wing and fascist actors would eagerly support smear campaigns, we should be attuned to how settler colonial outposts operationalize a “psychic state of siege” (Lloyd and Wolfe 2016) to conscript even non-ideologues in their disciplinary violence (Carter J. Carter, forthcoming). Their willful participation is often mobilized psychically and affectively, and perhaps tellingly, through a panic related to the creeping domination of “identity politics.” In loose terms, this version of “identity politics” caricatures real material concerns, instead implying a world dominated by wounded minoritized subjects who weaponize their “identity” to exact power over the dominant demographic. In its abstract manifestations, the discourse also collapses individual, identitarian claims with liberatory justice. Political centrists are then scared off by sloppy analogies of “left-wing authoritarianism” or the promulgation of “horseshoe theory,” whereby revolutionary thinkers and activists are one side of the same coin with white supremacist fascists because of their supposed “dogmatism” (Reimer 2020). Since October 2023, we have seen how liberals who otherwise have a psychic investment in liberal humanist discourses and good democratic values have increased their tenacity in using identity politics as a foil for crypto-fascist Zionist discourse.

Capitalizing on the “psychic stage of siege”, these types of settler colonial outposts—not incidentally, themselves often operating in a very familiar settler colonial milieu, as in the case of the settler colony of the US—slander, malign, and at the very basic level, create confusion that equates racist and xenophobic discourse with reality. In this way, “The impeccable logic of the paranoid” (Lloyd and Wolfe 2016, 114) is also operationalized by settler colonial outposts. More specifically, the coordinated smear campaigns by pro-Zionist vigilante groups act as one of the psyops arm of a settler colonial regime’s intent to harm anyone who dares disrupt its logics, even from afar. The crudeness of Zionist smear campaigns is often shocking, especially in their partnership and complicity with virulently antisemitic right-wing blogs and media who regularly speak of Jewish conspiracy theories. On the surface, partnerships with Fox News or Breitbart, for example, may appear to be incoherent or self-destructive. However, if we are attuned to the settler colonial logics behind outposts, the paranoid defense of the sanctity of settler colonialism itself emerges as their organizing charter.

Building a Case with Intent to Harm

I will use the high-profile Zionist smear campaign in which I have been targeted as a case example to highlight the mechanics of settler colonial outposts. In so doing, I highlight how Zionist ideologues and right-wing groups join otherwise self-ascribed liberal organizations and people (not all of them Jewish, it must be noted) to harass, intimidate, threaten, and intentionally libel those who advocate for Palestine. Rather than elevate it above others, especially considering the uptick in the ferocity of these campaigns since October 2023, I use my case as an archetype, especially because the volume of exculpatory documentation proves this campaign is a brazen ideological contrivance built on fabrications with intent to harm.

StandWithUs (SWU) is a pro-Israel group who filed a Title VI complaint with the US Department of Education (DoE) alleging that I had discriminated and retaliated against “Jewish and Israeli students” in my clinical psychology graduate classroom following a non-mandatory brown bag lecture by the internationally renowned feminist scholar, Nadera Shalhoub-Kevorkian. Co-hosted by my department and my newly launched Psychoanalysis and the Arab World Lab, Prof. Shalhoub-Kevorkian drew on recent work by Jewish Israeli scholars, Moriel Ram and Haim Yacobi (2022), describing how the state of Israel, through IsraelAID, launches mental and public health initiatives in the Global South as a means of developing soft power. Rather than exclusivizing Israel and alienating students as the complaint cynically asserts, the talk spoke to the ethical responsibility of clinical psychologists to recognize how they may be mobilized to serve state projects, no matter the state.

The allegations of the complaint are baseless and fabricated, yet follow a familiar blueprint, tellingly collapsing Jewishness with Zionism/Israel. More troubling is the touting of a new term, “erasive antisemitism”, the genesis of which appears to derive from one obscure Medium post that was requoted by an Israeli think-tank. As it is utilized in the complaint, this overarching term posits that merely espousing anti-Zionist views constitutes an erasure of Jewishness because, as they insist, Zionism is central to Judaism (see Gordon in this Special Issue).

To actively disrupt the many psychic intrusions on which settler colonial outposts rely, I structure this article around direct quotes from the conclusive findings of an independent third-party investigation. This was carried out by Crowell & Moring LLP at the insistence of my previous employer, the George Washington University (GW), who pre-empted the DoE in adjudicating SWU’s complaint.³ The findings were released on March 27, 2023, after an approximately three-month investigation that included comprehensive interviews with administrators, faculty, and student witnesses, including those who were present at Prof. Shalhoub-Kevorkian’s September 30, 2022, brown bag event. The investigation also included interviews with all students who were present for my October 3, 2022, graduate clinical psychology class, which was unethically recorded and from which SWU, not surprisingly, cherry-picked for salacious quotes. Most importantly for this Special Issue, the findings document that the complaint falsified claims, misrepresented facts, and noted that the adoption of the IHRA definition of antisemitism would be an impingement on academic freedom. The investigation provided a full and complete exoneration against all specious and libelous claims made by SWU.

I use direct quotes from the investigation to animate my case study and highlight how settler colonial outposts, so entrenched within filial US settler colonial society, prosecute their libelous campaigns. I draw special attention to how this harassment can happen with impunity in fields where right-wing organizing is already happening and where liberals are induced to identify with their fascistic counterparts. Finally, using the field of clinical psychoanalysis as a cautionary tale, I distill how Zionist ideologues that are not clinicians nor linked to the field of clinical psychoanalysis, come to act as interlopers that foment hate and inflict further harm. While this case details what happened specifically in the field of clinical psychoanalysis, it is my hope that we can infer from its logics how all fields are susceptible to this type of intrusion (Reimer 2020).

Setting the Stage: The Complaint

In January 2023, the George Washington University learned of a letter filed with the U.S. Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights alleging antisemitic discrimination and retaliation in a university course. The university engaged the law firm Crowell & Moring LLP to conduct a third-party investigation to thoroughly examine the allegations in this complaint (GW Office of the President 2023)

Before filing the Title VI complaint with the DoE, SWU released it to the right-wing press and redacted all names except mine.

On the evening of January 11, 2023, I received an email from The Washington Free Beacon, a third-rate Breitbart-wannabe rag, asking me to “comment on” a Title VI complaint that they had knowledge was to be filed against GW by SWU. The complaint alleged that GW “discriminated against first-year Jewish and Israeli students in its professional psychology program” (Ibid.). SWU’s filing of a contrived complaint and alliance with right-wing media is a textbook example of the mechanics of settler colonial outposts with intent to harm. As an Arab woman professor teaching in the United States, I am accustomed to demands to prove that I am not antisemitic as a precondition to engaging relationally, a fact also known to SWU who regularly work with right-wing sites to kickstart the well-oiled hate machine these sites salaciously feed (Wilson and Kamola 2021). This move, as in cases before mine, unambiguously showed their intention to manufacture controversy and rely on easily accessible, hackneyed racist and sexist tropes to distort my scholarship and activism around Palestine.

As the Center for Constitutional Rights and Palestine Legal has documented, defamation and harassment campaigns gain traction partially because there is a “Palestine Exception” for academic freedom and free speech (see Palestine Legal and Center for Constitutional Rights 2015). More than this, as I am asserting here, virulently pro-Israel organizations come to act as settler colonial outposts, ideological formations explicit in their intention to enforce positive unconditional regard toward the state now known as Israel. As an organizing feature, they opportunistically exploit those who might share their political views on Zionism. In this way, they use similar tactics of other right-wing activist groups, willfully misrepresenting facts to smear, isolate, and defame, causing harm before their victims can speak. Even if their larger claims do not gain traction, as is often the case, their intent to harm works on the logics of the “psychic stage of siege”, as described above. In this way, they delineate the discourse and parameters of psychological as well as intellectual functioning, especially within academia. Outposts induce chilling effects that have the potential to create self-censorship and produce re-identifications with liberal and “civility”-based notions of academic freedom, as David Landy, Ronit Lentin, and Conor McCarthy (2020) outline in their edited book, Enforcing Silence: Academic Freedom, Palestine and the Criticism of Israel. They also tend to dovetail with anti-labor and carceral logics inherent to academic institutions that reproduce a docile social order. These campaigns also rely on anti-Arab prejudice and racist “terrorist” tropes, which remain robustly evocative in the US societal imagination.

Hardly subliminal messages were used to kick up suspicion based on my Arabness, including pairing my face with Islamic Jihad photos, and using stock photos of detonating bombs to insinuate thinly veiled assertions of terrorism. A morbidly obsessed, retired, non-clinician academic of ill-repute has stripped of my citizenship and identity by casting aspersions on my legal status in the US and has fabricated that I have lost my citizenship in Canada. This is the work of settler colonial outposts, utilizing the logic of settler colonial dispossession and displacement, even in fantasy, to inflict harm and insist on what Frantz Fanon (1968, 103) calls “the racial allocation of guilt.” Recently, the terroristic claim has become more blatant, with clout-chasing pseudo academics claiming that the American Psychological Association (APA) provides “material support for terrorism” by not forcing me to resign my post as President of an APA Division. Palestine Legal and the Center for Constitutional Rights have recently published a white paper asserting that the US antiterrorism laws and their ballooning use against academics and students is “anti-Palestinian at the core.” As Junaid Rana (2016) also shows us, this deployment is central to the infrastructure of US security state discourses and policies. Similarly, Stephen Salaita (2017) has shown how the synergy between the settler colony of the USA and Israel is not coincidental, but rather, “symbiotic” with North American settler colonialism write large.

Outposts replace facts with inflammatory narratives that mobilize racist imaginaries. That is, settler colonial outposts capitalize on the twin settler colonial infrastructure of the USA, using campaigns of harassment and defamation that are predictably racist and sexist, and yet, ideologically coherent in technique and strategy.

Settler Colonial Logics in Action

Many of the statements the complaint alleges were made by Dr. Sheehi were, according to those who heard them, either inaccurate or taken out of context and misrepresented. (ibid)

While thousands of signatories in Academia more broadly, and in psychology and psychoanalysis more specifically, signed letters of solidarity and support on my behalf, right-wing agitators within my own field excitedly joined in astroturfing efforts. These inside agitators utilized similar right-wing tactics, generating “think pieces” (a generous description) that boasted heavy-handed symbolic photos of burning houses and disseminating their racist analyses on psychoanalytic listservs. Many of these right-wing agitators, some of whom are not clinicians, worked alongside the well-known retired academic of ill-repute who has a long and sordid history of harassing pro-Palestine academics.⁴ Some clinicians were “disturbed” by these exposés, insisting that I had abused my power; in other cases, clinicians indicated feeling outwardly affirmed by these racist assertions. Still others were shaken, wondering how this “scandal” had beached onto the once pristine (read: pure) shores of psychoanalysis.

I refrain from any paternalistic and white-washed reading of this being due to “ignorance”, but rather, as Carter J. Carter (forthcoming) also highlights, I want to underscore how the field of clinical psychoanalysis was both primed for this specific type of ideological campaign and, strategically targeted. This is evidenced by the multiple interferences by non-psychoanalytic, non-clinical “academics” who crashed professional listservs, attempted to disrupt professional events (including clinical talks of mine), mounted pressure campaigns to have me be fired from my job and leadership positions, and directly communicated with leadership in psychoanalytic and psychological organizations to set the parameters of libelous discourse. In all these scenarios, my political affiliations were highlighted, with specific focus on how my anti-Zionist positions intersected with my “anti-American” and “anti-capitalist” beliefs, and, more importantly to the work of psychic siege, associated this with my distinct ability to cause destruction.

Right-wing actors had no problem calling me a Hizballah and Hamas agent, an Ayatollist, an Arab Goebbels, a “sand-n***er”, a c*nt, a terrorist, or admonishing my partner for not “controlling my c*cksucker”. This overt sexist, racist, and Islamophobic rhetoric is typically treated as distasteful by liberals and progressives alike (Aziz 2021). Because the sleeper-cell terrorist trope was too distasteful to publicly endorse for liberals, concerns about my incivility was mobilized. This was done through banal methods as highlighting “crassness” (i.e. my ample use of the word “fuck” in social media posts), or through right-wing talking points of “leftist authoritarianism”—what was referred to in one prominent psychoanalytic forum as “the illiberal, extreme left” takeover (The Guardian 2023)

Here is where a psychic collapse happened. That is, the introduction of incivility psychically overwhelmed liberals who may have held back from supporting the more obviously racist and sexist talking points. In the psychic collapse, however, they could quickly abandon their self-righteous alignment with democratic principles, making clear that their magnanimity would be reserved only for a “good” liberal subject, not a “bad” one who publicly curses and visibly displays anger at injustice. Psychic collapse allows for a flattening effect of what otherwise would be glaring contradictions in liberal and fascist discourse, causing liberals to close ranks against the uncivil intruder, a phenomenon that psychoanalyst Avgi Saketopoulou (2019)⁵ has characterized as “whiteness closing ranks.” Incivility works on similar psychic fault lines of the code of identity politics (read: a fear of a black/brown planet), familiar in its racialized and gendered undertones. More importantly, incivility becomes a psychic entry point for liberals to close ranks with their right-wing and fascist counterparts without the psychic responsibility of what otherwise would be a politically irreconcilable identification.

It may be psychologically seductive to view this process as merely a rhetorical maneuver. If we are attuned to the reliance on psychic siege and the psychoanalytic understanding of how the unconscious works, however, we can instead see how threat is prominently mobilized. Speaking about Palestine, being aligned with Palestine, fighting for Palestinian liberation, comes to be enough to emotionally activate a fantastical threat—a psychic stand-in for outposts.

The threat in the field of psychoanalysis was especially activating because it was embodied rather than fantasied: an Arab woman with politically “radical” alignments. The “threat” activated an already deep-seated annihilation anxiety, one that dovetails with racist settler colonial logics of settlers being “replaced” or outbirthed; with the white supremacist “great replacement theory”; and, materially, with clinical psychoanalysis’ obsessive anxieties related to contemporary relevance and the demise of the field. This matches Lloyd and Wolfe (2016, 114) reading of, “the representation of the world as a surround populated by uncivil peoples who pose what, in the language of neoconservatism as of Zionism, is understood as an ‘existential threat’ to civil subjects.” The annihilatory anxiety is so saturated with racist, xenophobic, and misogynistic psychic material as to allow psychoanalysts, people who professionally work with and adhere to an understanding of the power of unconscious process, to eschew their own libidinal investments in their prized theory and method. Deflection and displacement bind them with fascists, a key strategy of settler colonial outposts.

This fascist-liberal alignment happened even as a very real (rather than imagined and projected, as theirs) targeting unfolded in real-time, in the American Psychoanalytic Association (APsA). Shortly after right-wing media sites “reported” on SWU’s salacious complaint, right-wing clinicians and their Zionist counterparts began to flood psychoanalytic listservs with these links. Because many liberals decried the offensiveness of relying on right-wing, antisemitic, and racist websites for “news”, outposts began to double down on the civilizing mission work of settler-colonialism by propagating lies about my intent to harm psychoanalysis—an ironic, yet classic projective identification that activated racialized, gendered, and politicized threats of intrusion (Sheehi 2023; Kemp and Pinto 2023). The deleterious impact of these interventions became clear when, breaking from the organization’s administrative procedures, I was unilaterally barred by APsA’s Executive Committee to speak on a panel at their fast-approaching yearly conference called, “Psychotherapy in Conditions of War”.

While the intent of such an unprecedented and explicitly discriminatory act was obvious to some, the leadership doubled down, and without so much as speaking to me (despite my being on APsA’s Program Committee), sent an email to the wider membership that left me unnamed and unmarked, but still very much present in what I psychically represented:

A polarizing question was raised in the Program Committee about whether to invite a well-known and controversial figure in our field to present on a panel at our upcoming virtual meeting in June 2023. She is a member in good standing of APsA. She has also been the object of passionate supporters and passionate detractors, as a result of reports of alleged actions in the context of her teaching role at George Washington University, and public statements related to the intractable conflict in Israel-Palestine.

After careful consideration and consultation with a range of experts, as well as extensive and difficult discussions within the Executive Committee and between members of the Executive Committee and the Program Committee, we decided that it is not in the best interests of APsA at this time to extend an invitation to her to speak at our conference. We felt that the Association could not "contain" a session with her on it, and some of us also felt uncomfortable with having a presenter who has been on record as making what some believe are statements that may constitute hate speech.

The decision not to extend an invitation to her at this time was determined on the basis of the escalating controversies surrounding her public statements regarding the Israel-Palestine conflict, and her alleged actions at George Washington University. (Conroy 2023)

There is nothing innocent about how this blatant discriminatory act can transpire (Sheehi and Sheehi 2022). Yet, it is helpful for us to document the reliance on civilizational discourse, i.e. civility, here in the specter of “containment” as the channel through which it is operationalized. This seemingly innocent procedural decision provides a brazen example of how outposts rely on displacement and hypothetical conditions to justify and rationalize their violence. In leadership discussions following my being barred to speak at APsA, it was casually articulated that if conditions were different, with further emphasis: if antisemitism were not present in the world, the organization and its liberal members would feel more comfortable with me presenting my professional work. The disappearance of the Arab as a fix to antisemitism is the thinly veiled messaging of the outpost.

Fearmongering by flouting an inability to “contain” also emerges as the convenient signal for its predecessor, the necessity to contain. By psychically and affectively generating the specter of the necessity to contain, anti-Zionist academics, clinicians, and activists become the imagined problem that, if eliminated, could in fantasy restore order and relieve organizations and professions of the issues of their concern. In locating the problem in individuals, of course, outposts ensure that the individual “problem” is the only one displaced, dispossessed, disappeared. Most importantly to their mission, conditions and structures that are the actual cause of dis-order remain intact. These are settler colonial logics in action.

“Psychoanalysis in Crisis”

Dr. Sheehi repeatedly acknowledged the students’ feelings, gave the students space to express their concerns, and denounced antisemitism as a real and present danger. No student-interviewees recalled Dr. Sheehi denying that antisemitism exists or denying the students’ lived experiences. (ibid)

Another concrete example will provide more texture to the work of settler colonial outposts. Under the guise of “warning” presumably clueless, ignorant, or inane clinicians (or all three) who otherwise could not possibly think for themselves, a non-clinician, non-psychoanalyst, has paired up with the same retired academic of ill-repute cited above, to “sound the alarm” about a “new” school of psychoanalytic thought. In keeping with the racist and xenophobic fearmongering, I was dubbed a leader of this fantasized movement, coalesced around an acronym that right-wing media often use to describe “wokeness”. Most tellingly, the new school of thought is said to rely heavily on boycott, divestment, and sanctions theory, in addition to queer theory, liberation theory and decolonial theory—an absurd and heavy-handed, yet strategic, associative process that alerts us to their central use of Palestine and anti-Zionism in their psychic state of siege.

In an online event called “The Crisis in Psychoanalysis”—later published in a non-peer reviewed online journal—one of the co-authors of this fabricated article attempts to engage in close text analysis of one of my personal tweets from years prior. My tweet responds to one of the many egregious crimes against humanity that Israel had perpetrated in Gaza, admonishing those who willfully and dangerously refuse to engage in power analysis and instead activate ideologically saturated tropes to hold Hamas responsible for all suffering incurred. While the tweet was made years prior to the current genocide being enacted in the Gaza Strip, its content remains widely academically accepted, is noncontroversial, and evinces precisely what we have been witnessing in the past several months.

The latent (though not unconscious) reason for why they chose this tweet is important, even as their attempt is rendered desperately pathetic in the face of the atrocities currently being committed by Israel. That is, they attempt to evince that not only am I “un-psychoanalytic” by making non-clinical proclamations, but also, that I am a dangerous and uncivil clinician by aligning with “China, Iran and Russia”. Here, I am marked with considerable destructive/uncivil potentiality, priming their audience as to how I have the ability, intent, and power to “blow up” psychoanalysis. Their intent to harm becomes more brazen through a telling thought experiment, where the non-clinician invites the audience to imagine what the future implications of “my” line of thinking would be to the field of psychoanalysis writ large. He concludes in shocking pseudo-intellectual acrobatics—dare I say, projections—that my beliefs would lead to the whole sale discrimination against Jewish students and candidates at psychoanalytic institutes.

We should be enraged by the blatant anti-Arab sentiment and the insinuation that the stealthy Arab is an a priori danger to Jewish people and, in this case, psychoanalytic candidates/students. Their farcical act is further damning, however, when we contextualize his statement within a multi-year study conducted by the Holmes Commission on Racial Equality in American Psychoanalysis. The final report of the Holmes Commission painstakingly documents how this type of wholesale discrimination is actually happening to BIPOC candidates in psychoanalytic institutes and training sites across the USA.⁶ More bluntly, the combined manifest and latent approach animates a psychic inversion with intent to harm—one that preys on always-already racist, xenophobic, anti-Arab, and anti-Palestinian tropes. That is, outposts mobilize conscious and unconscious fear of Arabs and Palestinians, and, of course, racist, and sexist discourses of angry women—notably anti-black in their implications—with knowledge that racism, sexism, and post-9/11 Islamophobia will unconsciously do their job, even—or perhaps especially—within otherwise liberal frameworks.

To concretize it further, but also to provide us with a helpful texture to the psychic state of siege employed by outposts with intent to harm, they are at once conjuring the image of a nostalgic pure (white) psychoanalysis free of conflict (a comical assertion for anyone with even cursory knowledge of the field and theory, famous for conflict theory) and, more importantly, contouring the battle ground for how it should be purged of its interlopers, intruders, and uncivil dissidents. This intent is painfully evident in this example, where outposts reach to a fabricated hypothetical to exploit both real memories and affective worries related to a psychoanalysis without Jews. The maneuver is a perverse nod to “great replacement” theory, this time perpetrated by an Arab psychoanalytic clinician who comes to be understood as uniquely dangerous.

I am hopeful that the examples I have offered in this section show how settler colonial outposts use ideologues to: first, mobilize a seductive psychic displacement that activates the moral panic of liberals who fear the demise of their alleged democracies; and second, dislocate the academic rigor and scholarly critique of Zionism into a sinister political agenda of a priori antisemites. What I am offering in this article is that these mechanics are central to the work of settler colonial outposts. By constructing me as the charismatic, totalitarian leader of the BIPOC hoards, outposts tapped into a deep-seated fear of the “stealthy Arab”, a sleeper-cell draconian leader—in my case, an angry, violent, antisemitic Arab woman, who will not stop until her zombie followers slay the “scapegoat, ideally a white male representing authority and privilege”, later referred to as “a bit of human sacrifice” (Conroy 2023).

Even in its puerility, the conscious messaging and dangerous displacement is clear: our “take over” is a savage one, uncivil because our voracious appetites crave white male blood only. In this cynical reading, our scholarly critique and activism has nothing to do with being in alignment with a decolonial understanding of “first do no harm”, underscored by the integrity for which we fight for the lives, dignity, self-determination, and real liberation of oppressed peoples.

Conclusion

SWU and a few of the students in the class, advocated for an expansive view of the definition of antisemitism, which, if accepted in the university environment, could infringe on free speech principles and academic freedom. (ibid)

What I have attempted to outline is how Zionist smear campaigns are settler colonial outposts, intent on expanding the sovereignty of the settler colonial state of Israel. To summarize, settler colonial outposts are political and ideological formations that create spaces of convergence for right-wing, fascist, and liberal actors alike. Firstly, they have intent to harm those who denaturalize Zionism; secondly, they work in tandem with and function seamlessly in US settler colonial violence (and their European counterparts); thirdly, they are operationalized through civilizational discourses that are animated psychically and affectively; and finally, they are promulgated through racist, sexist, and xenophobic discourses, especially in professional spaces that are primed for their mechanics.

Clinical psychoanalysis, not to be exclusivized from other fields that have lost their social currency, has been grappling openly for decades about its viability and relevance in the social sphere and, more specifically, as a clinical modality. While it has an “evidence base” that is growing, psychoanalysis has been rightfully critiqued and received with deep suspicion by people of and from the Global South, racial minorities in the state now known as the US, and sexual and gender minorities. This suspicion is not an exaggeration but is rather well supported, despite some of the field’s radical history, because clinical psychoanalysis has often identified itself, by theory and practice, as a colonial and/or bourgeois import that demands clinicians to adhere to “purity tests” and demands that the social and political be excised as proof of clinical competency and/or “technical neutrality”. (Portuges 2009) This is further complicated because the training and teaching of psychoanalysis as a method of clinical work is overwhelmingly only valid when done through a formal Psychoanalytic Institute, most of which are governed by a hierarchy of institutional privileges bestowed by the International Psychoanalytic Association or the American Psychoanalytic Association, or both.

In the last decades, especially, clinical psychoanalysis has been critiqued from within its ranks, largely by minoritized psychoanalysts and psychoanalytic clinicians, as well as their leftist majority-identified counterparts. This is the “social turn” that has caused much psychic commotion among psychoanalysts who have been, by and large, intellectually and socially isolated from other disciplines, insistent on a “split” between the clinical and the sociopolitical, even when they write or theorize about some of the most recognizable leftist psychoanalysts in history such as Erich Fromm, R.D. Laing, and Wilhelm Reich. Notably, very rarely do these analysts engage the work of Frantz Fanon, François Tosquelles, Gilles Deleuze, or Felix Gauttari, to name but a few who provide considerable input into how one resists the split between the psychic and the political, in clinical, practice as readily as in daily life. The proclamations from these clinicians appear shockingly infantile, even if violent, in their manifest content: claims that those of us who insist on the sociopolitical as intimately linked up with the intrapsychic are wanting to “castrate” white male leadership; or, more pointedly, if not dramatically indulgent, in my case, “[you] watch passively to the bloodshed…we owe you our final breath as the life drips out” (Conroy 2023).

It is no surprise that in this climate, in clinical psychoanalysis as readily as in other fields that are enduring a long-overdue “reckoning”, fascist claims mobilized by settler colonial outposts could find traction, with direct intent to harm. If we understand outposts as a psyops operational function of settler colonialism more broadly, we can begin to contour an important piece of outposts’ constitutive machinery. That is, we can identify an entire logic that otherwise may be misread as merely symptomatic. In this way, it is important to read my intervention here as intending to highlight how Zionist settler colonialism relies on outposts to regularize distinctly pro-Zionist discourses in spaces and places of impact, whether in clinical psychoanalysis or elsewhere. In doing so, an ever-more expansive definition of settler colonial sovereignty can be actualized. The intent to harm, rather than a symptom or after-effect of this process, comes to be of utmost importance, as countercurrents to sovereignty are deemed as an existential threat to the settler colonial base.

Acknowledgement

Open Access funding provided by the Qatar National Library.

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 For a comprehensive view of how these attacks work and the right-wing organizing behind them, see Wilson and Kamola (2021). Free Speech and Koch Money: Manufacturing a Campus Culture War. Pluto Press. Similarly, see the website of Faculty First Responders: Understand Right-Wing Attacks on Faculty, a grassroots effort to monitor right-wing websites and organizations—what they call “the usual suspects”—known for harassing and intimidating faculty (https://facultyfirstresponders.com/usual-suspects/). For Psychoanalysis specific, see most recently, Carter J. Carter (Forthcoming). All the rage: the whiteness of psychoanalysis and what it cannot dare to see. Found here: https://psychoanalyticactivist.com/2023/01/27/all-the-rage-the-whiteness-of-psychoanalysis-and-what-it-cannot-dare-to-see/. In Psychology at large, see for example: https://www.apa.org/news/press/releases/2023/08/florida-censored-psychology-curriculum#:∼:text=Washington%20%E2%80%94%20The%20American%20Psychological%20Association,to%20censor%20its%20Advanced%20Placement.

2 For a brilliant exposé of the history of normativity in psychoanalysis and an exquisite argument for why this is detrimental and dangerous, both in terms of understanding of gender, but also because of the “myths” the field and method tells itself, see Avgi Saketopoulou and Ann Pellegrini (2023), Gender Without Identity. The Unconscious in Translation. See also, Lynne Layton’s concept of “the normative unconscious processes”, best articulated in an edited book of her publications: Toward a Social Psychoanalysis: Culture, Character, and Normative Unconscious Processes. 2020. Routledge. See also, Ann Pellegrini (2021). This is not about Trump: Rage, resistance and the persistence of racism. In, Donald Moss and Lynne Zeavin (Eds.), Hating, Abhorring and Wishing to Destroy: Psychoanalytic Essays on the Contemporary Moment. Routledge.

3 The summary of the findings from which I quote can be found here: https://president.gwu.edu/summary-findings-independent-investigation-crowell-moring-llp. Crowell & Moring, an internationally renowned law firm, in addition to taking up Title VI complaints, has an “Israel Practice” information about which can be found here: https://www.crowell.com/en/services/practices/corporate-and-transactional/israel-practice and an “Antiboycott Laws” specialty office, focusing on the Arab League boycott of Israel: https://www.crowell.com/en/services/practices/international-trade/antiboycott-legislation#overview. Links last accessed September 28, 2023.

4 See as far back as January 17, 2014, Phan Nguyen, “Cary Nelson, the AAUP, and the privilege of bestowing academic freedom”, found here: https://mondoweiss.net/2014/01/privilege-bestowing-academic/#unhinged. See extensive scholarly coverage of his harassment of academics: David Lloyd (2014). “Cary Nelson: The Lackey of Power”, found here: https://www.jadaliyya.com/Details/31087; Robert Warrior (2015). Response to Cary Nelson. Journal of Academic Freedom, 6; David Palumbo-Liu (2015). Not so much anti-boycott as pro-Israel. symplokē, 23:1-2, 425–457.

5 Found here: https://wp.nyu.edu/artsampscience-nyu_pd_blog/2020/06/30/whiteness-closing-ranks-avgi-saketopoulou/, last accessed April 24, 2024.

6 The Holmes Commission on Racial Equality in American Psychoanalysis was commissioned by the American Psychoanalytic Association in 2020; see more information, including the full report here: https://apsa.org/about-apsa/holmes-commission/ (last accessed September 28, 2023). It might be tempting to think that perhaps the authors were ignorant of this study; however, their unethical inversion is even more serious, as the co-authors willfully cite the Holmes Commission in an upcoming publication and claim that the Commission itself is contaminated because, despite its aim to address systemic racism, it curiously overstepped by extending this courtesy to an Arab woman in highlighting the racist and sexist attempts to silence me by banning me from speaking at the American Psychoanalytic Association (the Commission’s home organization), an association in which I had held leadership positions for years, including editorial, programmatic, and educational roles.