Abridged, URL in title. West Bank: The colonist mentality The Settler Keeps Alive in the Native an Anger Which he Deprives of Outlet A look at Frantz Fanon's clinical understanding and treatment of colonised peoples who were denied their own anger to the point of pathology Zahra The Mazaj: 31 Dec 2025 Fanon once wrote that “The settler keeps alive in the native an anger which he deprives of outlet.” It wasn’t a metaphorical notion but his clinical observation. He was describing what occurs when a biologically grounded and socially necessary human capacity (defensive anger) is deliberately provoked and then structurally immobilised. To enrage, and then to seal off every avenue through which that rage might find form, release, or meaning. Nowhere can this be seen more plainly at the present moment than in, and in relation to, Gaza. Under colonialism, anger is neither resolved or allowed expression; it exists in a state of chronic suspension. Interestingly, the coloniser often does not even attempt to eliminate anger in the colonised. In fact, the colonised person’s anger becomes narratively useful to the settler. Its distorted expressions are captured as confirmation of the settler’s own mythology: that the native is irrational, savage, barbaric and in need of discipline, correction, or eradication. What colonial domination first produces, it then points to as justification. It cultivates the rage while ensuring it cannot fulfil its defensive role. The native is humiliated, expropriated, surveilled, beaten, and insulted, but any attempt to respond is labelled criminal. It is astonishing to me how plainly the early European colonisers of Palestine, for example, acknowledged this as a matter of fact. David Ben Gurion (1886-1973) was the primary founder and first prime minister of the State of Israel The settler produces the stimulus for anger while monopolising all legitimate means of acting upon it. Strikes and assemblies are banned; legal redress is blocked through military courts and administrative detention; peaceful marches are banned with military force; and then, when resistance turns violent after every civil avenue has been sealed, that violence is invoked as proof that repression was necessary all along. Negotiation with these people is obviously futile because they are born and raised ‘terrorists’ and ‘fanatics’. It is a methodological and refined cruelty. Anger is allowed to exist only as affect, never as force. What kind of human response would we call sane if not anger? If not blinding rage?
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