RESEARCH ARTICLE Coloniality and Necropolitics in the Age of COVID-19: The Question of Palestine Robin Gabriel University of California, Santa Cruz E-mail: rocgabri@ucsc.edu Abstract This article interrogates the necropolitical logics of the Israeli settler-state apparatus towards Palestinians in the Occupied Territories during the COVID-19 pandemic. It examines these logics and practices through the prism of coloniality, which conceptualizes manifestations of colonialism (whether material, epistemic, or ontological) as a diffuse set of practices, opening up the conversa- tion to discuss the ways in which international organizations, other states, and the Palestinian Authority continue to inflict the colonial harm through the employment of particular policies. Centring coloniality as an analytic allows a more global perspective and widens the discussion to include the ways in which Palestinians practise decoloniality, building and imagining “otherwise” worlds. This article maps the ways in which the devastation of the pandemic is not a product of the pandemic itself, but larger legacies of material, epistemic, and ontological colonial intervention. Keywords: Palestinian liberation; international solidarity; Israeli settler colonialism; vaccine apartheid; decoloniality 1. Introduction In May of 2021, Israel had the highest vaccination rate in the world at 60%. The Palestinian Occupied Territories (hereafter OPT), on the other hand, remained one of the least- vaccinated areas in the world, with the inoculation rate at a mere 5%. 1 Nearly six months later, while Israel’s vaccination rate approached 70%, the OPT had only reached 25%. Crucially, the stark disparity between Israel and the OPT is not an exclusively local phe- nomenon, but one prevails globally vis-á-vis colonized and racialized peoples. I contend, following scholars Mark Muhannad Ayyash and Jeanne Perrier, that Palestinians’ experi- ences of daily life in crises (and daily life as crises) are profoundly shaped by coloniality. 2 This article, building on their work, seeks to uncover the ways in which coloniality is uniquely revealed through the COVID-19 pandemic. This article aims to elucidate the terms and conditions of the OPT’s interaction with and capacity to respond to the COVID-19 pandemic through the lens of what Peruvian sociolo- gist Aníbal Quijano conceptualizes as coloniality, which explores the diffuse and often con- tradictory manifestations of colonialism (whether material, epistemic, or ontological) that emerge not only from the colonizer, but through various members of colonized and racial- ized groups as well as other actors. More specifically, coloniality lends itself to the analysis © The Author(s), 2022. Published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of Asian Journal of Law and Society 1 In Israel, this represents the proportion of the eligible population, which initially consisted of those aged 60 and over, those in elder care, the immunocompromised, and front-line health-care workers; however, by February, all Israelis aged over 16 were eligible; ourworldindata.org (2021). 2 Quijano (1991). Asian Journal of Law and Society (2022), 1–18 doi:10.1017/als.2022.18 https://doi.org/10.1017/als.2022.18 Published online by Cambridge University Press