On killing the "toured object": Anti-terrorist fantasy, touristic edgework and morbid consumption in the illegal Settlements in West Bank, Palestine

The chapter explores the emergence of morbid fantasy ‘terror camps’ in Israel and the West Bank as new forms of dark military tourism. Centring on scenarios of apprehending and killing fictional terrorists, who look suspiciously like Palestinian Arabs, the activity provides global tourists a chance to play the role of IDF soldiers in dramatic situations. Such staging consolidates the withdrawal of the empathic gaze from cross-cultural encounters in a highly sensitive political context. By producing an atmosphere of trivialised consumption of the macabre, which binds terror and darkness to racial politics, such activities recast ‘edgework’ (a variety of voluntary risk-taking behaviours positing ‘a threat to one’s physical or mental well-being or of one’s sense of an ordered existence’ - Lyng 1990) as touring the world safely, uncritically and with impunity.