Free Radikal

The zionist entity, a.k.a. the racial colony of israel, responded to the October 7 guerrilla act of resistance by the Gaza-based Islamic Resistance Movement – Harakat al-Muqawama al-Islamiya, Hamas – and its partners in the Popular Resistance Committees by launching a massive air bombardment of the besieged Gaza enclave, followed by a ground offensive that caused near total destruction, huge loss of lives, famine and disease throughout the colonized and besieged Gaza Strip. A year since the onset of the genocide, the official number of Gazans murdered by the zionist entity stands at over 43,000, some 40 per cent of whom are women and children (not including people buried under the rubble, nor people who died of hunger and disease); over 100,000 injured people and 1.9 million people displaced – some 90 per cent of the population. Unofficial figures estimate the casualties at anything between 186,000 ^[i] and 512,000. ^[ii]

Continue reading “Written on the first anniversary of the Gaza genocide – Long Live the Resistance”

The zone of (dis)comfort

Writing

Ronit LentinJuly 16, 2024April 21, 2025

Jonathan Glazer’s film The Zone of Interest, probably the most unsettling film I have seen (twice) in a very long time, ends with Auschwitz commander Rudolf Höss in an office party in Berlin, far away from his wife and five children with whom he had been living in a luxurious villa just outside the concentration camp walls, where they could just about avoid seeing the killing, but where there was plenty of aural and visual evidence of the mass murder, with the chimneys towering over their carefully tended garden. The party is thrown in honour of Höss’s new plan for a more efficient mass extermination operation. After boasting to his wife on the phone about the new plan, Höss wanders in the darkened building and is suddenly overcome by an urge to vomit. As he holds his stomach and stumbles on the floor, a vision of the future appears at the end of the dark hallway: a glimpse of Auschwitz today, a museum commemorating its Jewish and other victims (Dowd 2024). Vulture’s film critic A. A. Dowd wonders whether we should be reading this ending as Höss being finally confronted by his prominent role in the Nazi Final Solution and if he retched because his “sociopathic dissociation has faltered.” Or, alternatively, whether “Höss might be experiencing a different kind of rude awakening – not so much the belated emergence of a conscience as the realization of how small he is in the grand scheme of things.”

Colonial academic control in Palestine and Israel

israel, Palestine, Writing

Ronit LentinApril 11, 2024April 24, 2025

Institute of Culture and Society, Western Sydney University, “Taking action for Palestine in Academic and Cultural Institutions”, 11 April 2024

Last month, the Hebrew University of Jerusalem suspended Professor Nadera Shalhoub Kevorkian, of the Faculty of Law and Institute of Criminology and the School of Social Work for denouncing the Gaza genocide and casting doubts on the Hamas rape allegations. The university justified the suspension by saying it would “preserve a safe climate on campus.” Shalhoub Kevorkian, a world-renowned Palestinian scholar and author of numerous books, whose research focuses on trauma, state crimes, surveillance, gender violence, law and society, said in a recent podcast on Makdisi Street that she would never allow anyone to touch a baby, kidnap a child, or rape a woman: “not in my name; I would never accept it as a Palestinian.” Shalhoub Kevorkian had been in trouble before. After a paper she presented in 2019 claiming Israel tests weapons on Palestinian prisoners and Palestinian children to boost its international arms sales, and that “Palestinian spaces are laboratories for the Israeli security industry,” the Minister for Education called for her dismissal. And last October she was under pressure to resign her position when she signed a call for immediate ceasefire in Gaza.