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]

While perpetrating the Gaza genocide, the israeli military also killed over 750 Palestinians in the occupied West Bank in the year between October 2023 and October 2024, ^[iii] and Jewish settlers have continued to harass Palestinian civilians, demolish their homes and expel them under the watch of entity’s security forces, while the construction of illegal Jewish settlements has substantively expanded, ^[iv] and the situation of Palestinian civilians in occupied Al Quds has been the worst it has been in the past forty years. In recent weeks, the Zionist entity has escalated the war to attack Lebanon, displacing 1.2m people, allegedly fighting the resistance organisation Hizballah, and threatening to retaliate against Iran which has successfully launched ballistic missiles against the entity.

The israeli assault of the Gaza Strip was termed “a textbook case of genocide” ^[v] by Palestinians and millions of their supporters, and by international bodies, including the UN Special Rapporteur on the Situation of Human Rights in the Palestinian Territories Occupied since 1967. ^[vi] The Gaza genocide, vehemently denied by israel and its Zionist supporters, continues the ongoing zionist settler colonial resolve to eliminate the Palestinian natives, in line with their racialization by the Zionist movement that, since its inception in the late nineteenth century, has construced white European Jews as a superior race and Palestinians as well as non-European and Arab Jews as an inferior race, ^[vii]and conducted a perpetual war against the Palestinian people.

Israeli historian Dotan Halevi ^[viii] reminds us that Gaza was once a thriving trade port which lost its importance with the construction of the Suez Canal. The Gaza Strip remained in Egyptian hands after the 1948 Nakba, but it is an archetypical product of the Nakba – 200,000Palestinians who fled or were expelled from their homes settled in the Gaza Strip and today 86 per cent of Gazans are Nakba refugees and their descendants. The Strip was captured by the zionist entity in the 1956 Suez war and again in the 1967 war, and israel attacked it brutally several times, keeping it under a land, sea and air blockade since 2007. In 2008-9 israel invaded Gaza resulting in more than 1,000 deaths and widespread destruction of homes, schools and hospitals. In 2012 another invasion led to more than 100 people being killed, and in 2014, israel conducted a major invasion, its soldiers murdering 2,251 Palestinian people,including 551 children. The 2014 invasion resulted in extensive destruction, damaging 25 per cent of homes in Gaza city and 70 per cent of homes in Beit Hanoun. Another attack, in 2021, saw 256 Palestinians being killed by the israeli military. ^[ix]According to Halevi, though for most Israeli Jews the Gaza Strip had simply “always been there,” the Gazans, like all colonised Palestinians, have always resisted the Zionist violence and blockade.

The history of Palestinian resistance to colonisation and racialisation dates much earlier than the 1948 Nakba, when Zionist colonists expelled and murdered some 800,000 Palestinians, depopulated more than 500 villages and urban neighbourhoods, and replacing them with Jewish settlements and towns. ^[x]

Between 1936 and 1939, opposing the arrival of Jewish settlers, Palestinians staged the Great Palestinian Revolt, which, according to Ghassan Kanafani, ^[xi]had three main demands: an immediate stop to Jewish immigration to Palestine, the prohibition of the transfer of the ownership of Palestinian Arab lands to Jewish settlers, and the establishment of a democratic government in which Palestinian Arabs would have the largest share in conformity with their numerical superiority. Considering these demands quote ‘bombastic’, Kanafani writes that the revolt has its real roots in “the fact that the acute conflicts involved in the transformation of Palestinian society from an Arab agricultural-feudal-clerical one into a Zionist (Western) industrial bourgeois one, had reached their climax.” The revolt consisted of an armed insurgency and of attacks on British and zionist targets, a general strike, and, in the second phase “large swaths of the hilly Palestinian interior, including for a time the Old City of Jerusalem, fell fully under rebel control. Rebels established institutions, most significantly courts and a postal service, to replace the British Mandate structures they sought to dismantle.” The revolt was however suppressed by the British forces and by zionist militias armed and trained by the British authorities and was brought to an end by the combined impact of the British diplomatic and military efforts in the summer of 1939. In all, some 5,000 Palestinians were killed and nearly 15,000 wounded. The Palestinian leadership was exiled, assassinated, imprisoned, and made to turn against one another and the combined British-Zionist assault on Palestinian political and social life during the revolt had a long-lasting impact. ^[xii] The repression of the Great Revolt did not prevent many Palestinians taking active part in defending their villages and towns against zionist attacks during the 1948 Nakba, and in fact, as many Palestinians say, for them resistance is existence.

Two noteworthy acts of resistance were of course the Palestinian intifadas. The first, largely unarmed uprising, from 1987 to 1993, was characterised by protests, barricading, civil disobedience and boycotts, and the throwing of stones and Molotov cocktails throughout the West Bank and Gaza. Israel responded brutally, killing 1,087 Palestinians, including 240 children. The second Intifada (2000-2005) was an armed uprising, including suicide bombings, leading to the killing of over 1,000 israelis and nearly 5,000 Palestinians. Both Intifadas, brutally repressed by the zionist entity, are hailed by Palestinian protestors; as we all chant ‘there is only one solution, intifada, revolution’…

The zone of (dis)comfort

Writing

Ronit LentinJuly 16, 2024July 21, 2024

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.”

Another film, the documentary made by a Palestinian-Israeli collective including the Palestinian documentarist Basel Adra and the Israeli journalist Yuval Avraham, No Other Land, about the ongoing harassment of Palestinian sheep farmers in the South Hebron Hills area of Massafer Yatta, made me think about Dowd’s question regarding the end of The Zone of Interest. I watched No Other Land as the Gaza genocide continues. While a growing number of people, including Jewish people, act in solidarity with the Palestinians, others, “uninvolved” people I meet casually, are telling me that my adamant solidarity with Palestine is outside their zone of comfort.

I was born in Mandatory Palestine before the birth of the racial colony of israel and grew up in israel in a Zionist family and society before becoming aware of the Israeli colonisation of Palestine. I moved to Ireland where I had lived for 53 years and where I became increasingly involved in Palestine solidarity activism. I suppose that in today’s Ireland I would not have met so many people for whom solidarity with Palestine would be so uncomfortable. In some ways Irish society is exemplary in its solidarity with the colonised Palestinians, perhaps because of Ireland’s past as Britain’s first settler colony. However, even in Ireland, Jewish family members had been less than sympathetic. I spent my whole married life arguing with my late partner about Palestine and Palestine solidarity, had other family members tell me I was “wrong about absolutely everything to do with Israel,” and had some acquaintances say that “I had unresolved hate issues” regarding israel. Not to mention the profound discomfort of some of my israeli family members – my brother, a former israel air force pilot, has recently decided to cut our rather loose ties just because I mentioned the term “anti-Zionism.”

Colonial academic control in Palestine and Israel

israel, Palestine, Uncategorized

Ronit LentinApril 11, 2024

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.

According to Bhambra et al, Western universities are key sites through which colonialism, colonial knowledge, and theories of racism have been produced, institutionalised and naturalised, and universities in the global north were founded and financed through the spoils of colonial plunder, enslavement and dispossession.

As an imperialist, colonial, race-making European project, Zionism has always relied on academic knowledge to deepen its hold on Palestine and racialize the Palestinians. Since the early days of the Zionist movement Jewish universities in Palestine were used as a state-building instrument, and were key to enabling the colonization of Palestine and the racialization of the Palestinians. University education in Israel and occupied Palestine actually takes place in areas from which Palestinians were expelled. Thus Ben Gurion University in the Naqab is located in Be’er Sheva, the renamed Palestinian Bir Saba occupied by the Zionists on October 21 1948; 5,000 Palestinian were driven out at gunpoint to Hebron and many were shot; Tel Aviv University stands on the grounds of the depopulated Palestinian village Sheikh Muwannis, one of whose houses is the faculty club; the Hebrew University’s Mount Scopus campus is on Palestinian land occupied in 1967 – HUJI benefits from settlement infrastructure, transport lines and access roads in the occupied territory, some of them on privately-owned Palestinian land; and most infamously, Ariel University is built in the illegal Israeli colony-settlement Ariel in the occupied West Bank.

There are several historical and current aspects of the Israeli academy’s complicity with the colonisation of Palestine. According to Israeli sociologist Uri Ram, Israeli universities were always central to Zionism’s statist approach and Zionist academics have always maintained white European Jewish supremacy, and produced policies of colonization, of the racialization of the Palestinians as racially inferior to Israeli Jews, Jewish immigration, forging Jewish identity and denigrating “Israeli Arab” identity, the 1948-1966 military government regime, and Zionist land ownership. Since the 1967 occupation, academics have been ever more central to policies of occupation and settlement, segregation and apartheid, domination and military prowess.

According to the Palestinian Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel (PACBI), the current Gaza genocide, in which between 40,000 and 50,000 Palestinians were murdered and 80 per cent of Gaza has been rendered inhabitable, has elicited the support of most Israeli universities. Universities offer faculty and student reserve soldiers actively involved in the killing fields of Gaza various perks and privileges as rewards for their contribution to the war effort and the state’s “security.” This discriminates against Palestinian students, most of whom are not conscripted to the IDF and are thus not eligible for university grants and deferred exam dates available to serving Israeli student soldiers. Israeli academics are no different from the rest of Jewish-Israeli society, where 95% justify the bloody assault on the Palestinian people in Gaza, according to a recent poll.

The complicity of the Israeli academy is evidenced in several ways. Israeli universities and third level institutes of science and technology are central to developing and manufacturing Israel’s weapons and security systems, training military and security personnel, and providing theoretical backing for the Israeli occupation. At the same time, Israel exercises control and surveillance over academic institutions in occupied Palestine, curtailing students’ and academics’ freedom of movement and the actual freedom to educate Palestinians at all levels. Having successfully recruited Israeli academics as active collaborators in the colonisation of Palestine, Israel stymies free debate on the Israeli colonization of Palestine. In highlighting the importance of the academic boycott of Israeli institutions, I want to debunk the belief that Israeli academics are “progressive,” and should not be boycotted.