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.
I was born in Haifa, British-occupied Palestine, and grew up in occupied Palestine, a.k.a. the state of Israel. Throughout my childhood and youth, I have been indoctrinated by the Zionist regime and told to de-humanise Palestinians and regard their country as ‘ours.’ This was done through the education system, everyday discourses, popular songs, literature, youth movement activities, cultural activities, family talk, in short – everything.
A few weeks after the 1967 war, having met a group of members of Matzpen, the Socialist Organisation in Israel – I learnt the truth about Zionist colonisation, imperialism, and racial capitalism, though these were terms I got to know many years later.
Two years after the war I moved to Ireland; I was a late comer to academia and my interest in race and racism led me to understand racism, according to African American abolition scholar Ruthie Wilson Gilmore as “the state-sanctioned or extralegal production and exploitation of group-differentiated vulnerability to premature death.” This, and my work on race and racism in Ireland and elsewhere led me to put race front and centre in thinking and writing about Zionism.
Location and methodology are crucial to understanding Ronit Lentin’s latest book, Traces of Racial Exception: Racializing Israeli Settler Colonialism, a work that brings together her long experience as a Jewish anti-Zionist activist and critical race theorist. Positioning herself as an Ashkenazi Jew, Lentin witnesses: “I write this book about the perpetrators, fully aware of my privilege as a member of the colonizing collectivity” (p. 7). Her topic: Israel’s settler-colonial racialization of Palestinians and non-Ashkenazi Jews alike.
Traces of Racial Exception is made up of five chapters and a conclusion. The first chapter traces race in the settler colony and identifies it as structural to colonialism. The second chapter argues against the claim that Israel is a racial state of exception. The third argues that settler colonialism is a process, not an event. The fourth chapter locates race at the heart of the colonial project. Chapter 5 re-presents Palestine from a gender perspective. Finally, chapter 6 recasts the Israeli settler-colonial state in an international context and relates the Palestinian (Indigenous) anti-colonial struggle to global movements.
Beginning with a literature review establishing racialized settler colonialism as the foundation of the Israeli state, the author considers Ilan Pappé’s work on ethnic cleansing and rejects the term “ethnic” for the Palestinian people, the Indigenous inhabitants of Palestine. Continuing, she points out that settler colonialism is a continuous process in Canada, Australia, the United States, and elsewhere, so Pappé’s characterization of Israel as the last “active settler-colonialist project” in existence cannot stand. Further, Lentin describes how she abandoned her early embrace of Giorgio Agamben and Michel Foucault to discard their methodology as Eurocentric. I part with the author’s critique of these influential theorists (p. 22), who have been used extensively by Palestinian scholars.
Having preferred John Docker’s “genocide” to Pappé’s “ethnic cleansing,” Lentin describes the Zionist state’s ongoing treatment of Palestinian Bedouins, who inhabit “legal and conceptual liminality” and are central to theorizing Israel as a racial state (p. 52). The author demonstrates the racial regime does not apply to the occupied territories of 1967 alone, as some Israeli scholars argue. Israeli settler colonialism, according to Lentin, is no “new paradigm” but past and present: for the occupied Palestinian territories, for the state’s Palestinian citizens, and for the Palestinian Bedouins. This continuity of the Zionist settler-colonial project proves systemic racialization.
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