Two cemetries: Waking from my Zionist dream

The photographs of two cemeteries come to mind as I think about my journey away from my former Zionist self. In the first photograph I am a skinny five years old, holding my beautiful blond mother’s hand as we are paying our respects at the funeral of Theodore Herzl, the so called founding father of Zionism. Herzl died in Vienna in 1904 but his remains were reburied in 1949 in the Mount Herzl cemetery in Jerusalem, named in his memory.

I was born in Haifa, Palestine. My parents’ nationalities were registered as ‘Palestinian’ by the British Mandate authorities, yet the State of Israel re-issued my birth certificate in which my birthplace was changed to ‘Israel’, even though I was born four years before the state. I grew up in Israel, the daughter of migrants from Bucovina, Romania who did not question the Zionist colonization of Palestine.

The second photograph is of two tombstones, taken in December 2016 when I travelled to Haifa to bid my last farewell to my parents in their resting place on the slopes of Mount Carmel, during what was to be my last visit to my former country.

A long time passed between my two cemetery experiences, as other cemeteries were filling with the graves of Palestinian men, women and children murdered by the Israeli racial colony, and of Israel’s sons and daughters, conscripted to kill for their state.

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Ronit Lentin, Traces of Racial Exception: Racializing Israeli Settler Colonialism

Mahmoud Ababneh

Journal of Holyland and Palestine Studies 19(2)

https://www.euppublishing.com/…/10.3366/hlps.2020.0251

In Traces of Racial Exception, Ronit Lentin prefaces her book with a list of crimes that the Israeli settler-state committed against the indigenous peoples of Palestine. After each crime, Lentin concludes with but that’s not who we are, we are better than this (vii–viii). This stylistic and sarcastic approach not only introduces the readers into the overarching argument of the book but also functions as the author’s firm declaration of positionality as a member of the colonising collectivity (7). Therefore, this book is not about Palestine — since Lentin cannot speak for or on behalf of the Palestinians — but, rather, it is about Israel or the perpetrators and the permanent war against the Palestinians. Lentin’s book particularly focuses on the centrality of race to the Israeli rule of Palestine (3). To illustrate and support this overarching claim, the book initiates each chapter with an example of the daily crimes of the Israel state, that are racially motivated, against the Palestinians and Arab-Jews. Then, Lentin moves to theoretical debates and conversations that connect the lived experiences of the Palestinians with the academic efforts to theorise this case of colonisation. Her book becomes an attempt to understand the puzzle of the Zionists’ rule over Palestine that is only comprehensible, she concludes, through the lens of race.

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Colonial academic control in Palestine and Israel: Blueprint for repression?

Ronit Lentin

In Enforcing Silence: Academic Freedom, Palestine and the Criticism of Israel, eds. David Landy, Ronit Lentin, Conor McCarthy (Zed Books/Bloomsbury 2020)

Introduction

In January 2018 the Israeli Knesset approved a bill bringing academic institutes in the occupied West Bank under the jurisdiction of Israel’s Higher Education Authority. According to Haaretz, the legislation is “one of a series of laws designed to enact creeping annexation of the West Bank and apply Israeli law to the settlements” (Zur 2018). The bill was enacted despite opposition by leading Israeli academics who warned that it would damage the agreement reached between Israel and the European Union to maintain the separation between institutions within the state of Israel and in the Palestinian territory occupied in 1967, and that it would lead to demands that Israel be removed from scientific cooperation programmes such as the prestigious EU Horizon 2020 programme (Zur 2018).

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