Tag: israel

The zone of (dis)comfort

Ronit Lentin

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.” 

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

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Ronit Lentin

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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‘That’s not who we are, we are better than this’

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Ronit Lentin

From Traces of Racial Exception: Racializing Israeli Settler Colonialism (Bloomsbury Academic 2018).Book cover 'Traces of Racial Exception' by Ronit Lentin

Preface

  • We stole the lands of another people, but that’s not who we are we are better than this.
  • We expelled 800,000 of the owners of the land, or made them flee; we renamed their villages and urban neighbourhoods and settled our own people in them, but that’s not who we are we are better than this.
  • We uprooted the trees planted by the owners of the land and planted European conifers to cover the ruins of their depopulated villages, which they are not allowed to settle in and many of which we have made our own, but that’s not who we are we are better than this.
  • We massacred the populations of whole villages, tortured their men, raped their women and beat and tortured their children, but that’s not who we are we are better than this.
  • We occupied and annexed those parts of the land we had conquered in our ‘war of independence’ that the owners of the land call their Nakba, or catastrophe, but that’s not who we are we are better than this.
  • We bombed their cities, demolished their homes, flattened their refugee camps, and since 2002 built a 700 kilometres long concrete wall, which we call the separation barrier and the owners of the land call the Apartheid wall, to cut the owners of the land off from each other, but that’s not who we are we are better than this.
  • We installed hundreds of checkpoints preventing the owners of the land from getting to work, visiting their families, or reaching hospital to receive medical treatment or give birth, but that’s not who we are we are better than this.
  • We started war after war outside the 1949 armistice borders of our state, making hundreds of thousands homeless, claiming self-defence, but that’s not who we are we are better than this.
  • We put the owners of the land under a military government regime, ruled them with emergency regulations inherited from the British colonizers, enlisted them as collaborators and informers, and controlled their freedom of movement and expression, but that’s not who we are we are better than this.
  • We operate a separate military court system to try the owners of the land, imprison thousands of them including women and children, and put hundreds in administrative detention without trial, but that’s not who we are we are better than this.
  • We build our settlements on their lands and allow our illegal settlers to prevent the owners of the land from herding their flocks, tilling their fields and picking their olives, but that’s not who we are we are better than this
  • We allow the settlers to take over the homes of the owners of the land and to beat their children on their way to school, but that’s not who we are we are better than this.
  • We transferred thousands of Bedouin citizens off their lands and left them in ‘unrecognized villages’ without electricity, water, roads and schools, and demolish these ‘unrecognized villages again and again, but that’s not who we are we are better than this.
  • We extra-judicially execute the owners of the land when we suspect that their resistance amounts to ‘terrorist’ acts even after they are ‘neutralized’ and are lying defenceless on the ground; we arrest their children in dawn raids, interrogate them without any adults present, and try them in military courts, but that’s not who we are we are better than this.
  • We lock up asylum seekers, who we call ‘infiltrators’, and most of whose cases we never process, in concentration camps away from our towns that they are not permitted to enter, but that’s not who we are we are better than this.
  • We deny the owners of the land the right to remember and commemorate their Nakba, and force them to study our writers and poets, but that’s not who we are we are better than this.
  • You see, we are victims of persecution and Holocaust survivors, and their land had been promised to us by our god, and is thus legally ours, and anyone questioning our right to conquer, settle, expropriate, kill, imprison, shoot, bomb, torture, transfer and deport is antisemitic or a ‘self-hating Jew’. [1]

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