Tag: israel

New Year Violence

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Ronit Lentin

Two nights after Jewish people celebrated the New Year, two violent incidents occurred which made me angrier than usual at the brutal behaviour of Israeli Jewish West Bank settlers, the Israeli police, and the Israeli racial state.

On Friday 30 September, Jewish settlers at the West Bank settlement of Anatot brutally attacked a group of young Jewish Israeli activists who demonstrated in support Palestinian farmer Yassin Rifawi, whose privately owned lands in the village of Anata were illegally fenced by residents of Anatot, limiting his access. In the past few months Rifawi suffered continuous harassment by the settlers, including threats, uprooting of trees and dismantling his property. Despite recurrent appeals by the Israeli legal human rights organisation Yesh Din to the Israeli police, nothing was done to protect Mr Rifawi. Continue reading “New Year Violence”

Re-thinking Israel-Palestine: Racial state, state of exception

Ronit Lentin

Introduction: The dialectics of Israel-Palestine

2010 has been another eventful year in Israel-Palestine. First there was the debacle of the Gaza flotilla. Later on, Israeli police forces demolished the ‘unrecognised’ village of El Araqib three times. In Sheikh Jarrach, Silwan and Bil’in riot police keeps arresting unarmed demonstrators. In October, Israel legislated to obligate all non Jewish candidates for citizenship to pledge allegiance to Israel as a Jewish democratic state. The law officially entrenched  nationalist and fascist principles, endorsed by large parts of the Israeli Jewish population (Misgav, 2010). This occasioned debates as to whether this, and several other proposed laws – such as ‘the Bishara law’, revoking wages and pensions of Knesset members suspected of terror-related offenses and aiding the enemy, approved earlier this month by the House Committee following heated exchanges between Arab and rightist MKs (Sofer, 2010) – signal new manifestations of fascism and racist nationalism. These debates build on academic debates on Israel as settler colonial society or ethnocracy.
Following Edward Said’s argument (1980: xv) that thinking Palestine involves dialectically setting the Palestinian experience against Zionism, and following my book Thinking Palestine (Lentin, 2008),   this paper dialectically theorises Palestine, after Giorgio Agamben (1998, 2005) as a ‘state of exception’,   and Israel, after David Theo Goldberg (2002, 2008, 2009), as a ‘racial state’.   According to Fabio Vighi (2010), theorists such as Agamben (and, he stresses, Žižek and Badiou, and, I would add, also Foucault), reject postmodern theories as essentially a-political and instead insist on the urgent need to re-politicise theory. I refer to their theorisations, therefore, not in order to present abstractions of the Palestinian question, but rather as an attempt to re-politicise universal questions of sovereignty and abject subjecthood in the context of Palestine and Israel. Continue reading “Re-thinking Israel-Palestine: Racial state, state of exception”

To Gaza: When is self defence not self defence

,
Ronit Lentin

rachel-corrieEveryone who saw the brutal treatment of the passengers of the freedom flotilla attempting to break the blockade of Gaza, and heard the Israeli propaganda machine claiming this was done in ‘self defence’ should understand that this self justification has a long history.

As an Israeli child, I grew up on myths of ‘self defence’ and of ‘the few against the many’, which were the building blocks of Israeli state and society from its very inception. Israeli literary scholar Nurit Gertz identifies three ‘ideological narratives’ aimed at conserving the hegemonic power relations. The first myth is the ‘few against the many’ narrative, according to which a Jewish ‘David’ was attacked by an Arab ‘Goliath’, the second is the struggle between the enlightened (Jewish) Europeans and the backwards (Arab) Orientals and the ensuing myth about Palestine being a ‘desert’ which the Zionists made ‘bloom’, and the third is the struggle between the isolated Jewish nation and an uncaring world, a narrative strengthened by the indifference of the world in face of the Nazi genocide. A fourth myth is that of Israel as European, and a fifth – perhaps the strongest myth – was the belief that all Israel’s wars and brutalities are fought in self defence. Continue reading “To Gaza: When is self defence not self defence”