Palestine – 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]

Continue reading “Written on the first anniversary of the Gaza genocide – Long Live the Resistance”

The zone of (dis)comfort

Writing

Ronit LentinJuly 16, 2024April 21, 2025

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.”

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

israel, Palestine

Ronit LentinNovember 6, 2020November 23, 2020

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.