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Palestine/Israel and State Criminality: Exception, Settler Colonialism and Racialization
Abstract
This article critically engages with Israel's settler-colonial racial regime in Palestine as an Agambenian state of exception. The first part reiterates the author's argument that the Israeli state extends its laws to rule occupied and besieged Palestine while excluding itself and its Jewish citizen-colonists from legal instruments of oppression, occupation and siege. Positioning itself above and outside domestic and international law as far as Palestinian citizens and occupied and besieged subjects are concerned, Israel is theorized as a textbook example of state of exception, racial state and settler colony. The second part follows Weheliye in placing race front and centre in theorizing political violence as a socio-political process of differentiation and hierarchization that differentiates between the human, the not-quite-human and the non-human, employed by the State of Israel in dehumanizing and racializing Palestinian citizens, occupied and besieged subjects.
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Author and article information
Notes
According to Addameer, there are 7,000 Palestinian political prisoners in Israeli jails, including 60 females and 406 children, of whom 108 are under 16 ( http://www.addameer.org/).
As part of the 1919 post-World War I Paris Peace Conference, the administrative control of Palestine was allotted to the British mandate under Article 22 of the Convent of the League of Nations, and the territory was named “British Mandate for Palestine”. In July 1920, the civil administration of the mandate took over military control with Jerusalem as capital of Palestine ( http://www.palestinefacts.org/pf_ww1_british_mandate.php).
Cited in Weheliye ( 2014: 72).
The Civil Administration is part of the Israeli Government coordination apparatus in the occupied territories, responsible for the implementation of the government's policy in Judea and Samaria and the progression of the region in civil areas, according to the state level instructions, and in coordination with government ministries, the Israeli Defence Forces (IDF) and the security system. As such, the CA is a vital part of the IDF activities & A central role of the Civil Administration is civil and security liaison with the Palestinian Authority & In addition, the CA is in charge of liaising with international bodies in relation to humanitarian aid and entrepreneurship in Judea and Samaria. ( http://www.cogat.idf.il/1279-he/Cogat.aspx)
Israel's former Prime Minister Ehud Barak often used the telling metaphor of Israel is “a villa in the middle of a jungle”. Meaning: We are an island of civilization surrounded by savage animals. This is remarkably similar to old-established colonial attitudes and, indeed, a variation of Theodor Herzl's (the father of modern Zionism) metaphor of the “wall against barbarism” ( Avnery 2002).
Law of Return 5710-1950 ( http://www.mfa.gov.il/mfa/mfa-archive/1950-1959/pages/law%20of%20return%205710-1950.aspx).
Or, for the wave of immigration from the former Soviet Union, 50 per cent of whom were not Jewish according to the orthodox reading, Jewish relatives ( Hayeem 2010).
In fact, the emergency regulations are revalidated annually by the Israeli Knesset (Pappe 2008: 149).
http://www.badil.org/en/al-majdal/item/1404-mahajneh-jnf-and-israeli-law
Times of Israel , Joint List Slams “‘Miserable, Anti-democratic’ Suspension of Its MKs”, 8 February. http://www.timesofisrael.com/joint-list-slams-miserable-anti-democratic-suspension-of-its-mks/
A Zionist slogan actually used as early as 1843 by a Christian Restorationist clergyman ( Garfinkle 2009: 265).
Kibbutz (Hebrew for “gathering”) is a collective agricultural community; the first kibbutz was established in 1909. Moshav (Hebrew for “village, settlement”) is a cooperative agricultural community of small farms established by Labour Zionism.
“Comparing colonial and racial regimes”. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xwj5bcLG8ic&feature=youtu.be
See Hesse ( 2011).
However, some scholars have begun theorizing it in terms of racism (e.g., Shenhav and Yonah 2008), and discussions of racism are becoming more common in the Israeli media.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xwj5bcLG8ic&feature=youtu.be
http://www.thelocal.de/20150428/renewed-calls-to-recognize-namibian-genocide
See Shenhav ( 2006b).