Author: Ronit Lentin

Notes on Racial Capitalism and Palestine: Land, Labour and Jewishness as Property

, ,
Ronit Lentin
Internal documents show Canadian tax agency protected Jewish National Fund from scrutiny | The Electronic Intifada

Haider Eid and Andy Clarno’s (2017) analyze Zionist apartheid as both a racialized and an economic regime; racial capitalism is central to understanding race and the question of Palestine relating to questions of land, labour and resources. Charisse Burden-Stelly (2020) theorizes US racial capitalism as “a racially hierarchical political economy constituting war and militarism, imperialist accumulation, expropriation by domination and labour superexloitation…and permanent war” (cited in Alana Lentin 2021), all key components of the Zionist colonization of Palestine.

While Clarno (2017) focuses his analysis of post-apartheid South Africa and post-Oslo Palestine/Israel on the neoliberalization of apartheid, racial capitalism was integral to Zionism since its inception, even though many founding Zionists saw themselves as socialists. The colonization of Palestine involved several aspects of racial capitalism including the judaization of Palestinian lands by the Zionist movement since the early twentieth century, and the segmentation of labour from the Zionist Conquest of (Hebrew) Labour policy (Shafir 1989) to the current reliance on cheap and dispensable Palestinian labour. I would also like to posit Israel’s racialized justice system and prison industrial complex and white European Jewishness as property as further aspects of racial capitalism. As David Lloyd and Patrick Wolfe (2016, 116) write, “to the extent that Israel’s regime in Palestine recapitulates and extends earlier models of settler colonial dispossession and domination, its function as a program for contemporary state forms not only supplies new technologies and practices of regulation and segregation but also highlights the continuities between the logics of settler colonialism and those of the neoliberal state globally” (cited in Turner, forthcoming).

The racialization of land

According to Cedric Robinson (1983), racial capitalism is a suitable framework for highlighting central concerns of Indigenous peoples under settler colonialism, as the centrality of land fits with the emphasis in racial capitalism on dispossession, exploitation and extraction. Although the Zionist project was not primarily driven by economic considerations of profit and resource exploitation, Patrick Wolfe (2016) speaks of “purchase by another means” as the modus of Zionist colonization.

According to Wolfe (2016, 22), Eurocolonial powers arrived in Native country ex nihilo condensing power and expanding violence, and this  pre-formedness, relatively resistant to local determinations, is colonalism’s preaccumulation, which is different from the European experience of primitive accumulation that figures in Eurocentric Marxist historiography. In arriving in Native country, capitalism already contained its own global preaccumulations, such as enslaving Africans in the Americas and purchasing, seizing and depopulating value-added Native land in Palestine. Insisting that “imperialism is not the latest stage of capitalism but its foundational warrant,” Zionism, Wolfe writes, consciously avoided confinement to a single metropolis in favour of a “collective mother country” (Rodinson 1973, 76), purchasing Native land in conformity with the law of the current imperial power. Brenna Bhandar (2018, 2) argues that property law, a crucial mechanism for the colonial accumulation of capital, and racial subjectivity developed in relation to one another, along racial regimes of ownership. Importantly, Wolfe (2016, 211) argues, Zionism’s diffuse metropolis and Jewish land purchases in Palestine were linked in that the former financed the latter. 

In 1901 the Zionist movement’s main institutional structure, the World Zionist Organization (WZO), founded the Jewish National Fund so as to extend Jewish land ownership in Palestine (Wolfe 2016, 224). Zionist land purchasing strategies attached usufruct – the right to enjoy the use of another’s property – to title, so that (Palestinian) vendors might sell a right that might not have been theirs to sell (Wolfe 2016, 231). The dual aim of the Zionist purchasing methods was “to acquire the greatest amount of land with the smallest number of Palestinians and to concentrate the greatest number of Palestinians onto the smallest amount of land” (Erakat 2015, 85).  By 2007 the JNF, a donation-based organization that green-washes its racialized land purchases by having planted millions of trees, built dams and reservoirs, developed many acres of land and established parks and nature reserves, owned 13 per cent of the total land in Israel (About JNF, n.d.), 80 per cent of which is owned by the state and managed by the Israel Land Authority. Half of these lands are controlled by the IDF and the security services (Shiefer and Oren 2008), facilitating the ongoing demolition of Palestinian houses and villages, and the expulsion of Palestinian citizens from their lands (see e.g., Boxerman 2022). Many JNF forests, where European conifers displaced native trees, were used to cover the ruins of depopulated Palestinian villages, making the JNF a key technology of Zionist colonization and racialization (Cohen and Gordon 2018).  

Key to Israel controlling Palestinian lands is the 1950 Absentee Property Law that enabled the state of Israel via the Custodian of Absentees’ property to take charge of lands, houses, bank accounts and movable properties belonging to Palestinians expelled after 29 November 1947 (Adalah 2017). As most land in Israel is either state- or JNF-owned, a major effect of racial capitalism on Jewish property and Palestinian deprivation is the prohibition of purchasing or leasing land by Palestinian citizens and occupied subjects (Safian 1997). 

Continue reading “Notes on Racial Capitalism and Palestine: Land, Labour and Jewishness as Property”

Sandwith Street: ‘Whiteness riots’ and ‘local’ white communities

, , ,
Ronit Lentin

The violent events in Dublin’s city centre on Friday 12 May 2023 when groups of Dublin based people set upon five hundred plus asylum seekers, forced to live in tents outside the International Protection Office in Sandwith Street, setting their belongings on fire and shouting racist abuse at them were very troubling indeed. Lawyer and activist Gary Daly, who came to stand in solidarity with the asylum seekers, wrote on his Facebook page that what was particularly disturbing was that “the people threatening extreme violence or calling all refugees ‘rapists’ sounded just like me. They were Dublin voices… I recognised the accents, but I was a stranger to the language used. Claiming that we (those standing between them and the homeless migrant camp on Sandwith Street) were all ‘anteefa’ or ‘government shills’ or ‘paid NGOs’. This language is imported only very recently from far-right America.”

Following the Ukraine refugee crisis, the number of people seeking international protection in Europe has grown exponentially. Ireland is currently housing 19,874 asylum seekers, including 4,139 children, in 172 locations around the country. This is a 90 per cent increase in a year and a 266 per cent increase since 2018. Although still high when compared with pre-2022 figures, the number of applications has gone down considerably in recent weeks according to data provided by the Department of Justice. 

The much-criticised Direct Provision system, inadequate as it was, and epitomising Ireland’s ‘asylum industrial complex’ whereby private landlords and hotel owners had been paid millions of euros to house thousands of asylum seekers by the government, that is, by Irish tax-payers, as Vukašin Nedeljković and I reported in Disavowing Asylum: Documenting Ireland’s Asylum Industrial Complex, is no longer able to cope. Hotel owners have reverted to the more profitable tourism business which the government prefers to nurture at the expense of accommodating applicants for international protection, and hotels are no longer available. Due to Ireland’s disastrous housing and homelessness crisis, the result is a huge shortage of accommodation to newly arriving asylum seekers, 580 of whom are currently camping on the streets of Dublin, some in tents outside the ironically named International Protection Office, where they have been subjected to appalling racism by what has been described by some activists as ‘fearful local working class communities’ rather than by white Irish racists.

Continue reading “Sandwith Street: ‘Whiteness riots’ and ‘local’ white communities”

Spaces of Racialization: Ireland’s Direct Provision Asylum Centres as Sites of Racialized State Violence

, ,
Ronit Lentin

Presented at the Launch Event: State Crime Special Issue on Migration and Racist State Violence (eds. Monish Bhatia and Ronit Lentin)

Oct 18, 2022, London

The Republic of Ireland has a poor record in its response to refugee crises ever since the Nazi era, when only 60 Jewish refugees were admitted by neutral Ireland between 1933 and 1946. Although several groups of ‘programme refugees’ were admitted over the years, when asylum seekers began arriving in the mid-1990s, the government regarded them as a problem, and,  following Britain, since November 1999, dispersed asylum seekers, granting them bed and board and a small comfort allowance, in Direct Provision centres. Though initially meant for a six months stay, in June 2022 a record 11,689 people, including nearly 2,800 children, were living in direct provision and emergency accommodation centres, an increase of more than 40 per cent on last year. Most centres – including hotels and guest houses – are operated by for-profit companies paid 1.6 billion euro by the government between 2000 and 2021, constituting what I term Ireland’s “asylum industrial complex.” The centres are over-crowded, lack proper facilities, and are mostly in remote locations, cutting people off from Irish society. Until 2018 asylum seekers were not allowed to work or open bank accounts, and only the campaigning work of MASI – the Movement of Asylum Seekers in Ireland – brought their plight to the attention of Irish society.

I begin by addressing the link between the disavowal of the asylum seekers by state and society with the disavowal of the coercive confinement of unwed mothers and poor children in church-run institutions, where they were confined and enslaved until late in the twentieth century. Second, in view of the rise in the numbers of applications and of Ireland’s severe housing crisis, I theorize the Direct Provision regime as a recialized space of nonbeing, constituting what Berlant calls “slow death”. Third, because the movement of refugees is fluid and ever changing, I expand on the article as published by juxtaposing the Irish state response to accommodating refugees from Ukraine with its lack of action in relation to people seeking international protection, whose number has increased exponentially since the Russian invasion of Ukraine. Discriminating against people seeking international protection is a clear demonstration of racist state violence.

  1. Confinement and disavowal

In our 2021 book Disavowing Asylum: Documenting Ireland’s Asylum Industrial Complex, Vukasin Nedeljković and I argue that hiding from public view of Ireland’s past coercive confinement of thousands of unwed mothers and deprived children in church-run Mother and Baby Homes, Magdalene laundries and industrial schools (where 93,000 children of unwed mothers were kept and often physically, sexually and emotionally abused) until late in the 20th century represented a disavowal of something that Irish people were aware of but “managed not to know.” Far from accidental, this disavowal was engineered by the Irish state that continues to hide asylum seekers in Direct Provision centres from public view. Linking Ireland’s violent past coercive confinement regime with the confinement of asylum seekers in the 21st century, Clair Wills (2021) argues that like refugees, unwed Irish mothers and their children were violently forced from their own communities and were in effect rendered stateless by the Irish state and its agents – a clear case of racialized state violence.  Surprisingly, however, with very few exceptions, the Direct Provision regime has not been theorized in terms of race and racialized state violence.

  • Direct Provision as racialized spaces of nonbeing and deportability

In Direct Provision centres the “punitive ramifications” of deportability insinuate, as Peutz and De Genova argue, “the inequalities and excesses of state power and sovereignty into the everyday production of social space” (Peutz and De Genova 2010, 2). Frequent pre-dawn raids by Gardaí (Irish police officers) and the spectacle of deportation enforcement are technologies of violent state control that enable asylum seekers’ continual vulnerability to deportation.

I theorize Direct Provision centres as racialized spaces of nonbeing operating policies of mistrust and dispersal, making them functions of state governmentality at work to spread societal “xeno-racism” wherever asylum seekers are dispersed to, as argued by Frances Webber (2012, 94). Though they are not forced to reside in Direct Provision centres, as repeatedly stressed by government ministers, asylum seekers not taking up the offer of DP accommodation are deprived of the right to bed and board, and do not receive any state benefits, including medical cards and weekly allowances, which is why most accept the offer. Theorizing the racialization of space in Direct Provision centres is apt as for many asylum seekers living in Direct Provision is akin to what Lauren Berlant (2007, 754-764) terms “slow death.”

In recent months the conditions of asylum seekers in Direct Provision have seriously deteriorated, with some reduced to living in tents and others remaining homeless. As Vukasin Nedeljković writes, “In the history of Direct Provision it has never been so bad for people applying for protection… at the moment there are a number of asylum seekers sleeping rough on the streets of Dublin and Ireland before even making an official claim for international protection.”

  • Asylum seekers and Ukrainian refugees – racist state violence

There has been an eight fold increase in the number of asylum applications, from 1,148 in 2021 to 8,892 in 2022 – an increase of 700%. That is separate from over 50,000 people who have come from Ukraine fleeing the Russian invasion. According to the Department of Justice, the increase is partly down to the COVID-19 pandemic, but it is clearly also due to the war in Ukraine. While commending the Irish government’s positive handling of the Ukrainian refugee crisis, MASI coordinator Lucky Khambule said that processing Ukrainian refugees, giving them cards, accommodating them and enabling their children to go to school proved that this can be done quickly, and rightly so:

“We can see clearly what the government is doing and it demonstrates what we were saying all along. It was always possible to allow people to access the workforce, but we had to wait for nine months…Following the current crisis, we would like to see this kind of service available to all people who seek protection… we say that the welfare given to Ukrainian people must be available for everyone seeking protection… we need to address this urgently so that chidren in Direct Provision who can’t go to school will be able to go to school the same way as the children from Ukraine.”

Although clearly not all black or brown, people seeking asylum and residing in Direct Provision are racialized by the government as non-European others. Their discrimination, I propose, is nothing short of racial state violence.