Free Radikal

Archive for the ‘Palestine’ Category

On Friday 31 December 2010 Jawaher Abu Rahmah, 36, was evacuated to the Ramallah hospital after inhaling massive amounts of tear-gas during the weekly protest against the separation wall in Bil’in , and died of poisoning on New Year’s Day 2011. Abu Rahmah suffered from severe asphyxiation caused by tear-gas inhalation, and was evacuated to the Ramallah hospital unconscious. She was diagnosed as suffering from poisoning caused by the active ingredient in the tear-gas, that was shot by IDF soldiers to disperse the crowd of demonstrators against the separation wall in the village. Doctors at the Ramallah Hospital fought for her life all night, but were unable to save her.

Weekly demonstrations against the wall have been held in Bil’in for the past five years; villagers say the barrier unjustly separates them from their lands. In 2007, the Supreme Court accepted these arguments and ruled that the route of the fence should be move, and some 170 acres of land be returned to the villagers. The IDF has yet to implement the court’s decision. Read the rest of this entry »

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. Read the rest of this entry »

Part 1: Ilan Pappé & Ronit Lentin. Trinity College Dublin. 17-11-2010
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DKvc2P9nPcE

Part 2: Ilan Pappé & Ronit Lentin. Trinity College Dublin. 17-11-2010
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7sCPAR26bio

Part 3: Ilan Pappé & Ronit Lentin. Trinity College Dublin. 17-11-2010
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pyGgPaiJu3E

Part 4: Ilan Pappé & Ronit Lentin. Trinity College Dublin. 17-11-2010
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DVyIZjRTPuo

Part 5: Ilan Pappé & Ronit Lentin. Trinity College Dublin. 17-11-2010
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RIIme0rT_nM

Part 6: Ilan Pappé & Ronit Lentin. Trinity College Dublin. 17-11-2010
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zo0bMm2zAec

Part 7: Ilan Pappé & Ronit Lentin. Trinity College Dublin. 17-11-2010
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vQeBoLMS7HM

Everyone 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. Read the rest of this entry »

Eli Aminov                        November 09

Shortly after the UN Commission on Human Rights adopted the Goldstone Report the Israeli Ambassadress to the United Nations started a whining, emotional blackmailing attack against the commission: “Israel is the only state in the world which is being discriminated against by the commission and criticized more than any other state in the world!” she complained.

Her Excellency the Ambassadress should be reminded of what really makes Israel so unique globally. Read the rest of this entry »