Free Radikal

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 »

A was born shortly after the establishment of the state of Israel to a middle-class Ashkenazi Jewish family. He was an independent child who rebelled against authority – school and exam regimes were not for him. Like most Jewish (but also Palestinian-Bedouin and Palestinian-Druze) men, he joined the IDF, but once his military service was over, realizing he would not get a university place in Israel, his independence of spirit moved him to study engineering in a small US town. Since graduation he has worked on and off in a variety of managerial jobs in the armaments and construction industries. His American-born children were settled in the US so A and his wife, after one inconclusive attempt to return, and despite the longing for home, did what most migrants do and became settled in America, but socialized mostly with other Israelis.

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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

I saw Alan Grossman and Aine O’Brien’s film ‘Promise and unrest’, the story of mother and daughter Noemi and Gracelle from the Philippines, and was reminded, yet again, of the hidden lives of thousands of migrant women care workers in post-Tiger Ireland.

Noemi came to Ireland when her daughter Gracelle was seven months to work as a care worker for an elderly person in Dublin. She is one of many domestic and care workers who have become a feature of Ireland once independent and enterprising Irish women returned to the workplace in their thousands, requiring enterprising and independent migrant women to take their place – the assumption being that this is ‘women’s work’. Read the rest of this entry »