Beyond The Apartheid Analogy: Time to Reframe Our Palestinian Struggle (original) (raw)
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The criminalization and racialization of Palestinian resistance to settler colonialism
The Routledge International Handbook on Decolonizing Justice, 2023
Available via open access: https://www.taylorfrancis.com/chapters/oa-edit/10.4324/9781003176619-11/criminalization-racialization-palestinian-resistance-settler-colonialism-adan-tatour-lana-tatour?context=ubx&refId=2e5b9d92-88b1-4e65-ae98-c755ec8166a1 This chapter explores the criminalization of Palestinian resistance by Israel. It focuses on ‘’48 Palestinians’ (known also as Palestinian citizens in Israel) and the ways in which Israel systematically used mass arrests during the Unity Uprising in May 2021 as a colonial technology to stifle Palestinian protest and construct Palestinians as a security threat and as criminals. The chapter demonstrates the function of the Israeli justice system as integral to Israeli settler colonial violence. To punish Palestinians for their participation in the uprising, Israel, we demonstrate, mobilized racialized legal categories that enable it to subject Palestinians to aggravated punishment by classifying offences as racist and/or terrorist crimes. Israel, we further show, worked to connect the uprising – an act of resistance to settler colonialism – to the rising crime rates in Palestinian society in recent years, resulting in a dual process that we refer to as the securitization of crime (treating crime as a security issue) and the criminalization of resistance (treating political mobilization as a criminal issue). Through the entwinement of crime and political resistance, Israel sought to erase the anti-colonial sensibilities that drove ’48 Palestinians to the streets in May 2021.
Israel’s Ethnocratic Dynamics: A Settler Colonialist Lens on Apartheid-like Policies and the Marginalization of Palestinian Arabs, 2024
Marginalization and hostility towards minority populations, often manifested as discrimination, have been recurring themes in historical conflicts, with the Israeli-Palestinian case being no exception. While drawing parallels to South African apartheid is common among critics, this study seeks to illuminate Israel's distinct ethnocratic framework where the establishment as an exclusively Jewish state has led to preferential treatment for Jewish citizens and systematic marginalization of Palestinian residents. Notably, the utilization of over 60 laws favouring Jewish ethnic supremacy represents a direct challenge to international conventions against racial discrimination. By employing qualitative analysis of archival data and reports from Palestinian and Israeli human rights organizations such as Al Haq, B'Tselem, and Adala, in conjunction with primary documents including the Rome Statute, the Apartheid Convention, and relevant international laws, this study aims to unravel Israel's ethnocratic system within the framework of settler colonialism, providing a comprehensive understanding of its implications and consequences.
2009
One may also wonder whether a claim based on persistent objection can be structural as opposed to substantive. 65 Leonard Barnes offers another explanation of simple distance: since '[f]ormulations of human rights naturally tend to reflect the major frustrations of those who made them', the architects of international law are at a far remove from the oppressed of a colony, of territories where 'economic subordination entails political disability; where political disability may bring with it severe restrictions upon civil liberty and an exceptional widening of the legal meaning of 'sedition' (such restrictions being at their most severe when the metropolitan authorities regard the native culture as backward or inferior); and where official anxiety about sedition and allied offences lead to judicial and police practices which in the metropolitan country would be regarded as unusually harsh.' see 'The Rights of Dependent Peoples' in Human Rights: Comments and Interpretations (UNESCO, Paris, 25 July 1948) UNESCO/PHS/3 (rev.) p 253.
A Century of Settler Colonialism in Palestine: Zionism's Entangled Project
Brown Journal of World Affairs, 2017
Throughout the past century, the Zionist movement constructed the most sophisticated settler-colonial project of our age: the State of Israel. The violent birth of Israel in 1948 and the subsequent colonization of the entirety of the land of Palestine after the 1967 war are indeed reflections of Zionism's successes in fulfilling its settler-colonial ambitions in Palestine. Yet, while this settlercolonial project continues unabated, it is an entangled one, unable to reach the ultimate point of Jewish exclusivity in the land. Zionist settler colonialism, as its historical precedents suggest, is fundamentally based on the operative logic of "eliminating the native" and failing to utterly marginalize and "minoritize" him. The vibrant Palestinian presence in the land, the everyday resistance to the colonial order, and the robust Palestinian adherence to their rights all stand as structural obstacles to the ultimate realization of the "Zionist dream." 1 Despite Israel's relentless colonial power and domination, Palestinian steadfastness means that this project will remain impeded and incomplete, a matter that may lead to its future demise.
Alienation, Racial Capitalism, and the Racialization of Palestinians
Critical Sociology , 2023
In this paper, we outline the contours of the history of oppression toward Palestinians to discern how the settler colonial racial capitalist state of Israel generates alienation in Palestinians. To accomplish this, we explore how the Global North disregards and/or participates in propping up Israel's oppressive structural processes for stripping Palestinians of their land, resources, and identity. This includes the Palestinian healthcare system that has suffered decades of deliberate neglect, under-development, and strategic fragmentation, which hindered its coronavirus disease response. We conclude with implications and suggestions for rethinking not only how Palestinians are racialized and alienated as 'others' in a settler colonial racial capitalist system of oppression, but how the slow process of identity erosion (and perversion) works to dehumanize and justify the dispossession of Palestinians.
Is Israel an Apartheid State? A Critical Analysis of the Realities in Palestine
Political Science Undergraduate Review
This paper will examine whether the mainstream accusation of Israel being an apartheid state has some validity to it and if so, to what extent. In doing so, it will help build upon the already present political literature surrounding the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, while presenting a different perspective in the context of apartheid. Specifically, this paper analyzes the historical creation of Israel and how that directly set the tone for the inequalities present in the state today. In this regard, I rely on two case studies, which help determine whether Israel really qualifies as apartheid, so to speak, in terms of international law. Moreover, I present a rebuttal to my thesis and attempt to foil it.
For over a century, Zionism has subjected Palestine and Palestinians to a structural and violent form of destruction, dispossession, land appropriation, and erasure in the pursuit of a new colonial Israeli society. Too often, this Palestine 'Question' has been framed as unique; a national, religious, and/or liberation struggle with little semblance to colonial conflicts elsewhere. The two-day conference, Past is Present: Settler Colonialism in Palestine, seeks to reclaim settler colonialism as the central paradigm from which to understand Palestine. It asks: what are the socio-political, economic and spatial processes and mechanisms of settler colonialism in Palestine, and what are the logics underpinning it? By unearthing the histories and geographies of the Palestinian experience of settler colonialism, this conference does not only chart possibilities for understanding Palestine within comparative settler colonial analyses. Rather, it also seeks to break open frameworks binding Palestine, re-align the Palestinian movement within a universal history of decolonisation, and imagine new possibilities for Palestinian resistance, solidarity and common struggle.
Some are More Equal than Others: Palestinian Citizens in the Settler Colonial Jewish State
Settler Colonial Studies Journal , 2020
This article aims to examine whether the passing of the Basic Law: Israel – the Nation State of the Jewish People represents a transformative moment in the history of the State of Israel, as some critics claim, that undermines the State’s unique democratic features precisely the principle of equality. In this respect, this paper aims to revisit the principle of equality as it is enshrined in the Declaration of the Establishment of the State of Israel and as it applies in practice, law and court rulings. Specifically, the article will explore how the principle of equality come to manifest itself in the relationship between the State and the Palestinian citizens in three key moments; first, a pre-State stage, in the making of the Declaration; second, a post establishment stage, in the granting of suffrage and citizenship rights; and third, in the aftermath of the 1992 ‘constitutional revolution’ with the passage of the Basic Law: Human Dignity and Liberty. The article argues that the Nationality Bill does not represent a transformative moment, it rather reflects a continuous process that stems from the Zionist colonial ideology in historic Palestine. Therefore, rather than transforming Israel into an undemocratic apartheid State as some critics argue, the Nationality Bill rather makes sure that the State of Israel cannot be easily transformed into the State of all its citizens