Tag: Settler Colonialism

Colonialism

Explaining the Gaza genocide: Settler colonialism in Palestine – Pearls and Irritations

Palestinian Loss of Land 1947 to Present. israel vs Palestinian war. israel-Palestinian map

In a settler colonial state, the indigenous population has to be physically erased because they are an ongoing reminder of the violence and injustice that occurred at the foundation of the political community. Their continuing existence constitutes a legal and political challenge to the state’s legitimacy.

Noam Chomsky argues,

The movement that developed (ie the Jewish settlement of Israel) … is a settler-colonial society. Like the USA, Australia, the Anglosphere. Israel is one of them. It’s not a small point. If you take a look at the international support for Israel’s policies, it’s of course primarily the USA, but secondarily it’s the Anglosphere. Australia, Canada … I suspect there is a kind of intuitive feeling on the part of the population. Look, we did it, it must be right. So they are doing it, so it must be right. The settler-colonial societies have a different kind of mentality. We did exterminate or expel the indigenous population so there has to be something justified about it – superior civilisation or other ideas…. Israel has had the problem that it’s a twentieth-century version of a seventeenth – through nineteenth-century colonialism. That’s the problem.

 

Source: Explaining the Gaza genocide: Settler colonialism in Palestine – Pearls and Irritations

Colonialism

The racial contract of settler colonialism  – Pearls and Irritations

Close up photo of the word colonialism in a dictionary book. Image: iStock

It won’t be long before we hear politicians arguing about the “Democracy of Nth Korea” the way this term has come to be bandied about. After the referendum and with the LNP declaring Australia a Christian State calling Israel a Democracy seems more a smoke screen to stall us from questioning ours.

Jacinta Price demanded without acknowledging her mother to be funded an extra $ 12 M to set up a “re-education camp” (boarding school) for indigenous kids. It’s so like Abbott’s policy after he deducted $500M from their promised budget. He too cried for the need to re-educate “them” by getting them to school on time. Nothing akin to those Chinese camps the LNP claimed were against “human rights”. Price insists those at risk be defined by the government. The LNP do sound Democratic don’t they? In a very Israeli way.

The logic of a racial contract that overtly and unapologetically relegates colonised Indigenous peoples to “a position defined by violence, exploitation, poverty, and denial of … full humanity” is precisely that which we see being exercised in that act of collective punishment in which Alaa and her children were killed. Thousands more in Gaza, children and adults, have been killed in the last few weeks, even as the West ritually reiterates its support for the democratic state of Israel. But what price democracy in a state premised on the unequal humanity of Indigene and settler?

Source: The racial contract of settler colonialism  – Pearls and Irritations