Everyday Evil in Palestine: The View from Lucifer’s Hill by Ilan Pappé on Janus Unbound: Journal of Critical Studies

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Although the term “evil” might sound metaphysical or imaginary, Freud, Girard, and Arendt among others give it a psychological and clinical definition (Aragno 2014; Dadosky 2010; Whitefield 1981). As Coline Covington (2016, 1) argues, it is “an action that is intended to dehumanize another and to use the other as means to an end.” Covington shows how organized political systems and group psychology perpetuate the cycle of evil and destruction. Covington’s examples, like all works on the subject, exclude Israeli brutality in Palestine, even while scholars who depict Israel as a settler-colonial project insist that at the heart of such a project is the need to dehumanize the native, the other, the Palestinian. In genocide studies, it seems there is still a taboo on discussing Palestinians.
Recently, the research on everyday evil has moved outside the Western world and includes the horrors experienced by indigenous people. This approach introduced the concept of “historical oppression” without excluding contemporary oppression, as well as expanding the boundaries of resilience theory to contain the indigenous struggle. These developments open the way for a better understanding of the Palestine case (Brunette and Figley 2017; Salter, Adams et al. 2018).

Continue reading at https://journals.library.mun.ca/ojs/index.php/JU/article/view/2319/1832