Tag: Genocide Studies

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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

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Journal of Holy Land and Palestine Studies: Special Issue in Memory of Edward W. Said (Introduction by Professor Salim Vally, April 2017)

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John Docker excoriates another field — Genocide Studies. Mainstream Genocide Studies has scored a temporary ideological victory by dismissing those who have compellingly showed why the Nakba, in fact the ongoing Nakba should qualify as an example of genocide. Furthermore, the gatekeeper of Genocide Studies have clearly aligned with Zionist Israel by holding a conference on the Hebrew University’s campus in Occupied Jerusalem despite a Palestinian-led call to desist from going ahead. Docker usefully shows how Damian Short’s Redefining Genocide: Settler Colonialism, Social Death and Ecocide resonates with Said’s The Question of Palestine. Short, as explained by Docker, embraces Raphael Lemkin’s definition of genocide as a two-phase process of destruction and replacement constituted by:

… convergent processes that attempt to destroy the foundations of a society so that it can no longer exist as a society; processes that certainly might involve mass killing including massacres, but can also encompass methods of destruction and replacement that engage many dimensions, including the political, social, cultural, linguistic, religious, and economic.

Continue reading at http://www.euppublishing.com/doi/full/10.3366/hlps.2017.0149

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Nakba Memoricide: Genocide Studies and the Zionist/Israeli genocide of Palestine by Haifa Rashed, Dr. Damien Short, and Professor John Docker

In our view, taken together, the collections and books on genocide in Genocide Studies represent an archive of Nakba denial. Our concern is not so much that Israel is not classed as a case of genocide, but that it is never substantively discussed, even though there are good clear reasons for doing so… In Genocide Studies, international Zionism has achieved one of its most successful scholarly ideological victories. In its silent refusal to entertain substantive studies of the Nakba, without any self-reflexive discussion, Genocide Studies is on ethically dangerous ground. Because the field fears Zionist intimidation and ad hominem attack, it judges that a determined disinclination to pursue critical scrutiny of the Nakba as genocide serves its self-interest as a growing discipline. Genocide Studies is now on the edge of an ethical precipice, a crisis of intellectual bad faith, claiming to be making scholarly choices only, when those choices are subtended by political considerations. This essay calls for further research and discussion on this particular case study, which has thus far been sorely neglected in Genocide Studies.

 

Continue reading at http://www.counterpunch.org/2015/02/17/israels-decimation-of-gaza/

TAKE ACTION now and write a letter to the UN Office of the Special Adviser on the Prevention of Genocide. Make sure to post a copy of the letter in our comments as well, so we can publish it.
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Nakba Memoricide: Genocide Studies and the Zionist/israeli Genocide Of Palestine and other articles by Haifa Rashed, Dr. Damien Short, and Professor John Docker

In our view, taken together, the collections and books on genocide in Genocide Studies represent an archive of Nakba denial. Our concern is not so much that Israel is not classed as a case of genocide, but that it is never substantively discussed, even though there are good clear reasons for doing so… In Genocide Studies, international Zionism has achieved one of its most successful scholarly ideological victories. In its silent refusal to entertain substantive studies of the Nakba, without any self-reflexive discussion, Genocide Studies is on ethically dangerous ground. Because the field fears Zionist intimidation and ad hominem attack, it judges that a determined disinclination to pursue critical scrutiny of the Nakba as genocide serves its self-interest as a growing discipline. Genocide Studies is now on the edge of an ethical precipice, a crisis of intellectual bad faith, claiming to be making scholarly choices only, when those choices are subtended by political considerations. This essay calls for further research and discussion on this particular case study, which has thus far been sorely neglected in Genocide Studies.

Continue reading at https://independent.academia.edu/HaifaRashed/Papers#coauthor_wizard

TAKE ACTION now and write a letter to the UN Office of the Special Adviser on the Prevention of Genocide. Make sure to post a copy of the letter in our comments as well, so we can publish it.