Tag: Patrick Wolfe

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Situation of human rights in the Palestinian territories occupied since 1967* by Special Rapporteur on the situation of human rights in the Palestinian territories occupied since 1967, Francesca Albanese

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In a settler-colonial context and an apartheid regime, any display of collective identity and (re)claimed sovereignty from the subjugated people represents a threat to the regime itself. On 13 May 2022, Palestinian pallbearers were attacked by Israeli forces while also carrying their national flag during the funeral of Palestinian journalist Shireen Abu Akleh who had been killed two days earlier (see para. 58). In fact, Palestinian “symbols”, like the Palestinian flag, are systematically attacked and torn down, in public places, during public events, protests and even funerals, with the display of Palestinian national identity being de facto banned. In the occupied Palestinian territory, preventing the Palestinian people from expressing their collective identity in their own land has taken many forms.

This is part of a broader and deeper endeavour to “deconstruct and replace” Palestine from the collective imagination through a combination of cultural appropriation and the erasure of key cultural entities. [106] The Moroccan Quarter in the Old City of Jerusalem, destroyed at the beginning of the occupation to make space for the Wailing Wall esplanade, is one of the first recorded cases of Palestinian venues destroyed or seized and converted to Israeli cultural sites soon after June 1967.
Similarly, attempts to erase the Palestinian character of what is left of Palestinian ancestral land include: the elimination of Palestinian history in East Jerusalem schools, [107] the revocation of licences to Palestinian schools not adhering to Israeli curriculum policies [108] and the conversion or closure of sites representing Palestinian cultural, political and religious identity. [109]

Attacks on cultural objects of significance to eliminate all traces and expressions of Palestinian existence, and the incorporation of a revisionist view of history to assert (false) claims of sovereignty in the occupied Palestinian territory, demonstrate the occupier’s intention to permanently strip the land of its indigenous identity.

Continue reading at https://www.un.org/unispal/wp-content/uploads/2022/10/A.77.356_210922.pdf

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COVID-19 in Palestine: A Pandemic in the Face of “Settler Colonial Erasure” by Yara Hawari

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At the start of the lockdowns, many Palestinians commented that the world now finally understood what life was like for them. Particularly in the West Bank and Gaza, the curfews, the closure of public spaces, the inability or difficulty to travel, lingering anxiety and perpetual uncertainty are features common to Palestinian life. However, this new global reality reflects only a fraction of the Palestinian experience of suffering from nearly a century of ongoing settler colonialism.

Australian scholar, Patrick Wolfe, described settler colonialism as “a structure not an event”[1] and its driving logic as the elimination of the indigenous people. This ongoing settler colonial process is often referred to by Palestinians as al-nakba al-mustamirra (the ongoing catastrophe), and further manifests itself through expulsions, confiscation of land, incarceration, military bombardments and ghettoization processes across historical Palestine.

Continue reading at https://www.iai.it/en/pubblicazioni/covid-19-palestine-pandemic-face-settler-colonial-erasure

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Destroying to Replace: Settler Colonialism from Kashmir to Palestine by Zainab Ramahi and Azadeh Shahshahani

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In the words of scholar Patrick Wolfe, settler colonialism “destroys to replace.” In Canada, the United States, and Australia, the settler state has worked to eliminate the indigenous population through genocide and the erasure of language and cultural practices. Early Zionists promoted the myth of a “land without a people” in Palestine and continue to destroy Palestinian homes, land, and history.

Continue reading at https://www.versobooks.com/blogs/4817-destroying-to-replace-settler-colonialism-from-kashmir-to-palestine

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A Placebo Not the Cure: Why Removing Trump and Netanyahu Won’t Relieve the Illness by Benay Blend

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In his “Forward” to Ramzy Baroud’s Last Earth: A Palestine Story (2018), Ilan Pappe refers to Al-Nakba al Mustamera, the on-going Nakba, a common term for the period after 1948. Moreover, he explains that discrete chapters in the history of Palestine, such as the disaster of 1948, are not just past events, but instead are a long narrative of massacres, land confiscation, displacement, and assassination. Relying on Patrick Wolfe, who “adapted and applied” the settler-colonial paradigm to Palestine, Pappe explains that the colonial project is on-going, as is Palestine’s resistance to it.
Similarly, Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz writes in An Indigenous History of the United States (2014) that the history of United States is also that of settler-colonialism, i.e. the founding of a country established on the premise of white supremacy, the widespread use of African slavery, and a strategy of “genocide and land theft” that disenfranchised the Indigenous population (p.2). She adds that “those who seek history with an upbeat ending” (p. 2), or for the present purposes, those who seek to find a Golden Age in America’s past, might be looking far and wide for neither that conclusion nor that bygone age, exists.
Trump and Netanyahu, then, are merely just the symptoms, while Zionism, settler-colonialism, neoliberalism, capitalism, and racism are all elements of the disease. 

Continue reading at http://www.palestinechronicle.com/a-placebo-not-the-cure-why-removing-trump-and-netanyahu-wont-relieve-the-illness/

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Kashmir and Palestine share the struggle for self determination against colonial occupation by Zainab Ramahi

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Many have written about an imminent ethnic cleansing in Kashmir. As anthropologist Patrick Wolfe has noted, “the question of genocide is never far from discussions of settler colonialism.” As a Palestinian and Kashmiri there is little escape from the violence of the colonial machine. As I sit with my family and wait on news – any news – the only thing I can think to do is write.

Continue reading at https://mondoweiss.net/2019/08/palestine-determination-occupation/

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Racism is at center of Israeli settler-colonialist venture — Ronit Lentin by Jonathan Ofir

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Inside the general paradigm of colonialism, there exist variations. Settler-colonialism, that is colonialism that does not involve a ‘mother-country’, is generally known to be the more deadly variant, in that it is inherently eliminationist regarding the native population, whereas in other variants there is that ‘mother-country’ option to go back to. Lentin defines the Israeli example as special in its multi-faceted racialization of both white supremacy and Jewish supremacy, yet under the overall paradigm of colonialism, and particularly settler-colonialism, she does not view the Israeli example as particularly special, nor surprising. And its eliminationist aspect is inherently genocidal, she says, though the project was not necessarily about making all the natives disappear at once.

Continue reading at https://mondoweiss.net/2019/07/israeli-settler-colonialist/

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Disabling Wounds: Genocidal Violence, Paradoxical Indigeneity, and the Logic of Elimination of the Native by J. Kēhaulani Kauanui

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We might understand this as a paradox that also works with the right to maim—Israelis having it both ways: subjecting structural genocide on Palestinians as indigenous while also asserting that they are not killing them in calculated cold blood (genocide proper). In this twisted logic, actual killings are then justifiable by claiming that massacres enacted to stop “terrorists” (i.e., any Palestinians resisting their own genocide). So, we see a bid for settler innocence while eliminating the Native, one way or another.

Continue reading at https://socialtextjournal.org/periscope_article/disabling-wounds-genocidal-violence-paradoxical-indigeneity-and-the-logic-of-elimination-of-the-native/

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Race and surveillance in the settler colony: the case of Israeli rule over Palestine by Ronit Lentin

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Unlike colonialism which is about the exploitation of the natives, settler colonialism is about replacing the natives, and it always replaces what it destroys. In Palestine this meant Zionists replacing Palestinian orchards with imported European conifers (which they dubbed “making the desert bloom”), depopulated Palestinian villages and urban neighbourhood with Jewish settlements, roads and national parks, Palestinian place names with Hebrew place names, and the present day campaign of replacing Bedouin villages, deemed “unrecognized”, with space for Jews-only urban and rural settlements, army manoeuvres, and green spaces—classic settler colonial governmentalities.
Informed by various interpretations of terra nullius (a land without people), settler colonialism is a land-centred project. Wolfe theorizes settler colonialism as premised on securing territory in terms of “structured genocide”, evidenced by the expulsion of 800,000 Palestinians from their lands during and after the 1948 Nakba, by the 1967 occupation of the West Bank, Gaza, Sinai and the Golan, by progressively dispensing with Palestinian workers from the occupied territory, and by the increasing military and civil control of the occupied territory. 

Continue reading at https://www.nature.com/articles/palcomms201756

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“A Structure, Not an Event”: Settler Colonialism and Enduring Indigeneity by J. Kēhaulani Kauanui

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Wolfe’s essay “Settler Colonialism and the Elimination of the Native”2 is often cited as the principal work representing the concept and theory of the settler colonial analytic. And although Wolfe insisted on making it clear time and again that he did not create the field of settler colonial studies—that Native scholars did—within the field of American Studies (as just one example), he tends to be most frequently cited as if he had. Indeed, this one article of his (although not his first writing on the subject, nor the last) also seems to be the most cited, perhaps because it offers so much in one piece by distinguishing settler colonialism from genocide, contrasting settler colonialism from franchise colonialism, and—through comparative work focused on Australia, Israel-Palestine, and the United States—showing how the logic of settler colonialism is premised on the elimination of indigenous peoples.

Continue reading at http://csalateral.org/issue/5-1/forum-alt-humanities-settler-colonialism-enduring-indigeneity-kauanui/