Tag: Ronit Lentin

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

Please TAKE ACTION RIGHT NOW and send your letter to the UN Office of the Special Adviser on the Prevention of Genocide and the International Criminal Court Prosecutor.

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