Colonial modernity

Summary

In Liberal Zionism: A Pillar of Israel’s Settler Colonial Project, the framework within which Liberal Zionism is part and parcel: modernity, conceived of as a Western phenomenon, cannot be separated from the tools used to achieve it, colonization and slavery (Liberal Zionism: A Pillar of Israel’s Settler Colonial Project, line 195).

Liberal Zionists, in Ayyash’s account, fail to critically engage with the violent, colonial foundations of so-called Western liberal democracies; they accept as conventional wisdom that Western civilization is superior to all others, boasts the most advanced democratic systems, and is rightfully and globally spreading a civilization that endogenously developed within the West (lines 195-197).
Michael Walzer’s most recent book is Ayyash’s case in point: it praises “liberal morality” and “liberalism” as a “product of the Enlightenment and the triumph…of the emancipated individual—a Western figure”, with no decolonial paradigm centering those who suffered and were erased due to the Western colonial project (line 197).
By separating the civilization of the West from what the West does, liberal Zionism justifies, legitimizes and naturalizes the violent Zionist settler-colonial project in colonized Palestine and beyond (line 197).
The anti-racist project, on Ayyash’s closing formulation, must necessarily be decolonial and committed to dismantling the structures of colonial modernity, or it is not progressive politics at all (line 235).

tags
aliases	Colonial modernity