Summary
The phenomenon, developed by Hannah Arendt and Aimé Césaire and named by Hil Aked’s Chapter 28 of From the River to the Sea as the key to why states allied with Israel repress their own civil societies: colonial models are brought back to the West, which then practices an internal colonialism on itself (From the River to the Sea: Essays for a Free Palestine, lines 2198-2208).
Details
- Foucault’s summary, quoted at lines 2198-2202: colonization “had a considerable boomerang effect on the mechanisms of power in the West, and on the apparatuses, institutions, and techniques of power. A whole series of colonial models was brought back to the West, and the result was that the West could practice something resembling colonization, or an internal colonialism, on itself”.
- The Metropolitan Police’s Special Branch was first established to gather intelligence on potentially subversive Irish migrants in Britain, the original colonized ‘suspect community’, and MI5 was rooted in coercive technologies of social control first tried and tested in the colonies (line 2204).
- The same tear gas canisters exported from the US to Israel for use against Palestinian liberation protestors are also used domestically against Black Lives Matter demonstrations; the exchange is not unidirectional, since Israel has long used Gaza as a testing ground for weapons, border and surveillance technology it sells around the world (line 2206).
- The chapter’s close (lines 2209-2219) grounds the boomerang in the racial world order: selective mourning for Israelis and the drowning of migrants in the Channel and Mediterranean are the same racism, and the US-Britain-Israel alliance maintains that order; Palestine is “a portal”, in Colombian president Gustavo Petro’s words “the first experiment in considering us all disposable”, and the choice is between allowing Israel, “the model coercive state”, to finish the unfinished Nakba or standing in unconditional solidarity with Palestinian liberation, the right to return and decolonisation.
Related pages
From the River to the Sea: Essays for a Free Palestine, Hil Aked, Hannah Arendt, Fascism, BDS movement