Summary
Author of Chapter 15 of From the River to the Sea, “The end of colonial government” (9 December 2023), which argues that Israel’s obliteration machinery is animated by a desire not to govern Palestinians but to wish them out of political and historical existence (From the River to the Sea: Essays for a Free Palestine, lines 1049-1104 in this part; the chapter continues into part 3).
Details
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Even the frames of state violence, Apartheid and Genocide “fall short of diagnosing the repetitive violation of an already violated land and people”; the machinery transforms “the largest open-air prison in the world into an open-air death camp” (line 1060).
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Genocide as a legal category cannot frame the destruction of Palestinian historicity — the houses, neighbourhoods, mosques, churches, schools, streets and land where memory and collective life dwell (line 1074).
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“Ethnic cleansing” is also insufficient; the Arabic Nakba vocabulary — iqtila’ (uprooting), tarhil (deportation), tahjir (exiling), tashrid (banishment) — points to “the colonial project to not govern Palestinians” (line 1082).
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In the West Bank, checkpoints have morphed into gates of a “mini-blockade”; in Area C, settler and soldier depopulation of tens of villages in two months reenacts 1948 and aims “to materialize the colonial fantasy of a land without a people” (lines 1086-1092).
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The chapter’s close (lines 1105-1112, read in part 3): Apartheid also falls short, because at its core is biopolitical government, not necropolitical obliteration and removal; Israel’s ambition is the production of Palestinian absence from the land, “from Gaza to Hebron to Haifa”, and the radical Palestinian tradition answers that the more the bond with the land is severed, the more it is affirmed (From the River to the Sea: Essays for a Free Palestine, lines 1105-1112).
Related pages
From the River to the Sea: Essays for a Free Palestine, Genocide, Ethnic Cleansing, Nakba, Oslo Accords