Traces of Racial Exception: Racializing Israeli Settler Colonialism

Suspensions: Contemporary Middle Eastern and Islamicate Thought

by Ronit Lentin, Jason Bahbak Mohaghegh (Editor), Lucian Stone (Editor)

Positioning race front and centre, this book theorizes that political violence, in the form of a socio-political process that differentiates between human and less-than-human populations, is used by the state of Israel in racializing and ruling the citizens of occupied Palestine.

Lentin argues that Israel's rule over Palestine is an example of Agamben's state of exception, Goldberg's racial state and Wolfe's settler colony; the Israeli racial settler colony employs its laws to rule besieged Palestine, while excluding itself and its Jewish citizen-colonists from legal instruments and governmental technologies. Governing through emergency legislation and through practices of exception, emergency, necessity and security, Israel positions itself outside domestic and international law.

Deconstructing Agamben's Eurocentric theoretical position Lentin shows that it occludes colonialism, settler colonialism and anti-colonialism and fails to specifically foreground race; instead she combines the work of Wolfe, who proposes race as a trace of settler colonialism, and Weheliye, who argues that Agamben's western-centric understanding of exception fail to speak from explicitly racialized and gendered standpoints.

Employing existing media, activist, and academic accounts of racialization this book deliberately breaks from white, Western theorizations of biopolitics, exception, and bare life, and instead foregrounds race and gender in analysing settler colonial conditions in Israel.

Genres: Nonfiction, Middle East, Race, Academia

224 pages, Hardcover

Published August 9, 2018

Reviews

[leni swagger]

loved the essay on the "Femina Sacra" with the allegory of Palestine as woman. :)

[Muhammed Nijim · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a good book that interprets Israeli crimes as racist. Ronit Lentin, who is often described as an antisemite or a self-hating Jew is a pro-Palestinian or pro-justice scholar who wrote extensively about Palestine and Israel. In this book, she locates Israeli settler colonialism in a race-based framework. Race is the center of all Israeli crimes against Palestinians.

She uses some theories such as Agamben's bare life but she critiques it for being Euro-centric and not accounting for settler-colonialism, gender or race. Though she recognizes the usefulness of the theory to discuss Zionist crimes against the Palestinians.

Lentin then spends some time explaining to the reader how most of Israel's crimes are racist. Jews view themselves as superior to the Palestinians and benefit constantly from the unequal structure of colonialism. Besieging Gaza, constructing checkpoints, killing Palestinians, raiding their houses and stealing their lands are all racist crimes that are executed solely because Palestinians are not Jews. Lentin also argues that the Israeli society is internally divided as Ashkenazi white Israelis view themselves as the purist Jewish group as opposed to Eastern Mizrahim Jews who are not as racially pure and thus discrimination happens within Israel too.

Then she moves on to discuss gender-related issues and how Israel utilizes gender to maintain its hegemony. Israel either hyper-masculinizes Palestinian men or feminizes them - and both are good to entrench colonliasm. Israeli soldiers always beat Palestinian men in front of their family members, curse them and use verbally-taboo words to feminize them. This happens also in prisons where men are stripped of their clothes and tortured in sexually improper manners. The same is applied to women who are always threatened to be tortured, raped, or culturally exposed. Sexuality is used to deter women from participating in resistance, armed and non-armed.

In conclusion, she spends some time talking about avenues for decolonization and she stresses the fact that the cultural industry including art and poetry should be employed in any decolonizing project. she posits that any decolonial project should decolonize settlers and include them in any future Palestinian state.

[FL · Rating 4 out of 5]

I'm familiar with critical race theory through usual encounters within academia, and with Israeli political history mostly from Facebook and online activism. But, of course, online activism has many roots in leftist academia; certainly phrases now as commonplace as "cultural appropriation" had their origins within decolonial studies. In a sense, then, this text provided both a background and a clarification to the online activism I've seen, demonstrating how critical race theory provides a language through which to make sense of the horrors of Israeli political violence. That is, I already knew most of the facts in here about Israeli violence against the Palestinian people, but hadn't thought about how those actions construct race.

On the other hand, though, the author is less than transparent about her methodological approach to facts, despite her heavy dose of endnotes. For example, flipping through the bibliography shows a lot of newspaper articles, which in some sense seem to be taken for granted as containing facts or even representative language. And the author talks freely about the process of browsing Facebook when writing this book. Perhaps, then, the social media--academia feedback loop of activism could use a bit more clarity.

[Emmanuel Magdalene · Rating 4 out of 5]

works really well as a literature review as opposed to any kind of analysis