Settler Colonialism
Updated 2024-08-29
Gaza Fights Back (Film) Filmed in 2021 during the attack and in the days following the ceasefire, the documentary tells the story of how Gaza’s armed resistance groups outwitted the vastly superior Israeli military and established their ability to intervene against Israeli ethnic cleansing of neighborhoods like Sheikh Jarrah and provocations at the al-Aqsa compound in occupied East Jerusalem. https://www.mintpressnews.com/micro-site/gazafightsback/
Israeli settlers west bank (Videos) https://www.bing.com/videos/riverview/relatedvideo?q=israeli%20settlers%20west%20bank&mid=C65E12F253435143C5F8C65E12F253435143C5F8&ajaxhist=0
2024-08-15 Israeli Academia’s Complicity in Israel’s Settler-Colonial Project On todays show – a conversation with Maya Wind, a scholar of Israeli expertise and militarism. Her new book is Towers of Ivory & Steel: How Israeli Universities Deny Palestinian Freedom. As this book shows, Israeli universities serve as pillars of Israel’s system of oppression against Palestinians. Towers of Ivory and Steel is a powerful exposé of Israeli academia’s ongoing and active complicity in Israel’s settler-colonial project. https://kpfa.org/episode/law-disorder-august-15-2024/
2024-05-06 Israel Is Ignoring the Lessons of Settler-Colonial History The more resistance that the colonized shows, the more brutal the colonizer becomes. Genocidal Israel is now walking in the footsteps of all other settler colonies on their deathbed.
It has been 212 days since the beginning of the Gaza genocide. Over 34,200 civilians have been killed, including 14,500 children and 10,000 women. Over 10,000 people are still buried under the rubble. Mass graves have been uncovered at hospitals in the north and the south of Gaza.
Euro-Med Human Rights Monitor has documented 140 mass and unmarked graves so far in Gaza. The barbarity by Israel is unprecedented. Among the deceased in the mass graves at al-Shifa and Nasser hospitals, some people had been stripped of their clothes and buried with their hands tied. According to World Health Organization Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, a child is killed every 10 minutes in Gaza on average. Ghebreyesus paints a gloomy picture: “Nowhere and no one is safe.” https://www.commondreams.org/opinion/israel-settler-colonialism
2024-03-11 The Zone of Interest Is a Film About the Nazi Official as a Settler Hannah Arendt’s (by now highly cliched) notion of the “banality of evil,” a phrase she coined while covering the trial of Adolf Eichmann, known as the “architect of the Holocaust.”
But Arendt’s own refusal to interrogate the inherently colonial nature of European fascism, a refusal inseparable from her own racism and Western chauvinism, has blunted the sharpness of that term’s capacity for critical insight. Yes, the Holocaust was engineered by middle managers, but to what end? What did they get out of the horrific affair, besides satiating their sadism?https://www.commondreams.org/opinion/zone-of-interest-nazis-settlers
2024-01-03 Beyond Settler-Colonialism – KPFA – Against the Grain The modern nation-state has been premised on the violent creation of permanent minorities ruled over by ethnic or religious majorities, argues Mahmood Mamdani. The acclaimed scholar of colonialism and anti-colonialism reflects on the United States, Nazi Germany, South Africa, and Israel — settler-colonial societies built on internment and ethnic cleansing. He calls for a decolonialism that transcends nationalism altogether, moving beyond the divisions fostered by colonial rule (Encore presentation.). Resources: Mahmood Mamdani, Neither Settler nor Native: The Making and Unmaking of Permanent Minorities Harvard University Press, 2020 https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/beyond-settler-colonialism/id78900506?
2023-11-27 Top EU Official Slams Settlement Expansion Funds in Israeli Budget The European Union’s foreign affairs chief on Monday said he was “appalled to learn” that Israel’s wartime government is preparing to vote on a budget plan that includes money for illegal settlements in the occupied West Bank, where settler violence against Palestinians has grown in recent weeks amid Israel’s assault on Gaza.
“In the middle of a war, the Israeli gov is poised to commit new funds to build more illegal settlements,” Josep Borrell, the E.U.’s high representative for foreign affairs and security policy, wrote on social media. “This is not self-defense and will not make Israel safer. The settlements are a grave [international humanitarian law] breach, and they are Israel’s greatest security liability.”
“During the first eight months of 2023, settler violence soared to its highest level since the U.N. began recording this data in 2006; three incidents per day on average, up from two in 2022 and one in 2021,” Omar Shakir, Israel and Palestine director at Human Rights Watch, wrote last week. “That rate has almost doubled since October 7.”
“These abuses are a part of Israeli authorities’ crimes against humanity of apartheid and persecution, as documented by Human Rights Watch and other Israeli, Palestinian, and international human rights organizations,” wrote Shakir. “The roots of the violence in Israel-Palestine are multiple and run deep; ending the violence requires dismantling the systems of oppression that feed it, including in the West Bank.”
Agnes Callamard, secretary-general of Amnesty International, echoed that message on Monday in response to the Israeli government’s budget proposal. “The settlements in the West Bank,” she wrote on social media, “are part and parcel of the system of apartheid against Palestinian people, along with unlawful detention, torture, arbitrary killings, forced displacement, etc.” https://www.commondreams.org/news/top-eu-official-slams-settlement-expansion-funds-in-israeli-budget
2023-10-30 Israeli human rights groups: Israeli officials backing settler violence against West Bank farmers The coalition of groups — including B’Tselem, Breaking the Silence, and the Israeli arms of Amnesty International and Physicians for Human Rights — released a joint statement calling on the international community “to act urgently to stop the state-backed wave of settler violence which has led, and is leading to, the forcible transfer of Palestinian communities in the West Bank.” The Palestinian Health Ministry said Saturday that 111 Palestinians in the West Bank have been killed since October 7.
“Palestinian farmers are particularly vulnerable at this time, during the annual olive harvest season, because if they are unable to pick their olives they will lose a year’s income,” the groups explained. “Yesterday Bilal Muhammed Saleh from the village of As-Sawiya south of Nablus was murdered while tending to his olive trees. He was the seventh Palestinian to have been killed by settlers since the current war began.”
Jewish settlers have recently tried to scare Palestinians into fleeing the West Bank by displaying dolls covered in blood or a substance meant to mimic it and distributing leaflets with messages like “Run to Jordan before we kill our enemies and expel you from our Holy Land, promised to us by God.”
The coalition said Sunday that “unfortunately, the Israeli government is supportive of these attacks and does nothing to stop this violence. On the contrary: government ministers and other officials are backing the violence and in many cases the military is present or even participates in the violence, including in incidents where settlers have killed Palestinians.” https://www.salon.com/2023/10/30/israeli-human-rights-groups-israeli-officials-backing-settler-violence-against-west-farmers_partner/
2023-10-30 Israeli ‘rage’ in West Bank alarms France and US “[Israeli] prime minister [Benjamin] Netanyahu does have a responsibility to rein in the extremist settlers on the West Bank who are … pouring fuel on the fire,” US national-security adviser Jake Sullivan said in a TV interview on Sunday (29 October). The French foreign ministry said: “France strongly condemns the settler attacks that have led to the deaths of several Palestinian civilians over the past few days … as well as the forced departure of several communities”.
Israeli forces have also killed over 100 Palestinians in the West Bank in the same time frame, according to the Palestinian health ministry. And lethal incidents aside, a wave of violent harassment by armed settlers, with Israeli military protection, has also driven dozens of West Bank Palestinian families from their homes in fear in the past 20 days. “These incidents are likely to set the area alight”, Israeli intelligence chief Ronen Bar warned his own government on Sunday, Israeli media reported.
“Settlers have been exploiting the lack of public attention to the West Bank, as well as the general atmosphere of rage against Palestinians, to escalate their campaign of violent attacks in an attempt to forcibly transfer Palestinian communities,” said a coalition of 30 NGOs, including prominent Israeli human-rights groups Breaking the Silence and B’Tselem. https://euobserver.com/world/157631
2023-10-30 West Bank toll rises to 111 after Israeli settler kills Palestinian harvesting olives The Palestinian Health Ministry says the death toll from Israeli attacks in the occupied West Bank has reached 111 since October 7th. At least seven of those were killed by Israeli settlers, including 40-year-old Bilal Muhammad Saleh, who was fatally shot Saturday near Nablus as he was harvesting olives with his family. Over the weekend, residents of the Jenin refugee camp said Israeli army bulldozers destroyed a memorial for the Palestinian American journalist Shireen Abu Akleh erected at the spot where she was fatally shot in the head by an Israeli sniper in May 2022. https://www.radiohc.cu/en/noticias/internacionales/337944-west-bank-toll-rises-to-111-after-israeli-settler-kills-palestinian-harvesting-olives
2023-10-28 Settler Colonialism If you’re confused or just don’t know much about Palestine/Israel take a look at the creation of Israel in 1948 and the Ideology of Zionism. From the beginning Zionism was and remains a Western colonial project. As a religious nationalist project on Palestinian land Zionism followed in the Western tradition of settler colonialism. The inability of Americans to understand their own history as a settler colonial society limits the ability to understand the basics of what has been happening in Palestine for the last hundred years.
The same people that are remaining neutral today are following in the same tradition as all the people that remained neutral for the hundreds of years in which the Europeans were colonizing the “Americas,” Australia, New Zealand and parts of Asia and Africa by exterminating native populations. What’s happening today and for the last 100 years in Palestine is consistent with the history of the West for the last 500 years.
America had an ideology that summed up settler colonialism very well, “Manifest Destiny,” the idea that it was divine providence that white Europeans would bring civilization to the “savages.” In the Declaration of Independence Liberal darling Thomas Jefferson refers to the indigenous nations as “merciless Indian savages.”
What Israel is doing today is a much smaller scale of what the British and Americans did to the indigenous on this continent for 300+ years. What both Zionism and Manifest Destiny have to offer people is the bribe of land and wealth. People have a long history of trading their integrity for a little land and wealth. https://consortiumnews.com/2023/10/28/letter-to-the-editor-settler-colonialism/
2022-05-12 Rights group: Israel approves over 4,000 new settler homes Israel advanced plans for the construction of more than 4,000 settler homes in the occupied West Bank on Thursday, a rights group said, a day after the military demolished homes in an area where hundreds of Palestinians face the threat of expulsion.
It was a jolting illustration of Israel’s policies in the territory it has occupied for nearly 55 years. Critics, including three major human rights groups, say those policies amount to apartheid, a charge Israel rejects as an attack on its very legitimacy. Hagit Ofran, an expert at the anti-settlement watchdog group Peace Now, told The Associated Press that a military planning body approved 4,427 housing units at a meeting on Thursday that she attended. “The state of Israel took another stumble toward the abyss and further deepened the occupation,” she tweeted. https://apnews.com/article/us-supreme-court-middle-east-israel-west-bank-b3ca07a132d5df29f9c7d8c78fc14804
2021-10-27 Israel OKs some 3,000 new settler homes, despite U.S. rebuke Israel approved about 3,000 new settler homes in the occupied West Bank on Wednesday, a day after the United States issued its strongest rebuke yet of such construction. It was the biggest announcement of settlement plans during the Biden administration. The plans were approved by a Defense Ministry committee, according to a security official who was not authorized to speak publicly and did not provide further details. The anti-settlement group Peace Now also confirmed the approvals. The decision marked the latest boost for Israel’s half-century-old settlement enterprise on occupied lands the Palestinians seek for a state. Successive Israeli governments have expanded settlements, making an internationally backed two-state solution — a state of Palestine arising alongside Israel — increasingly impossible.
The Trump administration had tolerated settlement growth and abandoned the decades-long U.S. position that the settlements were illegitimate. Israel embarked on an aggressive settlement spree during the Trump years, advancing plans for more than 12,000 settler homes in 2020 alone, according to Peace Now, the highest number since it started collecting data in 2012.
Wednesday’s decision was bound to raise friction with Europe and the United States. Only a day earlier, U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken had protested the plan during a phone call with Israeli Defense Minister Benny Gantz, according to a senior U.S. official who was not authorized to speak publicly.
Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas called on the international community to take a “decisive stance” on the Israeli decision, which he said amounted to a “message of disdain for the efforts of the U.S. administration.” https://apnews.com/article/business-middle-east-jerusalem-israel-united-states-a6d7faba3f0fb6d40695729ec398dc21
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