Israeli violence isn’t senseless — it follows a colonial logic.
... While destroying cultural and educational institutions keeps a people from symbolically re-producing itself, Israel’s mass murder of 229 Palestinian children and injuring of 1,949 others is the most grotesque, most literal impediment to the capacity of Palestinians to continue to exist as a group in Palestine going forward. That is what it means for Israel to have put 194,000 children in need of psychological support. That is what it means for maternity care to be restricted “for an estimated 45,000 pregnant women in the Gaza Strip, of whom approximately 5,000 have been displaced.” ... Those of us who are citizens of states that help Israel do all of this need to compel our governments to stop. Until then we all share responsibility for its horrifically logical violence.
Shiva Shankar
The Logic of Israeli Violence by Greg Shupak https://www.jacobinmag.com/201
... “Since 2005, Israel has developed an unusual, and perhaps unprecedented, experiment in colonial management in the Gaza Strip,” seeking to “isolate Palestinians there from the outside world, render them utterly dependent on external benevolence,” and at the same time “absolve Israel of responsibility toward them.” ...
... While denying refugees their legally protected and natural right of return is the most overt tactic that Israel uses to maintain its desired demographic picture, creating conditions inhospitable to the autonomous existence of Palestinians can also in the long run secure for Israel “as much land as possible, [and] as few Palestinians as possible.”
Violence that abides by this logic is not unique to Zionism. It is central to settler-colonialism and finds historic parallels in, for example, the American Trail of Tears or in Canada, the clearing of the plains through the deliberate starvation of Aboriginal peoples. The meaning of Protective Edge is similar.
Preventing a people from providing for themselves is a way of sabotaging their ability to live autonomously. That is how we should understand Israel’s assaults on forty-six of Gaza’s fishing boats or its attacks on Day Sixteen of Protective Edge against agricultural sites in the Northern Gaza Strip, Gaza City, the Central Gaza Strip, Khan Yunis, and Rafah. That is how we should understand Israel rendering two-thirds of Gaza’s wheat mills inoperative and the need of 3,000 of Gaza’s herders for animal feed (to say nothing of the value of animal life itself). That is how we should understand this intensification of what Harvard’s Dr. Sara Roy describes as the long-running deliberate destruction and de-development of the Gaza Strip’s economy that, unless funding for UNRWA is increased, could cause mass starvation. ...
... Israel’s assault on Palestinian culture can also be understood as acts of violence against the Palestinians as a people. Cultures are not static but participate in the unending process of making, unmaking, and re-making texts, and their interpretations is one way that groups understand themselves as distinct and one way that they are understood as such by non-members.
The ability of a group to tell their own stories about themselves is a key aspect of their autonomous existence. Impeding the capacity of Palestinians to undertake these practices is what Israel does when it destroys the home of the poet Othman Hussein and that of the artist Raed Issa; when it kills cameraman Khaled Reyadh Hamad in Shujaiya and a driver for Gaza’s Media 24 news agency named Hamdi Shihab; when it attacks Arabic-speaking journalists at al-Jazeera and the BBC; or when it destroys the building that’s home to the Sawt al-Watan radio station.
Undermining the ability of a people to educate their young, to train them for work, and to teach them to think critically is furthermore a way of stifling their independent existence. This is the implication of the 133 schools that have been hit. ...
... While destroying cultural and educational institutions keeps a people from symbolically re-producing itself, Israel’s mass murder of 229 Palestinian children and injuring of 1,949 others is the most grotesque, most literal impediment to the capacity of Palestinians to continue to exist as a group in Palestine going forward. That is what it means for Israel to have put 194,000 children in need of psychological support. That is what it means for maternity care to be restricted “for an estimated 45,000 pregnant women in the Gaza Strip, of whom approximately 5,000 have been displaced.” ... Those of us who are citizens of states that help Israel do all of this need to compel our governments to stop. Until then we all share responsibility for its horrifically logical violence.
Shiva Shankar
The Logic of Israeli Violence by Greg Shupak https://www.jacobinmag.com/201
... “Since 2005, Israel has developed an unusual, and perhaps unprecedented, experiment in colonial management in the Gaza Strip,” seeking to “isolate Palestinians there from the outside world, render them utterly dependent on external benevolence,” and at the same time “absolve Israel of responsibility toward them.” ...
... While denying refugees their legally protected and natural right of return is the most overt tactic that Israel uses to maintain its desired demographic picture, creating conditions inhospitable to the autonomous existence of Palestinians can also in the long run secure for Israel “as much land as possible, [and] as few Palestinians as possible.”
Violence that abides by this logic is not unique to Zionism. It is central to settler-colonialism and finds historic parallels in, for example, the American Trail of Tears or in Canada, the clearing of the plains through the deliberate starvation of Aboriginal peoples. The meaning of Protective Edge is similar.
Preventing a people from providing for themselves is a way of sabotaging their ability to live autonomously. That is how we should understand Israel’s assaults on forty-six of Gaza’s fishing boats or its attacks on Day Sixteen of Protective Edge against agricultural sites in the Northern Gaza Strip, Gaza City, the Central Gaza Strip, Khan Yunis, and Rafah. That is how we should understand Israel rendering two-thirds of Gaza’s wheat mills inoperative and the need of 3,000 of Gaza’s herders for animal feed (to say nothing of the value of animal life itself). That is how we should understand this intensification of what Harvard’s Dr. Sara Roy describes as the long-running deliberate destruction and de-development of the Gaza Strip’s economy that, unless funding for UNRWA is increased, could cause mass starvation. ...
... Israel’s assault on Palestinian culture can also be understood as acts of violence against the Palestinians as a people. Cultures are not static but participate in the unending process of making, unmaking, and re-making texts, and their interpretations is one way that groups understand themselves as distinct and one way that they are understood as such by non-members.
The ability of a group to tell their own stories about themselves is a key aspect of their autonomous existence. Impeding the capacity of Palestinians to undertake these practices is what Israel does when it destroys the home of the poet Othman Hussein and that of the artist Raed Issa; when it kills cameraman Khaled Reyadh Hamad in Shujaiya and a driver for Gaza’s Media 24 news agency named Hamdi Shihab; when it attacks Arabic-speaking journalists at al-Jazeera and the BBC; or when it destroys the building that’s home to the Sawt al-Watan radio station.
Undermining the ability of a people to educate their young, to train them for work, and to teach them to think critically is furthermore a way of stifling their independent existence. This is the implication of the 133 schools that have been hit. ...
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