Tag settler colonialism
John Reynolds: For those seeking to draw tactically on international law to confront the Nakba, the international legal prohibition of apartheid can be useful in going further than the prohibition of colonialism.
Majd Kayyal: The catastrophe that took place on 5 June 1967 boils down to one fact: it sealed the consequences of the Nakba. It marked the defeat of political projects that promised an Arab rebirth and refused to accept the 1948 ethnic cleansing of Palestine.
As part of an ongoing dialogue with the Native rights movement in the United States, Adalah USA Representative Nadia Ben-Youssef recently sat down with Melanie Yazzie and Nick Estes, scholar-activists and founders of Red Nation, a coalition of Native and non-Native activists, educators, students and community organizers advocating Native liberation. They discussed the points of intersection between Palestinian and Native histories and consider ways forward to reclaim memory as a force for collective liberation.
Nick Estes: While the Nakba was taking place in Palestine, Native peoples in the United States faced what is known as “the era of termination.” Termination was meant to forcibly assimilate Native peoples into white culture while in Palestine, Zionism emphasized segregating Jews and Arabs instead. But in both places, dispossession and expulsion were the order of the day.
A Dutch citizen who moves to a settlement in the West Bank receives higher pension payments from the Dutch government than if he stayed in the Netherlands. This is only one particularly egregious example of how other states sponsor Israel’s colonization of Palestine and the ongoing Nakba.
On 14 July in Acre, Mada al-Carmel — the Arab Center for Applied Social Research will host its second annual international conference on the theme of “The Illusion of Justice in the Settler Colony: Palestinian Women, Law and the State.”… Continue Reading →
In Israeli political discourse, the issue of African asylum seekers and the question of Palestine are largely seen as disconnected from one another. Yet the contours of Israel’s asylum regime and, by extension, its anti-Blackness and mistreatment of African migrants, cannot be understood in isolation from the Nakba and its laws.
How can one think productively about the Holocaust and the Nakba together? Political theorist Bashir Bashir argues that confronting this question is necessary in order to develop a new approach to decolonization in Israel/Palestine. Bashir agreed to discuss the project of engaging the Holocaust and Nakba together in a recent interview with The Nakba Files.
Terms like “creeping annexation” are used to convey disapproval at Israel’s refusal to respect the Palestinian right to self-determination or — more often in the case as used by Israelis — a warning about a future undetermined point when partition will no longer be seen as a viable option. Far less clear is when one can say that annexation is no longer merely “creeping” or “de facto.” How does one know if the “window for the two-state solution,” in peace process-speak, has definitively closed?
Noura Erakat: An anti-blackness framework urges us to think about other communities, besides native Palestinians, that intersect with the category of “black.” People of African descent have long been in Palestine/Israel, and their presence cuts across dominant categories: there are Afro-Palestinians (predominantly Muslim), Ethiopian Israeli Jews (whose mass migration begins to achieve momentum in the mid-eighties), and recently-arrived asylum seekers from Sudan and Eritrea (both Muslim and Christian). Such provocations unsettle a stark native-settler binary and illuminate broader implications for anti-racist commitments within the Palestinian liberation struggle.