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Settler Colonialism: Palestine, 2024
So far as Indigenous people are concerned, where they are is who they are, and not only by their own reckoning. As Deborah Bird Rose has pointed out, to get in the way of settler colonization, all the native has to do is stay at home.5 Whatever settlers may say—and they generally have a lot to say—the primary motive for elimination is not race (or religion, ethnicity, grade of civilization, etc.) but access to territory. Territoriality is settler colonialism’s specific, irreducible element.
The logic of elimination not only refers to the summary liquidation of Indigenous people, though it includes that. In common with genocide as Raphaël Lemkin characterized it,6 settler colonialism has both negative and positive dimensions. Negatively, it strives for the dissolution of native societies. Positively, it erects a new colonial society on the expropriated land base—as I put it, settler colonizers come to stay: invasion is a structure not an event.7 In its positive aspect, elimination is an organizing principal of settler-colonial society rather than a one-off (and superseded) occurrence.
—Patrick Wolfe, Settler colonialism and the elimination of the native, Journal of Genocide Research, 2006
“Israel imposed mass famine, and committed massacres every day. What happened was all expected. I wrote a book about this previously 20 years ago. Children are now living in the streets and tents in the bitter cold. Their weak, fragile bodies are torn apart by shells or they die of hunger and more than 700,000 people suffer from diseases related to famine, lack of clean water and lack of sanitation. Although there are other hungry and oppressed people elsewhere (Iraq, Yemen, Sudan, Western Sahara, etc.), our situation is unique. The images are horrific and we have active and deliberate genocide by a colonial power supported by the governments of several colonial powers (US, UK, France, Germany, Australia). The genocide is broadcast live and is not hidden. No one can claim that he did not know. Every human being on this earth knows (including perpetrators and accomplices), but my topic here is not knowledge; It is corruption that leads to these things.”
—Professor Mazin Qumsiyeh, Wake up and wake up, Arabs, 18 Feb 2024
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