#settler colony

[myyyyediary]

ur reminder Canada is almost as bad as America, just w better PR

[myyyyediary]

May any American who victimizes themselves about foreign war get drafted and die.

[somdyala]

Settler’s Rest, 2022-2023. 

Variable dimensions

Umbhaco and sea salt  

More from my residency at Nirox Sculpture Park; got to play in the beautiful studio space by reinterpreting an ongoing work.  

[freeandeasywandering]

Gaza

I wrote this as a comment on Smartypants' blog, about Gaza:

Well, I'll give you my take on Gaza. I view Israel primarily through the lens of "settler colony." http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Settler_colonialism What you see in Gaza is the ineluctable result of the fact of settler colonialism. Take any example, from North America, to Southern Africa, to Palestine, and you see the same thing. 1. A better armed population wrests land from already-present inhabitants. 2. Political and legal structures are created which legitimate the fact of expropriation. 3. An ideological structure, racism, develops, taking the contours of the political and legal structures and in the process legitimating them. 4. Racism produces policy developments which in their turn reinforce the basic, colonialist contours of the political and legal structures, and which as likely as not magnify them. The logic of the process cannot on its own terms avoid genocide, which is not simply the killing of a group of people, but, by the UN Convention, any policy which would dis-integrate a people as a people. Only some external force can reduce or stop this process. To be clear, there is a lot to be hopeful about in the US, but this process has not stopped here, however it may have modified with passing time. So, what you see in Gaza is par for the course, in its specific way, for a settler colony. The younger Sharon in his piece in the Jerusalem Post http://www.jpost.com/Opinion/Op-EdContributors/Article.aspx?ID=292466&R=R1 simply articulates the underlying logic of the project. Our form here was Manifest Destiny and then Indian Schools. There, it's bombing Gaza into the Middle Ages. This is what happens when one group of people takes another group's land. I don't expect US policy to modify quickly. It would be unconscionable to me to fund Israel's genocide if it wasn't actually what my tax dollars are doing. As such, I have to recognize it as a fact. We also need to stop pretending that "two-state solution" is anything other than a contradiction in terms. When I was young, and when I learned that Israel restricted citizenship based on religion (yes, there are Arab citizens, but the fact of their exceptionalism demonstrates the larger restriction) I was shocked, because I'd been raised to think that Israel was one of the "good guys" and that, at the same time, "freedom of religion" was one of the distinguishing factors of the "good guys." I was told that this arrangement was necessary, because of the Holocaust. The Zionist colonial project was very much under way before Hitler, and should not be seen as a result of that genocide. To view it that way is not only factually wrong but totally disrespectful of those who died as well as those who survived.

[freeandeasywandering]

Settler Colonies

I work in a mall and there's a kiosk across from my store, worked by Israelis. One of them asked me, "why do the Spanish-speakers think they can just talk to you on Spanish?" I replied that not only is San Diego adjacent to Mexico, it was Mexico until the US, on a flimsy pretext, went to war and took the land. It is reasonable for Mexican people to feel that not only may they speak Spanish, but that this land is properly theirs. I'm the settler, they aren't. The Israeli woman did not disagree, but seemed completely unable to understand. She said it didn't make any sense and looked at me strangely.

[freeandeasywandering]

Israeli Students Cheering Nazis in Play

That's right.  Here's the link.

“You embarrassed the Jewish people and the Holocaust,” actor Oded Leopold said from the stage of the Cameri Theater last Thursday, lashing out at hundreds of high school students after they repeatedly disrupted a play dealing with the Holocaust on Holocaust Remembrance Day.

The students’ behavior, news of which only hit the Israeli media on Monday, prompted an intensive bout of national radio debate and soul-searching about indiscipline, educational failures, poor parenting and lost values among Israeli youth.

During the play “Ghetto,” which portrays the life of Jews in the Vilna Ghetto in the early 1940s at Tel Aviv’s Cameri Theatre, students in the audience made fun of the actors and shouted offensive remarks toward the stage. Some laughed and cried out encouragement during scenes depicting Jews being killed by Nazis, and when a kapo beat a Jew. Calls of “hit him harder” and “well done” were heard from the audience.

So, why is this important?  There is no need to indulge in facile comparisons of the Israeli project in Palestine to Nazi Germany.  The point--missed apparently by the authors of the piece and, if they are correct, much or most of the Israeli public--is that, as I noted on my Twitter feed, it is no accident that young people from the settler class in a settler colony identify with the perpetrators of state terror rather than its victims.

How could they do otherwise, given conditions?  These young people, in 2012, clearly do not see themselves being hit by the kapo.  They see themselves in the kapos.  Most important, this was repeated egging-on, not a brief, isolated comment.  They were allowed to continue, and afterwards the adults wring their hands about the young generation they themselves bred.