Israel as Absolute State

Abstract

Israel as Absolute StateIn his seminal essay, Critique of Violence/Zur Kritik der Gewalt (1921), Walter Benjamin proposes a direct link between violence and law. Law is initially instituted by violence, he offered, and in turn the direct consequence of law is political domination by virtue of that legalized Just two years before the publication of Benjamin's essay, Max Weber in his Politics as a Vocation/Politik als Beruf' (1919) had defined as the institution with an exclusive claim to legitimate (i.e. considered to be legitimate) violence. The combined insights of Weber and Benjamin mark the state as the legalized apparatus of violence systemically geared toward political domination.In these two critical essays, both Weber and Benjamin were in part responding to the immediate consequences of World War I (1914-1918) and the humiliating defeat of Germany in its aftermath. Preoccupied as they were with their own intra-European predicament, neither of these two pathbreaking theorists of violence, law, and state were particularly concerned with the colonial context of similar issues, let alone the racialized denomination of state violence when extended to the non-European world. Theorization of the colonial world, as indeed the colonial world itself in the shadow of European imperial conquest, would remain un- and under-theorized until decades later with the rise of a generation of critical thinkers best exemplified by Frantz Fanon and Edward Said.In his groundbreaking new book, Israel's Colonial Project in Palestine: Brutal Pursuit (2016), the eminent Palestinian sociologist Elia Zureik continues his earlier work to expand the political implication of such and similar ideas, with particular attention to Foucault's work on biopolitics, into Palestinian territories under the Zionist colonial project. Just like Walter Benjamin and Max Weber, Foucault was almost entirely oblivious to the colonial shadow of European modernity. For Zureik, the reverse is true. He plants his theoretical tripod right at the heart of European colonialism in Palestine and offers a corrective lens to theories of state, law, and violence.For Zureik, the three interrelated themes of violence, territoriality, and population control (all with a strong racialized undertone) are the three-prong strategies of the settler colony dominating the native population of Palestine. Racialized violence, racialized demarcation of land, and racialized surveillance are the direct result of this colonial project. In Zionism, European imperialism around the globe has invested all its techniques of domination as if in a laboratory for the world at large to see and examine. If people were not alive to see what the British did in India, or the French and Italians in North Africa, the Belgians in Congo, the Dutch elsewhere in Africa, all the way back to the Spaniards in the New World, all they need to do is to look at what European Zionists are doing in Palestine. For this reason alone, Elia Zureik is today perhaps the most astute theorist of this archive of European racist colonialism as collectively cataloged and put into practice in Palestine.The central argument of Zureik's book is in its third chapter (Colonialism as Surveillance), and its cathartic moment in its final chapter (The Internet and Acts of Everyday Residence). Chapter two navigates a critical updating of Zionism as a colonial project. The book in its entirety is a tour de force of critical thinking on racism, domination, surveillance, and land theft, based on the widest body of archival evidence ever gathered for such a scrupulous examination.Depopulating Palestine, denationalizing the refugees, and stealing ever bigger chunks of Palestinian lands are the point of departure for Zureik upon which he then builds a thorough theoretical argument about the manner in which Israel has systematically stolen Palestinian lands, racialized the daily life of its colonial subjects, demolished Palestinian homes and farms, and consistently sought to dismantle the very social basis of a civic life, in effect seeking to erase Palestinians from their own homeland. …