Black Palestinian Aff - Wake 2019

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The domestic and international consolidation of American arms sales do not
function as separable entities but rather are intimately connected via tactical
networks of control which ensure that the military operations conducted “out
there” are first tested on black people at home. The mobilization of
COINTELPRO to disconnect black radicals from the legacy of US imperialism, the
silencing of protesters such as Tiffany King who recognized the entanglements
between capital and race during the 2003 anti-war protests, and the utilization
of the DoD’s 1033 program to siphon off surplus military-grade weapons which
“allowed [police] departments to acquire new technologies and equipment,
further promoting the militarization of local law enforcement” 1; all elucidate a
deep-rooted desire to both literally and metaphysically asphyxiate those who
seek to reveal the paradoxical nature of Americas arms transfers abroad.
According to Moten and Harney, this attempt by the state and civil society to
deprive radicals of the ability to breathe while simultaneously rehabilitating
them on the condition of “good behavior” locks in a violent cycle of credit and
debt. In this lexicon, the transfer of arms is not simply an economizing move
but rather a tokenizing one that forces both domestic and international
organizers to become indebted to the state for mercy, justice, freedom, and the
very weapons they use to resist its soon-to-come chokehold. 2
1
Moule et al.’19 |Richard K. Moule Jr. is an assistant professor in the Department of Criminology at the University of South Florida. He earned his BS in Criminology and Justice
Studies from The College of New Jersey (2009), and his MS (2011) and PhD (2016) in Criminology and Criminal Justice from Arizona State University. Megan M. Parry is an
Assistant Professor of Criminology & Criminal Justice at the University of Rhode Island George W. Burruss, Ph.D., is Associate Professor in the Department of Criminology at the
University of South Florida and affiliated with the Florida Cybersecurity Center. He received his Ph.D. in criminology and criminal justice from the University of Missouri — St.
Louis in 2001. Dr. Bryanna Fox is an Associate Professor in the Department of Criminology and Courtesy Professor in the Department of Mental Health, Law, and Policy at the
University of South Florida. Dr. Fox earned her Ph.D. in psychological criminology from the University of Cambridge in England. “Assessing the Direct and Indirect Effects of
Legitimacy on Public Empowerment of Police: A Study of Public Support for Police Militarization in America”. Law and Society Review, Volume 53, Number 1 (2019)|KZaidi
2
Moten and Harney 13 (Fred Moten, poet and scholar whose work explores critical theory, black studies, professor of Performance Studies at New York University, Stefano
Harney, Professor of Strategic Management Education, Singapore Management University and co-founder of the School for Study, “The Undercommons: Fugitive Planning &
Black Study”, published 2013, pages 66-68)
Nowhere, however, is this dyadic relation between credit and debt more
apparent than in US arms transfers to Israel. Puar says that the connective
tissue between Ferguson and Gaza on the level of security practice is not
benign, but rather is a product both of US weapons sales, which grant Israel a
means to maintain “Palestinian populations as perpetually debilitated, and yet
alive, in order to control them”3 and “the training of U.S. law enforcement by the
Israeli state.”4 This cycle turns the debilitation of Palestinians into a profitable
event both for America and Israel. The relationship thrives not on shooting to
kill Palestinians, but rather to maim them, creating a cruel reliance on state-
sanctioned care. This is the debt of war.
Puar’17 |Jasbir K. Puar is a U.S.-based queer theorist and Professor and Graduate Director of Women’s
and Gender Studies at Rutgers University, where she has been a faculty member since 2000. The Right to
Maim, Duke University Press, 2017. Chapter 4, Page 142-147. Footnote 83 included in curly braces|KZaidi
Numerous debates about collateral damage and intentional versus unintentional civilian deaths proliferated during the summer of
2014. Critics avowed that Israelwas using “unguided, indirect fire with high-explosive shells,” weaponry
widely understood to be “inappropriate for a densely populated area.” Nadia Abu El-Haj writes that Israel’s allies proclaim
that “the Israeli army wages war with moral integrity. It doesn’t target civilians. It never intends to kill
them. It even warns Gazans when an attack is coming so they can get out of harm’s way.”75 Abu El-Haj dissects the discourse of
“unintentionality,” arguing that “most civilian deaths in urban counterinsurgency warfare may be ‘unintentional,’ but they are also
predictable.”76 Laleh Khalili takes a more pointed view, arguing that civilians
are not accidental casualties but
“the very object of a settler-colonial counterinsurgency.”77 This discussion on intentionality leaves yet
another possibility unspoken. The purposiveness behind civilian deaths may be indiscernible, debatable, or, as Khalili avers,
absolutely transparently obvious. What the debate on civilian deaths may obscure is the intentional
activity of maiming: the proliferation of injuries leading to permanent debilitation that remain
uncalculated within the metrics of collateral damage. As a term that emerges in 1961, and signals the
“debt” of war—that which should be avoided and must be paid back —why does collateral damage
disarticulate debilitation from death? Such a disarticulation effectively disconnects the act of violent
perpetration from the effects of violence. Official terminology follows suit; for example, the designation “explosive
remnants of war” suggests that the war is over and that the remnants, ranging from dumdum bullets to
armament toxicity to land mines, are benign, manageable, or negligible.78
Maiming thus functions not as an incomplete death or an accidental assault on life, but as the end goal in
the dual production of permanent disability via the infliction of harm and the attrition of the life
support systems that might allow populations to heal from this harm. Maiming is required. Not merely a
by-product of war, of war’s collateral damage, it is used to achieve the tactical aims of settler colonialism. This
functions on two levels. The first is the maiming of humans within a context that is utterly and
systematically resource-deprived, an infrastructural field that is unable to transform the cripple into the disabled. This
point is crucial, for part of what gels the disabled body that is hailed by rights discourses is the
3
Puar’17 |Jasbir K. Puar is a U.S.-based queer theorist and Professor and Graduate Director of Women’s and Gender Studies at Rutgers University, where she has been a faculty
member since 2000. The Right to Maim, Duke University Press, 2017|KZaidi
4
Ibid
availability of the process of cultural rehabilitation—that is, normalization practices that produce
docile bodies.79 The second is the maiming of infrastructure in order to stunt or decay the able-bodied into debilitation
through the control of calories, water, electricity, health care supplies, and fuel.80
What does the sustained practice of maiming—in this case, sustained since the first intifada at least—accomplish for settler
colonialism? What is the long-term value of will not let die, of withholding death? The
understanding of maiming as a
specific aim of biopolitics tests the framing of settler colonialism as a project of elimination of
the indigenous through either genocide or assimilation . It asks us to reevaluate the frame of
biopolitics in relation to the forms of maiming (and stunting, which I will discuss shortly) that have gone on for
centuries in settler colonial occupations. The right to maim is therefore not an exceptional facet of any one form of sovereignty; it
does not newly emanate from Israeli settler colonialism. Rather, the
right to maim allows us to differently
apprehend the wielding of Israeli state power while also challenging the current limits of
biopolitical theorizing such that it may revise our thinking on other times and places. Accounting for
Israeli settler colonialism and occupation is an encounter with the unspoken thresholds of biopolitical thought. Examining the role of
maiming not only in Palestine but also in Canada, New Zealand, Australia, and the United States puts analytic pressure on the
assumption that the goal of settler colonialism is necessarily elimination.81
Noting these different pressure points, Helga Tawil-Souri says of Gaza: “Israel
is not seeking to assimilate the natives
. . . nor enfold them (anymore) as a cheap labor force, but to treat them as refuse.”82 Here, settler
colonialism is framed as a process of value extraction from populations that would otherwise be
disposed of. The productivity of maiming —“will not let die”—is manifold . This third biopolitical vector,
“will not let or make die,” keeps the death toll numbers relatively low in comparison to injuries,
while still thoroughly debilitating the population —depopulation through slow attrition, through maiming human
forms. Because eventful killing is undesirable, the dying after the dying, perhaps years later, would not count as a war death
alongside the quick administration of war deaths. Where do the numbers of “collateral damage” end and the demarcation of “slow
death” begin?
Further, debilitation is extremely profitable economically and ideologically for Israel’s settler
colonial regime. Many sectors take on the “rehabilitation” of Gaza in the aftermath of war: Israel, Egypt, the Arab Gulf states,
NGO actors who are embedded in corporate economies of humanitarianism. Crumbs of the reconstruction will be
fought over through local forms of control brokered by Hamas and the Palestinian Authority. But
these circuits of profit are uneven and perverse; who profits and how are extremely complex
issues and not straightforward at an imperial scale.83 {Foreign countries and international organizations, especially on
the part of the United States, have strong financial investments in the occupation. The United States
signed a Free Trade Agreement with Israel in 1985, increasing exports to Israel by more than 500 percent and imports from Israel by
more than 1200 percent. Since then, the
occupation has shifted increasingly toward market-driven
decisions. The privatization of the occupation that resulted from the Oslo peace process net ted
large sums of international aid money for Israel and has generated an industry for private
military investments between the United States and Israel (see also Klein, The Shock Doctrine, chap. 21). The
United States began offering “peace dividends” to countries that would enter into trade
agreements with Israel (and, indirectly, the United States) and later created the Regional Business Council to establish trade
relations between Israel and other Middle Eastern countries while explicitly excluding the West Bank and Gaza, implying a tacit
approval of the occupation in favor of opened trade between Israel and countries such as Egypt and Jordan (Lubin, “Peace
Dividends”). Grassroots organizations have called neoliberal financial institutions such as the IMF
and the World Bank the “shadow government” in the West Bank, dictating the development
program and expenditure of the Palestinian Authority . Under the guidance of the United States, the European
Union, Israel, and these international financial institutions, the PA adopted a brutally economically stunting
policy of reform and development in 2007, eliminating an enormous percentage of the jobs in the West Bank. This
policy also called for the development of industrial zones in the West Bank where labor laws
would not apply and relocating to these zones Turkish businesses that would produce cheap
goods for the United States, the European Union, and the Gulf States. The wealthiest Palestinian business
groups, foreign businesses (such as Coca-Cola and Marriott), and U.S. and European aid organizations (such as
USAID) convened at a conference in 2008 to confirm the reform policies. The conference also highlighted a
multinational plan to turn Palestinian farmers into day laborers and sub- contractors for big agricultural industry in the Jordan Valley,
producing exports to Israel and the Gulf States (Hanieh, “Palestine in the Middle East”). See also Lubin, “The Disappearing Frontiers
of US Homeland Security”; the Who Profits website, www.whoprofits.org.} However
distinct some of these actors
may appear, the overall assemblage works to feed back into the economic and ideological
validation of Israel. The actors in play all calculate Palestinian life, death, and debilitation
according to different economic, geopolitical, and domestic metrics . For the Arab Gulf States, this
disjuncture between rhetoric and the outcome of financial exchanges points to certain political benefits, not simply profit in an
economic sense but their favored status within an imperial order led by the United States.84 Similarly, Egypt, under Abdel Fatah
Al-Sisi, is
rewarded for a disjuncture between policy and rhetoric, receiving military aid and
support for its own domestic tyranny in return for shutting off the flow of vital goods to Gaza ,
all while condemning Israeli airstrikes publicly. As Max Blumenthal points out further, the team of consultants hired by the NGO
complex to oversee Gaza’s (privatized) rebuilding envisions a future of sweatshops producing zippers and buttons for Israeli fashion
houses. TheUnited States and other Western countries provide the majority of money for the
UNRWA while providing the money and munitions that go into destroying UNRWA
infrastructure like schools and hospitals.85
As a public health crisis, Gaza now represents a perversion of Foucault’s management of health frame
in that it feeds into models of disaster capitalism. Joseph Pugliese notes that Elbit, the company whose
drones were tested during Israel’s assault, recorded a 6 percent increase in profits during the
first month of Operation Protective Edge.86 Post-onslaught donor conferences raise billions of dollars for rebuilding
infrastructure in Gaza— capitalist accumulation that ultimately feeds back into Israel’s regime — despite
the inevitability that Israel will destroy Gaza again.87 This leads to “donor fatigue” due to the cycle of
rebuilding infrastructure that will surely be razed yet again. It is most likely, however, that “donors will
pay up because it is far easier than addressing the underlying causes of and possible solutions to the
Israeli-Palestinian conflict.”88 Israel’s commitment to allow the five million tons of construction materials needed to
rebuild the strip have resulted in naught; as of January 2015, only 3.9 percent of that had entered Gaza.89 Materials to
rebuild Gaza are subjected to massive administrative oversight by Israel and the UN because of fears that
cement will be used to rebuild the tunnels.90 Maintenance of the “separation policy” of Gaza from the West Bank
is part of the economic withholding that gives license to other networks.91
These multifaceted circuits suggest that the targeting of Palestinian bodies as a source of extractive value
goes beyond the plus-minus logic of accumulation toward a broader strategic goal of
regenerating the structure of occupation, both locally in Gaza and globally through the many
circuits of the imperial order. Given the economic profitability of the occupation to numerous actors
who are ultimately beholden to the geopolitical and economic legitimation of Israel, it becomes even more urgent that
resistant strategies such as BDS focus on disrupting the circuits of capitalist accumulation.
Resistant strategies must also respond to Ilana Feldman’s urgent call to break open the obscuring frame of
humanitarianism and disrupt the cycle of destruction and rebuilding that ultimately regenerates the colonial situation.92 Anne
Le More concurs: “The international donor community has financed not only Israel’s continued
occupation but also its expansionist agenda —at the expense of international law, of the well-being of the
Palestinian population, of their right to self-determination, and of the international community’s own stated developmental and
political objectives.”93 “Will not let die” is monetized to great effect and to the detriment of Gazans.
“Existence is resistance” must necessarily refer to an existence outside this logic, beyond an inhuman biopolitics that takes the right
to maim as its prerogative.
Thus one interpretation here is that the debilitation of Gazans is not only capitalized upon in a neoliberal
economic order that thrives on the profitability of debility, as is the case elsewhere, but that Gazans
must be debilitated in order to make (their) life (lives) productive. Perhaps differing from earlier colonial
and occupation regimes where deprivation was distributed in order to maim yet keep labor alive, there is less need for
Palestinian labor, for Palestinian production. Rather, profit is derived from the dismemberment of
reproduction, a function of capitalism without labor (in part because a massive increase in migrant labor has been used to
offset the need for Palestinian labor). This inhuman biopolitics flourishes through and beside human
populations—economic life growing without human life. In this regard we can say that along with the right to
maim, Israel is also exercising a sovereign “right to repair,” one that reaps profit through a speculative
withholding and distribution of rehabilitation that is tactical, conditional, and controlled
through Israel’s security doctrine.
US arms are the catalyst for Israel’s settler colonial regime. We must draw
connections between the militaristic tendencies of the domestic and its
investment in Palestinian debt.
Badillo’19 |Anna Badillo is a research analyst at Canadians for Justice and Peace in the Middle East
based in Montreal, Quebec. She holds an M.Phil from Trinity College Dublin, in International Peace
Studies. Anna is a social justice activist and human rights advocate with a focuses on Palestinian-Israeli
affairs and international law. “The US-Israel ‘special relationship’ subsidizes American military industry
and Israeli colonialism” in The Defense Post on April 9, 2019. https://thedefensepost.com/2019/04/09/us-
israel-arms-sales-opinion/. Accessed 6/17/19|KZaidi
But to fully conceptualize the U.S.-Israel special relationship we need to unpack the preferential
arms trade agreements that allows for this relationship to continue at the expense of the
indigenous population in the occupied territories. Max Ajl, a PhD candidate in development sociology at Cornell
University, writes: “U.S. ‘military assistance,’ more accurately understood as a circular flow through
which U.S. weapons firms profit off the colonization of Palestinian land and Israeli
destabilization of the surrounding states, is a long-term structuring element of the U.S.-Israel
‘special relationship.’” U.S. military loans started arriving in Israel in November 1971, when the
Nixon administration signed a Memorandum of Understanding with Israel to build up its
domestic industrial-arms sector through technical and manufacturing assistance. Grants started to
replace loans in 1974. The U.S. government shortly afterwards started to permit Israel to spend 26% of the
annual military grant on purchases in Israel – a unique arrangement, since by U.S. law recipient countries must spend all of
their foreign military financing in the U.S. According to Ajl, “the Israeli military industry often relies on U.S.
technological inputs, and the U.S. forbids Israel from manufacturing crucial heavy weaponry,
such as fighter jets, in order to maintain control over Israel.” U.S. military grants to Israel were
often quid pro quo, as Israel increasingly took on the work for which the U.S. could not publicly
take responsibility, given popular unease in the States over aid to fascist dictatorships. As the International Jewish Anti-Zionist Network
noted in their report, Israel’s Worldwide Role in Repression, in the 1970s, Israel armed the brutal military regime of the
Argentinian junta that imposed seven years of state terrorism on the population. Israel also
provided most of the arms that Nicaraguan dictator Anastasio “Tachito” Somoza used in the
last year of his dictatorship to oppose the revolution, a conflict that killed tens of thousands of Nicaraguans in the 1970s.
By the 2000s, the Israeli military-industrial complex had produced an industry capable of
competing in small-arms and high-end security technology on a worldwide scale . Israel started
to export arms that have been refined through high-technology colonial policing of the
Palestinian population, especially in the Gaza Strip and the West Bank. In recent years, Israel has risen to one
of the top 10 arms exporters in the world. Last May Haaretz reported, “Israel’s defense-related exports in 2017 totalled $9.2 billion, an all-time record
and whooping 40% increase over 2016 – when defense-related transactions totaled $6.5 billion.” The
Obama administration
adjustments to Israel’s military aid package came amidst a shifting geopolitical environment,
both within the U.S. and Israel. There was a shift in original MOU that would slowly phase out
the provisions through which Israel could spend up to 26% of its funding package within Israel ,
to Israel spending more of this funding on the advanced military capabilities that only the
United States can provide – as much as $1.2 billion per year, according to Ajl. In addition, this MOU locked
in $500 million annually for missile defense . The MOU mandates Israel update its fighter aircraft
fleet, which is a direct investment into the U.S. military-industrial complex, given that fighter-
jet factories are exclusively based in the United States. Not only does U.S. foreign policy and Israeli-
settler colonialism shape what happens across historic Palestine, it also shapes what happens across the Middle
East region. The firm establishment of Israel’s military defense industry also provides an excuse to sell ever-
more-sophisticated weapons to other regional U.S. allies, especially Saudi Arabia. As long as Israel has
the latest U.S. technology, other countries can buy older models, again to the great profit of the
U.S. defense industry. Israel thus is the spark plug for an entire region-wide weapons bazaar,
while also providing such countries the means to destroy and dismantle even poorer countries
like Yemen. This keeps the entire region aflame, oppressed and desperate, and thus unlikely to upset hierarchical regional and international
social structures. Ajl suggests that one of reasons the United States pushed through this MOU before Obama left office is the rising discontent within
the U.S. population over ongoing support for Israeli colonization of historic Palestine and the surrounding region. Frida Berrigan, author of Made in the
U.S.A.: American Military Aid to Israel, writes that a major barrier to any shift in American policy towards
Palestine-Israel is “financial pressures from a U.S military industrial complex accustomed to
billions of dollars in sales to Israel and other Middle Eastern nations locked in a seemingly
perpetual arms race with each other by all buying American and using Foreign Military
Financing (FMF) to pay the bills.” The United States is the primary source of Israel’s far superior arsenal. Israel’s
dependence on the U.S. for aid and arms means that the Israeli military relies on spare parts and technical
assistance from the U.S. to maintain optimum performance in battle. During the Bush administration,
from 2001 to 2005, Israel had actually received more in U.S. military aid than it has in U.S.
arms deliveries. Over this time period, Israel received $10.5 billion in FMF – the Pentagon’s biggest military aid program –
and $6.3 billion in U.S. arms deliveries. According to Berrigan, the most prominent of those deals was a $4.5
billion sale of 102 Lockheed Martin F-16s to Israel. Unlike other countries, Israel receives its Economic Support Funds in
one lump sum early in the fiscal year rather than in four quarterly installments. While other countries primarily deal with
the Department of Defense when arranging to purchase military hardware from U.S.
companies, Israel deals directly with U.S. companies for the vast majority of its military
purchases in the United States. Other countries have a $100,000 minimum purchase amount per
contract, but Israel is allowed to purchase military items for far less, according to Berrigan. Today, Israel has been the
beneficiary of approximately $125 billion in U.S. aid. An unimaginable sum, more than any other country since
World War II. U.S. aid is projected to further increase to $165 billion by the end of the new 10-
year package, in 2029, according to Charles D. Freilich, a former Israeli deputy national security adviser. U.S. aid constitutes some 3% of
Israel’s total state budget and about 1% of its GDP, a highly significant sum. Moreover, U.S. aid constitutes some 20% of the
total defense budget, 40% of the budget of the Israel Defense Forces, and almost the entire
procurement budget, according to Freilich. Israel’s dependence on the U.S. is not limited to financial aid and weapons sales. According to
Freilich, the U.S. provides technologies for the development of unique weapons systems that Israel
needs, such as the Iron Dome and the Arrow rocket and missile defense systems. It mans the radar
deployed in Israel, which is linked to the global American satellite system. Fredilich writes, “There is simply no alternative to
American weapons, and our dependence on the United States is almost complete; the bitter
truth is that without the United States, the IDF would be an empty shell.” The United States is Israel’s
largest trading partner, at least partially due to their bilateral free trade agreement, the first the United States signed with any country. The U.S.-
Israel special relationship is rooted in preferential arms trade agreements as a way to subsidize
the U.S. military industry and reinforce support for Israeli colonialism. This special relationship
is locked into an arms trade cycle where both the Israeli and American elite class benefits, at
the expense of the indigenous population. The U.S. recognition of Israeli sovereignty over
occupied territories provides a boost for Israeli colonialism. We must ask ourselves, “If Trump has consented to
Israeli illegal seizure of the Golan Heights and Jerusalem, why not also the West Bank?” Prime Minister Netanyahu has vowed to
annex Israeli settlements in the West Bank if he is re-elected, which will likely be considered as
the final blow to the so called possibility of a two-state solution. The Trump administration is expected to
announce his “ultimate deal” following the Israeli elections and after a new government is formed . It is only a matter of time till the
Trump administration decides to follow suit and recognize Israeli sovereignty over the West
Bank, which will drive the final nail into the coffin of the Palestinian-Israeli peace negotiations and solidify
Israeli apartheid.
As such, the choking of resistance is not intrinsic to Palestine but similarly cuts
through US political decisionism. The same tactics used to maim Palestinians
are replicated by police officers who train with IDF soldiers while the racialized
hieroglyphs of American anti-black surveillance policies trickle down into Israel.
Speri’17|Alice Speri is a writer for the Intercept who has reported from Palestine, Haiti, El Salvador,
Colombia, and across the United States. She is originally from Italy and lives in the Bronx. “ISRAEL
SECURITY FORCES ARE TRAINING AMERICAN COPS DESPITE HISTORY OF RIGHTS ABUSES”, in the Intercept.
September 15, 2017. https://theintercept.com/2017/09/15/police-israel-cops-training-adl-human-
rights-abuses-dc-washington/|KZaidi
THE POLICE EXCHANGES WITH U.S. officers are premised on Israel’s experiences with terrorism
and its security forces’ handling of continued risks. But Israel’s record in carrying out its counterterror policies is
checked with allegations of grave abuses. Founded amid a campaign of ethnic cleansing in 1948, Israel seized the West
Bank and Gaza in 1967’s Six-Day War and has since maintained its occupation — including by
building civilian Israeli settlements in Palestinian territory, itself a violation of international law. Now, the same
security forces accused of mistreating citizens and stateless Palestinian subjugates are training American cops. Last
year, the ADL’s training included meetings with officials from Israel’s internal security service, known as
Shin Bet. The security agency was allegedly behind the surveillance, as well as the torture and
targeted assassinations, of Palestinians in both Israel and the occupied territories. The U.S. law
enforcement officials on tour with the ADL also met with Israeli police special patrol units known as “Yasam” —
paramilitary riot police whose excessive force and abuse of Palestinians is well-documented — and
traveled to checkpoints, prisons, and Hebron. In Hebron, a city in the West Bank, some 200,000 Palestinians are barred from entering the old city center, where fewer than 1,000
The ADL, a group with a nominal mission to oppose bigotry that has instead expended much of its
Jewish settlers are protected by the same number of Israeli soldiers.
energies on advocating for Israel, failed to devote much attention to Palestinian law enforcement. In 2016, the group’s
itinerary included a single meeting with a Palestinian police officer — from the Bethlehem Tourist Police. A spokesperson for the ADL said in a statement to The Intercept that
ADL’s law enforcement

critics’ suggestions that its programs contribute to police brutality and racism is “false and defamatory.” “On the contrary,
missions have a goal of doing exactly the opposite, by strengthe ning law enforcement’s
connection to the communities they serve,” the spokesperson said. In the past, the group condemned those
drawing parallels between police abuse in the U.S. and Israel ’s occupation of Palestine. “There is a long
history of using legitimate American social justice issues to undermine the Jewish state,” a top official from the group wrote in the aftermath of the Ferguson protests. There is
The
“no rational connection between the challenge of racism in America and the situation facing the Palestinians,” the ADL official added. Yet the criticism persists.
group Jewish Voice for Peace recently launched a campaign to bring greater public scrutiny to
U.S.-Israel police exchange programs. “These programs transform Israel’s 70 years of
dispossession and 50 years of occupation into a marketing brochure for ‘successful’ policing,”
Stefanie Fox, JVP’s deputy director, wrote in an email to The Intercept. “ Under the banner of ‘counterterrorism’ training, high-
ranking police and immigration officials visit checkpoints, prisons, settlements, police stations,
and other key sites that are central to Israel’s policies of occupation and apartheid.” Law
enforcement exchanges are marketed as an opportunity for American police to learn about
counterterrorism from the field’s self-appointed leader, but, for Israel’s advocates, they are also seen as a
way to sell a particular audience on pro-Israel ideology. “[They] come back and they are Zionists,” then-ADL regional director David
Friedman said of the delegation’s impact in 2015. “They understand Israel and its security needs in ways a lot of audiences don’t.” That may just be the intended outcome.
“They are trying to get the U.S. to see the world as divided into these camps of good and evil,
and they want to tighten the U.S. commitment to Israel on the basis of it being on the front
lines fighting terror,” said Vitale, referring to the groups behind the trips. “The whole project is a political project, which
uses the police to answer a particular analysis of international affairs.” To date, Israel has already
been an inspiration to some controversial police initiatives, like the infamous NYPD Muslim
surveillance program, which was modeled in part on the surveillance of Palestinians in the
West Bank. Thomas Galati, the chief of the NYPD Intelligence Division at the time, had participated in one of the ADL
trainings in Israel. Israeli police and security forces may also be learning a thing or two from their American counterparts. In 2016, for instance, Israel
passed a “stop and frisk law” modeled after its American equivalent, allowing police to
“search anyone, regardless of behavior, in a location that is thought to be a target for hostile
destructive actions.” Palestinian residents of Jerusalem said the legislation is applied with “blatant racism.” “ We see Israeli police taking
on U.S. stop-and-frisk policies, further adding to the state violence already facing Palestinians, ” Fox
said. “This deadly exchange goes both ways and encourages worst practices, such as racial profiling,
mass surveillance, police brutality, and suppression of political dissent that already exist in
both countries.”
What we are witnessing is a regime of “asphixatory power” which weaponizes

debt-relations in a convergence between policing and destabilization
culminating in infrastructural violence so as to rupture the conditions necessary
for resistance to emerge while also ensuring that Palestinians remain indebted
to the state rather than one another. Asphyxiation siphons the potential for
radicalism by encoding populations in a position where they are forced to be
productive but denied the very capacity to do so.
Maim, Duke University Press, 2017. Chapter 4, Page 128-. Footnotes included in curly braces|KZaidi
Omar Jabary Salamanca extensively details the Israeli

government’s re- signification of Gaza’s main service
buildings from infrastructural networks to “terrorist infrastructures,” noting that the latter
designation is used to justify Israel’s policy of what he calls “infrastructural violence.” This form of
violence has increased, not decreased, after Israeli “disengagement” from the Gaza Strip in
2005.44 The assault on infrastructure, Salamanca argues, is an essential, even central, component of
the biopolitical regulation of a malleable humanitarian collapse, whereby “the supporting
infrastructure of ordinary life became both target and weapon.”45 The disengagement from
Gaza facilitates the appearance of the end of Israel’s colonial presence while allowing it to retain forms of “remote”
infrastructural control, a continuing yet covert colonial presence. Gaza as open-air prison is crafted
through a “reassembled regime of spatial control,” and works through manufacturing a
“regulated humanitarian collapse.”46 Exemplifying what Sari Hanafi terms “spaciocide,” the terrain is
dependent on the withdrawn colonizer’s infrastructural support, which modulates calories, megawatts,
water, telecommunication networks, and spectrum and bandwidth allocation to provide the bare minimum for survival. The one
fiber-optic cable, for example, that connects the entirety of Gaza to the outside world passes through and is controlled by Israel.
“Spectrum allocation” thus becomes another tool of control, with Israel alternately withholding and releasing bandwidth.
Salamanca calls this an “ ‘asphixatory’ application of power.”47 This capacity to asphyxiate,
however, is not just one of land enclosure via territorial containment. Nor is it digital enclosure that allows
and regulates access to mobility via virtual worlds. Rather, as Helga Tawil-Souri argues, “Hi-tech enclosure is a multifaceted process. .
. . This combination is what makes the Gazan case unique.”48 Itis this interplay of territorial and virtual
enclosure that complicates the Deleuzian (digital and digitizing) configuration of control societies,
redescribed by Tawil-Souri as “a physical geography cancelled by networks.” What she is pointing to as well is the
co- existence and reinforcement of discipline and control. Topologies overlap, she argues, to the point where “it is
increasingly difficult to distinguish one form of power from another in the Gazan landscape, for
the Israeli space and practice of power has become one of in-distinction.”49 This interfacing of
physical enclosure and virtual high-tech enclosure is what I take to be the epitome of an
asphixatory regime of power.
The target here is not just life itself, but resistance itself. Salamanca quotes Israeli politician Dov Wiesglass,
who states that Israel’s policy would be “like an appointment with a dietician. The Palestinians will
get a lot thinner, but won’t die.”50 Because of this asphixatory control, Israel can create a crisis
at will, having already set in place the bare minimum requisite for life that can be withheld at
any moment, what he terms “an elastic humanitarian crisis.”51 There are continuities between these forms of elasticity, with-
holding, and suspension with the practices of “tactical government” that have historically ruled Gaza.52 A provisional, tactical
governmental structure is one devoid of vision and one that avoids legitimacy, capacity, and
accountability through continual reactivity to crises.
Clearly, the capacity to asphyxiate is not a metaphor: while the West Bank is controlled largely through
checkpoints, the Gaza Strip is suffocated through choke points. The intensification of policing and
control thus happens through, and not despite, “disengagement” and disinvestment, not
through checkpoints but through choke points. There is a temporal shift within this asphixatory control
society from a Virilian narrative of increasing speed to other forms of algorithmic , parallel, distributed, and
networked time, working through suspension between states and slow attenuation, in direct
contrast to the always-connected ideal. In fact, slow death itself is literalized as the slowing
down of Palestinian life. In the West Bank, immaculate freeways transport Israeli settlers through a landscape of
dilapidated Palestinian back roads. Checkpoints ensure one is never guar- anteed to reach work on time .
The fear of not reaching work on time produces migration patterns that then clear the land for more settlements.53 Time itself
is held hostage; time is lived as fear. Distance is stretched and manipulated to create an entire
population with mobility disabilities. And yet space is shrunken , as people are held in place,
rarely able to move far. Unlike theorizations of space-time compression, the increased spatial dispersion is
not remedied with temporal simultaneity. Rather, this simultaneity is withheld.54 Hagar Kotef articulates the
paradoxical relation of freedom to movement: move too much and one is unruly, too little and
one is primitive.55 The geopolitics of racial ontology is a frame that examines the regulation of
affect as a racializing form of control. Accelerationist logics map speed, movement, and their
withholding as an assemblage of racial ontologies. Disciplinary enclosure consorts with
micromodulations of bodily becomings to ensure a population laden with affective reactivity. A
politically regulated and controlled affective logic projected and interpreted as cultural and civilizational reactivity
reinforces Orientalist projections of racial difference. Sensation racializes.
Thus, we affirm blackpalestinian breath as a reduction of debt/credit

relationships that structure both the international transfer of arms to Israel.
blackpalestinian breath is a re-tooling of Fanon’s notion of Combat Breath to
understand that there is something beautiful, something fugitive within the
most intense moments of debilitation and war debt. “We hear them say, what’s
wrong with you is your bad debt. You’re not working. You fail to pay your debt to
society.”5 However, instead of ceding to the demands posed to us by
governance to “invest your interests again in debt and credit” 6, we direct
ourselves towards a new rhythm, the melismatic underground, a moment of
love that wallows in our bad debt towards one another. In an environment that
constricts the possibility to form any solidarity by deeming it an irrational act,
we exhaust the protocols of the state solution that allow the genocidal nature
of arms transfers to become infinitely replicated across the socius.
Moten'18 |Fred Moten is a professor of English at Duke University. “blackpalestinian breath”, in Social
Text Online. October 25, 2018. https://socialtextjournal.org/periscope_article/blackpalestinian-breath/|
KZaidi
Jasbir Puar’s work in The Right to Maim is crucial to understanding not only that the nature of settler
colonialism is genocidal but also how that genocidal nature operates . Settler colonialism is, in
each and every case, a state operation , but the more fucked up–and therefore better–way to put this, because it bears at
least a tiny potential to shock, is that in each and every case, the state is a settler colonial operation.
Moreover, as Puar teaches us, the statist, settler colonial operation, in its genocidal nature, is given in the
horrific resonance, the brutal articulation, the asymptotic non-convergence, of killing and
maiming. In thinking—along with and by way of Puar—the unlikely and unavoidable locale of Ferguson, Gaza we
encounter the instrumental rationality through which this bloody reverberation is ceaselessly
achieved and announced. What she helps us see is that genocide is regulation unto the vanishing point
of extermination; it is savage attenuation carried out and on with all deliberate speed. We can kill them one
by one, they say, and this will have been interminable. They can’t kill us all, we say, but regulation is given in
the interminable series of my black death . Then, we’re talking our way out of their freedom
because it’s not just that freedom and slavery are in the same place but that their
entanglement constitutes that place. Puar is a vital and indispensable part of the chorus that allows and requires
us to ask, what if the terms and conditions of the ongoing genocide we survive, but wherein
5
Moten and Harney 13 (Fred Moten, poet and scholar whose work explores critical theory, black studies, professor of Performance Studies at New York University, Stefano
Harney, Professor of Strategic Management Education, Singapore Management University and co-founder of the School for Study, “The Undercommons: Fugitive Planning &
Black Study”, published 2013, pages 66-68)
6
ibid
each and every one of us will have been murdered, is way deeper than, and cannot be
encompassed by, the intimate opposition of slavery and freedom, exile and home, occupation
and sovereignty?
Such militantly anti-military thinking requires considering another irreducible entanglement—

that of blackness and indigeneity. This requires understanding, along with Robin D. G. Kelley, that Africa is a field
of indigeneity violated by settler colonial incursion’s constant articulation with the constant
articulation of slavery and freedom, given in what Hortense Spillers might call extended intramural, as well as
extramural, catastrophe. Indeed, Afro-diasporic life, both within the continent of Africa and in all of its
transoceanic variants, doesn’t just bear the trace, but is, more fundamentally, the residual of
settler-colonial violation, recognizing that residuality, in the complex intra-activity of
displacement and derivation, refuge and refusal, that it bears, can never be reduced to being either
the effect or creation of the violator. So that the entanglement of blackness and indigeneity–
given in a mode of solidarity that will have never been wholly voluntary in its ongoing emergence
from and as something way on the other side of what is manifest in the coalitions of political
subjects and their state or pre-state formations–is constantly disbursed in habits of displacement and sub-
communal movement whose energy the political propriety of settlement comes to regulate
and consume. Such disbursal is exhaustive, lived in and as exhaustion, as the solidarity of a
shared atmosphere wherein an alternative (meta)physics of the alternative is implied . Such
implication is manifest gesturally, in social life’s refusal of real politics, something Ashon T. Crawley
might call mutually resuscitative, (pre)occupied, blackpalestinian breath. Ferguson and Gaza are
also entangled—like settler coloniality and the state and like the violent two-state solution (i.e., the United States and the
State of Israel) in which Ferguson and Gaza will have been dissolved— and we need to try to understand the
difference between the people who know that and the people who don’t . Puar knows, and shapes
common knowledge of our common, if neither proximate nor synchronized, aspiration.
In its inveterate statelessness, blackpalestinian breath is both imposed disability and elective affinity,
against the grain of every deadly, fetishistic modality of vitalism given in the state’s serial self-
support and self-consultancy, which takes its most venal form in martial intellectuality, a range
of training protocols wherein scholarship fulfills itself, unto its vanishing point, as a branch of
the armed forces. What are the implications for blackpalestinian breath of the necessarily settler-colonial state’s exercise of
what Puar calls the will “not to let die,” which is a matter of military reason? Do the logic and metaphysics of the
individual life continually lubricate the machine that exercises the right to kill in the will not to
let die? If genocide, in the end, is just this continual maiming, which moves in the non-space
between killing each and every one and the constantly cultivated , measured, and tested
inability to kill all, then how might we offer, in practicing, a form of informal, enforming life
that continually refuses the very idea of a basic human unit and its always already racialized
embodiment? Such embodiment is a disability, a wound, our shared flesh shares and so we
have to ask if debilitative individuation is fundamental to the logic of genocide because it
exposes the limits of genocide’s implied metaphysics . Where attempts at mass death strain against the limits
of accounting, the imposition of the body-in-individuation is this perpetual wounding and
incarceration of the mass–an ongoing maiming that obliterates sacrilege and sacrifice.
But what do we say about the structures of incompleteness that attend and precede this
maiming, which is not simply an imposition of incompleteness but the enforcement of a certain
incompleteness, one given in the chalk-outlined conceptual figuration of the body itself when it
is reduced to stasis, which is, if you’ll forgive me, its natural state. It is necessary, then, to unexplain
such vicious culmination and the amputative diminishment it bears. The very idea of Black Lives, or
Palestinian Lives, those carceral sets of pluralized singularities, bears the incapacitating capacity to be
counted, a burden that is not a matter of mattering but is, rather, the ghoulish convergence of
de-materialization and de-animation. Here, it is important to note, by way of Puar, that this is as much a
denial of death as it is a reductively repetitive and representational death sentence, which
seeks to detach decay from decomposition and, thus, from (re)generation. What’s at stake is something
paradoxical—like a local anaesthesia that seeks to impose a general anaesthetic effect. Blackpalestinian breath is
genocidally cut short in the complex, structurally separable instantiation of Black and
Palestinian Lives, one by one. Meanwhile, the new, co-constituting assemblage of Ferguson, Gaza that
Puar critically celebrates allows and requires us to ask what it would mean to recognize , but also to
embrace and enact, the exhaustion of the state solution. We give life to the state solution
when we breathe air into the dead language of lives and bodies. Perhaps we can embrace and
enact that exhaustion when we say another naming, against the grain of nominalized
individuation and the state and stasis for which such naming inadvertently settles. This would be the
enactment of a healthy incompleteness arrayed against order and its terms , as Cedric Robinson might
say, where blackpalestinian study’s interinannimation of ascent and descent and assent and
dissent—its improper complexities of hostility and hospitality, its jurisgenerative harvest on
unowned land, its sounding ululative height in melismatic underground— works like an organ
without a body, as more + less than one.
V2 – Protest
US arms sales to Israel sustain its settler colonial occupation of Palestine while
simultaneously providing an outlet for the strengthening of global
counterinsurgent activities. Absent US support, the occupation would collapse.
competing in small-arms and high-end security technology on a worldwide scale. Israel started
United States can provide – as much as $1.2 billion per year, according to Ajl. In addition, this MOU locked
contract, but Israel is allowed to purchase military items for far less, according to Berrigan. Today, Israel has been the
announce his “ultimate deal” following the Israeli elections and after a new government is formed .
It is only a matter of time till the
Israeli apartheid.
We must map connections along the Ferguson-Gaza Axis – the use of arms to
debilitate and maim Palestinians is not intrinsic to Israel but rather is a tactic
reciprocally replicated domestically against black bodies. Power is thus marked
on the body not simply for the purpose of killing but to obfuscate the parallel
tracks of violence sustained by the arms trade.
Maim, Duke University Press, 2017|KZaidi
The intensification of the writing of this book, and the formulation of “the right to maim,” its most urgent political theoretical
contribution, began the summer of 2014. This was the summer police shot Michael Brown in Ferguson,
Missouri, and the summer of Operation Protective Edge, the fifty- one-day Israeli siege of Gaza.
Organizers protesting these seemingly disparate events began drawing connections, tracing the
material relationships between the Israeli occupation of Palestine and the militarization of police in
Ferguson, from the training of U.S. law enforcement by the Israeli state to the tweeting of
advice from Palestinians on how to alleviate tear gas exposure. Descriptions of the militarized
containment of civilians in Ferguson echoed those of the settler colonial occupation of Palestine. It
was not long before the “Ferguson to Gaza” frame starting taking hold as an organizing rubric. Ferguson-to-Gaza forums
sought to correlate the production of settler space, the vulnerability and degradation of black
and brown bodies, the demands for justice through transnational solidarities, and the
entangled workings of settler colonialism in the United States and Israel. The comparisons, linkages, and
affective resonances between Ferguson and Gaza were not perfectly aligned, and they did not always
yield immediate alliances. But these efforts were convivial in their mutual resistance to the violent
control of populations via targeted bodily assaults, and reflected desires for reciprocating,
intersectional, and co-constituted assemblages of sol.
One striking aspect of the connective tissue between Ferguson and Gaza involved security
practices mining the relationship between disability and death. Police brutality in the United
States toward black men and women in particular showed a definitive tendency to aim for death,
often shooting numerous bullets into an unarmed, subjugated, and yet supposedly threatening body—overkill, some
might call it. Why were there seemingly so few attempts to minimize the loss of life? The U.S. security
state enacted powerful sovereign entitlements even as it simultaneously claimed tremendous
vulnerability. The police were merely “doing their job,” a dangerous, life-threatening one. This calculation
of risk is the founding rationalization for the impunity of “the right to kill” wielded by U.S. law
enforcement.
The might of Israel’s military—one of the most powerful in the world— is built upon the claim of an
unchanging ontological vulnerability and precarity, driven by history, geopolitics, and geography. Alongside the
“right to kill,” I noted a complementary logic long present in Israeli tactical calculations of settler colonial rule—that of
creating injury and maintaining Palestinian populations as perpetually debilitated, and yet alive,
in order to control them. The Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) have shown a demonstrable pattern over
decades of sparing life, of shooting to maim rather than to kill. This is ostensibly a humanitarian
practice, leaving many civilians “permanently disabled” in an occupied territory of destroyed hospitals, rationed
medical supplies, and scarce resources. This pattern appeared again during Operation Protective Edge; the number of
civilian casualties was reported daily and justified through the logic of collateral damage, while the
number of injuries was rarely commented upon and never included in reflections of the daily toll of the siege.
Shooting to maim in order not to kill might appear as minor relief given the proclivity to shoot to kill. Why
indeed were so many unarmed black victims of police brutality riddled with scores of bullets? But oscillations between the
right to kill and the right to maim are hardly haphazard or arbitrary. The purportedly humanitarian practice of
sparing death by shooting to maim has its biopolitical stakes not through the right to life, or even letting
live, but rather through the logic of “will not let die .” Both are part of the deliberate debilitation of
a population—whether through the sovereign right to kill or its covert attendant, the right to maim—and are key elements
in the racializing biopolitical logic of security. Both are mobilized to make power visible on the
body. Slated for death or slated for debilitation—both are forms of the racialization of individuals and populations that liberal
(disability) rights frameworks, advocating for social accommodation , access, acceptance, pride,
and empowerment, are unable to account for, much less disrupt.
This special relationship along the Ferguson-Gaza axis thus normalizes domestic
forms of police brutality along with Israeli surveillance practices as American
police officers and IDF soldiers become strange bedfellows to a regime of
colonization.
THE POLICE EXCHANGES WITH U.S. officers are premised on Israel’s experiences with terrorism
and its security forces’ handling of continued risks. But Israel’s record in carrying out its counterterror policies is
checked with allegations of grave abuses. Founded amid a campaign of ethnic cleansing in 1948, Israel seized the West
Bank and Gaza in 1967’s Six-Day War and has since maintained its occupation — including by
building civilian Israeli settlements in Palestinian territory, itself a violation of international law. Now, the same
security forces accused of mistreating citizens and stateless Palestinian subjugates are training American cops. Last
year, the ADL’s training included meetings with officials from Israel’s internal security service, known as
Shin Bet. The security agency was allegedly behind the surveillance, as well as the torture and
targeted assassinations, of Palestinians in both Israel and the occupied territories. The U.S. law
enforcement officials on tour with the ADL also met with Israeli police special patrol units known as “Yasam” —
paramilitary riot police whose excessive force and abuse of Palestinians is well-documented — and
traveled to checkpoints, prisons, and Hebron. In Hebron, a city in the West Bank, some 200,000 Palestinians are barred from entering the old city center, where fewer than 1,000
The ADL, a group with a nominal mission to oppose bigotry that has instead expended much of its
Jewish settlers are protected by the same number of Israeli soldiers.
energies on advocating for Israel, failed to devote much attention to Palestinian law enforcement. In 2016, the group’s
itinerary included a single meeting with a Palestinian police officer — from the Bethlehem Tourist Police. A spokesperson for the ADL said in a statement to The Intercept that
ADL’s law enforcement

critics’ suggestions that its programs contribute to police brutality and racism is “false and defamatory.” “On the contrary,
missions have a goal of doing exactly the opposite, by strengthe ning law enforcement’s
connection to the communities they serve,” the spokesperson said. In the past, the group condemned those
drawing parallels between police abuse in the U.S. and Israel ’s occupation of Palestine. “There is a long
history of using legitimate American social justice issues to undermine the Jewish state,” a top official from the group wrote in the aftermath of the Ferguson protests. There is
The
“no rational connection between the challenge of racism in America and the situation facing the Palestinians,” the ADL official added. Yet the criticism persists.
group Jewish Voice for Peace recently launched a campaign to bring greater public scrutiny to
U.S.-Israel police exchange programs. “These programs transform Israel’s 70 years of
dispossession and 50 years of occupation into a marketing brochure for ‘successful’ policing,”
Stefanie Fox, JVP’s deputy director, wrote in an email to The Intercept. “ Under the banner of ‘counterterrorism’ training, high-
ranking police and immigration officials visit checkpoints, prisons, settlements, police stations,
and other key sites that are central to Israel’s policies of occupation and apartheid.” Law
enforcement exchanges are marketed as an opportunity for American police to learn about
counterterrorism from the field’s self-appointed leader, but, for Israel’s advocates, they are also seen as a
way to sell a particular audience on pro-Israel ideology. “[They] come back and they are Zionists,” then-ADL regional director David
Friedman said of the delegation’s impact in 2015. “They understand Israel and its security needs in ways a lot of audiences don’t.” That may just be the intended outcome.
“They are trying to get the U.S. to see the world as divided into these camps of good and evil,
and they want to tighten the U.S. commitment to Israel on the basis of it being on the front
lines fighting terror,” said Vitale, referring to the groups behind the trips. “The whole project is a political project, which
uses the police to answer a particular analysis of international affairs.” To date, Israel has already
been an inspiration to some controversial police initiatives, like the infamous NYPD Muslim
surveillance program, which was modeled in part on the surveillance of Palestinians in the
West Bank. Thomas Galati, the chief of the NYPD Intelligence Division at the time, had participated in one of the ADL
trainings in Israel. Israeli police and security forces may also be learning a thing or two from their American counterparts. In 2016, for instance, Israel
passed a “stop and frisk law” modeled after its American equivalent, allowing police to
“search anyone, regardless of behavior, in a location that is thought to be a target for hostile
destructive actions.” Palestinian residents of Jerusalem said the legislation is applied with “blatant racism.” “ We see Israeli police taking
on U.S. stop-and-frisk policies, further adding to the state violence already facing Palestinians, ” Fox
said. “This deadly exchange goes both ways and encourages worst practices, such as racial profiling,
mass surveillance, police brutality, and suppression of political dissent that already exist in
both countries.”
Arms sales turn the debilitation of Palestinians into a profitable event for both
America and Israel in a convergence between policing and destabilization,
placing a target on Palestinian bodies as reservoirs for monetary-extraction and
death-making.
2014. Critics avowed that Israelwas using “unguided, indirect fire with high-explosive shells,” weaponry
widely understood to be “inappropriate for a densely populated area.” Nadia Abu El-Haj writes that Israel’s allies proclaim
availability of the process of cultural rehabilitation—that is, normalization practices that produce
the indigenous through either genocide or assimilation . It asks us to reevaluate the frame of
disposed of. The productivity of maiming —“will not let die”—is manifold . This third biopolitical vector,
death” begin?
program and expenditure of the Palestinian Authority . Under the guidance of the United States, the European
according to different economic, geopolitical, and domestic metrics . For the Arab Gulf States, this
Al-Sisi, is
cement will be used to rebuild the tunnels.90 Maintenance
of the “separation policy” of Gaza from the West Bank
Vote aff as an endorsement of domestic and international protest against the

legitimacy of US arms sales to Israel.
The endorsement of protest is a rallying cry that brings together different
collectives against both the debilitation of Palestinians and the extra-juridical
killing of black people within the locus of racial capitalism.
In the midst of the Movement for Black Lives, the fight against the Dakota Access Pipeline , the
struggle for socialized health care in the United States, the demand to end U.S. imperial power
in the Middle East (Israel, Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, Yemen), what constitutes the able body is ever evolving,
and its apparent referents are ever shrinking. What is an able body in this context? What is a non-disabled body,
and is it the same as an able body? Layers of precarity and vulnerability to police brutality, reckless
maiming and killing, deprivation, and destruction of resources that are daily features of living
for some populations must not be smoothed over by hailing these bodies as able-bodied if
they do not have or claim to be a person(s) with a disability. In the wise words of disability studies scholar
and prison abolitionist Liat Ben-Moshe, “It does not matter if people identify as disabled or not.”22 “Hands
up, don’t shoot!” is not a catchy slogan that emerges from or announces able-bodied
populations. Rather, this common Black Lives Matter chant is a revolutionary call for redressing
the debilitating logics of racial capitalism. It is a compact sketch of the frozen black body,
rendered immobile by systemic racism and the punishment doled out for not transcending it.
It is the story of a Palestinian resister shot dead for wielding a knife (if that) against an idf solider who has
the full backing of the world’s military might. “I can’t breathe!” captures the suffocation of chokeholds on
movement in Gaza and the West Bank as it does the violent forces of restraint meted out
through police brutality. “Hands up, don’t shoot!” and “I can’t breathe!” are, in fact, disability justice rally cries.
The Right to Maim therefore does not seek to answer the question, where is our disability pride movement? Instead, it
hopes to change the conversation to one that challenges the presumption that the
distinction between who is disabled and who is not should fuel a pride movement . I explore if and
how this binary effaces the biopolitical production of precarity and (un)livability that runs across
these identities. The project, then, is not just one that hopes to contribute to intersectional
movement building, though let me insist that this is crucial from the outset. That is to say, Black Lives Matter and the struggle
to end the Israeli occupation of Palestine are not only movements “allied” with disability rights, nor are they only distinct disability
justice issues. Rather,
I am motivated to think of these fierce organizing practices collectively as a
disability justice movement itself, as a movement that is demanding an end to so many
conditions of precaritization that debilitate many populations. At our current political conjuncture, Black
Lives Matter, the Palestinian solidarity movement, the protest against the Dakota Access
Pipeline to protect sacred grounds and access to water: these are some of the movements that
are leading the way to demand livable lives for all. These movements may not represent the
most appealing or desired versions of disability pride. But they are movements anchored, in fact,
in the lived experiences of debilitation, implicitly contesting the right to maim, and imagining
multiple futures where bodily capacities and debilities are embraced rather than weaponized.
The accumulation of small tactical victories in the way of ending the occupation
is critical.
Atshan and Moore’14 |Sa'ed Atshan is a professor of peace and conflict studies at Swarthmore
and an LGBT, Palestinian, Quaker human rights activist. He received a PhD (2013), MA (2010), and MPP
(2008) from Harvard University and a BA (2006) from Swarthmore College. He previously served as a
Postdoctoral Fellow at Brown University's Watson Institute for International Studies. Darnell L. Moore is
head of strategy and programs at Breakthrough U.S. received his B.A. in Social and Behavioral Science
from Seton Hall University, an M.A. in Clinical Counseling from Eastern University, and an M.A. in
Theological Studies from Princeton Theological Seminary. “RECIPROCAL SOLIDARITY: WHERE THE BLACK
AND PALESTINIAN QUEER STRUGGLES MEET”, in Biography, Vol. 37, No. 2, Life in Occupied Palestine
(spring 2014)|KZaidi
We are reminded of why this reciprocal solidarity is so important when we listen to the words of dream hampton, the Black
American writer, filmmaker, and community organizer from Detroit, after her visit to Palestine: "I wasn't prepared for the white
supremacy" (Barrows-Friedman). We are also moved and our friendship is deepened when we read the words of African-American
UCLA Professor Robin Kelley describing what he witnessed in Palestine: "A level of racist violence I have never seen" (Kane). The
choir of African-American voices speaking in support of the Palestinian struggle as linked to their
anti-racism consciousness and activism continues to grow, with groups such as the Indigenous
and Women of Color Feminists Delegation to Palestine, who affirmed their "association with
the growing international movement for a free Palestine," and joined the call for divestment
from Israel (Ransby). Interfaith Peace-Builders has also been organizing solidarity tours in the
form of African Heritage Delegations to Palestine, the last of which issued a statement calling on
African-Americans to support the Palestinian freedom struggle and to join the boycott
movement against Israel (African Heritage). A poignant "Letter to Black America on Palestinian Rights"
has also served as a powerful call for solidarity between Black Americans and Palestinians, and it has been
signed by prominent Black Americans including Cornell West (US Campaign). Headlines today reveal the
extent of this solidarity with Palestinians, as renowned Black American singer John Legend uses his public
platform as a commencement speaker at the University of Pennsylvania (his alma mater) to call for the
humanization of Palestinians (Salaita), and Black American actor Danny Glover calls for a cultural boycott of
Israel (JTA). Even among the younger generation of African-Americans, Israel's blackwashing has met with only limited success.
Ebony recently published a powerful piece by queer African-American Stanford University
student Kristian Davis Bailey entitled, "Why Black People Must Stand With Palestine." Furthermore,
the same Colorlines article describing the pro-Israel lobby's courting of Black college students reports that Black Americans
such as Edna Bonhomme—a queer Princeton University student and Palestine solidarity activist
—are resisting the lobby's efforts and clearly articulating their positions on Palestine: If you look at
South Africa, there were differential sets of laws for people of different races in education, jobs, housing, for example. Having a
differentiated and unequal legal system where racial origin differentiates people is apartheid. In
Israel and the Occupied
Territories the legal structure is that Arab residents have different rights than Jewish residents.
It's an apartheid structure. (Wessler) The support of Black Americans for the Palestinian cause is not a recent
phenomenon. In November 1970, for instance, the New York Times published "An Appeal by Black
Americans Against United States Support of the Zionist Government of Israel" (Abukhater). This
appeal calls for an end to racist oppression, a cutting of United States aid to Israel , and for Black
American solidarity with Palestinians. Similarly, James Baldwin, the Black gay American writer and
poet, was a vocal critic of Zionism and supporter of the Palestinian struggle . The potential for reciprocal
solidarities and friendships bears fruit as we collaborate on this essay. It also has been manifested as one of us—
who traveled in community with the other in the other's homeland—is able to write about his
experiences and reflections upon his return to the United States. 2 Indeed, our friendship,
imagined as a noun and verb, functions as space for learning/knowledge production and
affective support. And our friendship is also an act of mutual recognition and radical love.
Without the deep knowing and empathy that friendship allows it would be impossible for each of us to return to our various
communities with a deep sense of connection to the interconnected struggles that we both have encountered across time and
space. In fact, it
would take more courage to articulate our disparate and intersectional experiences
under the conditions of structural violence if we did not have communities of solidarities ,
friends, who could witness on our behalf and commit to the types of transformative justice
work necessary to undo the various violences that befall us. We do not face insular and singular
struggles, but expansive and interconnected forms of oppression. As a result, we need
interconnected communities of solidarities, which include peoples from diverse contexts, to
respond to totalizing forms of structural violence. Indeed, it has become difficult for a Black American of
conscience today to not stand in solidarity with the Palestinian people against Israeli policies. There is increasing
cognizance that the Israeli system is one that determines what types of rights one is granted—if
one is granted rights at all—based on ethno-religious classifications that privilege Jewish Israelis
(primarily Ashkenazi/ White Israelis from Europe) over native Palestinian Christians and Muslims. Additionally, awareness
of the significant discrimination against and oppression within Jewish communities in Israel,
particularly against Black populations such as Ethiopian Jewish Israelis, heightens the
abhorrence with the Israeli regime. For instance, the Israeli newspaper Haaretz has reported that "20% of Israeli-
Ethiopians graduate high school with the necessary credential to go on to university, and nearly
70% live under the poverty line" (Pfeffer). This is a result of pervasive anti-Black racism and a
racial hierarchy in Israel that leads to dramatic structural and physical violence. Haaretz has
also reported on the "almost 50-percent decline over the past 10 years in the birth rate of
Israel's Ethiopian community" and the Israeli practice of injecting Ethiopian-Israeli women with
long-term contraceptives (Nesher). The situation faced by non-Jewish Black refugees and asylum
seekers escaping unrest in African states, mainly from Sudan and Eritrea, has been appalling to anyone
committed to ensuring basic human rights for all people, regardless of race. Journalists David Sheen's and Max Blumenthal's report
for The Nation, "Israel's New Racism," explains how the 60,000
African migrants arriving in Israel have been
labeled as "infiltrators" by right-wing Israeli politicians and activists. These refugees face
significant persecution, coupled with a detention center in Southern Israel, all in the name of
their potential disruption of a Jewish demographic majority in Israel. Returning to the impact of the Israeli
state's racist policies toward Palestinians, a recent piece published in Haaretz by the Israeli journalist and academic Eva Illouz is
entitled "47 Years a Slave: A New Perspective on the Occupation." Her title draws upon the award-winning film 12 Years a Slave,
which is based on the 1853 memoir of Solomon Northup, a free Black man from the North enslaved in the South during the slavery
era of the United States. In her article, Illouz
argues that "there are strong parallels between black slavery
and Israel's treatment of Palestinians." She does not contend that the situation of Black
Americans under slavery and Palestinians today are equivalent , but that Israel's complete
control and domination over Palestinian bodies and lives constitutes "conditions of slavery" and
a contemporary form of captivity. The histories and present moment of the United States and South Africa, where
there is profound asymmetry in power between regimes and Black populations, compel people
of conscience around the world to understand that the call for ending forms of apartheid and
their structural and physical violence must be unequivocal. The same must transpire with Israel/Palestine to
day. At the same time, by attending to how colonial violence turns inward — to how structural and
physical violence from outside of the home creeps into the home, and to how even within oppressed
communities there are internal "others"—we are able to name and must work to rectify the oppression
and violence carried out within our communities. Reciprocal solidarity requires that we not
lose sight of the struggles against patriarchy and homophobia within Black American and
Palestinian society, as well as the anti-Palestinian racism among some Black Americans and the
anti-Black racism among some Palestinians. In the true spirit of intersectionality, and inheriting the words and spirit
of Audre Lorde, we understand how all of these struggles are inextricably intertwined. But, more importantly, we would not
be able to map the intersections inherent in our struggles if we did not share a friendship space
where they could be illuminated. Within our friendship, the sharing of our stories and the practice of empathy make our
solidarity work possible. Our friendship is intersectional in theory and practice. THE BURDENS OF NON-PRIVILEGE Our experience has
led us to believe that we in the anti-pinkwashing movement have a significant amount of work ahead
of ourselves, not only in linking anti-pinkwashing with anti-blackwashing, but also in realizing
reciprocal solidarity. Al-Qaws and Palestinian Queers for Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions
have solicited support from people across the globe, often from the West, which is fundamental
to the struggle, given the legacy of Western colonialism, the reality of ongoing Western
imperialism, and the role of the United States' unconditional support for Israel . Yet Western allies in
the queer Palestinian solidarity movement cannot be made legible and identified in the same manner. Clearly, not every queer
and straight ally in the movement is identical. The queer Jewish American who is anti-Zionist
combats the pink washing within the US Jewish establishment. The queer Native American
combats the increasing tide of "redwashing"—or the Israeli state's attempt to co-opt
indigenous North American communities and elites in an effort to render the Jewish Israeli
population as "native" and to recruit Native American support for Israeli colonialism and
apartheid. The fact that redwashing has gained any traction is ironic given the common features
of US and Israeli settler-colonialism—perhaps another characteristic that accounts for the
"special relationship" between the two countries. Similarly, a queer Black American struggles
within her community to combat blackwashing. And all of these modes of resistance—Jewish anti-
Zionist solidarity, anti-pinkwashing, anti-redwashing, anti-blackwashing— reinforce one another and move the
United States one step closer to ending its complicity in the apartheid, ethnic cleansing,
settler-colonialism, and military occupation that have been experienced by the Palestinian
people. It also helps move the United States one step closer to ending oppression of
populations within its borders. When subjects are asked to contribute to the Palestinian freedom struggle, some
have more resources than others, and some face more limitations, sometimes severe
limitations, than others. Despite the significant and over whelming constraints that Palestinians
face and the indignities and Israeli domination that they experience in every aspect of their lives,
the spaces for reciprocal solidarity within the global Palestinian solidarity movement must
continue to expand. The transnational dimensions of the Canadian indigenous movement, Idle
No More, garnered Palestinian contributions to solidarity with the First Nations of Canada. This
exemplified the immense potential for global indigenous networks and activism. For instance,
Khaled Barakat, a Palestinian activist, organized a solidarity statement signed by hundreds of
Palestinians in support of Idle No More. We see Black-Palestinian reciprocal solidarity taking hold when, in 2010,
Palestinians in Gaza, despite their own experiences with poverty that have resulted from a brutal and medieval Israeli siege,
collected Red Cross donations including money, blankets, and food for the victims of Haiti's
devastating earthquake. In reporting on this, the Los Angeles Times quotes Palestinians in Gaza who stated,
metaphorically: "We were exposed to our own earthquake" (Lutz), a way of noting the shared
impact of "natural" crises that are exacerbated by human-facilitated structural conditions. The
tremors of such conditions can be felt from Haiti to Gaza.
Ending occupation prerequisite to identitarian empowerment.

Maim, Duke University Press, 2017. Post-Script, Page 159-161|KZaidi
And yet, the promise of the articulation of disability by the members of the CBR support group, rendered not
exceptional but convivial—in fact, the conviviality between disability and debility—is marked by the utopian
appeal to collective struggle. Indeed, collective punishment is overturned into otherwise untenable
lines of solidarity. Anti-occupation activism is a focal point of disability activism and includes
supporting hunger strikes for Palestinian prisoners and using wheelchairs on the “frontlines . . .
try[ing] to protect people behind them, thinking that maybe the IDF wouldn’t shoot at them” during confrontations. The
participants face daily the weaponization of debilitation that is maintained to deter resistance
to the occupation, as one Palestinian man with a “permanent disability” explained: “ They want
to debilitate entire families so that their main concern becomes the disabled person and
making sure their needs are met. Because disabled people are the responsibility of the entire community and not just of
their families, this ensures that we are unable to fight the occupation. This is the occupation’s calculus.”
What is the main demand of disability activism? A common phrase we heard was “Treatment without checkpoints.” In this context
of the collective punishment of occupation, what
constitutes “disability activism” is multifaceted and
complex. Forms of radical insurgency—rock throwing, strikes, actions, housing demolition
rallies, and civil disobedience—protest not only the legal and economic circumstances of the
occupation but also the ongoing bodily debilitation of the Palestinian population. These acts of
protest must be embraced as forms of disability activism and resistance. There is no type of
resistance in Palestine that is not implicitly, if not explicitly, addressing and contesting the ongoing assaults
to bodily capacity and health that are constitutive of and central to Israeli settler colonial
occupation. There is a lack of grievance structures through rights discourses —and even when they
exist, the world does not hold Israel accountable to even the most agreed-upon human rights violations. This
means that disability justice activism takes on the very form of collectivity and dissent upon
which tactics of debilitation are deployed.
Toward the end of our visit with the CBR self-support disability group at the Al-Dahiriya Youth Group center, we
asked the
twenty-odd people there of varying ages and genders what their dreams were for the future.
Along- side hopes for the full implementation of “Number Four,” a reference to the 1999 constitutional amendment, one
respondent after another articulated desires for rehabilitation: “I hope to walk again someday”; “I want
Palestine to be liberated, so we can have freedom of movement , we can get the treatment we need”; “I want to be
able to know what it’s like to walk.”
These statements of desire for mobility are profound in the context of the mobility impairments
and the enclosures of space that fuel the prime logics of settler colonial occupation. The stigmatization of disability as
deficit justifies the right to maim; the production of widespread debilitation is key to
maintaining colonial rule. But these desires on the part of Palestinians with disabilities point to something more
entrenched. Becoming disabled is not a before-and-after event but an ongoing navigation with
quotidian forms of blockage that draw populations in and out of debilitating and capacitating
experiences. Efforts to claim disability as an empowered identity and to address ableism in Palestine will
continue to be thwarted until the main source of producing debilitation—the occupation—is ended. The
former simply cannot happen without the latter.
The trope of 'extinction' enables settler moves to innocence which locks in

settler colonialism as the inevitable telos of civilization
Dalley’16 (Hamish “The deaths of settler colonialism: extinction as a metaphor of
decolonization in contemporary settler literature,” Settler Colonial Studies
https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/2201473X.2016.1238160 DH)
Settlers love to contemplate the possibility of their own extinction ; to read many contemporary literary
representations of settler colonialism is to find settlers strangely satisfied in dreaming of ends that never come. This tendency is
widely prevalent in English-language representations of settler colonialism produced since the 1980s: the possibility of an ending –
the likelihood that the settler race will one day die out – is a common theme in literary and pop culture considerations of
For settlers, of all
colonialism’s future. Yet it has barely been remarked how surprising it is that this theme is so present.
people, to obsessively ruminate on their own finitude is counterintuitive, for few modern social
formations have been more resistant to change than settler colonialism. With a few exceptions (French
Algeria being the largest), the settler societies established in the last 300 years in the Americas, Australasia, and Southern Africa
have all retained the basic features that define them as settler states – namely, the structural privileging of settlers at the expense of
indigenous peoples, and the normalization of whiteness as the marker of political agency and rights – and they have done so
notwithstanding the sustained resistance trading as that has been mounted whenever such an order has been built. Settlers think all
the time that they might one day end, even though (perhaps because) that ending seems unlikely ever to happen. The significance of
futurity offers a useful
this paradox for settler-colonial literature is the subject of this article. Considering the problem of
foil to traditional analyses of settler colonial narrative, which typically examine settlers’
attitudes towards history in order to highlight a constitutive anxiety about the past – about origins.
Settler colonialism, the argument goes, has a problem with historical narration that arises from a contradiction in its founding
mythology. In Stephen Turner’s formulation, the settler subject is by definition one who comes from elsewhere but who strives to
make this place home. The settlement narrative must explain how this gap – which is at once geographical, historical, and existential
– has been bridged, and the settler transformed from outsider into indigene. Yet the transformation must remain constitutively
incomplete, because the desire to be at home necessarily invokes the spectre of the native, whose existence (which cannot be
disavowed completely because it is needed to define the settler’s difference, superiority, and hence claim to the land) inscribes the
settler’s foreignness, thus reinstating the gap between settler and colony that the narrative was meant to efface.1 Settler-colonial
narrative is thus shaped around its need to erase and evoke the native, to make the indigene both invisible and present in a
contradictory pattern that prevents settlers from ever moving on from the moment of colonization.2 As evidence of this constitutive
contradiction, critics have identified in settler-colonial discourse symptoms of psychic distress such as disavowal, inversion, and
repression.3 Indeed, the
frozen temporality of settler-colonial narrative, fixated on the moment of
the frontier, recalls nothing so much as Freud’s description of the ‘repetition compulsion’ attending
trauma.4 As Lorenzo Veracini puts it, because: ‘settler society’ can thus be seen as a fantasy where a
perception of a constant struggle is juxtaposed against an ideal of ‘peace’ that can never be
reached, settler projects embrace and reject violence at the same time . The settler colonial situation is
thus a circumstance where the tension between contradictory impulses produces long-lasting psychic conflicts and a number of
associated psychopathologies.5 Current scholarship has thus focused primarily on settler-colonial narrative’s view of the past, asking
how such a contradictory and troubled relationship to history might affect present-day ideological formations. Critics have rarely
considered what such narratological tensions might produce when the settler gaze is turned to the future. Few
social
formations are more stubbornly resistant to change than settlement, suggesting that a future
beyond settler colonialism might be simply unthinkable. Veracini, indeed, suggests that settler-colonial narrative
can never contemplate an ending: that settler decolonization is inconceivable because settlers lack the metaphorical tools to
imagine their own demise.6 This article outlines why I partly disagree with that view. I argue that the narratological paradox that
defines settler-colonial narrative does make the future a problematic object of contemplation. But that does not make settler
decolonization unthinkable per se; as I will show, settlers do often try to
imagine their demise – but they do so in a
way that reasserts the paradoxes of their founding ideology , with the result that the radical potentiality of
decolonization is undone even as it is invoked. I argue that, notwithstanding Veracini’s analysis, there is a metaphor via which the
end of settler colonialism unspools – the
quasi-biological concept of extinction, which, when deployed as
a narrative trope, offers settlers a chance to consider and disavow their demise, just as they
consider and then disavow the violence of their origins . This article traces the importance of the trope of
extinction for contemporary settler-colonial literature, with a focus on South Africa, Canada, and Australia. It explores variations in
how the death of settler colonialism is conceptualized, drawing a distinction between historio-civilizational narratives of the rise and
fall of empires, and a species-oriented notion of extinction that draws force from public anxiety about climate change – an
invocation that adds another level of ambivalence by drawing on ‘rational’ fears for the future (because climate change may well
render the planet uninhabitable to humans) in order to narrativize a form of social death that, strictly speaking, belongs to a
different order of knowledge altogether. As such, my analysis is intended to draw the attention of settlercolonial studies toward
futurity and the ambivalence of settler paranoia, while highlighting a potential point of cross-fertilization between settler-colonial
and eco-critical approaches to contemporary literature. That
‘extinction’ should be a key word in the settler-
colonial lexicon is no surprise. In Patrick Wolfe’s phrase,7 settler colonialism is predicated on a ‘logic
of elimination’ that tends towards the extermination – by one means or another – of
indigenous peoples.8 This logic is apparent in archetypal settler narratives like James Fenimore Cooper’s The Last of the
Mohicans (1826), a historical novel whose very title blends the melancholia and triumph that demarcate settlers’ affective responses
to the supposed inevitability of indigenous extinction. Concepts like ‘stadial development’ – by which societies progress through
stages, progressively eliminating earlier social forms – and ‘fatal impact’ – which names the biological inevitability of strong peoples
supplanting weak – all contribute to the notion that settler
colonialism is a kind of ‘ecological process’ 9 that
necessitates the extinction of inferior races. What is surprising, though, is how often the trope
of extinction also appears with reference to settlers themselves; it makes sense for settlers to
narrate how their presence entails others’ destruction, but it is less clear why their attempts
to imagine futures should presume extinction to be their own logical end as well . The idea appears
repeatedly in English-language literary treatments of settler colonialism. Consider, for instance, the following rumination on the
future of South African settler society, from Olive Schreiner’s 1883 Story of an African Farm: It was one of them, one of those wild
old Bushmen, that painted those pictures there. He did not know why he painted but he wanted to make something, so he made
these. […] Now the Boers have shot them all, so that we never see a yellow face peeping out among the stones. […] And the wild
bucks have gone, and those days, and we are here. But we will be gone soon, and only the stones will lie on, looking at everything
like they look now.10 In this example, the narrating settler character, Waldo, recognizes prior indigenous inhabitation but his
knowledge comes freighted with an expected sense of biological superiority, made apparent by his description of the ‘Bushman’s’
‘yellow face’, and lack of mental self-awareness. What is not clear is why Waldo’s contemplation of colonial genocide should turn
immediately to the assumption that a similar fate awaits his people as well. A similar presumption of racial vulnerability permeates
other late nineteenthcentury novels from the imperial metropole, such as Dracula and War of the Worlds, SETTLER COLONIAL
STUDIES 3 which are plotted around the prospect of invasions that would see the extinction of British imperialism, and, in the
process, the human species. Such anxieties draw energy from a pattern of settler defensiveness that can be observed across
numerous settler-colonial contexts. Marilyn Lake’s and Henry Reynold’s account of the emergence of transnational ‘whiteness’
highlights the paradoxical fact that while white male settlers have been arguably the most privileged class in history, they have
routinely perceived themselves to be ‘under siege’, threatened with destruction to the extent that their very identity of ‘whiteness
The fear of looming annihilation serves a powerful
was born in the apprehension of imminent loss’. 11
ideological function in settler communities, working to foster racial solidarity, suppress
dissent, and legitimate violence against indigenous populations who, by any objective measure, are far
more at risk of extermination than the settlers who fear them. Ann Curthoys and Dirk Moses have traced this pattern in Australia
narratives of settler extinction are acts of
and Israel-Palestine, respectively.12 This scholarship suggests that
ideological mystification, obscuring the brutal inequalities of the frontier behind a mask of
white vulnerability – an argument with which I sympathize. However, this article shows how there is more to settler-colonial
extinction narratives than bad faith. I argue that we need a more nuanced understanding of how they encode a
specifically settler-colonial framework for imagining the future, one that has implications for how we understand
contemporary literatures from settler societies, and which allows us to see extinction as a genuine, if flawed, attempt to envisage
social change. In the remainder of this paper I consider extinction’s function as a metaphor of decolonization. I use this phrase to
invoke, without completely endorsing, Tuck and Yang’s argument that to treat decolonization figuratively, as I argue extinction
narratives do, is necessarily to preclude radical change, creating opportunities for settler ‘moves to innocence’ that re-legitimate
racial inequality.13 The counterview to this pessimistic perspective is offered by Veracini, who suggests that progressive change to
settler-colonial relationships will only happen if narratives can be found that make decolonization thinkable.14 This article enters the
debate between these two perspectives by asking what it means for settler writers to imagine the future via the trope of extinction.
Does extinction offer a meaningful way to think about ending settler colonialism, or does it re-activate settler-colonial patterns of
thought that allow exclusionary social structures to persist? I explore this question with reference to examples of contemporary
literary treatments of extinction from select English-speaking settler-colonial contexts: South Africa, Australia, and Canada.15 The
next section of this article traces key elements of extinction narrative in a range of settler-colonial texts, while the section that
follows offers a detailed reading of one of the best examples of a sustained literary exploration of human finitude, Margaret
Atwood’s Maddaddam trilogy (2003–2013). I advance four specific arguments. First, extinction narratives take at least two forms
depending on whether the ‘end’ of settler society is framed primarily in historical-civilizational terms or in a stronger, biological
sense; the key question is whether the ‘thing’ that is going extinct is a society or a species. Second ,
biologically oriented
extinction narratives rely on a more or less conscious slippage between ‘the settler’ and ‘the
human’. Third, this slippage is ideologically ambivalent: on the one hand, it contains a radical
charge that invokes environmentalist discourse and climate-change anxiety to imagine social
forms that re-write settler-colonial dynamics; on the other, it replicates a core aspect of
imperialist ideology by normalizing whiteness as equivalent to humanity. Fourth, these ideological
effects are mediated by gender, insofar as extinction narratives invoke issues of biological reproduction, community protection, and
violence that function to differentiate and reify masculine and feminine roles in the putative de-colonial future. Overall, my central
claim is that extinction
is a core trope through which settler futurity emerges, one with crucial
narrative and ideological effects that shape much of the contemporary literature emerging
from white colonial settings.
This insurgency necessitates a scholar-activist frame that dismantles domestic

warfare while paving the way for grassroots mobilization outside the moorings
of the state.
Rodriguez’09 |Dylan Rodriguez. “The Terms of Engagement: Warfare, White Locality, and Abolition”
Critical Sociology. January 2009. Volume 36 No. 1. Pgs 167-170. DOI: 10.1177/0896920509347145|KZaidi
Thus, behind the din of progressive and liberal reformist struggles over public policy, civil liberties, and law,
and beneath the infrequent mobilizations of activity to defend against the next onslaught of racist, classist, ageist, and misogynist
criminalization, there is an unspoken politics of assumption that takes for granted the mystified
permanence of domestic warfare as a constant production of targeted and massive suffering,
guided by the logic of normalized and mundane black, brown, and indigenous subjection to the
expediencies and essential violence of the American (global) nation-building project. To put it
differently: despite the unprecedented forms of imprisonment, social and political repression, and
violent policing that compose the mosaic of our historical time, the establishment left (within and
perhaps beyond the USA) really does not care to envision , much less politically prioritize, the abolition of US
domestic warfare and its structuring white supremacist social logic as its most urgent task of the
present and future. The non-profit and NGO left, in particular, seems content to engage in desperate (and
usually well-intentioned) attempts to manage the casualties of domestic warfare, foregoing the urgency of an abolitionist praxis that
openly, critically, and radically addresses the moral, cultural, and political premises of these wars. In so many ways, the
US
progressive/left establishment is filling the void created by what Ruth Wilson Gilmore has called the violent
‘abandonments’ of the state, which forfeits and implodes its own social welfare capacities (which were already
insufficient at best) while transforming and (productively) exploding its domestic warmaking
functionalities – which Gilmore (2007b: 44–5) says are guided by a ‘frightening willingness to engage in
human sacrifice’. Yet, at the same time that the state has been openly galvanizing itself to declare and wage violent struggle
against strategically targeted local populations, the establishment left remains relatively unwilling and therefore
institutionally unable to address the questions of social survival, grass roots mobilization, radical
social justice, and social transformation on the concrete and everyday terms of the very
domestic war(s) that the state has so openly and repeatedly declared as the premises of its own
coherence. Given that domestic warfare composes both the common narrative language and
concrete material production of the state, the question remains as to why the establishment
left has not understood this statecraft as the state of emergency that the condition so openly,
institutionally encompasses (war!). Perhaps it is because critical intellectuals, scholar activists, and
progressive organizers are underestimating the skill and reach of the state as a pedagogical
(teaching) apparatus, that they have generally undertheorized how the state so skillfully
generates (and often politically accommodates) sanctioned spaces of political contradiction that engulf
‘dissent’ and counter-state, antiracist, and antiviolence organizing. Italian political prisoner Antonio
Gramsci’s thoughts on the formation of the contemporary pedagogical state are instructive here: The State does have and
request consent, but it also ‘educates’ this consent, by means of the political and syndical associations ;
these, however, are private organisms, left to the private initiative of the ruling class. (Gramsci 1995: 259). Although Gramsci was
writing in the 1920s, he had already identified the institutional symbiosis that would eventually produce the non-profit industrial
liberal foundations such as the Ford, Mellon,
complex. The historical record of the last three decades shows that
Rockefeller, Soros and other financial entities have become politically central to ‘the private
initiative of the ruling class’ and have in fact funded a breath-taking number of organizations,
grass roots campaigns, and progressive political interests. The questions I wish to insert here, however, are
whether the financially enabling gestures of foundations also 1) exert a politically disciplinary or repressive force on contemporary
social movements and community-based organizations, while 2) nurturing
an ideological and structural
allegiance to the state that preempts a more creative, radical, abolitionist politics. Several social
movement scholars have argued that the ‘channeling mechanisms’ of the non-profit industrial complex ‘may now far outweigh the
effect of direct social control by states in explaining the ... orthodox tactics, and moderate goals of much collective action in modern
America’ (McCarthy et al. 1991: 48). The
non-profit apparatus and its symbiotic relationship to the state
amount to a sophisticated technology of political repression and social control, accompanying
and facilitating the ideological and institutional mobilizations of a domestic war waging state.
Avowedly progressive, radical, leftist, and even some misnamed ‘revolutionary’ groups find it opportune to
assimilate into this state-sanctioned organizational paradigm, as it simultaneously allows them
to establish a relatively stable financial and operational infrastructure while avoiding the
transience, messiness, and possible legal complication of working under decentralized, informal,
or even ‘underground’ auspices. Thus, the aforementioned authors suggest that the emergence of the state-
proctored non-profit industry ‘suggests an historical movement away from direct, cruder forms [of
state repression], toward more subtle forms of state social control of social movements’ (McCarthy et al.
1991). The regularity with which progressive organizations immediately forfeit the crucial political and
conceptual possibilities of abolishing domestic warfare is a direct reflection of the extent to which
domestic war has been fashioned into the everyday, ‘normal’ reality of the state. By extension, the
non-profit industrial complex, which is fundamentally guided by the logic of being state-sanctioned (and often state-
funded), also reflects this common reality: the operative assumptions of domestic warfare are taken
for granted because they form and inform the popular consensus. Our historical moment
suggests the need for a principled political rupturing of existing techniques and strategies that
fetishize and fixate on the negotiation, massaging, and management of the worst outcomes of
domestic warfare. One political move long overdue is toward grass roots pedagogies of radical
dis-identification with the state, in the trajectory of an anti-nationalism or anti-patriotism, that
reorients a progressive identification with the creative possibilities of insurgency (this is to consider
‘insurgency’ as a politics that pushes beyond the defensive maneuvering of ‘resistance’). While there are rare
groups in existence that offer this kind of nourishing political space (from the L.A.-based Youth Justice Coalition to
the national organization INCITE! Women of Color Against Violence), they are often forced to
expend far too much energy challenging both the parochialisms of the hegemonic non-profit
apparatus and the sometimes narrow politics of the progressive US left. Conclusion: Abolition and Radical Political Vision The
abolition of domestic warfare, not unlike precedent (and ongoing) struggles to abolish colonialism, slavery, and
programmatic genocide, necessitates a rigorous theoretical and pragmatic approach to a counter- and
anti-state radicalism that attempts to fracture the foundations of the existing US social form. This
political shift requires a sustained labor of radical vision, and in the most crucial ways is actually anchored to
‘progressive’ notions of life, freedom, community, and collective/personal security ( including safety from racist
policing/criminalization and the most localized brutalities of neoliberal or global capitalism). Not
long from now, generations will emerge from the organic accumulation of rage, suffering, social alienation, and (we hope) politically
principled rebellion against this living apocalypse and pose to us some rudimentary questions of radical accountability: How
were we able to accommodate, and even culturally and politically normalize the strategic,
explicit, and openly racist technologies of state violence that effectively socially neutralized and
frequently liquidated entire nearby populations of our people, given that ours are the very
same populations that have historically struggled to survive and overthrow such ‘classical’
structures of dominance as colonialism, frontier conquest, racial slavery, and other genocides?
In a somewhat more intimate sense, how could we live with ourselves in this domestic state of
emergency, and why did we seem to generally forfeit the creative possibilities of radically
challenging, dislodging, and transforming the ideological and institutional premises of this
condition of domestic warfare in favor of short- term, ‘winnable’ policy reforms ? (For example, why
did we choose to formulate and tolerate a ‘progressive’ political language that reinforced dominant
racist notions of ‘criminality’ in the process of trying to discredit the legal basis of ‘Three Strikes’
law?) What were the fundamental concerns of our progressive organizations and movements during this time, and were they
willing to comprehend and galvanize an effective, or even viable opposition to the white supremacist state’s terms of engagement
(that is, warfare)? This radical accountability reflects a variation on anticolonial liberation theorist Frantz Fanon’s memorable
statement to his own peers, comrades, and nemeses: Each generation must discover its mission, fulfill it or betray it, in relative
opacity. In the underdeveloped countries preceding generations have simultaneously resisted the insidious
agenda of colonialism and paved the way for the emergence of the current struggles. Now that we are in the
heat of combat, we must shed the habit of decrying the efforts of our forefathers or feigning
incomprehension at their silence or passiveness. (Fanon 2004 [1963]: 146) Lest we fall victim to a certain political
nostalgia that is often induced by such illuminating Fanonist exhortations, we ought to clarify the premises of the
social ‘mission’ that our generation of USA-based progressive organizing has undertaken. In the
vicinity of the constantly retrenching social welfare apparatuses of the US state, much of the most urgent and immediate
work of community-based organizing has revolved around service provision . Importantly, this
pragmatic focus also builds a certain progressive ethic of voluntarism that constructs the model
activist as a variation on older liberal notions of the ‘good citizen’. Following Fanon, the question is whether
and how this mission ought to be fulfilled or betrayed. To respond to this political problem requires an analysis
and conceptualization of ‘the state’ that is far more complex and laborious than we usually
allow in our ordinary rush of obligations to build campaigns, organize communities, and write
grant proposals. We require, in other words, a scholarly activist framework to understand that the
state can and must be radically confronted on multiple fronts by an abolitionist social theory.
Effectively contradicting, decentering, and transforming the popular consensus (for example, destabilizing
assertive assumptions common to progressive movements and organizations such as ‘we have
to control/get rid of gangs,’ ‘we need prisons,’ or ‘we want better police’ ) is, in this context,
dangerously difficult work. Although the truth of the matter is that the establishment US left, in ways both
spoken and presumed, may actually agree with the political, moral, and ideological premises of domestic
warfare. Leaders as well as rank-and-file members in avowedly progressive organizations can and must reflect on how
they might actually be supporting and reproducing existing forms of racism, white supremacy, state violence, and domestic
warfare in the process of throwing their resources behind what they perceive as ‘winnable
victories’, in the lexicon of venerable community organizer Saul Alinsky. Arguably, it is precisely the creative and pragmatic work of
political fantasy/political vision/political imagination that is the most underdeveloped
dimension of the US establishment left’s organizational modus operandi and public discourse.
While a full discussion is best left for sustained collective discussion, we might consider the post-1960s history of the reactionary, neoconservative, and Christian fundamentalist
US right, which has fully and eagerly engaged in these political labors of fantasy/vision/imagination, and has seen the desires of their wildest dreams met or exceeded in their
It might be useful to begin by thinking of ourselves as existing in a

struggles for political and cultural hegemony.
relationship of deep historical obligation to the long and recent, faraway and nearby historical
legacies of radical, revolutionary, and liberationist struggles that have made the abolition of
oppressive violence their most immediate and fundamental political desire.
2AC
Case
A2 – Reform
Framing/UQ
openly, critically, and radically addresses the moral, cultural, and political premises of these wars.
In so many ways, the US progressive/left establishment is filling the void created by what Ruth Wilson Gilmore has
called the violent ‘abandonments’ of the state, which forfeits and implodes its own social welfare capacities
(which were already insufficient at best) while transforming and (productively) exploding its domestic
warmaking functionalities – which Gilmore (2007b: 44–5) says are guided by a ‘frightening willingness to
engage in human sacrifice’. Yet, at the same time that the state has been openly galvanizing itself to declare and wage
violent struggle against strategically targeted local populations, the establishment left remains relatively unwilling
and therefore institutionally unable to address the questions of social survival, grass roots mobilization,
radical social justice, and social transformation on the concrete and everyday terms of the very
‘dissent’ and counter-state, antiracist, and antiviolence organizing.
Italian political prisoner Antonio Gramsci’s thoughts on the formation of the contemporary pedagogical state are instructive here:
The State does have and request consent, but it also ‘educates’ this consent, by means of the political and
syndical associations; these, however, are private organisms, left to the private initiative of the ruling class. (Gramsci 1995:
259).
Although Gramsci was writing in the 1920s, he had already identified the institutional symbiosis that would eventually produce the
liberal foundations such as the
non-profit industrial complex. The historical record of the last three decades shows that
Ford, Mellon, Rockefeller, Soros and other financial entities have become politically central to
‘the private initiative of the ruling class’ and have in fact funded a breath-taking number of
organizations, grass roots campaigns, and progressive political interests. The questions I wish to insert
here, however, are whether the financially enabling gestures of foundations also
1) exert a politically disciplinary or repressive force on contemporary social movements and community-based organizations,
while
2) nurturingan ideological and structural allegiance to the state that preempts a more
creative, radical, abolitionist politics.
Several social movement scholars have argued that the ‘channeling mechanisms’ of the non-profit industrial complex ‘may now far
outweigh the effect of direct social control by states in explaining the ... orthodox tactics, and moderate goals of much collective
action in modern America’ (McCarthy et al. 1991: 48). Thenon-profit apparatus and its symbiotic relationship
to the state amount to a sophisticated technology of political repression and social control,
accompanying and facilitating the ideological and institutional mobilizations of a domestic war
waging state. Avowedly progressive, radical, leftist, and even some misnamed ‘revolutionary’ groups find it
opportune to assimilate into this state-sanctioned organizational paradigm, as it
simultaneously allows them to establish a relatively stable financial and operational
infrastructure while avoiding the transience, messiness, and possible legal complication of
working under decentralized, informal, or even ‘underground’ auspices. Thus, the aforementioned
authors suggest that the emergence of the state-proctored non-profit industry ‘suggests an historical
movement away from direct, cruder forms [of state repression], toward more subtle forms of state social
control of social movements’ (McCarthy et al. 1991).
The regularity with which progressive organizations immediately forfeit the crucial political and conceptual
possibilities of abolishing domestic warfare is a direct reflection of the extent to which domestic
war has been fashioned into the everyday, ‘normal’ reality of the state. By extension, the non-
profit industrial complex, which is fundamentally guided by the logic of being state-sanctioned (and often state-funded),
also reflects this common reality: the operative assumptions of domestic warfare are taken for
granted because they form and inform the popular consensus.
Our historical moment suggests the need for a principled political rupturing of existing
techniques and strategies that fetishize and fixate on the negotiation, massaging, and management
of the worst outcomes of domestic warfare. One political move long overdue is toward grass
roots pedagogies of radical dis-identification with the state, in the trajectory of an anti-
nationalism or anti-patriotism, that reorients a progressive identification with the creative
possibilities of insurgency (this is to consider ‘insurgency’ as a politics that pushes beyond the defensive
maneuvering of ‘resistance’). While there are rare groups in existence that offer this kind of nourishing political space
(from the L.A.-based Youth Justice Coalition to the national organization INCITE! Women of
Color Against Violence), they are often forced to expend far too much energy challenging both
the parochialisms of the hegemonic non-profit apparatus and the sometimes narrow politics of the progressive
US left.
Conclusion: Abolition and Radical Political Vision
The abolition of domestic warfare, not unlike precedent (and ongoing) struggles to abolish colonialism, slavery, and
policing/criminalization and the most localized brutalities of neoliberal or global capitalism).
Not long from now, generations will emerge from the organic accumulation of rage, suffering, social alienation, and (we hope)
politically principled rebellion against this living apocalypse and pose to us some rudimentary questions of radical accountability:
How were we able to accommodate, and even culturally and politically normalize the strategic,
statement to his own peers, comrades, and nemeses:
Each generation must discover its mission, fulfill it or betray it, in relative opacity. In the underdeveloped countries preceding
generations have simultaneously resisted the insidious agenda of colonialism and paved the way for
the emergence of the current struggles. Now that we are in the heat of combat, we must shed the habit of
decrying the efforts of our forefathers or feigning incomprehension at their silence or
passiveness. (Fanon 2004 [1963]: 146)
Lest we fall victim to a certain political nostalgia that is often induced by such illuminating Fanonist exhortations, we
ought to
clarify the premises of the social ‘mission’ that our generation of USA-based progressive
organizing has undertaken.
In the vicinity of the constantly retrenching social welfare apparatuses of the US state, much of the
most urgent and
immediate work of community-based organizing has revolved around service provision .
Importantly, this pragmatic focus also builds a certain progressive ethic of voluntarism that
constructs the model activist as a variation on older liberal notions of the ‘good citizen’. Following
Fanon, the question is whether and how this mission ought to be fulfilled or betrayed. To respond to this political
problem requires an analysis and conceptualization of ‘the state’ that is far more complex and
laborious than we usually allow in our ordinary rush of obligations to build campaigns, organize
communities, and write grant proposals. We require, in other words, a scholarly activist framework
to understand that the state can and must be radically confronted on multiple fronts by an
abolitionist social theory.
victories’, in the lexicon of venerable community organizer Saul Alinsky.
it is precisely the creative and pragmatic work of political fantasy/political vision/political

Arguably,
imagination that is the most underdeveloped dimension of the US establishment left’s

organizational modus operandi and public discourse. While a full discussion is best left for sustained collective discussion, we might
consider the post-1960s history of the reactionary, neoconservative, and Christian fundamentalist US right, which has fully and eagerly engaged in these political labors of
It might be
fantasy/vision/imagination, and has seen the desires of their wildest dreams met or exceeded in their struggles for political and cultural hegemony.
useful to begin by thinking of ourselves as existing in a relationship of deep historical obligation

to the long and recent, faraway and nearby historical legacies of radical, revolutionary, and
liberationist struggles that have made the abolition of oppressive violence their most
immediate and fundamental political desire.
A2 – State Good
Even if they win general state good args, only our evidence assumes the current
political climate under Trump who has demonstrated a firm stance AGAINST
helping Palestine. Entanglement is inevitable abasnet the aff.
In the wake of U.S. President Donald Trump’s recognition of Israeli sovereignty over the Syrian Golan Heights,
we are seeing a continuation of the Trump’s administration’s flat-out rejection of international
law on the status of occupied territories held by Israel since 1967. The timing is significant because it is
an attempt by Trump to meddle in the Israeli elections on April 9 which ultimately could benefit
Benjamin Netanyahu’s chances for re-election. The Trump administration seems to care very little
about international consensus and international law on the status of the occupied territories. Instead, it
has sabotaged the American government’s standing as an “honest broker” and effectively
encouraged support for the continuation of Israeli colonization of Arab land. Until now, no country had
recognized Israel’s act of plunder in the Golan Heights. Following the Six Day war in 1967, Israel expelled
130,000 Syrians from the Golan Heights. 14 years later, in 1981, Israel annexed the territory – in
violation of international law. The United Nations member states, including the U.S., immediately declared Israeli efforts
to change the Golan Height’s status “null and void.” A small population of Syrian Druze are the only survivors
of that ethnic cleansing operation. Greg Shupak, author of The Wrong Story: Palestine, Israel and the Media, argues
that “American foreign policy and Israeli settler-colonial capitalism shape what happens across
historic Palestine.” We recently saw this unfold when Trump issued his Jerusalem decree to
recognize the city as the Israeli capital, which goes against the international community’s consensus of
Jerusalem as a final status issue in negotiations and, again, violates international law. While the U.S.
Embassy was moving from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem on May 15, Israeli snipers were massacring 60
Palestinians protesters in the Great March of Return at the Gaza fence. This is not the first time
we have seen U.S. foreign policy and Israeli settler-colonial enterprise interfered with the
international community’s consensus on Palestinian-Israeli affairs. The Jerusalem Basic Law of 1980 and
the Jerusalem Embassy Act of 1995 were highly controversial because of their timing and their political and
legal implications, according to Michael Zank, a professor at Boston University. Both laws were enacted during times
when the international coalition was making progress with the Palestinian-Israeli peace
negotiations. U.S. President Jimmy Carter and Egyptian President Anwar al-Sadat had signed the Camp
David Accords, a peace treaty with Israel and Egypt in 1979; consequently, the Jerusalem Basic Law
endangered the peace process and negatively impacted the ongoing negotiations. The Jerusalem Embassy Act
was signed into law shortly after the Oslo Accords were concluded and greatly affected the final status
negotiations between Israel and the Palestinian Authority that were held at Camp David in 2000. Both
these legislative acts created a binding relationship between Israel and the U.S which
ultimately changed the status quo.
Tag
Maim, Duke University Press, 2017. Chapter 3, Page 108-110|KZaidi
The transition from stigmatization—“objects of charity” and “religious obligation”—to a rights-based,

empowerment approach has been tricky at best given the lack of resources to implement the
law. Allam Jarar, director of the Palestinian Medical Relief Society’s rehabilitation program in the West Bank and Gaza, writes that
“the question remains whether this change can genuinely affect peoples’ lives and whether the
rights-based approach to disability can be translated from slogans and articles to hard facts
and realities that can make a difference in the lives of people with disabilities .”67 Issues regarding the
implementation of Number Four continue to be ad- dressed, especially as it pertains to the inadequate distribution of resources by
the Palestinian Authority.68 According to the Palestinian Central Bu- reau of Statistics (PCBS) and the Palestinian Ministry of Social
Affairs, in 2011, there
were at least 113,000 Palestinians in the West Bank, Gaza, and occupied East
Jerusalem (2.7 percent of the population) with a disability. In 2007, the PCBS recorded the disability rate
as 5.3 percent, with almost 80 percent of these individuals having no jobs and 55 percent having
no education. In 2011, the PCBS reported a slight decline in the percentage of people with
disabilities who do not have access to education, at 37 percent; yet 84 percent still cannot find
jobs and 76 percent cannot use public transportation.69
Numerous NGOs work on integration and empowerment programs —job skills and employment creation,
access to education, and tackling stigma and discrimination—for people with disabilities in Palestine: the East
Jerusalem YMCA (supported by Y Care International); Handicap International, present in Gaza since 1996;
Maysoon’s Kids (wellness for Palestinian children with disabilities); the Maximizing Potential Program (begun in
2015, focusing on Down syndrome, autistic spectrum disorder, visual impairment, deafness, cerebral palsy, and learning
difficulties); Irada, at the Islamic University of Gaza (begun in 2008 to support the massive increase in the numbers of young
people with disabilities during Operation Cast Lead). Disability in this context may well be instrumentalized as
a form of economic pragmatism to secure funding for bodies through international NGO
networks. These funding flows also may provide a way for international actors to offer
humanitarian aid and simultaneously deflect from addressing the larger concerns of the
occupation. The definition of disability in Palestine also is constantly evolving. The difference between abled bod-
ies and disabled bodies may not be as thoroughly delineated in a context where a population
experiences collective punishment largely meted out through the obstruction of mobility . The
occupation itself can be understood as disabling the entire Palestinian West Bank population
through the restriction of mobility, what Langan refers to as “mobility disability.”
A2 – Anti-Semitism
Their idea of academic freedom within “predictable constraints” is not a neutral
imposition but replicates Zionist tactics to shut down radical potentiality
Puar and Medien’18 |Jasbir K. Puar is a U.S.-based queer theorist and Professor and Graduate
Director of Women’s and Gender Studies at Rutgers University, where she has been a faculty member
since 2000. Kathryn Medien is a PhD student at the University of Warwick and was a visiting research
fellow in the Gender, Sexuality, and Feminist Studies Program at Duke University. Thinking Life, Death,
and Solidarity Through Colonized Palestine, An Interview with Jasbir K. Puar. Journal of Middle East
Women's Studies, Volume 14, Number 1, March 2018, pp. 94-103. Published by Duke University Press|
KZaidi
KM: You have importantly suggested that academic freedom is a fantasy, one that masks a lot of violence (Puar
2013b).This suggestion is particularly pertinent given that Israeli academics and institutions develop or
codevelop with US and European scientists and institutions many of the technologies used to
maim and restrict Palestinians, for example, remote-controlled bulldozers, drones, rocket and
missile defensive systems, and tunnel-detection systems . Do you think the academic-freedom argument
masks the Israeli academy’s deep entanglement in colonialism and occupation?
JKP: You are absolutely correct that the academic-freedom debate deflects and shuts down discussion of
the details and mechanisms of the Israeli occupation. Aside from complicities with the war machine, the
Israeli academy has only a handful of Palestinian scholars , if that, working in each institution, although
Palestinians make up 20 percent of the population in 1967-bordered Israel. That fact alone should give us pause. Beyond the
challenges of claiming a space for Palestinian solidarity in the United States are the difficulties of
elaborating on the material networks that, for example, connect the Israeli security firm Elbit to the Mexican-US
border in Arizona,where it is building infrastructure. Similarly, there are close relations between the Israeli
Defence Forces and US law enforcement and security agencies. The Zionist tactic of launching
smear campaigns, therefore inciting the defense of academic freedom, effectively deflects from these material
and ideological alliances. I think that is the strategy at this point, because what would they discuss if they
allowed a debate on the merits of Israeli colonization? They have nothing, no alibi, because the
broader public conversation has shifted from “Is Israel culpable?” to “ How should the global
community intervene in a clearly unacceptable situation?” Five years ago Zionists would attend
my lectures to argue with me. Now they begin smear campaigns well before I arrive at a
campus and do everything they can to shut down the forum, because they want to repress the
circulation of knowledge and have no grounds on which to argue. The last four or five years have seen
more spaces and support for discussing Palestine as well as more deliberate targeting of people who are active in BDS and insist on
opening these discussions. Mostdisturbing are the violent reactions of Zionists to descriptions of
Palestinian suffering. It is as if advocating for the value of Palestinian lives is anti-Semitic unto
itself. The more one ascribes value to Palestinian lives, the more vociferous the accusations of
anti-Semitism. I think persistently foregrounding the intensely tragic toll of the occupation is key, not
to portray Palestinians as victims or to claim their humanity but rather to expose the
inhumanity of their oppressors.
Framework
Framing
Framing/UQ
openly, critically, and radically addresses the moral, cultural, and political premises of these wars.
In so many ways, the US progressive/left establishment is filling the void created by what Ruth Wilson Gilmore has
called the violent ‘abandonments’ of the state, which forfeits and implodes its own social welfare capacities
(which were already insufficient at best) while transforming and (productively) exploding its domestic
warmaking functionalities – which Gilmore (2007b: 44–5) says are guided by a ‘frightening willingness to
engage in human sacrifice’. Yet, at the same time that the state has been openly galvanizing itself to declare and wage
violent struggle against strategically targeted local populations, the establishment left remains relatively unwilling
and therefore institutionally unable to address the questions of social survival, grass roots mobilization,
radical social justice, and social transformation on the concrete and everyday terms of the very
‘dissent’ and counter-state, antiracist, and antiviolence organizing.
Italian political prisoner Antonio Gramsci’s thoughts on the formation of the contemporary pedagogical state are instructive here:
The State does have and request consent, but it also ‘educates’ this consent, by means of the political and
syndical associations; these, however, are private organisms, left to the private initiative of the ruling class. (Gramsci 1995:
259).
Although Gramsci was writing in the 1920s, he had already identified the institutional symbiosis that would eventually produce the
liberal foundations such as the
non-profit industrial complex. The historical record of the last three decades shows that
Ford, Mellon, Rockefeller, Soros and other financial entities have become politically central to
‘the private initiative of the ruling class’ and have in fact funded a breath-taking number of
organizations, grass roots campaigns, and progressive political interests. The questions I wish to insert
here, however, are whether the financially enabling gestures of foundations also
1) exert a politically disciplinary or repressive force on contemporary social movements and community-based organizations,
while
2) nurturingan ideological and structural allegiance to the state that preempts a more
creative, radical, abolitionist politics.
Several social movement scholars have argued that the ‘channeling mechanisms’ of the non-profit industrial complex ‘may now far
outweigh the effect of direct social control by states in explaining the ... orthodox tactics, and moderate goals of much collective
action in modern America’ (McCarthy et al. 1991: 48). Thenon-profit apparatus and its symbiotic relationship
to the state amount to a sophisticated technology of political repression and social control,
accompanying and facilitating the ideological and institutional mobilizations of a domestic war
waging state. Avowedly progressive, radical, leftist, and even some misnamed ‘revolutionary’ groups find it
opportune to assimilate into this state-sanctioned organizational paradigm, as it
simultaneously allows them to establish a relatively stable financial and operational
infrastructure while avoiding the transience, messiness, and possible legal complication of
working under decentralized, informal, or even ‘underground’ auspices. Thus, the aforementioned
authors suggest that the emergence of the state-proctored non-profit industry ‘suggests an historical
movement away from direct, cruder forms [of state repression], toward more subtle forms of state social
control of social movements’ (McCarthy et al. 1991).
The regularity with which progressive organizations immediately forfeit the crucial political and conceptual
possibilities of abolishing domestic warfare is a direct reflection of the extent to which domestic
war has been fashioned into the everyday, ‘normal’ reality of the state. By extension, the non-
profit industrial complex, which is fundamentally guided by the logic of being state-sanctioned (and often state-funded),
also reflects this common reality: the operative assumptions of domestic warfare are taken for
granted because they form and inform the popular consensus.
Our historical moment suggests the need for a principled political rupturing of existing
techniques and strategies that fetishize and fixate on the negotiation, massaging, and management
of the worst outcomes of domestic warfare. One political move long overdue is toward grass
roots pedagogies of radical dis-identification with the state, in the trajectory of an anti-
nationalism or anti-patriotism, that reorients a progressive identification with the creative
possibilities of insurgency (this is to consider ‘insurgency’ as a politics that pushes beyond the defensive
maneuvering of ‘resistance’). While there are rare groups in existence that offer this kind of nourishing political space
(from the L.A.-based Youth Justice Coalition to the national organization INCITE! Women of
Color Against Violence), they are often forced to expend far too much energy challenging both
the parochialisms of the hegemonic non-profit apparatus and the sometimes narrow politics of the progressive
US left.
Conclusion: Abolition and Radical Political Vision
The abolition of domestic warfare, not unlike precedent (and ongoing) struggles to abolish colonialism, slavery, and
policing/criminalization and the most localized brutalities of neoliberal or global capitalism).
Not long from now, generations will emerge from the organic accumulation of rage, suffering, social alienation, and (we hope)
politically principled rebellion against this living apocalypse and pose to us some rudimentary questions of radical accountability:
How were we able to accommodate, and even culturally and politically normalize the strategic,
statement to his own peers, comrades, and nemeses:
Each generation must discover its mission, fulfill it or betray it, in relative opacity. In the underdeveloped countries preceding
generations have simultaneously resisted the insidious agenda of colonialism and paved the way for
the emergence of the current struggles. Now that we are in the heat of combat, we must shed the habit of
decrying the efforts of our forefathers or feigning incomprehension at their silence or
passiveness. (Fanon 2004 [1963]: 146)
Lest we fall victim to a certain political nostalgia that is often induced by such illuminating Fanonist exhortations, we
ought to
clarify the premises of the social ‘mission’ that our generation of USA-based progressive
organizing has undertaken.
In the vicinity of the constantly retrenching social welfare apparatuses of the US state, much of the
most urgent and
immediate work of community-based organizing has revolved around service provision .
Importantly, this pragmatic focus also builds a certain progressive ethic of voluntarism that
constructs the model activist as a variation on older liberal notions of the ‘good citizen’. Following
Fanon, the question is whether and how this mission ought to be fulfilled or betrayed. To respond to this political
problem requires an analysis and conceptualization of ‘the state’ that is far more complex and
laborious than we usually allow in our ordinary rush of obligations to build campaigns, organize
communities, and write grant proposals. We require, in other words, a scholarly activist framework
to understand that the state can and must be radically confronted on multiple fronts by an
abolitionist social theory.
victories’, in the lexicon of venerable community organizer Saul Alinsky.
it is precisely the creative and pragmatic work of political fantasy/political vision/political

Arguably,
imagination that is the most underdeveloped dimension of the US establishment left’s

organizational modus operandi and public discourse. While a full discussion is best left for sustained collective discussion, we might
consider the post-1960s history of the reactionary, neoconservative, and Christian fundamentalist US right, which has fully and eagerly engaged in these political labors of
It might be
fantasy/vision/imagination, and has seen the desires of their wildest dreams met or exceeded in their struggles for political and cultural hegemony.
useful to begin by thinking of ourselves as existing in a relationship of deep historical obligation

to the long and recent, faraway and nearby historical legacies of radical, revolutionary, and
liberationist struggles that have made the abolition of oppressive violence their most
immediate and fundamental political desire.
A2 – Deliberation
Their idea of academic freedom within “predictable constraints” is not a neutral
imposition but replicates Zionist tactics to shut down radical potentiality
KZaidi
Crip-Pessimism
Debility
They’re wrong about disability
Disability is not a fixed state or attribute but exists in relation to assemblages of capacity and
debility, modulated across historical time, geopolitical space, institutional mandates, and discursive regimes. The
globalization of disability as an identity through human rights discourses contributes to a
standardization of bodily usefulness and uselessness that discounts not only the specificity of
location but also the ways bodies exceed or defy identities and subjects. The non-
disabled/disabled binary traverses social, geographic, and political spaces. The distinctions or parameters
between disabled and non-disabled bodies shift historically, as designations between productivity,
vagrancy, deviancy, illness, and labor market relations have undergone transformations from
subsistence work to waged labor to hypercapitalist modes of surplus accumulation and
neoliberal subject formation. They shift geographically, as varied cultural, regional, and national
conceptualizations of bodily habitations and metaphysics inhabit corporeal relations differently and sometimes irreconcilably, and
issues of environmental racism are prominent. They shift infrastructurally, as a wheelchair-accessible elevator becomes a
completely altered vehicle of mobility, one that masks various capacities to climb stairs, in many parts of the world where power
outages are a daily, if not hourly, occurrence. They shift legally,
administratively, and legislatively, as rights-
bearing subjects are formed and dismantled in response to health care and insurance
regimes, human rights discourses, economic opportunism, and the uneven distribution of
resources, medical supplies, and basic care. They shift scientifically, as prosthetic technologies of capacity, from
wheelchairs to cell phones to dna testing to steroids, script and rescript what a body can, could, or should
do. And they shift representationally, as discourses of multicultural diversity and plurality absorb
“difference” into regimes of visibility that then reorganize sites of marginalization into
subjects of privilege, indeed privileged disabled subjects.
In The Right to Maim: Debility, Capacity, Disability, I think through how and why bodies are perceived as debilitated, capacitated, or
often simultaneously both. I mobilize the term “debility” as a needed disruption (but also expose it as a collaborator) of the
category of disability and as a trian- gulation of the ability/disability binary, noting that while
some bodies may not be
recognized as or identify as disabled, they may well be debilitated, in part by being foreclosed
access to legibility and resources as disabled. Re- latedly, some bodies may well be disabled but also
capacitated. I want to be clear here: I am not diluting or diffusing the identity rubrics of disability by
suggesting all bodies are disabled to some extent or another, or by smoothing disability into a
continuum of debility and capacity. Quite the opposite; I am arguing that the three vectors, capacity,
debility, and disability, exist in a mutually reinforcing constellation , are often overlapping or coexistent,
and that debilitation is a necessary component that both exposes and sutures the non-
disabled/disabled binary. As Christina Crosby rightly points out, “The challenge is to represent the ways in
which disability is articulated with debility, without having one disappear into the other.”7 I would add that the
biopolitical management of disability entails that the visibility and social acceptance of disability
rely on and engender the obfuscation and in fact deeper proliferation of debility.
Queer Theory
Pinkwashing
Tag
Maim, Duke University Press, 2017. Chapter 3, Page 96-101. Footnotes 2, 5, 11, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 20, and
21 included in curly braces|KZaidi
This piece of advertising, created by the pro-Israel organization Size

Doesn’t Matter as part of an ad campaign focused
on promoting the vir- tues of Israel to Canadians, canbe hailed as an example of “pinkwashing,” a piece of
propaganda highlighting the LGBT rights record of Israel as a function of obscuring or legitimating its
occupation of Palestine.2 {“Pinkwashing!” has become a rallying cry to mobilize queer activists globally to
stand in solidarity with Palestine by resisting the so-called co-optation of LGBTq identity by the
state of Israel. As its shorthand use proliferates in anti-occupation organizing forums internationally, pinkwashing must be
situated within the wider homonationalizing geopolitical context. While it is crucial to challenge the Israeli state,
it must be done in a manner that acknowledges the assemblage of homonationalism goes
beyond the explicit activities of any one nation-state, even Israel. I have been unconvinced that
pinkwashing is a practice singular to the Israeli state, though the specific manifestations of this practice on the part of the Israeli
state are singular and noteworthy. Building on theoretical points first articulated in my book Terrorist Assemblages, I contend that
pinkwashing appears to be an effective strategy not necessarily because of any exceptional activities on the
part of the Israeli state but because of the history of settler colonial violence, the international
LGBT tourism industry, the gay and lesbian human rights industry , and, finally, the role of the
United States.} Repurposed in 2009 from campaigns to critique facile medical corporate support of breast cancer research,
pinkwashing has been redefined as the Israeli state’s use of its admittedly stellar LGBT rights
record to deflect attention from, and in some instances to justify or legitimate, its occupation
of Palestine. Resonating within a receptive field of globalized Islamophobia significantly amplified since September 11, 2001,
this messaging is reliant on a civilizational narrative about the modernity of the Israelis
juxtaposed against the backward homophobia of the Palestinians. As such, pinkwashing has
become a commonly used tag for the cynical promotion of LGBT bodies as representative of
Israeli democracy. More generally, it is the erasure of hierarchies of power through the favoring of
the “gay-friendly nation” imagery. It is a discourse about civilizational superiority that relies on a
transparent and uninterrogated construction of “Palestinian homophobia” contingent upon the
foreclosure of any questioning about “Israeli homophobia.” Besides making Zionism more appealing to (Euro-
American) gays, part of the mechanism at work that benefits Israel is a disciplining of Palestinian queers into
legible subjects. At the same time, as Haneen Maikey has noted, the most relevant and damning effect of
pinkwashing is its contribution to the processes of internal colonization: the naturalization of
Israeli superiority by Palestinians themselves. The most important targets of pinkwashing therefore
are not actually Euro-American gay tourists but (queer and gay) Palestinians themselves.3 As such, I would
argue that it functions dually, as a form of discursive preemptive securitization that marshals neo-
orientalist fears of Palestinians as backward, sexually re- pressed terrorists, and as an intense mode of
subjugation of Palestinians under settler colonial rule.
For whom is pinkwashing legible and persuasive as a political discourse, and why? First of all, a
neoliberal
accommodationist economic structure engenders the niche marketing of various ethnic and
minoritized groups and has normalized the production of a gay and lesbian tourism industry
built on the discursive distinction between gay-friendly and not-gay- friendly destinations .4 The
claims of pinkwashing are often seen as plausible when rendered through an LGBT
rights discourse that resonates
within North America and Europe as a dominant measurement of teleological progress.5 {This is
an important tactic within the context of a gay and lesbian human rights industry that
proliferates Euro-American constructs of identity (not to mention the assumption of a universal
attachment to sexual identity itself), that privilege identity politics, “coming out,” public
visibility, legislative measures as the dominant barometers of social progress, and a flat invocation
of “homophobia” as an automatic unifying experiential frame. Palestinian queer organizers assert that it is irrelevant whether
Palestinian society is homophobic or not, and that the question of homophobia within Palestinian society has nothing to do with
the fact that the occupation must end. For the political platform of the Palestinian Queers for BDS and Al-Qaws for Sexual and
Gender Diversity in Palestinian
Society queer organizing is anti-occupation organizing; likewise, anti-
occupation work is queer organizing. Palestinian Queers for BDS is not a liberal project that is
demanding acceptance, tolerance, or inclusion within a “nationalist” movement . Rather,
through foregrounding the occupation as its primary site of struggle, Palestinian Queers for BDS
is slowly, strategically, and carefully insisting upon and creating systemic and thorough changes
in the terms of Palestinian society itself. Al-Qaws claims that its primary work is about ending the
occupation, not about reifying a homosexual identity that mirrors an “Israeli” or “Western” self-
serving form of sexual freedom.}These claims make far less sense in the “Middle East,” for example, where there is a
healthy skepticism about the universalizing of LGBT rights discourses and where knowledge of the complexities of sexualities in the
region is far more nuanced. Additionally, in
some senses Israel is a pioneer of homonationalism, as its
particular position at the crosshairs of settler colonialism, occupation, and neoliberalist
accommodationism creates the perfect storm for the normalization of homosexuality through
national belonging. The homonationalist history of Israel illuminates a burgeoning of LGBT rights and
increased mobility for gays and lesbians during the concomitant increased segregation and
decreased mobility of Palestinian populations, especially post-Oslo. I have detailed this point at greater length
elsewhere, but to quickly summarize: the advent of gay rights in Israel begins around the same time as the
first intifada, with the 1990s known as Israel’s “gay decade” brought on by the legalization of
homosexuality in the Israeli Defense Forces, workplace antidiscrimina- tion provisions, and
numerous other legislative changes.6 The idf becomes a notable site of homonationalist
distinction in relation to other countries in the “Middle East,” as “Only in Israel” can “Gay
Officers Serve Their Country.”
The financial, military, affective, and ideological entwinement of U.S. and Israeli settler colonialisms, and
the role of the United States more generally, should also not be minimized when evaluating
why pinkwashing appears to be an effective discursive strategy.7 The United States and Israel
are the greatest beneficiaries of homonationalism in the current global geopolitical order, as
homonationalism operates to manage difference on the scalar registers of the internal,
territorial, and global. Moreover, pinkwashing is an ideological and economic solicitation
directed to the United States—Israel’s greatest financial supporter internationally—and to Euro- American gays who
have the political capital and financial resources to invest in Israel. Thus, pinkwashing’s unconscious appeal to U.S.
gays is produced through the erasure of U.S. settler colonialism enacted in the tacit endorse-
ment of Israel’s occupation of Palestine.8
But pinkwashing has many antecedents; it

is one more justification of colonial rule in the long history of
imperial, racial, and national violence. How has “the homosexual question” come to supplement “the woman
question” of the colonial era to modulate arbitration between modernity and tradition, citizen and terrorist, homonational and
queer? As elaborated by Partha Chatterjee, this
question arose with some force in the decolonization
movements in South Asia, whereby the capacity for an emerging postcolonial government to
protect native women from oppressive patri- archal cultural practices, marked as tradition,
became the barometer by which colonizers arbitrated political concessions made to the
colonized.9 Here echoes Gayatri Spivak’s famous dictum regarding the colonial project: “white men saving brown women from
brown men.”10 Over time the terms of the woman question have been redictated, from the nineteenth- century formulation of
white women’s relation to colonial women as the “white woman’s burden” to present-day liberal feminist scholars who have
become the arbiters of other women’s modernity, or the modernity of the Other Woman. To
reinvoke Spivak for the
twentieth and twenty-first centuries, then: white women saving brown women from brown
men. The white woman’s burden from the nineteenth century is regenerated for contemporary
deployment through liberal feminist frames within human rights discourses.
While the woman question has hardly disappeared as a liberal mission- ary narrative design, it is now accompanied by
another formulation: white queers (queer men?) saving brown homosexuals from brown
heterosexu- als.11 {This trajectory from the woman question to the homosexual question has multiple prongs, subject to
contextualization in various divergent locations. The supple- menting of homosexuality to women is the result
of the merging of the postcolonial hangover (where, vis-à-vis Jacqui Alexander’s work, the postcolonial state
shores up its respectability and legitimacy to prove its right to sovereignty to the colonial father) with the folding in or
acknowledging of homosexual subjects into legal and consumer legitimacy via neoliberal
economies. Some homosexuals, once on the side of death (aids), are now on the side of life, or
productive for nation building.} I call this the homosexual question: How well do you treat your homosexuals? A mere
thirty years ago this question was of no relevance to the evaluation of a nation’s capacity for sovereign
governance. The homosexual question is in fact a reiteration of the woman question, insofar as it reproduces a demand
for gender exceptionalism, relies on the continual reproduction of the gender binary, and as
with the advertisement described above, embraces queer bodies that are cisgender and gender
conforming. The homosexuals hailed by the nation-state are not gender queer or gender nonconforming—they
are, rather, the ones re-creating cisgender norms through, rather than despite, homosexual
identity. Obscured by pinkwashing is how trans and gender-nonconforming queers are not welcome in
this new version of the proper “homonationalist” Israeli citizen. What was also known as “the Jewish
question,” a series of debates in the nineteenth century and early twentieth century in Europe interrogating the capacity for Jewish
populations to assimilate, hinged on religious difference as the defining obstacle to Jews achieving European modernity.12 Pivotal to
my analysis, therefore, is that a quasi resolution to the Jewish question reworks the denigrated effeminate masculinity of
nineteenth-century European Jewry into the elevated, rehabilitated, secular, homonationalist masculinity of the occupying and
settler colonialist Israeli state.
Pinkwashing also obscures the persistent downplaying of the woman question, and attendant feminist
struggles, in relation to the homosexual question. Gender segregation in some ultra-Orthodox Jewish
communities in Israel is still an active practice, for one example .13 Another is how the homosexual question
might eclipse the woman question for gay and lesbian con- sumers. On January 11, 2011, the same day that Tel Aviv’s
dubious honor as the “world’s best gay city” was announced, an amendment to Israel’s
citizenship laws that prohibits the unification of West Bank Palestinians with their spouses in
Israel was upheld by the High Court of Justice. 14 As Nadera Shalhoub-Kevorkian explains, the citizenship law
was approved by the Knesset in 2007 and prohibits Palestinian spouses or children of Is- raeli
citizens from receiving permanent residency or citizenship in Israel.15 {See full discussion in Shalhoub-Kevorkian,
Security Theology, Surveillance and the Politics of Fear, 50–56. The author details the history of the legislation, including
various amendments and provisions and the manner in which the law is used to produce
Palestinians married to Israeli citizens as terrorists and national threats, and how the discourse of
unification is perverted into fears of actualizing Palestinian right of return.} The passage of “social
suitability” laws, attempts at regulating sexual activities between foreign laborers and Israeli
Jews, and the efforts of vigilante groups and social organizations that monitor and agitate against
sexual liai- sons between Israeli Jewish women and Palestinian men: these are forms of (hetero)sexual
regulation that are submerged in the pinkwashed stories of LGBT liberation. Regulation across homo-
hetero divides seeks to con- strict the sexual, ethnic, reproductive, and familial activities of all bodies
not deemed suitable for the Israeli body politic. 16 {In “‘We Are All Israelis,’” Alex Lubin writes: “Hence, in 2002,
Israel amended its citizenship law to prevent ‘family unification’ among married Israeli and non-
Israeli Palestinians when it passed the Citizenship and Entry into Israel Law. The amendment
denied Israeli citizenship through marriage only for Palestinians . In defending and upholding the
amendment in 2006, Israeli judge Michael Chechin argued that the amendment merely reproduced a form of security practiced by
Western governments: ‘The Palestinian Authority is an enemy government, a government that wants to destroy the state and is
not prepared to recognize Israel. . . . Why should we take chances during wartime? Did England and America take chances with
Germans seeking their destruction during the Second World War? No one is preventing them from building a family but they should
live in Jenin instead of in [the Israeli Arab city of] Umm al-Fahm’ (Donald Macintyre, “ ‘Racist’ Marriage Law Upheld by Israel,”
Independent, May 15, 2006). Those opposed to the amendment drew a different kind of comparison, claiming that the
antifamily law mirrors U.S. anti-miscegenation laws in order to preclude increasing numbers
of Palestinian citizens in Israel. The Israeli amendment to its citizenship law relies on a
comparative imaginary that links U.S. and Israeli forms of colonial rule” (685).}
Pinkwashing thus does more than work through an active portrayal of the Palestinian population
as homophobic and thus unworthy of liberation; the biopolitical target is arguably even more
so the control of heterosexual reproduction. Furthermore, we see in the advertisement described earlier that
there are many forms of normativity proliferating. The fact that the opening scene suggests two heterosexual
couples reflects certain versions of gender and racial normativity. Blackness in the video stands in for diversity and seeks to solicit
African American and Afro-Canadian audiences, while also deflecting from the lack of presence of any notably Arab
bodies.17{Yityish
Aynam, an Ethiopian-born Israeli model and former idf lieutenant, was the first black woman to
be crowned Miss Israel in 2013. In the face of protests against racism toward black Jews in
Israel, she has been leveraged as proof that Israel does not have a race problem and has
herself repeated the Israeli right-wing argument that questions the validity of allowing African
migrants to enter or stay in Israel due to their supposed violent nature. See The Stream, “Black and
Jewish in Israel”; Gray, “First Black Miss Israel.”} This is truly notable given the efforts that the Israeli government is making to recruit
African Americans into the Brand Israel project and African American Jews into birthright projects.18 {See Wessler, “The Israel Lobby
Finds a New Face.” To counteract the rhetoric from Palestinian solidarity activists that Israel is a racist
state that practices apartheid, the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), the largest pro-Israel lobby in the United
States, maintains a presence on and recruits students from historically black campuses . AIPAC
lures students by offering career-building opportunities to visit Capitol Hill, meet political figures of the
highest level such as President Obama and Prime Minister Netanyahu, and participate in lobbying and
campaigning on behalf of AIPAC’s agenda. AIPAC educates these students in a Zionist version
of Middle Eastern politics and deploys them to argue that it is a mischaracterization and
offensive to black Americans to use terms like “racist” or “apartheid” to describe Israel. See also
“ ‘Blackwashing’ and the Israeli Lobby,” a roundtable hosted by Al Jazeera’s The Stream. That AIPAC places an emphasis on
leveraging African American support of Israel is especially clear in an April 2012 story published in AIPAC’s biweekly Near East
Report, “Student Leaders across America Oppose Nuclear Iran,” which states that 122 universities and colleges across the United
States had signed a statement that “opposes the development of an Iranian nuclear weapons capability” and supports a “strong
U.S.-Israel alli- ance and Israel’s right to defend itself.” The story specifies that “17 Historically Black Colleges and Universities (hbcus)
are represented, including Morehouse College in Georgia, Grambling State University in Louisiana, and Oakwood Uni- versity in
Alabama.”}
In Israel, Ethiopian Jew- ish women have been subjected to forced sterilization, and African populations have been protesting their
labor conditions and are connecting to Black Lives Matter organizing.19 {Ben-eliezer, “Becoming a Black Jew.” Despite
being
allowed to settle in Israel as many other immigrant Jews have done, Ethiopian Jews and their
descendants continue to face antiblack racism in Israel. For a history of Ethiopian Jewish migration to Israel
and subsequent racial discrimination, see Chehata, “Israel: Promised Land for Jews . . . as Long as They’re Not Black?,” 67–77.
Israeli officials have also admitted to forcibly or nonconsensually sterilizing Ethiopian Jewish
women during and after the settlement process. Some of these women have testified that they were not
allowed inside the country without being administered a long-lasting sterilization shot. See Gordts, “Ethiopian Women Claim Israel
Forced Them to Ac- cept Birth Control Shots.” Israelalso employs a policy of ethnic cleansing through
deportation and detainment on African migrants. As the New Yorker reported in January 2014 in Margalit,
“Israel’s African Asylum Seekers Go on Strike,” undocumented African migrants protested across Tel Aviv
new laws that further criminalized their presence and allowed for the indefinite detainment of
migrant workers, who are primarily from Sudan and Eritrea, in an open-air prison in the Negev
Desert. The Israeli government currently gives undocumented migrants whom they seize a
choice: leave Israel or face indefinite detainment.} Finally, the reclaiming of small size is worthy of mention.
Tourism literature compares Israel to the state of New Jersey—“Israel is the size of New Jersey.”20 {In a speech to AIPAC in 2010,
Prime Minister Netanyahu compared the size of Israel to that of the state of New Jersey in an
effort to impress on his audience the “security predicament” Israel finds itself in, describing
Israel as a tiny nation besieged on all sides by terrorist groups that fire “6,000 rockets into that
small state” and “amass another 60,000 more missiles to fire at you” (Haaretz Service, “Prime Minister
Benjamin Netanyahu’s Speech to aipac Conference”).}The focus on size might reflect the anxious histories of debilitation
and rehabilitation in the establishment and development of the state of Israel. The notation of the
“small” size of Israel is often encased in compensatory rhetoric.
In this chapter I am interested in what else pinkwashing regulates besides and alongside sexual
orientation. I map out a broader biopolitical portrait of sexual regulation in the Israeli occupation of Palestine and elaborate
sexuality as an assemblage not anchored through the prism of queer, lesbian, gay, bisexual, or
trans identities. I am interested in this particular turn for several reasons that encompass both theoretical and pragmatic
organizing issues. First, as a political response to pinkwashing in the U.S. context, I argue that it is crucial not to reiterate
the fantasy of queer exceptionalism by responding to pinkwashing through an appeal to queer
solidarity or queer resistance, but rather to connect the regulation of queerness to the
regulation of sexuality and bodies writ large. The articulation of the specific connections between different
kinds of sexualities—indeed, the sexual regulation of heterosexuality, in fact, miscegenated heterosexuality—not only
provides a more nuanced understanding of how sex and biopolitics work in Palestine/Israel but also refuses to return the
gaze of the exceptionalizing mandate of the Israeli state that insists on propping up
homosexuals as sexual citizens par excellence.21 {The challenge, then, is to not allow the liberal
or establishment gays in Euro-America (who are the primary target of pinkwashing) to redirect the script of
anti- pinkwashing activism away from this radical approach . Failing this, as Maya Mikdashi has so brilliantly
articulated in “Gay Rights as Human Rights,” the rewriting of a radical Palestinian queer politics by a liberal
Euro-American queer politics would indeed be a further entrenchment of homonationalism.
Organizing against pinkwashing through a “queer international” platform can potentially
unwittingly produce an affirmation of the terms within which the discourse of pinkwashing
articulates its claims, namely, that queer identity emboldened through rights is the predominant
manner through which sexual subjectivities should be lived. While one may agree with Joseph Massad’s
damning critique of the “gay international” in Desiring Arabs, it is also important to ask exactly how the “queer
international proposed by Sarah Schulman, in Israel/Palestine and the Queer International, is an alternative or
antidote to the gay international. Is it the case that simply by virtue of being articulated through “queer” rather than
“gay,” and through a global solidarity movement, the pitfalls of the gay international are really avoided? How is such a
positioning of queer one that purports to be transgressive, morally and politically untainted,
and outside of power? That is to say, “queer solidarity” cannot be contingent on “them” producing
a model of sexuality that is acceptable to “us.”} This portrait of biopolitical reproductive and regenerative
mechanisms necessarily implicates convergences of gender, sexuality, race, nationalism, and bodily ability and disability. Finally,
what I am adding to the analysis of homonationalism is its imbrication in a nation-building
project of rehabilitation, reproductive biopolitics, and the capacity and debility of bodies; how
ableism and hetero and homo reproduction are entwined.
Misc Cards
Pink/Blackwashing Thesis
Tag
What brought us together was a shared commitment to resisting pinkwashing —this is a term
employed by queer Palestinian activists and other people of conscience to describe the efforts by the
Israeli state and its supporters to draw attention to Israel's purportedly progressive record on
LGBT rights to detract attention from Israel's gross violations of Palestinian human rights. Sarah
Schulman, a New York-based lesbian, Jewish, and anti-Zionist writer and academic, has emerged as one of the key figures in the
global queer Palestinian solidarity movement, and her efforts were invaluable toward the recruitment of the delegates on the
LGBTQ delegation to Palestine.1 The delegation was hosted by queer Palestinian organizations, namely Al-Qaws (Arabic for
"rainbow," also known as an organization for "Sexual and Gender Diversity in Palestinian Society"), Aswat (Arabic for "voices," also
known as "Palestinian Gay Women"), and Palestinian Queers for Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (PQBDS). The purpose of
the delegation was not only to connect queer Americans and Palestinians, following upon a
successful speaking tour of queer Palestinians across the United States the previous year, but
also to further establish networks to undermine pinkwashing campaigns , and the cooptation
of queer Western movements by the Israeli state's political project. Other leaders in the global
queer Palestinian solidarity movement have included Judith Butler, the lesbian, Jewish, anti-
Zionist renowned gender theorist; and Angela Y. Davis, the queer, African-American, academic,
civil rights leader and prison abolitionist. For instance, in 2012, Davis spoke as part of the "Queer
Visions" initiative at the World Social Forum in Brazil, the theme of which was "Free Palestine." The growth of the global queer
Palestinian solidarity movement has been heartening and energizing for us, and yet the connections between
pinkwashing and blackwashing need to be theorized. The latter is a term employed by
Palestinian solidarity activists to describe the campaign on the part of the Israeli state to co-opt
Black Americans to support Israeli policies. Thus, African-Americans have been identified by
Israeli consulates across the United States as strategic targets in a similar manner as LGBT
communities. For instance, the American Israeli Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), one of the most powerful lobbies in the
United States, is used to push the Israeli state's agendas on Capitol Hill. AIPAC has been known for
actively recruiting Black college students to its conferences and on campuses across the United
States in order for them to serve as propagandists for the Israeli state (Moore and Mahfuz). As Seth
Wessler of Color lines has reported: Israel is under growing attack from Palestinian and international
activists who call the country a racist apartheid state. In response, its staunchest U.S. lobby is recruiting
black students as moral shields to make the case for Israeli impunity. At historically black colleges and
universities (known as HBCU's) around the country, AIPAC is finding and developing a cadre of black allies to
declare there's no way Israel can be racist. Such forms of blackwashing, and the pinkwashing we
referenced earlier, must be understood as interlinked and integral to the "Brand Israel" efforts
of the Israeli Ministry of Foreign Affairs to improve its image across the world, particularly in
liberal and racial minority communities where support for Israel is diminishing rapidly, while
support for Israel remains solid and steady among rightwing conservative groups such as some
communities of Evangelical Christians in the United States. Israel recognizes that it is facing a
public relations crisis, but rather than improve its treatment of Palestinians to improve its
global image, the state seeks to render its policies of apartheid and brutal, illegal military
occupation more palatable to Western publics, particularly in the United States, given the
unprecedented and tremendous financial, political, and military aid that is provided to Israel.
Nonetheless, key figures such as Angela Y. Davis have not only identified the struggle for Palestinian
freedom as a queer struggle but also insisted that Black Americans and Palestinians are natural
allies. In her own activism and scholarship as a former political prisoner in the United States, and as a queer woman, Davis is able
to elucidate how, for instance, the prison industrial complex links both Israel and the United States.
She is known for compelling arguments against the carceral state. In the cases of Israel and the United
States, both function as carceral apparatuses that permit the mushrooming of prisons and
proliferation of criminalizing policies. Davis publicly campaigns against corporations such as
G4S, the British multinational security corporation and the world's largest security company,
which is complicit in supporting Israel and its illegal detention and torture of Palestinians in
prison facilities, including women and children, in violation of human rights {"Desmond Tutu"). From the
New York Times we know that the United States has "less than 5 percent of the world's population. But it
has almost a quarter of the world's prisoners" (Liptak). We also know that this system targets minority
men, black and brown, disproportionately , as delineated by Michelle Alexander in her book The New Jim Crow. And
according to Addameer, the Palestinian prisoners' rights organization, Israel has detained nearly 20 percent of all
Palestinians in the occupied West Bank, and 40 percent of West Bank Palestinian men. Perhaps the
"special relationship" between the United States and Israel that we are so used to being celebrated by American and Israeli
politicians is precisely that of mass-incarceration and criminalization of bodies that have been
marked as the racialized other. As our friendship has developed over the past two years, it is a shared
experience of the disciplining of our bodies, the pervasive surveillance of a repressive state and
its policing apparatuses in our lives, and the deaths and detentions of our brothers and sisters,
queer and straight, locally and trans nationally, that brings us together and strengthens our
bond. In many ways we realize that queer and trans Blacks and Palestinians are born with prison
sentences, not knowing whether we will see the light of day tomorrow due to racism,
homophobia, and colonial violence. We count our blessings to be alive when we can, and we
celebrate our friendship, together. This is what motivates us to serve as better allies.
2AC – PDB
Aligning oneself with solidarity is key to generate networks of love and care for
one another while breaking down both the domestic consolidation of anti-
blackness while simultaneously stopping the occupation of Palestine.
space. In fact, it
under the conditions of structural violence if we did not have communities of solidarities ,
imperialism, and the role of the United States' unconditional support for Israel . Yet Western allies in
PDB – Human as Relational
A2 Afro-Pessimism, Perm vs Set Col, Generic perm card vs K’s
Medien’19|Kathryn Medien is a Research Associate in the Department of Sociology and a member of
the Reproductive Sociology Research Group (ReproSoc). Her research combines her interests in
colonialism, anti-racism, reproduction, gender and sexuality. She is currently researching the relationship
between sexuality and Israel’s occupation of Palestine through a focus on sexual violence, the regulation
of mixed-relationships, and reproductive technologies and medicine. “Palestine in Deleuze.” Theory,
Culture & Society 0(0). Page 11-14. DOI: 10.1177/0263276418816369. Footnote 19 included in curly
braces|KZaidi
In detailing the ongoing dispossession of Palestine and the Palestinian people, and linking this

instance of settler colonialism to a global system of capital, Deleuze’s writings reveal the productive
interplay between settler colonial regimes and modern capitalist advancement. Here, rather than the
Nakba, the term used to name the Zionist military expulsion of an estimated 800,000 Palestinians from their homeland in 1948
(Shalhoub-Kevorkian, 2016), appearing as a one-off event, Deleuze’s writings transform the Nakba into an ongoing
structural machine, or what Laleh Khalili has called a ‘habit of destruction’ (2014). In so doing, Deleuze’s
writings stress the inability of the modern world order to account for any ontology of Palestinian-
ness, marking their identity as co-extensive with death: ‘They have never been given any other
choice than to surrender unconditionally. They have been offered only death’ (Deleuze, 1978: 23). Yet, in unleashing
his critique of Israel’s settler colonial social order, Deleuze’s writings affirm the humanness of Palestinian life, an
affirmation that at once demands a reconfiguring or destruction of the category of the human,
given that Palestinians have been placed on the ‘underside’ of its colonial orderings (McKittrick, 2014:
3–4). With reference to an article that appeared in the French-Palestinian literary magazine Revue d’etudes palestiniennes (Journal
of Palestine Studies),18 Deleuze writes: ‘to Israel’s arrogant formula, ‘‘We are not a people like others,’’ the Palestinians have not
stopped responding with the cry that was invoked in the first issue of the Revue d’etudes palestiniennes: ‘‘we are a people like
others, we only want to be that’’’ (1983: 32). This simultaneous de-exceptionalisation of Israeli Jewish life and
affirmation of Palestinian humanness disrupts the denial of humanity that structures
Palestinian existence. In harnessing the human as the central object in the affirmation of Palestinian
life, Deleuze opposes the minoritising tactics – refugee, exile, terrorist – that conscript Palestinians to the
realm of specialist, minor or particular subjects, a realm that would only propagate the status
of Palestinian life as beyond the grasp of the modern human. Rather, Deleuze’s writings on persisting
Palestinian existence and/as resistance – which, he argues, ‘bears witness to a new consciousness’
– concretely affirms Palestinian life as a status that opposes or transforms the colonising
assemblages that define the sociopolitical and economic modern world order (Deleuze, 1982: 25, in
Deleuze and Sanbar, 1982). Deleuze’s affirmation of Palestinian life may at first appear as at odds with his well-known anti-
humanism, often understood as ‘his commitment to the univocity of being, which places the human alongside all other beings . . .
[and] insists on the radical and foundational equality of all beings: televisions, earthworms, stones, pineapples, as well as human
beings’ (Stark and Roffe, 2015: 10). Indeed, Deleuze’s commitment to the destruction of the category of the human has taken many
Deleuzian theorists beyond or outside the category of Man, focusing instead on ‘pre-human or even non-human elements that
compose the web of forces, intensities and encounters’ (Braidotti, 2006: 41) (see, for example, Sellbach and Loo, 2015; Laurie, 2015;
Stark, 2015; Ansell-Pearson, 1999; Colebrook, 2014; Grosz, 2008). Yet within his writings on Palestine, rather
than a focus on
the nonhuman, Deleuze reveals the fallacies and violences of the category of Man via an
affirmation of those humans expelled from Man’s colonial orderings. A life-affirming politics
that serves as a reminder that the limits of the category of the human are formed not just
through the subordination of non-human life, but also through the rendering of certain human
life as in-human. Deleuze’s affirmation of the ‘ordinary’ human-ness of Palestinian life chimes
with re-figurings of the category of the human through the praxis of Blackness (see, for example,
Hartman, 1997; McKittrick, 2006, 2014; Moten, 2013; Weheliye, 2014; Wynter and McKittrick, 2014). Here, in differing
ways, scholars have sought to dismember Man through Blackness, declining the invitation to
enter the orderings of Western Man and exploring other ‘genres of being human’ (McKittrick, 2014).
In her exploration of Sylvia Wynter’s oeuvre, for example, Katherine McKittrick asks about ‘the ways in which those currently
inhabiting the underside of the category of Man-as-human – under our current epistemological
regime, those cast out as impoverished and colonized and undesirable and lacking reason – can,
and do, provide a way to think about being human anew’ (2014: 3). In doing so, McKittrick asks that we
disfigure the subject of ‘Man-as-human’ via the incorporation of the colonial and racist
histories that have birthed this figure, an invitation that necessarily brings ‘ being human as
praxis into our purview, which envisions the human as verb, as alterable, as relational , and
necessarily dislodges the naturalization of dysselection’ (2014: 7). In Deleuze’s (1979a, 1983, 1988) writings on
Palestine, Palestinian-ness similarly emerges not as a cultural or biological descriptor , a noun to describe a
marginal group, but as a verb, one that articulates Palestinian- ness as a state of being human. Writing
in a 1988 edition of al Karmel, a Palestinian literary journal published in the Arabic language in Ramallah,
Palestine, Deleuze harnesses
the ‘underside’ of Man on which Palestinians stand: Occupation,
endless occupation: the hurled stones come from inside, from the Palestinian people, as a
reminder that somewhere in the world – no matter how small it is – the debt has become reversed. The
Palestinians throw their stones, the living stones of their land. Men are born out of these stones. No one
can pay his debt by murders, one, two, three, seven, ten daily, or by striking deals with anyone other than the people directly
concerned. The others may choose to eschew their responsibility, but every dead person calls on
the living. The Palestinians have struck deep into the soul of Israel. They are at work on it fathoming and
traversing it every day. (Deleuze, 1988: 35) In restoring Palestinians to their land through the
criminal19 ‘living stones’ they hurl at the Israeli occupying forces, Deleuze reanimates a field of
Palestinian land and life. Producing what he might elsewhere term a ‘line of flight’ – a mode of acting
against the dominant system, one that allows for the activation of minor life – Deleuze
reanimates Palestinian stones, the rubble of their homeland, and marks these stones as
coextensive with modalities of Palestinian life : ‘Men are born out of these stones’. In so doing, Deleuze pertinently
reminds us that Palestine and Palestinians live on in spite of, and against, the forces of Zionist
capture and erasure. This living on refuses death as the condition of Palestinian life – ‘every
dead person calls on the living’ – and entails the production and proliferation of new modes of
being. Indeed, Deleuze’s affirmation of Palestinian-ness, his desire to allow them ‘to become what they are, that is, a completely
‘‘normal’’ people’ (1982: 29, in Deleuze and Sanbar, 1982), demands that we see the inadequacies of pre-
existing framings of human life. Or, as Deleuze poetically suggests, a resistive Palestinian-ness that
produces a ‘multiplicity of the possible, the profusion of possibles at each moment’ (1982: 29, in
Deleuze and Sanbar, 1982).
Conclusion
Through an examination of Zionist colonialism, Deleuze’s writings on Palestine importantly highlight the centrality
of
processes of settler colonial dispossession to the formation and maintenance of the capitalist
world order: a set of processes that separate bodies out into hierarchized groups, creating a
supremacist classificatory system that marks certain populations for minoritised
disappearance. Yet, the force of Deleuze’s writings on Palestine is to show that these historical injustices of
displacement, domination and dispossession are not overcome solely through their
documentation. Rather, in harnessing this realm of the ‘underside’ of Man that the deemed
expendable Palestinian population inhabit, Deleuze asks that we think the possibilities of life that
emerge when we take the humanness of being Palestinian as praxis(McKittrick, 2014). Yet, despite
Deleuze’s affirmation of Palestinian life in the face of their ongoing minoritising disappearance, his writings on Palestine are left
largely unmentioned throughout his wider oeuvre,20 {During the same period of Deleuze’s engagement with Palestine, he was in
the process of co-authoring A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia with Felix Guattari. While Palestine is not explicitly
mentioned in the text, Franc ̧ ois Dosse (2010: 261) has noted that ‘the
notion of a war machine is particularly
appropriate for thinking about the stateless Palestinian people’. In addition, in Deleuze’s essay ‘Mediators’,
which appeared in Negotiations, he briefly considered Palestine when discussing ‘minority discourses’. Here he asked, ‘was there
ever a Palestinian people? Israel says no. Of course there was, but that’s not the point. The thing is, that once
the
Palestinians have been thrown out of their territory, then to the extent that they resist they
enter the process of constituting a people . . . So, to the established fictions that are always
rooted in a colonist’s discourse, we oppose a minority discourse, with mediators’ (1997: 126).} and
have not been subjected to the same celebratory canonisation as much of his other work. While an extensive tracing of the lines of
relation between Deleuze’s anti-colonial writings and his popular philosophical work exceed the scope of this essay, my aim has
been to begin to draw out the political commitments that may have influenced and shaped his broader work. With regard to their
marginalisation within the Deleuze canon, I want to conclude by offering some thoughts on how this exclusion might be understood
and, importantly, redressed. Indeed, given that, as Deleuze argues, histories of colonial domination and the
persisting erasure of indigenous populations continue to structure the contemporary world, the
lack of attention Deleuze’s writings on Palestine have garnered presents an occasion for us to
reconsider the ways that colonial structures of dispossession and erasure permeate
contemporary scholarly endeavours. Drawing on Gayatri Spivak’s (1999) discussion of ‘sanctioned ignorance’, Rauna
Kuokkanen has named the silencing and marginalisation of indigenous scholarship as ‘epistemic
ignorance’, a term that refers ‘to academic practices and discourses that enable the continued
exclusion of other than dominant Western epistemic and intellectual traditions’ (2008: 60). A
framework of sanctioned epistemic ignorance importantly forces us to look beyond good faith
suggestions of omission, which would leave Deleuze’s Palestine writings as perhaps unexplored by chance. Rather, both
Spivak and Kuokkanen ask that we consider collective silencing and omission as connected to broader
patterns of colonial domination and erasure, ones that posit particular texts, locations, peoples,
and histories as marginal, specialist, or irrelevant to scholarly knowledge proper: a mode of
collective silencing that, in the context of Deleuze’s writings on Palestine, cannot be thought as separate to
the minoritisation and erasure of Palestinian life that Deleuze so forcibly critiques . If
these hierarchical and exclusionary practices of ‘epistemic ignorance’ have deemed Deleuze’s writings on Palestine, and the
Palestinian people more broadly, as unworthy of study within the Western philosophical canon, how might we go about addressing
this exclusion? Rather than concluding by asking for the inclusion of the Palestine writings in the
Deleuzian canon, a gesture that would maintain an understanding of his wider oeuvre as not inflicted with an anti-colonial politic, I
ask that we take seriously the ways in which an understanding of indigenous dispossession, as
well as prolonged engagements with indigenous thinkers, may have been constitutive of
Deleuze’s philosophy proper: a consideration that would necessitate an acknowledgement of
the inad- equacy of our present epistemic regimes in fully accounting for marginal forms of
life. The challenge of thinking Palestine in Deleuze, then, is to think against the institutionalised colonial
modes of production that operate to foreclose and deem insignificant modes of life that
sit outside of the dominant worldview: a challenge that, from the position of Palestinian praxis,
simultaneously offers us the opportunity to think being human anew (McKittrick, 2014).
Root Cause vs Set Col and Cap
Tag
Medien’19 |Kathryn Medien is a Research Associate in the Department of Sociology and a member of
Culture & Society 0(0). Page 1-2. DOI: 10.1177/0263276418816369|KZaidi
In the late 1970s and early 1980s Gilles Deleuze authored a series of articles and interviews in which he elaborated upon the
formation of the state of Israel and its attendant dispossession and colonisation of Palestine and the Palestinian people (1978, 1982,
1983, 1988). For Deleuze (1983: 31), the
creation of the state of Israel was ‘clearly a matter of
colonization’, but one that differed from previous and ongoing colonial projects. Rather than the
exploitation of colonised peoples for economic gains, and unidentical to settler colonies that have sought to exterminate their
indigenous populations, Deleuze suggested that the
state of Israel’s actions were tantamount to ‘genocide,
but one in which physical extermination remains subordinated to geographical evacuation :
being only Arabs in general, the surviving Palestinians must go and merge with the other Arabs’ (1983: 31). Differing from common
uses, Deleuze deployed the term genocide to articulate the systematic colonial erasure of the
history and geography of Palestine, and the displacement of the Palestinian people, more
commonly referred to as ‘ethnic cleansing’ (see Gordon and Ram, 2016; Pappe ́, 2007). This dispossessive
logic of settler colonialism that Deleuze describes functions, as Edward Said writes, to ‘not only deny the
Palestinians a historical presence as a collectivity, but also to imply that they were not a long-
standing people who had a long-standing peoplehood’ (2000: 187). Going on to situate Palestinian
dispossession in relation to the ongoing colonisation of native North American life, Deleuze’s writings on Palestine de-
exceptionalise Israeli settler colonialism, drawing attention to a global matrix of colonial
violence (1983, 1982).
Published in variety of outlets and formats – Mahmoud Darwish’s Palestinian literary journal al Karmel (Deleuze, 1988); French
news- papers (Deleuze, 1978); in conversation with Palestinian intellectual Elias Sanbar (Deleuze and Sanbar, 1982); and in Revue
D’etudes Palestiniennes (Journal of Palestinian Studies) (Deleuze, 1983) – Deleuze’s
writings on Palestine move
between an analysis of the formation and development of the state of Israel, and an
examination of capitalism’s reliance on settler colonialism as a means of its global
development. Indeed, Deleuze suggests that the mode of capitalist production that Israeli and North
American settler colonialism embody, rather than being based solely on a logic of internal
exploitation, ‘is a matter of emptying a territory of its people in order to make a leap forward ,
even if it means making them into a workforce elsewhere’ (1982: 26, in Deleuze and Sanbar, 1982).1
Furthermore, in continually affirming the existence of the Palestinian people as a population with
claims to territory, Deleuze articulates a field of life affirming Palestinian resistance. Indeed, from
the confines of settler colonial occupation, Deleuze suggests that Palestinians emanate the ‘profusion of possibles
at each moment’ (1982: 29, in Deleuze and Sanbar, 1982).
A2 – Israel Good/Holocaust
Tag
Deleuze’s writings on Palestine, while offering a damning critique of the state of Israel, begin with a recognition
and foregrounding of the Holocaust as a tragedy that warrants reparation. But for Deleuze, the
founding of a Jewish state on already inhabited land was not an ethical reparative politic .
Deleuze opens his short 1988 essay, ‘Wherever They Can See It’, by stating that, ‘ Europe did not start paying its infinite
debt to the Jews; it rather made another people, an innocent one – the Palestinians – pay
back’ (1988: 34). Deleuze’s call for a reparative post-Holocaust politic is further elaborated in his earlier 1983 essay, ‘The Grandeur
of Yasser Arafat’, where he argues:
The United States and Europe owed reparation to the Jews. And they made a people, about
whom the least that could be said is that they had no hand in and were singularly innocent of
any holocaust and hadn’t even heard of it, pay this reparation. (1983: 30)
Importantly situating his critique of the formation of the state of Israel in an imperial and global
frame, recognising the role that Europe and the US played in creating it, Deleuze affirms the
reality of the Holocaust, but simultaneously refuses to grant the state of Israel legitimacy.
Deleuze’s move to unsettle and disrupt the founding of the state of Israel is an important one given
that, as Nadera Shalhoub-Kevorkian has argued, ‘in many ways, the foundational violence of the Jewish state
remains sacred and untouchable’ (2016: 24). Indeed, while dominant narrations and conceptualisations of Palestine
frame the context as ‘Israel/Palestine’ or ‘Jews’ versus ‘Arabs’, a narration that, I would suggest, already assumes the existence of
the state of Israel in Palestine, Deleuze’s
writings importantly unsettle the foundational violences,
highlighting the ‘injustices’, ‘acts of violence’, ‘illogicalities’ and ‘false reasoning’s’ that brought
Israel into being (Deleuze, 1983: 30).7
A2 – Settler Colonialism + Capitalism – Particularity
Tag
Culture & Society 0(0). Page 5-9. DOI: 10.1177/0263276418816369. Footnote 10 included in curly braces|
KZaidi
Deleuze’s line of argumentation, which chimes with the analyses of numerous critics of Israeli settler colonialism (see for example
Graham, 2002; Jabary Salamanca, 2015; Abujidi, 2014; Weizman, 2012), draws attention to the ways in which the project of
the state of Israel rests upon the expulsion of the native inhabitants of Palestine and the infra-
structural destruction of their land. The forced removal or displacement of the Palestinian
population is central to logics of Zionist settler colonialism , allowing the territory to appear as
empty and awaiting modernisation, at once naturalising and legitimating the Israeli state
building project. Indeed, as Deleuze argues, the destruction of native lands and removal of native
peoples outlined above functions to deny ‘the very fact of the Palestinian people . . . from the
start Israel has never concealed its goal: to empty the Palestinian territory. And even better, to act
as if the Palestinian territory was empty, always destined for Zionists’ (Deleuze, 1983: 31).10 {The
assertion that Palestinian peoples and their land had to ‘disappear’ is one that was openly expressed
by Zionist colonisers. Indeed, Theodore Herzl, a founding father of Zionism, wrote: ‘If I wish to substitute a new building for
an old one, I must demolish before I construct’ (cited in Wolfe, 2006: 388).}
The connection that Deleuze draws between Palestinian disappearance and Zionist becoming is predicated
on attempts to disremember Palestine and through the forced externalisation of the Palestinian
people. Deleuze alongside Felix Guattari elsewhere charts the territorialising process by which the state
apparatus forces everything under its control, operating through a logic of capture (Deleuze and
Guattari, 1987: 495; see also Patton, 2000: 113). For Deleuze and Guattari, it is through this often militarised and
violent (re)territorialisation that a state majority model is produced, consolidated and
legitimated, maintained by institutional and structural state violence (Deleuze and Guattari, 1987: 494–
5). The majority model, here the Zionist social order, is not defined by the size of its geography or
population, but rather by its hegemonic and normative status; ‘what defines the majority is a model you
have to conform to: the average European adult male city-dweller, for example . . . A minority, on the other hand, has no model, it’s
a becoming, a process’ (Deleuze, 1973: 173). Producing its ideal governable subject – Jewish, modern,
European-facing – the Zionist state machine folds out of land and life that which is
incompatible, figuratively and materially producing the Palestinian population as an exterior
diasporic minority; ‘[Israel] will act as if the expelled Palestinians came from outside’ (Deleuze, 1983: 31).
Thus, for Deleuze, the

state of Israel, brought into being through the co-constitutive disappearance
of Palestine and minoritisation of the Palestinian people, emerges as a colonial project that
operates via the codification and valuing of life, exteriorising that which is deemed
incompatible with the settler colonial social order. Here the landscape of Palestine is figured as a
deserted desert awaiting Zionist redemption, and the subsequent transfer of the Palestinian
population into refugee camps, exile, zones of blockade and occupation both allows for, and is
justified by, their profiling as ‘outsider terrorists’ with no claim to their homeland, at once
naturalising the existence of the state of Israel; ‘Arab villages had to disappear . . . [Israel] cleansed themselves of
their own terrorism by treating Palestinians as terrorists from the outside’ (1983: 30). This codification and folding out
of life which, while not explicitly described by Deleuze as racialised,11 deploys identity
formations and tropes commonly understood as racialising12 – ‘terrorist’, ‘outsider’, ‘Arab’ –
leading to a discourse by which, for Deleuze, ‘Israel’s actions are considered legitimate reprisals
(even if they appear disproportionate), while those of the Palestinians are treated exclusively as terrorist crimes. And an Arab death
has neither the same value or the same weight as an Israeli death’ (1978: 23).
Israeli Settler Colonialism and Global Capital
As scholars have noted (Said, 2000, 1979b; Kanaaneh, 2002; Bass, 2003; Lloyd and Pulido, 2010), the
US’s overt support for
the Zionist state building project has been key to Israel’s continued naturalisation and
legitimation. For Deleuze, one arena in which this support emerged was through the US’s continual
articulation of the Palestinian peoples as Arab, a discourse that functions to deny Palestinians a
historical presence as a population, eradicating both their identity as a collectivity and their ties
to a homeland. As Deleuze argued, ‘it is important to maintain the fallacy that Palestinians are Arabs
who came from elsewhere, and could very well return there’ (1988: 34).13 Elaborating on the role that the US
played in perpetuating this discourse, Deleuze continues:
The Americans made of Israel a super-production in the Hollywood manner: they conceived of the land as a terra nullius awaiting
the arrival of the ancient Hebrews, its only occupants being a few Arab settlers keeping guard over the place’s sleeping stones. In
this way, they are pushing the Palestinians towards oblivion. They want them to acknowledge the legal existence of Israel, while the
Israelis disavow the palpable reality of the Palestinians. (1988: 34)
The US’s re-coding of the Palestinian peoples as ‘Arab settlers’, and the pushing of this new
identity onto the Palestinian people, rather than grounded in historical fact, takes on a life
administering function – ‘pushing the Palestinians towards oblivion’ – in the service of
naturalising a newly established settler colony. In conversation with the Palestinian intellectual and diplomat Elias
Sanbar, both Deleuze and Sanbar argued that the process of Zionist colonisation was not dissimilar to that of
US setter colonialism; ‘our [Palestinians’] one and only role constituted in disappearing. In this it is
certain that the history of the establishment of Israel reproduces the process which gave birth to
the United States of America’ (Sanbar, 1982: 27, in Deleuze and Sanbar, 1982). A recognition that allowed both Deleuze
and Sanbar to argue that the US’s unwavering support for Israel and continued re-staging of Israeli
colonialism as a divine return, rather than coincidental, is politically motivated by a shared
history of settler colonialism. Referring back to his engagement with Sanbar’s work, a reference that signals Deleuze’s
sustained engagement with thinkers from the Global South,14 Deleuze argued:
The complicity of the United States with Israel does not arise solely from the Zionist lobby. Elias Sanbar has shown clearly how the
United States rediscovered in Israel an aspect of its own history: the extermination of the
Indians which, there as well, was only in part directly physical. It was a matter of emptying, as
if there had never been Indians except in the ghettos, which were made for them as immigrants
from inside. In many respects, the Palestinians are the new Indians, the Indians of Israel. (1983: 31)
In coupling the plight of the native peoples of North America with that of Palestinians, Deleuze points to a
global matrix of
settler colonial violence and a shared terrain of native solidarity .15{There is a long history on
Native American-Palestinian solidarity. For example, in 2016, Palestinian students in Gaza released
a letter and accompanying video standing in solidarity with Standing Rock Sioux Native
Americans and their fight against the US government plans to install an oil pipeline on their
land, stating that ‘When I read your history, I can see myself and my people reflected in yours. I
feel in my core that your fight is my fight, and that I am not alone in the battle against injustice’
(Norton, 2016).} Similar to his analysis of the logics of native dispossession and disappearance in Palestine outlined above, Deleuze
argues that American
settler colonialism is animated via a productive process of folding native
subjects out of land and life.
In invoking this shared US–Israeli settler colonial history, Deleuze makes clear that, rather
than motivated purely by a
desire for territorial expansion, the ongoing North American and Israeli state building projects
represent a key facet of modern capital. Arguing that the violent externalisation of the Palestinian population signals
a ‘movement within capitalism’, Deleuze elaborates:
Taking a people on their own territory and making them work, exploiting them, in order to
accumulate a surplus; that’s what is ordinarily called a colony. Now, on the contrary, it is a matter
of emptying a territory of its people in order to make a leap forward, even if it means making
them into a workforce elsewhere. The history of Zionism and Israel, like that of America,
happened the second way: how to make an empty space, how to throw out a people? (1982: 26,
in Deleuze and Sanbar, 1982)
In articulating two differing logics of capitalist development, both rooted in relations of colonialism, Deleuze’s analysis makes an
important move. While Deleuze takes the newly founded state of Israel and the United States as sites of analysis, his coupling of
their colonial economies asks us to simultaneously transcend the nation-state as a unit of
analysis, unearthing the regimes of capital – colonial economies of dispossession, frontier
expansion, and colonial-ordered divisions of labour – which structure a trajectory in the
development of the capitalist world system. Elaborating on this analysis in his 1983 essay, ‘The Grandeur of Yasser
Arafat’, Deleuze argues:
Marxist analysis reveals the two complementary movements of capitalism: constantly to

impose the limits, within which it develops and exploits its own system; and always to push
these limits further back, to exceed them in order to begin its own foundation once again on a
larger and more intense scale. Pushing back limits was the act of American capitalism, the
American dream, taken up by Israel and the dream of Greater Israel on Arab territory , and on
the backs of Arabs. (1983: 32)
Here, drawing on Marxist analysis, which stresses the centrality of dispossession to capital accumulation, Deleuze
importantly draws attention to the relations of colonialism that underscore these modes of
dispossession. Thought together with his analysis of the dispossessive logics of settler colonial erasure, Deleuze draws
attention to the ways in which the development of the capitalist world system has been
constituted through the creation of settler colonies, redrawing social and spatial boundaries
through both the expansion of frontiers – the deployment of terra nullius – and through the
creation of enclosures – ghettos, refugee camps, reservations. Contrary to many analyses of the
history of capitalism which, as Walter Rodney (1972) famously argued, often couple colonial capitalist
accumulation with progress and development, Deleuze’s writings on Palestine rupture any such
teleological assertion, underscoring the concomitant logics of dispossession and violence that
give capital accumulation its modern force . Thus, while Deleuze’s comparison of Israeli and US colonial capitalism
fails to unpick the many differences between the two projects,16 his analysis necessitates the acknowledgement
of colonialism as a central organising principle of Israeli and American markets and capital
flows.
Control Society Thesis
Tag
Following his writings on Palestine, Deleuze went on to outline what he termed ‘societies of control’,
developing Foucault’s concept of ‘disciplinary power’ in order to account for the ways that ‘technological
evolution’ had ‘mutated capitalism’ (1992: 6). Arguing that the spaces of ‘enclosure’ are in ‘crisis’ (1992:
3), and that ‘societies of control . . . are in the process of replacing the disciplinary societies’ (1992:
4), Deleuze located the shift from discipline to control in technological and scientific capitalist
production. As Deleuze explains:
Societies of control operate with machines...computers, whose passive danger is jamming and
whose active one is piracy and the introduction of viruses . . . this technological evolution must
be . . . a mutation of capitalism . . . in the present situation, capitalism is no longer involved in
production, which it often relegates to the Third World. Capitalism has retained as a constant
the extreme poverty of three-quarters of humanity, too poor for debt, too numerous for
confinement: control will not only have to deal with erosions of frontiers but with the
explosion of shanty towns and ghettos. (1992: 6)
This technological capitalist intensification is traceable throughout Deleuze’s analysis of Zionist

warfare. Noting that the ‘Israeli intelligence is much admired by the entire world’ (1988: 28), Deleuze
argues that the models of colonial control and repression being developed by the Israeli state are
exportable and globally desirable. Writing about the Israeli control society, Deleuze elaborates:
The Israel-Palestine model is the determinant in current problems of terrorism , even in Europe. The
worldwide understanding among states and the organization of a world police force with
worldwide jurisdiction, currently underway, necessarily leads to an expansion in which more
and more people are considered virtual ‘terrorists’ ...Today, the state of Israel leads the
experimentation. It is establishing a model of repression that will be converted for other countries ,
adapted by other countries. There is a great deal of continuity in its politics...It transformed the
invitation to with- draw from the occupied territories into the duty to establish colonies there.
Currently it considers the deployment of the international force in South Lebanon an excellent idea...on the condition that this force
is ordered to transform the region into a surveillance zone or a controlled desert. (1978: 24)
Thus, what we see emerging out of Deleuze’s writings on Palestine is an analysis that entwines
settler colonialism with the emergence and proliferation of new regimes of colonial capital
accumulation and modalities of surveillance and control.17 Yet, despite Deleuze’s writings articulating a
forceful, perhaps fatalist, critique of Zionism’s violent and accumulative logics, contained within his writings is an
affirmation of the resistive possibilities of Palestinian life. As the final section of this essay will now go on to
explore, against the ‘apocalyptic history’ (Deleuze, 1982: 29, in Deleuze and Sanbar, 1982) that Palestinians have been met with,
Deleuze articulates ongoing Palestinian
existence and resistance as a creative force that necessarily
challenges the regimes of colonial capital and dispossession that structure their disappearance.
A2 – TVA
Tag
Puar and Mikdashi’12 |Jasbir K. Puar is a U.S.-based queer theorist and Professor and Graduate
since 2000. Maya Mikdashi is a PhD candidate at Columbia University`s Department of Anthropology and
Co-Director of the documentary film About Baghdad. She is co-founder of Jadaliyya Ezine. She is Faculty
Fellow/Assistant Professor at NYU. “Pinkwatching And Pinkwashing: Interpenetration and its Discontents”,
in Jadaliyya. August 9, 2012. https://www.jadaliyya.com/Details/26818|KZaidi
In Israel, pinkwashing works to mobilize a discourse about gay rights to obfuscate the ongoing
occupation of Palestine. In the United States, pinkwatching is so focused on recovering the
queer Palestinian voice and legitimating queer solidarity frames that it speaks almost
exclusively to an American queer audience and its experiences of discrimination and struggle—
which it uses as an emotional bridge to Palestinian queers and Palestinians more broadly. Thus,
settler colonialism in historic Palestine is framed as a serial of segregated human rights abuses
that can be ameliorated piece by piece by state entities. After all, indigenous people
everywhere would feel much safer under the watchful eye of the United Nations, the
International Criminal Court, and entities such as the United States and the “western” world.
Pinkwashing ignores the settler-colonialism of Israel. Unfortunately, pinkwatching ignores the

settler-colonialism of the United States and its own entrenchment in homonationalism. More often
than not, pinkwatchers in the United States rightly critique the structural violence of settler
colonialism in Palestine, but do so without recognizing the fact that they (we) are also settlers
who live in a settler colony. Often, critique of the illegal settlements in Palestine is rendered
through a disidentification with those settlers, rather than recognition of a common historical,
political, and ongoing practice of settling the United States.
The United States is Israel’s greatest benefactor—its diplomatic and military blank check.
Without a critique of US complicity in Israel’s occupation of Palestine, queer solidarity efforts
are reproducing homonationalist versions of queerness and colluding with US imperialism.
American queers did not need to be reached out to by the Israeli government to have always already
been complicit in the colonial and criminal settling of historic Palestine. The fact that they were named as a
propaganda target by the Israeli government is only evidence of the normalization of the
“special relationship” between Israel and the United States writ large. The very visibility of the
call to American gays obfuscates the deeper and more intractable binding
between all American citizens and the continued settling of historical Palestine.
In addition to shared history and practice of settler colonialism, the United States and Israel are the largest benefactors of
homonationalism, as it operates on three scalar registers: internal, territorial, and global.
3.The Dangers of Exceptionalism
Pinkwashing partakes in global circulations of gay rights that accord civilizational status to “gay-friendly” nations, cultures, and
religions. In fact, without these global circulations, pinkwashing would not make much sense at all, just as it would not make sense if
international circulations of Islamophobia, Orientalism, and particular ideas about Arab culture had not become “normal.”
Pinkwatching does not take into account this broader global context, and instead focuses on the state of Israel as the sole offender
of this use of gay rights to demarcate civilizational aptitude. The
fact that the United States actively pinkwashes
its occupation of Iraq and pinkwashes its military desires on Iran (and that US gays are mobilized for this
purpose) goes unremarked upon. In fact, the Israeli state`s attempt to “pinkwash” its occupation of Palestine relies
on the same discourses that allowed a giant blow up doll of President Ahmadinejad to be
sodomized by a blow up nuke held by a white queer dungeon master at the 2011 San Francisco
Pride Parade. Pinkwatching activism in the United States by and large ignores the ways that the
use of gay rights discourses and bodies have been used to legitimize American colonial and
military ambitions.
A2 – Queer Theory Mutual
Tag
Puar and Mikdashi’12 |Jasbir K. Puar is a U.S.-based queer theorist and Professor and Graduate
since 2000. Maya Mikdashi is a PhD candidate at Columbia University`s Department of Anthropology and
Co-Director of the documentary film About Baghdad. She is co-founder of Jadaliyya Ezine. She is Faculty
Fellow/Assistant Professor at NYU. “Pinkwatching And Pinkwashing: Interpenetration and its Discontents”,
in Jadaliyya. August 9, 2012. https://www.jadaliyya.com/Details/26818|KZaidi
Pinkwashing ignores the settler-colonialism of Israel. Unfortunately, pinkwatching ignores the
settler-colonialism of the United States and its own entrenchment in homonationalism. More often
than not, pinkwatchers in the United States rightly critique the structural violence of settler
colonialism in Palestine, but do so without recognizing the fact that they (we) are also settlers
who live in a settler colony. Often, critique of the illegal settlements in Palestine is rendered
through a disidentification with those settlers, rather than recognition of a common historical,
political, and ongoing practice of settling the United States.
The United States is Israel’s greatest benefactor—its diplomatic and military blank check.
Without a critique of US complicity in Israel’s occupation of Palestine, queer solidarity efforts
are reproducing homonationalist versions of queerness and colluding with US imperialism.
American queers did not need to be reached out to by the Israeli government to have always already
been complicit in the colonial and criminal settling of historic Palestine. The fact that they were named as a
propaganda target by the Israeli government is only evidence of the normalization of the
“special relationship” between Israel and the United States writ large. The very visibility of the
call to American gays obfuscates the deeper and more intractable binding
between all American citizens and the continued settling of historical Palestine.
Zuabi Story
Tag
Ritskes’17|Eric Ritskes is a PhD candidate in the department of Social Justice Education at the
University of Toronto. He is the founder and editor of the online, undisciplinary, open access journal,
Decolonization: Indigeneity, Education & Society. “Beyond and Against White Settler Colonialism in
Palestine: Fugitive Futurities in Amir Nizar Zuabi’s “The Underground Ghetto City of Gaza”” in Cultural
Studies ↔ Critical Methodologies 2017, Vol. 17(1). Page 78-|KZaidi
Knowledge of freedom is (in) the invention of escape, stealing away in the confines, in the form,
of a break. —Harney and Moten (2013, p. 51) I write, and the world does not close in on me. It does not
grow smaller. It moves in the direction of what is open, future, possible. I imagine and the act of
imagination revives me. I am not fossilized or paralyzed in the face of predators. —Grossman (2009, p. 65)
Amir Nizar Zuabi’s (2014) 900-word short story, titled “The Underground Ghetto City of Gaza,” begins with an exodus
of biblical proportions: “Ten years and seven operations later . . . Upper Gaza is totally
abandoned. All of Gaza has moved underground. Men, women and children, a great mass of
people.” For the readers of a leading Israeli news site, Haaretz, where the story was published, the word image
of “a great mass of people” moving—fleeing— strikes a chord of familiarity, echoing the biblical
exodus of the Jewish people fleeing their slavery and death in Egypt. For Palestinian readers, it
would also bring to mind a different exodus, that of the 1948 Nakba, when more than 700,000
Palestinians fled their homes in the face of the unrelenting settler colonial violence of the newly
forming Israeli state. Nizar Zuabi’s story mobilizes both of these images to begin his story with a
similar, yet different, sort of exodus, a futuristic and fugitive exodus of the Palestinian people into the depths
of the earth to flee the relentless exploding bombs and stomping boots of the Israeli army. Deftly
drawing from both of these mentioned narratives of exodus, the exodus of this story is both a fleeing of colonial
violence and displacement, and also a return to a homeland . Nizar Zuabi (2014) writes,
We dug entire neighborhoods, streets, highways, schools, theaters, hospitals. We dug mirror
images of the land above that we abandoned . We gave up on the dream of getting out of the
Gaza Strip. On the promises to lift the blockade, to find a solution to the crowdedness and the
hunger, and we took action. That action, to “bury ourselves alive,” to keep digging “all the way to the core,” and
“perforate the land like a honey- comb” is what will bring about the change that wasn’t possible for the
Palestinians on the surface. In this way, the Palestinian fugitives of the story become the
gravediggers of empire, digging until the world “will suddenly collapse in on itself,” digging
their way through the land into new decolonial futures.
This article closely examines Amir Nizar Zuabi’s short story, published on August 4, 2014, in Haaretz, during the fourth week of the
most recent (2014) military invasion of Israel into Gaza, called “Operation Protection Edge” by Israeli Defense Forces (IDF). I analyze
Nizar Zuabi’sstory as an example of the fugitive futurity of decolonization, movements that
refuse colonial forms of inclusion within the state, evacuate Eurocentric definitions of
humanity and being as a site of contestation, and, “in perpetual flight from genocide” moves
“toward healthy intimacies” (James, 2013). In the story, Nizar Zuabi centers land and fugitive movements
within it, in the hopes of decolonial futures beyond the current colonial constructs of being
offered to Palestinians. In the invention of escape, in tunneling through the land, decolonial and
Palestinian futures are realized in Gaza. In the midst of profound violence, Nizar Zuabi is creatively activating
decolonial futures.
Fugitivity
Tag
Ritskes’17|Eric Ritskes is a PhD candidate in the department of Social Justice Education at the
University of Toronto. He is the founder and editor of the online, undisciplinary, open access journal,
Decolonization: Indigeneity, Education & Society. “Beyond and Against White Settler Colonialism in
Palestine: Fugitive Futurities in Amir Nizar Zuabi’s “The Underground Ghetto City of Gaza”” in Cultural
Studies ↔ Critical Methodologies 2017, Vol. 17(1). Page 78-|KZaidi
Furthermore, this story engages with modes of refusal that are both disruptive of colonial violence
and generative of Palestinian futures. I discuss these generative refusals as instigating fugitive
futurities to contribute to the larger theorizing of decolonization , of what decolonization will
require, and Palestine’s connections within decolonization. Decolonization demands more than
understanding the predatory modes of settler colonialism for resistance to them (as is often the
stated goal within settler colonial studies), but also the resurgence of alternative modes of being,
alternative futures. It is not enough to merely disrupt or “de-link” from coloniality (Mignolo, 2007);
decolonization further demands the resurgence of Indigenous, Black, and non- White life,
knowledges and ways of being. This resurgence positions these ways of being as propositions
and pathways for/to the future, rather than merely as a stasis to be recovered , or as that
which stands immobile in resistance to the colonial flux. Decolonial futurities are able to
imagine and perform and, in so doing create, “otherwise worlds” and worlds beyond the limits
of colonial imagination (Crawley, 2015). Decolonial futures are the result of the generative
reinvigoration of what colonialism has cast as degenerate.
situate Palestine and Palestinian writing within the discourses

Part of my motivation for this article is also to
of decolonial futurity (as seen in Indigenous futurism, and the more established Afrofuturism) and decolonization,
placing it in conversation with these resistance and resurgence movements in other geographic
contexts. Not only will I connect the Palestinian struggle to other Indigenous struggles against settler colonialism but I will also
draw from a robust history of Black radical studies, particularly in relation to fugitivity, to highlight the intersecting and
concomitant ways in which decolonization demands we work across race and indigeneity. Often
race, and particularly forms of anti-Black racism, have been under attended in conceptions of settler
colonialism, broadly, and Palestinian studies more specifically ; as Junaid Rana (2014) has recently argued in
regard to racism in Palestine, “racism is more often seen to be epiphenomenal, a tangent, a hindrance
to be overcome, rather than an integral part of the design [of settler colonial occupation].” In
truth, even a superficial glance demonstrates the intense anti-Black racism and state violence
that is an integral part of the daily settler occupation of the state of Israel, typically meted out
against Black immigrants in the form of mass detention (Tait, 2014), forced sterilization (David, 2014),
and frequent, violent demonstrations where White Jewish Israelis chant, “Blacks out!” (Greenwood,
2012). Jemima Pierre (2015) does important work in connecting these incidents to argue that Zionism and the occupation
of Palestine are explicitly anti-Black projects. In light of these examples, as well as the global
design of anti-Blackness as central to the project of colonialism (Wynter, 2003), this essay, despite examining
settler colonialism within the Palestinian context, intentionally centers traditions of Black radical thought and critical Indigenous
sovereignty alongside Palestinian scholarship. I do this alongside similar scholarship that sees the forms
of anti-Black
racism and settler colonialism as co-constitutive and/or inextricably intertwined (Jackson, 2014; King,
2014; Tuck, Guess, & Sultan, 2014).
In this way, I
hope to illustrate the complex and nuanced ways in which fugitive futurities are an
important framework for understanding decolonization, particularly in relation to imagining
alternative modes of being and relating, both to one another and to the land, beyond the
settler state. Discussing Israel and Palestine within settler colonial and decolonization
frameworks is not new (Abdo & Yuval- Davis, 1995) and, as Bandar and Ziadah (2016) remind us, there is a robust
history of scholarship that situates Palestine within the colonial project and creates a foundation
for current scholarship around settler colonialism in Palestine. In recent years, there has been a
marked rise of settler colonialism as a term of reference and field of inquiry within the
academy, and subsequently a more recent reinvigoration of writing about the settler colonial
nature of the Israeli state and its occupation of Palestinian territory, beginning with those such as Salaita
(2006) who connect settler colonialism in the United States to settler colonialism in Palestine, and continuing through into an even
more recent and ongoing explosion in past years (Jabary Salamanca, Qato, Rabie, & Samour, 2012; Krebs & Olwan, 2012; Mikdashi,
2013; Perugini, 2014; Saranillio, 2014; Veracini, 2013). Alongwith comparisons with state imposed apartheid
(particularly in South Africa), Israel has been commonly compared with other White settler
colonial nations such as Canada, the United States, and Australia, which occupy the territories
of Indigenous peoples, displacing and killing them to settle and make a new home in which to
stay. This article builds on these histories of settler colonial scholarship, but also actively works to unsettle the
boundaries of settler colonialism, embracing the slippages and interplay within colonialism and
settler colonialism; King (2013) reminds us of the productive “elasticity” between these terms when
theorized through Black and Indigenous feminist lenses, a necessary elasticity that is echoed by
Bhandar and Ziadah (2016) in regard to Palestine. This productive slippage between colonialism and
settler colonialism allows different forms of solidarity to be opened, and also allows the
recognition of the anti-Black settler colonial nature of Israeli occupation and how Palestinian
futurities breach these many forms of occupation and colonial violence in transformative ways.
The Politics of Refusal in Nizar Zuabi’s Underground Gaza
We, who were attacked from the sky, from the sea, from the fields, who had one-ton bombs
dropped on our heads in pointless rounds of killing, have turned our back on life. We, whom
the world forgot, decided to pay it back in kind, and forgot it right back. (Nizar Zuabi, 2014)
We kept digging, more and more, with bare hands, with cracked fingernails. We dug so deep, so
far, that we cancelled out the blockade and the borders and the definitions of the upper world.
(Nizar Zuabi, 2014)
The politics of refusal, particularly in refusing the various modes of enclosure offered by the
colonial state, have been taken up in both Indigenous and radical Black scholarship. Coulthard’s (2007,
2014) influential work on the politics of Indigenous recognition argues, through a Fanonian lens, that recognition and inclusion
through the state, rather than leading to sovereignty, reproduce the very colonial power that
Indigenous peoples hope to transcend. It is a refusal to settle for a seat at the colonial table
when the table itself could be overturned. Audra Simpson’s (2007, 2014) equally important work on ethnographic refusal
similarly demonstrates how colonial recognition works to establish “the terms of even being seen” (p. 69), how
the colonial frame of reference “sieves” Indigenous futures “in ways that are not their own” (p.
70). Instead, and in response to these colonial impositions, she positions refusal as generative, as
re-opening space for Indigenous sovereignties and futures. Tuck and Yang (2014) take up refusal in similar ways, as
both, setting the limits of what can be known and also as a generative anticolonial
counterknowledge. In productive relationship to the above works, writers such as Joy James (2013) have taken up Black refusal through
discussions of fugitivity and maroon philosophy, building on the work of scholars such as Hartman & Wilderson (2003), Wynter (2003), and other Black
radical scholars, in arguing
for the need to resist inclusion into the “perpetual genocide” of
democracy, arguing instead for work and theory based on the Black maroons who “in
perpetual flight from genocide and towards health intimacy . . . crossed the borders of colonies
and democracies” (p. 127).
Nizar Zuabi’s Palestinian fugitives embody these strands of refusal, in both the destructive and
generative senses of the term. Their work of building alternative futures begins with refusal:
“We gave up on the dream . . . and we took action” (Nizar Zuabi, 2014). Often those who advocate
for an emphasis on futurity are levied with the charge of abdicating the now for a utopic future
but, as Anderson (2010) demands, the future must be both imagined and built in the now. This is what
the Palestinian fugitives of Nizar Zuabi’s story do; they refuse the present situation, and the
death it entails, and set to work to build a better alternative. The future for the fugitive, then,
is not a utopic dream in the face of a stubborn, destructive reality. As Gaza is “totally abandoned,” the
fugitives abandon even hope: “We gave up on the dream of getting out of the Gaza Strip. On the
promises to lift the blockade, to find a solution to the crowdedness and the hunger.”
Instead of paralyzing the fugitives, their abandonment of hope energizes them to dig, to build
an entirely new city under the ground, to build an entirely new existence beyond the continual
violence of the world above. What the abandonment of hope illustrates is that, within the
colonial context of Israel, there never was any hope to begin with for the Palestinians. Deleuze wrote
in 1978 that, “Palestinians were never given any choice other than unconditional surrender. All they were offered was death” (Deleuze, 2006, p. 165).
Two weeks before Nizar Zuabi’s story was published in Hareetz, the Jerusalem Post published an opinion column by Martin Sherman (2014), which was
titled and which argued, “Gaza Must Go.” It was a violent, settler colonial piece of rhetoric that argued, in light of the ongoing resistance in Gaza, “The
grass needs to be uprooted—once and for all . . . The only durable solution requires dismantling Gaza . . . and extension of Israeli sovereignty over the
region . . .”
Nizar Zuabi’s
story and its dismissal of hope flips the idea of “Gaza Must Go” and looks at what it might mean to intentionally
evacuate the Israeli state, and their vacuous promises of solutions, for other possibilities. In
refusal, the fugitives realize
the opportunity to invest in other places and other worlds—they choose to focus on building
elsewhere. Within the parameters of Gaza’s walls and the state violence that contains
Palestinians within them, there is no hope to find; the search is futile. The physical blockade and
the ongoing Israeli occupation of Gaza are both literally sieving the possibilities and options of
Palestinians living there, and also sieving the futures available to them through the demand
for the continuance of settler occupation. There is no hope that Israel will liberate Gaza; the
normalcy and legitimacy of the settler state demands the negation of Palestinian claims to land
and sovereignty. But, in Nizar Zuabi’s story, refusing the hope of possible rescue leads to a
collective, mass movement into the ground. In the story, refusal is a fugitive move that
generatively builds a new, alternative future within the land. As Halberstam (2013) succinctly reminds us,
“The path to the wild beyond is paved with refusal” (p. 8).
What, exactly, is being refused, though by the fugitive? Here, I want to lay out three
interconnected and mutually
reinforcing modes of colonialism that are being refused in Nizar Zuabi’s story. I will focus briefly on the
first two (the state and definitions of the human), and more extensively on the third (property relationships); though, there is much
more to be explored and said about each of these, especially in regard to how they are connected and co-constitutive of one
another, which can only be gestured at in this brief space.
First, the
Palestinian fugitives refuse the recognition of the Israeli state as the mode of liberation
and freedom. The fugitive politics of decolonization in Nizar Zuabi’s story refuse binaristic
solutions, such as a “one-state solution” or a “two state solution,” that are so often called for in
Palestine; instead choosing, as Palestinian scholar Sophia Azeb (2014) calls it, a “no-state solution,” opening
up new possibilities that allow “moving beyond the imaginary of the state” (Azeb, 2014). Rana (2014)
similarly demands that decolonization in Palestine is not simply the fight for a nation-state but “also a
struggle of liberation from the nation-state.” Both Azeb and Rana connect Indigenous
movements, particularly in Turtle Island (North America), to the struggle for Palestinian futures, stating
that the power of Indigenous movements—such as the recent Idle No More movement, for example—
for Palestinians is assisting in “imagining a sovereignty that goes beyond the nation state, that
is land based” (Azeb, 2014). In refusing the solutions of the state , Nazir Zuabi, like Azeb, looks outside
the current frames of inclusion and possibility, beyond “the promises to lift the blockade, to
find a solution for the crowdedness and hunger” (Nizar Zuabi, 2014). As Azeb (2014) argues, Palestinians have
been fighting for a nation- state because, to be recognized within international frameworks, one must be a nation. Instead, in Nazir
Zuabi’s story, inclusion
and, subsequently, state-based solutions necessary for inclusion, are
abandoned for a politics of fugitivity and land-based futurity.
Second, in “The Underground Ghetto City of Gaza,” there is a refusal of being “human” as understood through
colonial sense-making mechanisms and the legal apparatuses that enshrine these particular
definitions of humanness and belonging. Harney and Moten (2013), building on Fanon, demonstrate
the decolonization is not only the end of colonialism but “ the end of the standpoint from which
colonialism makes sense” (Halberstam, 2013, p. 8). Sylvia Wynter’s (2003) work underpins how Western
reason and sense making have been the bulwarks of the coloniality of Man, centering the
heteronormative, White, rational male subject. Wynter demonstrates the historical and ideological
roots of the colonial construct of Man and its central role not only in global anti-Black violence
but also in the project of empire and genocide in the so-called “new world,” a project that Weheliye (2014) takes up
and furthers in his recent work. They demonstrate how conceptions of humanity (and who might be included in this
category) have always been racialized, gendered, colonial, etc. in ways that structure the ideal
rational and universal Man in contrast to and negation of “Others.” Weheliye (2014) argues that this
refusal of Man (as a category of being) has been the central work of critical Black studies, which “works
towards the abolition of Man, and advocates the radical reconstruction and decolonization of
what it means to be human” (p. 4).
In Nizar Zuabi’s story, the Palestinian fugitives

have “turned their back on life” because Palestinian life
within the White, settler colonial nation of Israel has been constructed through these
frameworks of racism and colonialism as non-human. Within Gaza, Palestinians live at the mercy of
an occupier that seeks their perpetual (into the future) death. The settler colonial state, built
through the connected structures of anti-Black racism and Indigenous genocide, seeks the
perpetual death of Palestinian life. As a past Prime Minister of Israel, Ben Guirion, sums up: “We must expel the Arabs
and take their places and if we have to, use force, to guarantee our own right to settle in those places” (n.p., in Martin, 2005).
There is no possibility for Palestinian futures within occupied Gaza.
In “turning our back on life,” the Palestinian fugitives abdicate both the pursuit of inclusion
into the solutions of the colonial nation-state and what this inclusion demands, which is the
“acceptance of categories [of the human] based on white supremacy and colonialism” (Weheliye,
2014, p. 77). When one has been forgotten, relegated to the zone of non-being and perpetual
death, the only action left besides waiting for death, is refusal—“We, whom the world forgot,
decided to pay it back in kind, and forgot it right back” (Nizar Zuabi, 2014). The colonial logic of life, as
existing into perpetuity alongside the perpetual death of the racialized and Indigenous other, is
illustrated in Nizar Zuabi’s story by the chants shouted alongside the “military march” of boots:
They shout, “Death to Gaza . . . Death to life!” The logic of White settler colonialism has marked Palestinians
for death; they are made murderable and, in fact, must be murdered for settler colonialism to
be normalized and legitimated. They are the non-human by which, and through, whose death,
the occupation and its definitions of who belongs, who is human , are made normal. And, it is
these logics, of inclusion and of who is made human, that are blocked —in fact, the very shouts
of “Death to life!” are blocked in the story—by the land. The fugitives “return to [the land]” and,
in the process of return and in the process of fleeing, of digging through it, cancel out the rules
and definitions of settler colonialism.
Settler Colonialism and the Futuristic Politics of Land
Decolonization necessarily involves an interruption of the settler colonial nation-state, and of

settler relations to land. Decolonization must mean attending to ghosts. (Tuck & Ree, 2013, p. 647)
For Nizar Zuabi’s fugitives, “the only refuge left to us was the earth. We buried ourselves.”
Within the earth they are safe from the death above them and there they can build a different
future, a different world that is both a refuge and a site of possibility. This emphasis of the importance of
the land, and the call to “return” to it echoes the multitude of Indigenous writers who demand the
centering of the land— of earth, water, and territory—in decolonization movements (Corntassel,
2012; Tuck & Yang, 2012; Watts, 2013). Too often the emphasis on land and earth has rendered Indigenous
politics as static, as rooted and unable to adapt (Goeman, 2013; Martineau & Ritskes, 2014). King (2013)
emphasizes this “fixing” as part of the settler colonial discourse, where Indigenous peoples’
connection and relationship to land is stuck in the particular:
Settlement is the subjugation and sinking/fixing of others into a state of flux (death, fungibility) in
order for the Settler to transcend into a state of humanness. As the ultimate self actualizing human, the
Settler can actually overcome the particularity of place (body, gender, race, abject sexuality) and launch
into the universal and abstract space. (p. 98)
Indigenous conceptions of land refuse these colonial fixations and are instead mnemonic,
alive, and ever changing; land is what roots Indigenous routes of flight against and beyond
colonialism (Goeman, 2013; Martineau & Ritskes, 2014; Vizenor, 1998). Nizar Zuabi’s piece beautifully illustrates how
Indigenous land roots paths of flight, affirmatively answering questions such as the one
Mishuana Goeman (2013) asks about Indigenous peoples in relation to their lands, “Are we free
to roam?” (p. 11). Indigenous land itself resists stasis; it is alive and in motion.
Nizar Zuabi’s futurity rejects state inclusion, and its colonial definitions of the human, and plunges
into the earth, digging. He both re-roots while re-routing through the land, toward a future
where colonial definitions of humanity no longer make sense. In this, he embraces the land as
both particular and mobile, re-rooting/routing the Palestinian fugitives in and through spaces
that reconfigure their very beings. It is in this move to the land that the third mode of colonial
being is refused. In centering both survival and future within conceptions of Indigenous and
Palestinian land, the logic and relationality of property ownership is refused. I want to further
examine how Indigenous land challenges this colonial mode of being and demonstrate how, by reorienting the spatial
through Indigenous understandings of land, we might also reorganize the temporal logics of
belonging to include past, present, and future as sites of contestation. Decolonization demands
attention to, and struggle for, not only the past and present, but also the future. As Nizar Zuabi (2014)
declares in his story, recognizing the connections between the colonial definitions of humanity and
temporality, in digging the fugitives dig “beyond life, and far beyond time.”
In digging through the earth, the

Palestinian fugitives of Nizar Zuabi’s story are reconnected and rooted
to their history; as Indigenous Hawaiian scholar and activist Huanani Kay Trask (1999) states, “To know my history, I
had to put away my books and return to the land ” (p. 118). Indigenous “land is mnemonic, it has its
own set of memories” (Wheeler, 2010, p. 55) and, as these fugitives dig, they dig “down into the soil of
Gaza, through the layers of time” (Nizar Zuabi, 2014). In the ground, tunneling and perforating time,
the Palestinian fugitives find ghosts of the past, of their history: They find Samson’s long braid,
Delilah’s thighbone, and broken pillars from an ancient temple; remnants from a tale of past
revenge when Samson brought Palestinian buildings tumbling, killing thousands of people. An
etching on one of the pillars leaves no way to miss the message of this story: “Remember me, please, that I may be avenged of my
two eyes.” Zuabi’s
use of this particular story speaks of vengeance against the occupying oppressor;
Samson, who had his eyes gouged out, his strength removed, and his dignity stolen and, yet, in
the midst of a seeming never-ending captivity, was able to rise up one last time and exact
revenge on his captors.
It is in the land that these stories are unearthed and re- animated alongside the tunneling
fugitives. Keshet (2011) argues that the Palestinian refugee is the ghost that haunts the state of Israel
because of the state’s denial of the Palestinian’s right to return to their homeland; in Nizar Zuabi’s
story, it is in the land that the refugee finds both these ghosts and also a “subterranean right of
return” (Nizar Zuabi, 2014). This “right of return” which is found within the soil confounds inclusion within the
settler colonial state: “Haunting . . . is the relentless remembering and reminding that will not
be appeased by settler society’s assurances of innocence and reconciliation” (Tuck & Ree, 2013, p.
642). The return of the Palestinian body to Palestinian land is a re-rooting, a reclaiming of place,
and an assertion of relationships that exist before, beneath, and beyond settler colonial
imposition. Byrd (2014) argues that for Indigenous bodies, their return “haunts the nation-state”
formation and, subsequently, is always deferred and dispersed. Here, these Palestinian histories,
the ghosts of belonging in this place, haunt the Israeli state. Coming face to face with a history that
represents Palestinian life and history, there is a direct challenge to Israeli settler colonialism, which
demands the emptying of Palestinian life and history to claim sole historical legitimacy to
occupy the land. These ghosts, dug up by the fugitives, are once again made visible and, in the process, demonstrate
the potential to disrupt the past, present, and future of Israeli settler colonialism.
This temporal reconstruction and remixing is central to the fugitive futurism of this story,
where past, present, and future are (re)constructed within (and, in motion through) the land.
This is done through refusing colonial intrusion; as the fugitives dig Nizar Zuabi notes the
sounds of the occupation are blocked by the land , “we don’t hear anything anymore.” Nizar Zuabi’s
Palestinian fugitives dig, and then they keep digging: “we kept digging—beyond life and beyond
time.” The “beyond” is a fugitive, futuristic move that seeks escape from colonial “life” and
“time.” This remixing of the temporal in the “beyond” gestures to what Fanon (1967) argues,
that without a Black past and a Black future, he is unable to live out his Black identity in the
present. It is the same for the Palestinian fugitives. In the earth, their past (Delilah’s braid, the temple pillars) is
reconnected to the present struggles, while digging in a move to secure the future. The land holds
the past; as Goeman (2013) demonstrates, the land is storied land and the holder of memories and
knowledge. The land also holds decolonial futurities that exist beyond settler futures (Tuck & Yang,
2012).
The land in Nizar Zuabi’s

story does more than remix colonial understandings of time in relation to
place, it also confounds colonial sense making, more broadly. As the Palestinians build and
entrust themselves to the land, the world above them is canceled out and destroyed. Both the
physical and material manifestations of occupation are canceled out —the noise of the bombs, the limits of
the wall— but also the very definitions of the occupation are canceled : “We dug so deep, so far, that we
cancelled out the blockade and the borders and the definitions of the upper world” (Nizar Zuabi,
2014). The definitions that are canceled are the terms of colonial understanding, of being, and
of relating—of who belongs, whose life matters, and who has a future.
Zuabi’s descriptions of going underground and of the digging emphasize the land as material
and agentic—the land is layered by time, it cracks fingernails, it is the ally of despair and the
despairing. Understanding land as agentic, as escaping the definitional confines of colonial
sense making in itself, confounds colonial sense making. Discussing Indigenous epistemologies
and land, Watts (2013) insists that Indigenous ways of knowing and relating to land directly
counter and disrupt colonial sense making. Her writing itself deconstructs “reason,” science and
history look like by working from the premise that the story of Sky Woman, as part of the
Haudenosaunee creation story of the land is, “not imagined or fantasized. This is not lore, myth
or legend . . . This is what happened” (p. 21). Indigenous conceptions of the earth see it as
agentic, as “alive and thinking”; human (and non-human) agency is derivative of and
concomitant with the agentic, speaking, stor(y)ing land. It is this agentic, mnemonic, Indigenous
land that the fugitives return to, to tunnel and build in; it is this land that holds them and
protects them; and, it is this land that “perforates” the world and causes its violent destruction
(Nizar Zuabi, 2014).
In the fugitive’s continual tunneling into the land,
We start to hope that if we keep on digging . . . if we don’t stop . . . maybe it will suddenly
collapse in on itself . . . The upper part and lower part will blend. And the rules will change.
(Nizar Zuabi, 2014)
This is the destructive and violent possibility of decolonization: that the rules will change when
the current world collapses.
Decolonization, which sets out to change the order of the world, is, obviously, a program of
complete disorder . . . In decolonization, there is therefore the need of a complete calling in
question of the colonial situation . . . “The last shall be first and the first last.” Decolonization is
the putting into practice of this sentence. (Fanon, 1961, pp. 35-36)
In the story, when the upper world is destroyed, definitions of the nation and of the human are
also destroyed, as is the colonial mode of being/relationality: property. Critical Black studies has
articulated how Black bodies and Blackness challenge racialized logics of property and
ownership constructed within colonial frames; similarly, Indigenous land challenges conceptions
of property and ownership, presenting alternatives and “relationships otherwise.” Property is a
settler colonial mode of being in relationship, a mode of power based on conquest and
exploitation that subverts Indigenous modes of relationship to land, seeking to destroy them to
claim ownership of the land (Tuck & Yang, 2012). Indigenous conceptions of land refuse the
logics of property and ownership and “this radical relationality to the land, that is birthed from
and in the alterity of indigeneity, is a lived critique of settler modes of knowing and sensing that
are cognitively ordered through property and ownership” (Martineau & Ritskes, 2014).
The fugitive’s move into the land, returning and re-rooting/re-routing to and through the
refuge of the earth, is a move irrecupable to colonial ways of knowing and being. King (2013),
who in her work links Black studies and Indigenous studies, demonstrates through her
examination of the plantation and Black female bodies how property is a “concept of unending
possibility that cognitively orders the mind of the Settler and master and enables their surveying
eyes to see the potential yield of both bodied beyond the confines and definitions of settler
colonialism, the fugitives refuse not only definitions of the human but the relationships of
property ownership that defines who is human through colonial constructions of Man. Weheliye
(2014) demonstrates how colonialism demands the death of the Indigenous body as the “fee” in
which to access personhood, to “save the world of Man” (p. 79). Settler colonialism demands
Indigenous death (genocide), to maintain and normalize property ownership over land; property
ownership is also the mode of relating to Black flesh within an anti-Black world (slavery),
making Black peoples property to be owned. As Kawash (1999) argues, “The purpose of the
[settler colonial] state begins with the irreducible principle: the principle of property” (p. 238).
The settler colonial state is founded on these modes of being and relationship oriented through
property.
Instead of personhood and inclusion founded on relationships of property, the Palestinian

fugitives turn in/to the land and the possibilities of new decolonial relationalities found within it.
Not only does the land resist definitions of personhood connected to relationships of property—
as Kawash (1999) writes, “The modern idea of property and the modern idea of the subject are
indissociable” (p. 238)— but it re-links to relationalities and modes of being found in the land; as
Trask (1999) argues, for Indigenous peoples, “[Our story and being] rests within the culture,
which is inseparable from the land. To know this is to know our history. To write this is to write
of the land and the people who are born from her” (p. 121). The Palestinian people are born
from the land, the loamy soil of Gaza, and, in their desire to escape occupation, they return to it.
Nazir Zuabi refuses the world of colonial sense making and, in digging—in fugitive movements
through the land—perforates the world and willingly brings about its complete destruction.
Digging, in this story, is the fugitive action bringing about decolonial futures:
And we start to hope that if we keep on digging, all the way to the core, if we don’t stop . . .
maybe it will suddenly collapse in on itself. And then, like a tray piled with cups of coffee and
cookies that crashes to the floor in a mess of crumbs and glass, it will all mix together.
This fugitive action is birthed of a politics of refusal, the refusal of the intimately connected
colonial cognitive orders of the state, of humanity, and of property. Digging perforates the world
constructed by colonization and gives possible Palestinian futures beyond occupation. Tunneling
digs the grave of empire and births new futures, and—in Nizar Zuabi’s story—new people who
emerge from the earth.
Conclusion
In Zuabi’s fugitive futurity, it is in the soil that Palestinians experience a “right to return”; it is the
land that welcomes them home and gives them what the state of Israel refuses to do. It is a
reminder that it is not the colonial state that is home; it is the land, the literal earth, that is both
home and also brings them home. It is in the land that the Palestinian fugitive is re-rooted and
re-routed beyond settler colonialism. This futuristic “right of return” is a repopulating of
Palestinian life and future on and in the land. The ending of Nizar Zuabi’s story sees the
Palestinian people re-emerge from the ground into the light, onto the surface of the land. Upon
re-emerging, fear creeps into their hearts that “while we were finding refuge in subterranean
Gaza, the land above took its own life, was left behind and emptied out.” This uncertain ending
does two things. One, it refutes a popular Israeli argument, that the Palestinians wish to see the
Jewish people exterminated and driven into the sea; thus, because of this murderous drive, any
violence that Israel metes out is merely self-defense against an enemy that wishes to see it
exterminated. It also speaks back against the narrative that emanated from the most recent
siege, both from Israeli commentators and soldiers. Editorials emerged from leading Israeli news
sites, such as one in the Jerusalem Post (Sherman, July 24, 2014), titled “Why Gaza Must Go,”
that advocated for “uprooting” Gaza and displacing the Palestinians living there as the only
approach acceptable, and one in The Times of Israel (Gordon, August 1, 2014), titled “When
Genocide is Permissible,” that advocated for “permissible” genocide of the Palestinian peoples.
These “final solutions” demand the removal and extermination of the Palestinian people, an
emptying out of the land for Israeli sovereignty to flourish. And that, according to IDF soldiers
involved in the ground incursion, is what happened. In an online article, IDF soldiers were
quoted saying that, “When we [pulled out of Gaza] we made sure there was nothing left
standing, no resistance” and that their unit had “wiped clean” the area they had been fighting in
(Frenkel, 2014). Instead, in the story, the Palestinians do not disappear and refuse to disappear,
the Palestinians emerge to repopulate the land and to claim their rightful place in Gaza.
Settler colonialism demands an emptying of the land, a genocidal removal of anyone and
anything that challenges the normativity and legitimacy of the settler’s existence and right to
rule as sovereign. The land becomes free to claim in the violent absence of life. As the Jerusalem
Post (2014) article argues, Gaza and its people must be dismantled and removed to extend
“Israeli sovereignty over the area.” This is the logic of settler colonialism that Zuabi refuses once
again in his ending. He refuses death, including the death of the Jewish people, as the basis for
the future. The decolonial future is not the emergence of one people at the expense of another,
but a future where everyone’s right to be is affirmed and the challenges of working together to
build with and on the land beyond the limits and definitions of settler colonialism are embraced.
The future that awaits the re-emergent Palestinian people cannot be rendered easily imaginable
—their fugitive tunneling through Indigenous land is both world making and world shattering;
this is the power fugitive futurities (Halberstam, 2013). Through refusal, a tunnel, a passage way,
a break, is opened up for the work of imagining, enacting, and building new relationalities,
relationalities that are “beyond” the limits of colonial sense making. The vision written out in
Nizar Zuabi’s “The Underground Ghetto City of Gaza” is not a utopia; it is a fugitive future. It
recognizes that the work of building new decolonial relationalities has much to accomplish even
after the destruction of the “world above.” Decolonization must be both world shattering and
world building. But we do not yet know exactly where that building, that rooting/routing, that
creative force will take us. Despite this unknown that the fugitives are confronted with upon
emergence onto the surface, they know the conditions of possibility lie within the land and the
reconfiguring of relationships through the land. To be able to make a break, to puncture the
definitions of the world that colonialism has created, there must be a fugitive futurity that
refuses recognition and integration, that remains irrecupable to colonial being, sensing and
knowing, and that creatively imagines and builds futures beyond the limits of colonial forms of
knowing, relating, and being.
Israel Cards Week 2
Thinking Life Death and Solidarity Through
Colonized Palestine – Puar
Pinkwashing
Tag.
KZaidi
JKP: Terrorist Assemblages includes a short section that addresses the conditional
queer solidarities offered around
Palestine, which usually revolve around a narrative of “we support you in your statehood, but you
need to get your act together around gender and sexuality.” This informed my thinking about Islamophobia,
the Islamophobic queer, and progressive queer organizing structured around Islamophobic principles well before 9/11, for example,
in Britain and northern Europe, which have very different and in some ways earlier and more entrenched histories of Islamophobia
than the United States. I
think of the United States and Israel as collaborators in naturalizing settler
colonial ideology and settlement practices insofar as they are both states with the most to gain
from homonationalist projections of sexual tolerance and sexual freedom. Both can deploy
homonationalism on multiple scales: internally, in relation to territories they occupy, and at the level
of global cosmopolitanism. Homosexuality becomes a marker of the sovereign capacity of a
state and a foil, even justification, for settler colonialism and the violence of empire. At least since the 1990s,
multiple states, societies, cities, and even businesses actively deploy pinkwashing as a strategy that
produces them as gay-friendly. Pinkwashing is pivotal to the global gay and lesbian tourism
industry, which has prolifically produced a distinction between gay-friendly and not gay-
friendly locations for several decades. For Palestinians, the recruitment and instrumentalization of
LGBTQ tourists into the Brand Israel ideology is the least of it. Palestinian queer activists forcefully
taught me the devastating effects of Israeli pinkwashing on Palestinians. They understand pinkwashing as a
form of internal colonialization, an introjection and reification of the discourse of “Palestinian
homophobia” into the psyches and souls of Palestinians, thus suturing the occupation to yet
another vector of inferiority. It is a damning and insidiously powerful strategy. Often the focus of queer
solidarity with Palestinians and criticism of the Israeli state’s instrumentation of LGBTQ identities is structured
around “not in my name” antiwar and antioccupation protests by Jewish queers and queers
globally, rather than around the effects of pinkwashing on the colonized.
KM: In your work on the war on terror, you take the homosexual body as a site through which to examine the “progressive” politics
of sexuality. But alongside pinkwashing, the Israeli state regulates sexuality in other ways, through Jewish pronatalist policies,
regulating miscegenation between Palestinians and Jewish Israelis, and sterilizing black Jewish women against their will or
knowledge. Does an examination of the sexual politics of the Israeli state warrant a different kind of analytic? To what extent do you
think the homonationalist analytic developed in Terrorist Assemblages travels across the terrains of Zionist occupation and
colonization?
JKP: In my recent monograph, The Right to Maim: Debility, Capacity, Disability (Puar 2017a), I conjoin pinkwashing, which
essentially centralizesa binary that pits the putative sexual freedom of the Israelis against the
purported sexual repression of Palestinians, with the biopolitical regulation of sexuality that
cuts across homohetero divides. In June 2017 Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu once again denied
requests that women and men have equal access and space at the Western Wall in the Old City of
Jerusalem. Thus the so-called gay haven of Tel Aviv—if you are not Arab—easily coexists with strict
gender segregation among some Jewish communities in Jerusalem and multiple Israeli
settlements in the occupied West Bank. Israel is also preoccupied with regulating heterosexual
reproduction, children and child rearing in gay partnerships, and women’s sexuality, gay and straight. These coexisting
realities challenge the LGBTQ acceptance versus homophobia binary and show how the discourse of
LGBTQ rights and freedoms obscures much more than the occupation.
Assemblage Theory
Tag
KZaidi
JKP: My concerns with intersectionality were twofold. The first is how gender
studies is becoming a disciplinary site
through its attachment to a specific method and object. For interdisciplinary scholars, the relation
between discipline, method, and object is something that we always have to unsettle. I am
resistant to the consolidation of any specific method to an object within interdisciplinary work. Second, I have always used
intersectional approaches in my research. However, I noticed that the
citational reliance on “intersectionality” —a
gestural intersectionality— did not always disrupt the epistemological formations in the work of white
feminists who continue to theorize gender as the foundational difference. It is somewhat like saying “We
need diversity” and then relying on the performativity of this statement to be a force of diversification
unto itself. I was also frustrated with how the deployment of intersectionality in the academy leaves
women of color primarily responsible for the deployment and acceptance of intersectional
theorizing. In academe, anyway, our numbers haven’t changed and the bodies haven’t changed— or have not changed enough.
The debates of the past ten years in black feminist theory have produced multiple, inspiring,
and rigorous analyses of the uses of intersectionality. I love, for example, how Jennifer C. Nash (2014) and
Angela Davis (2016) write about intersectionality. While neither writes about intersectionality per se, Kara Keeling (2012) and Sylvia
Wynter (2003) make important cases for theorizing the manner in which race, sex, and gender intersect as
historically specific, which I take to mean that intersectionality is not an ontological absolute or
self-evident experience of being but is rather a historically and situationally site-specific
heuristic. I am also reminded of Rey Chow’s (2002) incisive summation that race and sex are forms of categorical
miscegenation in themselves. Her phrasing makes me think of a Möbius strip where the inside and
outside are one. What is called forth as the outside continuously rotates with what is called forth as
the inside. Race, sex, and gender are ever-moving in this sense. There is nothing transcendent
about the concept of assemblage, and it has its own limitations. I started working with affect and thinking about
nonhuman entities and objects. Assemblage prioritizes movement over location, a distinct difference
from intersectionality. The concept is helpful because societies of control function more through
affective modulations and the micromanagement of populations than through identitarian
formations. There are many reasons to consider multiple creative combinations of methods and approaches. I was never
championing Gilles Deleuze’s work—and believe me, orthodox Deleuzians are not interested in how I use his work. I have always
advocated repurposing canonical work for what we want to do with it, whether to interrupt, disrupt, or antagonize existing
institutional power dynamics. It is also important that we continually reevaluate the analytic rubrics we
mobilize in our work.
RTM
Tag
KZaidi
JKP: Debilitation and maiming for me are routes toward a more robust critical lexicon for
discussing life, death, and disability. In The Right to Maim I offer two main interventions in relation to biopolitics. First,
I suggest that the pendulum of living and dying that most theorizations of biopolitics hinge on
cannot account for debilitation as a distinct coordinate that is neither a diminished life nor an
injury en route to death, but rather a chronic state of being and thus a tactical aim of bio-political
control. I think Israel enacts a “will not let die” vector that is distinct from the “let die” quadrant of
slow death. During Israel’s 2014 Operation Protective Edge against the Palestinians of Gaza, I was struck by
the productivity of a remote-control system that allowed the state to manage and damage the
colonized population from afar. This offers an interesting contrast to the West Bank, where there is
more intimacy and proximity of bodies in space in the colonial relationship. Massive profit is generated by
making sure Gazans remain alive but not in a vibrant or resistant way. During Operation
Protective Edge, many may have wondered what Israel gets from maintaining Gaza’s
population when they could just as easily go in and bomb the entire place. Debilitating and
injuring, perhaps more so than killing, seem to be important to the Israelis, debilitating the water and
electricity infrastructures, maiming bodies with certain weapons . This debilitation is justified through claims
of the humanitarian “sparing” of life, of shooting to maim rather than to kill, a policy narrated in life-
preservationist terms. And yet the injured have few resources to heal and recover. The second intervention
follows from this question and is directed beyond the specific site of Palestine to the theorization of settler colonialism broadly:
what are the aims of settler colonialism? Yes, genocide and assimilation have been key, but I
believe that chronic debilitation is also necessary—for generating profit, justifying
humanitarian intervention and thus preserving the “civilized” alibi of the project, and deriving
ideological heft from a population that can be said to exist but somehow cannot thrive. The idea of
slow death focuses on the relation to death but does not adequately theorize the slow aspect of slow death. Temporalities of
slowness are manifest to Palestinians in the West Bank, where it can easily take three hours to
travel ten kilometers. Israel systematically slows down the movement of Palestinians, their
commerce, and their products with checkpoints, roadblocks, the separation wall, and
segregated roads and highways. Palestine itself becomes simultaneously bigger and smaller in
a spatial and temporal sense because it takes so long to get anywhere even as Israel
appropriates more Palestinian land, making it unavailable for them to use or travel through. People stay very close to
their necessary paths in this smaller world of Areas A, B, and C, where it is so difficult to travel between areas without limited
permits and identifications. Some Palestinian disability activists understand this as the
production of mobility
impairment across populations, across a disablednondisabled binary, a form of collective punishment for all
Palestinians. This is the slow aspect of slow death: slow death can entail a really slow life too. The occupation
works in part by withholding from Palestinians any control over temporality: by foreclosing or suspending
access to speed, the immediacy of forms of contact, and the space-time compression so coveted in modernity and crucial to the
circulation of goods, ideas, and bodies.
KM: Despite your focus on Palestinian death, your work remains committed to Foucault’s positive, productive, and life-affirming
conception of the biopolitical. In “The Right to Maim”(Puar 2015, 6), you ask,“What are the productive, resistant, indeed creative,
effects of such attempts to squash Palestinian vitality, fortitude, and revolt?” How does one conceptualize resistance in a context of
what Nadera Shalhoub-Kevorkian (2014) calls the Palestine “death zone”? Does living itself become a technology of anticolonial
resistance?
JKP: I developed an even greater appreciation for the phrase “Existence

is resistance” after my 2016 trip to Palestine. This
is the absolute reality for Palestinians. Everyday life in Jerusalem, the West Bank, and Gaza is
saturated with endless acts of resistance, including refuting, navigating, and contesting the
occupation. Most Palestinians refuse to cave in to its logics and are committed instead to
practicing forms of living as critique. That in itself requires an astonishing amount of labor.
Imagine having to organize your day around getting up at three in the morning while not knowing if you will get through the
checkpoint and arrive to work on time, spending hours to get home, and then starting the whole thing over again the following day.
This fortitude is a model of dignity and determination even as we should not romanticize it. As I
explain in The Right to Maim, the state of Israel has calculated the monetization of existence as
resistance. The inevitable normalization of quotidian struggles —because people have to live their lives—
demands directing copious amounts of corporeal and other resources toward this abusive
relationship. Palestinians live in the temporal instability of the indefinite. The suspended state of the
indefinite wreaks multigenerational psychological and physical havoc on Palestinians.
BDS
Tag
KZaidi
JKP: We are reaching an important threshold with BDS campaigns in major academic organizations. From the vantage of the Right to
Education movement in Palestine, every
effort to pass a BDS resolution is a victory , whether or not it is
successful, because it compels discussion. We have seen these battles blow open public debate and
challenge the status quo that continuously recycles the Palestine situation as the third rail of
academe. There is a slight shift in the politics of “radical feminist except for Palestine” or “leftist
except for Palestine”—a problem Edward Said pointed out for decades. The ongoing Modern Language
Association (MLA) BDS campaign is telling in what it has taught us about the mutual reinforcement of disciplinary and ideological
conservatism. I do not feel that it is a coincidence that the first BDS resolution passed in an interdisciplinary organization, the
Association for Asian American Studies (April 2013)—which was before ASA, let us not forget. These organizations
represent fields indebted to social justice movements, fields that prioritize the imperative of
decolonizing knowledge production. By stating that the association needs to get back to the task of studying
literature, the MLA assumes the privileged stance of ignoring relations between global politics and
knowledge production. It is a bizarre but not surprising position for those of us engaged in interdisciplinary scholarship.
Notably, undergraduate and graduate students, including Jewish American students working in organizations such as Jewish Voices
for Peace and Students for Justice in Palestine, are leading much of the incredible BDS activism; some are turning to divestment
campaigns. The terrain, composition, and multiracial nature of BDS organizing is evolving and includes the
Black Lives Matter connection, the “Ferguson 2 Palestine” forums, and recent solidarity
statements from black intellectuals. This is becoming an anti-imperialist movement in its fullest
sense. Even in this politically repressive climate, perhaps because of it, while some people are playing it safer than
ever around the question of Palestine, others are fighting harder than ever . That is very exciting.
US Israel Special Relationship – Badillo
General History
Tag
In the wake of U.S. President Donald Trump’s recognition of Israeli sovereignty over the Syrian Golan Heights,
we are seeing a continuation of the Trump’s administration’s flat-out rejection of international
law on the status of occupied territories held by Israel since 1967. The timing is significant because it is
an attempt by Trump to meddle in the Israeli elections on April 9 which ultimately could benefit
Benjamin Netanyahu’s chances for re-election. The Trump administration seems to care very little
about international consensus and international law on the status of the occupied territories. Instead, it
has sabotaged the American government’s standing as an “honest broker” and effectively
encouraged support for the continuation of Israeli colonization of Arab land. Until now, no country had
recognized Israel’s act of plunder in the Golan Heights. Following the Six Day war in 1967, Israel expelled
130,000 Syrians from the Golan Heights. 14 years later, in 1981, Israel annexed the territory – in
violation of international law. The United Nations member states, including the U.S., immediately declared Israeli efforts
to change the Golan Height’s status “null and void.” A small population of Syrian Druze are the only survivors
of that ethnic cleansing operation. Greg Shupak, author of The Wrong Story: Palestine, Israel and the Media, argues
that “American foreign policy and Israeli settler-colonial capitalism shape what happens across
historic Palestine.” We recently saw this unfold when Trump issued his Jerusalem decree to
recognize the city as the Israeli capital, which goes against the international community’s consensus of
Jerusalem as a final status issue in negotiations and, again, violates international law. While the U.S.
Embassy was moving from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem on May 15, Israeli snipers were massacring 60
Palestinians protesters in the Great March of Return at the Gaza fence. This is not the first time
we have seen U.S. foreign policy and Israeli settler-colonial enterprise interfered with the
international community’s consensus on Palestinian-Israeli affairs. The Jerusalem Basic Law of 1980 and
the Jerusalem Embassy Act of 1995 were highly controversial because of their timing and their political and
legal implications, according to Michael Zank, a professor at Boston University. Both laws were enacted during times
when the international coalition was making progress with the Palestinian-Israeli peace
negotiations. U.S. President Jimmy Carter and Egyptian President Anwar al-Sadat had signed the Camp
David Accords, a peace treaty with Israel and Egypt in 1979; consequently, the Jerusalem Basic Law
endangered the peace process and negatively impacted the ongoing negotiations. The Jerusalem Embassy Act
was signed into law shortly after the Oslo Accords were concluded and greatly affected the final status
negotiations between Israel and the Palestinian Authority that were held at Camp David in 2000. Both
these legislative acts created a binding relationship between Israel and the U.S which
ultimately changed the status quo.
Arms Sales
Tag
competing in small-arms and high-end security technology on a worldwide scale . Israel started
United States can provide – as much as $1.2 billion per year , according to Ajl. In addition, this MOU locked
contract, but Israel is allowed to purchase military items for far less , according to Berrigan. Today, Israel has been the
announce his “ultimate deal” following the Israeli elections and after a new government is formed . It is only a matter of time till the
Israeli apartheid.
The Right to Maim
Thesis – Ferguson to Gaza Axis
Tag
The intensification of the writing of this book, and the formulation of “the right to maim,” its most urgent political theoretical
contribution, began the summer of 2014. This was the summer police shot Michael Brown in Ferguson,
Missouri, and the summer of Operation Protective Edge, the fifty- one-day Israeli siege of Gaza.
Organizers protesting these seemingly disparate events began drawing connections, tracing the
material relationships between the Israeli occupation of Palestine and the militarization of police in
Ferguson, from the training of U.S. law enforcement by the Israeli state to the tweeting of
advice from Palestinians on how to alleviate tear gas exposure. Descriptions of the militarized
containment of civilians in Fergu- son echoed those of the settler colonial occupation of Palestine. It
was not long before the “Ferguson to Gaza” frame starting taking hold as an organizing rubric. Ferguson-to-Gaza forums
sought to correlate the production of settler space, the vulnerability and degradation of black
and brown bodies, the demands for justice through transnational solidarities, and the
entangled workings of settler colonialism in the United States and Israel. The comparisons, linkages, and
affective resonances between Ferguson and Gaza were not perfectly aligned, and they did not always
yield immediate alliances. But these efforts were convivial in their mutual resistance to the violent
control of populations via targeted bodily assaults, and reflected desires for reciprocating,
intersectional, and co-constituted assemblages of sol.
One striking aspect of the connective tissue between Ferguson and Gaza involved security
practices mining the relationship between disability and death. Police brutality in the United
States toward black men and women in particular showed a definitive tendency to aim for death,
often shooting numerous bullets into an unarmed, subjugated, and yet supposedly threatening body—overkill, some
might call it. Why were there seemingly so few attempts to minimize the loss of life? The U.S. security
state enacted powerful sovereign entitlements even as it simultaneously claimed tremendous
vulnerability. The police were merely “doing their job,” a dangerous, life-threatening one. This calculation
of risk is the founding rationalization for the impunity of “the right to kill” wielded by U.S. law
enforcement.
The might of Israel’s military—one of the most powerful in the world— is built upon the claim of an
unchanging ontological vulnerability and precarity, driven by history, geopolitics, and geography. Alongside the
“right to kill,” I noted a complementary logic long present in Israeli tactical calculations of settler colonial rule—that of
creating injury and maintaining Palestinian populations as perpetually debilitated, and yet alive,
in order to control them. The Israeli Defense Forces (idf) have shown a demonstrable pattern over
decades of sparing life, of shooting to maim rather than to kill. This is ostensibly a humanitarian
practice, leaving many civilians “permanently disabled” in an occupied territory of destroyed hospitals, rationed
medical supplies, and scarce resources. This pattern appeared again during Operation Protective Edge; the number of
civilian casualties was reported daily and justified through the logic of collateral damage, while the
number of injuries was rarely commented upon and never included in reflections of the daily toll of the siege.
Shooting to maim in order not to kill might appear as minor relief given the proclivity to shoot to kill. Why
indeed were so many unarmed black victims of police brutality riddled with scores of bullets? But oscillations between the
right to kill and the right to maim are hardly haphazard or arbitrary. The purportedly humanitarian practice of
sparing death by shooting to maim has its biopolitical stakes not through the right to life, or even letting
live, but rather through the logic of “will not let die .” Both are part of the deliberate debilitation of
a population—whether through the sovereign right to kill or its covert attendant, the right to maim—and are key elements
in the racializing biopolitical logic of security. Both are mobilized to make power visible on the body.
Slated for death or slated for debilitation—both are forms of the racialization of individuals and populations that liberal
(disability) rights frameworks, advocating for social accommodation , access, acceptance, pride,
and empowerment, are unable to account for, much less disrupt.
Disability Impact
Tag
Disability is not a fixed state or attribute but exists in relation to assemblages of capacity and
debility, modulated across historical time, geopolitical space, institutional mandates, and discursive regimes. The
globalization of disability as an identity through human rights discourses contributes to a
standardization of bodily usefulness and uselessness that discounts not only the specificity of
location but also the ways bodies exceed or defy identities and subjects. The non-
disabled/disabled binary traverses social, geographic, and political spaces. The distinctions or parameters
between disabled and non-disabled bodies shift historically, as designations between productivity,
vagrancy, deviancy, illness, and labor market relations have undergone transformations from
subsistence work to waged labor to hypercapitalist modes of surplus accumulation and
neoliberal subject formation. They shift geographically, as varied cultural, regional, and national
conceptualizations of bodily habitations and metaphysics inhabit corporeal relations differently and sometimes irreconcilably, and
issues of environmental racism are prominent. They shift infrastructurally, as a wheelchair-accessible elevator becomes a
completely altered vehicle of mobility, one that masks various capacities to climb stairs, in many parts of the world where power
outages are a daily, if not hourly, occurrence. They shift legally,
administratively, and legislatively, as rights-
bearing subjects are formed and dismantled in response to health care and insurance
regimes, human rights discourses, economic opportunism, and the uneven distribution of
resources, medical supplies, and basic care. They shift scientifically, as prosthetic technologies of capacity, from
wheelchairs to cell phones to dna testing to steroids, script and rescript what a body can, could, or should
do. And they shift representationally, as discourses of multicultural diversity and plurality absorb
“difference” into regimes of visibility that then reorganize sites of marginalization into
subjects of privilege, indeed privileged disabled subjects.
In The Right to Maim: Debility, Capacity, Disability, I think through how and why bodies are perceived as debilitated, capacitated, or
often simultaneously both. I mobilize the term “debility” as a needed disruption (but also expose it as a collaborator) of the
category of disability and as a trian- gulation of the ability/disability binary, noting that while
some bodies may not be
recognized as or identify as disabled, they may well be debilitated, in part by being foreclosed
access to legibility and resources as disabled. Re- latedly, some bodies may well be disabled but also
capacitated. I want to be clear here: I am not diluting or diffusing the identity rubrics of disability by
suggesting all bodies are disabled to some extent or another, or by smoothing disability into a
continuum of debility and capacity. Quite the opposite; I am arguing that the three vectors, capacity,
debility, and disability, exist in a mutually reinforcing constellation , are often overlapping or coexistent,
and that debilitation is a necessary component that both exposes and sutures the non-
disabled/disabled binary. As Christina Crosby rightly points out, “The challenge is to represent the ways in
which disability is articulated with debility, without having one disappear into the other.”7 I would add that the
biopolitical management of disability entails that the visibility and social acceptance of disability
rely on and engender the obfuscation and in fact deeper proliferation of debility.
Biopolitics
Tag
In a context whereby four-fifths of the world’s people with disabilities are located in what was once
hailed as the “global south,” liberal interventions are invariably infused with certitude that
disability should be reclaimed as a valuable difference—the difference of the Other—through rights, vis-
ibility, and empowerment discourses—rather than addressing how much debilitation is caused
by global injustice and the war machines of colonialism, occupation, and U.S. imperialism .
Assemblages of disability, capacity, and debility are elements of the biopolitical control of populations
that foreground risk, prognosis, life chances, settler colonialism, war impairment, and capitalist
exploitation. My analysis centralizes disability rights as a capacitating frame that recognizes some
disabilities at the expense of other disabilities that do not fit the respectability and empowerment
models of disability progress—what David Mitchell and Sharon Snyder term the “biopolitics of disability.”11 But the
normalization of disability as an empowered status purportedly recognized by the state is not
contradicted by, but rather is produced through, the creation and sustaining of debilitation on a mass
scale. Debilitation is not a by-product of the operation of biopolitics but an intended result, functioning
both as a disruption of the non-disabled/disabled binary— as an in-between space—and as a
supplement to disability, that which shadows and often overlaps with disability. I therefore do not offer debility as an
identity; it is instead a form of massification. My alternative conceptualization of the biopolitics of debilitation not only
refers to the remaindering of what the liberal inclusion of disability fails to fully embrace, but also points to the forms of violent
debilitation of those whose inevitable
injuring is assumed by racial capitalism. I therefore seek to
connect disability, usually routed through a conceptual frame of identification, and debilitation,
a practice of rendering populations available for statistically likely injury.
why biopolitics?
The Right to Maim situates disability as a register of biopolitical population control, one that
modulates which bodies are hailed by institutions to represent the professed progress made by
liberal rights–bearing subjects. As with Terrorist Assemblages, this book is largely about what happens
after certain liberal rights are bestowed, certain thresholds or parameters of success are claimed to
have been reached: What happens when “we” get what “we” want? In other words, how is it that
we have come to this historical juncture where we can or must talk about “(white) privilege,”
and “disability” together? But my argument also makes a critical intervention into the literatures of and scholarship on
biopolitics, which have been less likely to take up issues of disability and debility. Michel Foucault’s foundational formulation hinges
on all the population measures that enable some forms of living and inhibit others: birthrates, fertility, longevity, disease,
impairment, toxicity, productivity. In other words, these
irreducible metrics of biopolitics are also metrics of
debility and capacity. Biopolitics deployed through its neoliberal guises is a capacitation
machine; biopolitics seeks capacitation for some as a liberal rationale (in some cases) or foil for the
debilitation of many others. It is, in sum, an ableist mechanism that debilitates.
Biopolitics as a conceptual paradigm can thus be read as a theory of debility and capacity.
Addressing disability directly forces a new, discrete component into the living/dying pendulum that forms most discussions of
biopolitics: the living dead, death worlds, necropolitics, slow death, life itself. These
frames presume death to be the
ultimate assault, transgression, or goal, and the biopolitical end point or opposite of life. I am
arguing that debilitation and the production of disability are in fact biopolitical ends unto
themselves, with moving neither toward life nor toward death as the aim. This is what I call “the right to
maim”: a right expressive of sovereign power that is linked to, but not the same as, “the right to kill.” Maiming is a source
of value extraction from populations that would otherwise be dis- posable. The right to maim
exemplifies the most intensive practice of the biopolitics of debilitation , where maiming is a
sanctioned tactic of settler colonial rule, justified in protectionist terms and soliciting disability
rights solutions that, while absolutely crucial to aiding some individuals, unfortunately lead to
further perpetuation of debilitation.
In The Right to Maim, Ifocus less on an important project of disability rights and disability studies,
which is to refute disability as lack, as inherently undesirable, and as the sign, evidence, or
fetish of injustice and victimhood. I am not sidestepping this issue. Rather, I centralize the quest for justice
to situate what material conditions of possibility are necessary for such positive reenvisionings
of disability to flourish, and what happens when those conditions are not available . My goal here is
to examine how disability is produced, how certain bodies and populations come into biopolitical being through
having greater risk to become disabled than others. The difference between disability and debility that I
schematize is not derived from expounding upon and contrasting phenomenological experiences of corporeality, but from
evaluating the violences of biopolitical risk and metrics of health, fertility, longevity, education, and geography.
Debility Connects Movements
Tag
In the midst of the Movement for Black Lives, the fight against the Da- kota Access Pipeline, the
struggle for socialized health care in the United States, the demand to end U.S. imperial power
in the Middle East (Israel, Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, Yemen), what constitutes the able body is ever evolving,
and its apparent referents are ever shrinking. What is an able body in this context? What is a non-disabled body,
and is it the same as an able body? Layers of precarity and vulnerability to police brutality, reckless
maiming and killing, deprivation, and destruction of resources that are daily features of living
for some populations must not be smoothed over by hailing these bodies as able-bodied if
they do not have or claim to be a person(s) with a disability. In the wise words of disability studies scholar
and prison abolitionist Liat Ben-Moshe, “It does not matter if people identify as disabled or not.”22
“Hands up, don’t shoot!” is not a catchy slogan that emerges from or announces able-bodied
populations. Rather, this common Black Lives Matter chant is a revolutionary call for redressing
the debilitating logics of racial capitalism. It is a compact sketch of the frozen black body,
rendered immobile by systemic racism and the punishment doled out for not transcending it.
It is the story of a Palestinian resister shot dead for wielding a knife (if that) against an idf solider who has
the full backing of the world’s military might. “I can’t breathe!” captures the suffocation of chokeholds on
movement in Gaza and the West Bank as it does the violent forces of restraint meted out
through police brutality. “Hands up, don’t shoot!” and “I can’t breathe!” are, in fact, disability justice rally cries.
The Right to Maim therefore does not seek to answer the question, where is our disability pride movement? Instead, it
hopes to change the conversation to one that challenges the presumption that the
distinction between who is disabled and who is not should fuel a pride movement. I explore if and
how this binary effaces the biopolitical production of precarity and (un)livability that runs across
these identities. The project, then, is not just one that hopes to contribute to intersectional
movement building, though let me insist that this is crucial from the outset. That is to say, Black Lives Matter and the struggle
to end the Israeli occupation of Palestine are not only movements “allied” with disability rights, nor are they only distinct disability
justice issues. Rather,
I am motivated to think of these fierce organizing practices collectively as a
disability justice movement itself, as a movement that is demanding an end to so many
conditions of precaritization that debilitate many populations. At our current political conjuncture, Black
Lives Matter, the Palestinian solidarity movement, the protest against the Dakota Access
Pipeline to protect sacred grounds and access to water: these are some of the movements that
are leading the way to demand livable lives for all. These movements may not represent the
most appealing or desired versions of disability pride. But they are movements anchored, in fact,
in the lived experiences of debilitation, implicitly contesting the right to maim, and imagining
multiple futures where bodily capacities and debilities are embraced rather than weaponized.
Pinkwashing
Tag
Maim, Duke University Press, 2017. Chapter 3, Page 96-101. Footnotes 2, 5, 11, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 20, and
21 included in curly braces|KZaidi
This piece of advertising, created by the pro-Israel organization Size

Doesn’t Matter as part of an ad campaign focused
on promoting the vir- tues of Israel to Canadians, canbe hailed as an example of “pinkwashing,” a piece of
propaganda highlighting the LGBT rights record of Israel as a function of obscuring or legitimating its
occupation of Palestine.2 {“Pinkwashing!” has become a rallying cry to mobilize queer activists globally to
stand in solidarity with Palestine by resisting the so-called co-optation of LGBTq identity by the
state of Israel. As its shorthand use proliferates in anti-occupation organizing forums internationally, pinkwashing must be
situated within the wider homonationalizing geopolitical context. While it is crucial to challenge the Israeli state,
it must be done in a manner that acknowledges the assemblage of homonationalism goes
beyond the explicit activities of any one nation-state, even Israel. I have been unconvinced that
pinkwashing is a practice singular to the Israeli state, though the specific manifestations of this practice on the part of the Israeli
state are singular and noteworthy. Building on theoretical points first articulated in my book Terrorist Assemblages, I contend that
pinkwashing appears to be an effective strategy not necessarily because of any exceptional activities on the
part of the Israeli state but because of the history of settler colonial violence, the international
LGBT tourism industry, the gay and lesbian human rights industry , and, finally, the role of the
United States.} Repurposed in 2009 from campaigns to critique facile medical corporate support of breast cancer research,
pinkwashing has been redefined as the Israeli state’s use of its admittedly stellar LGBT rights
record to deflect attention from, and in some instances to justify or legitimate, its occupation
of Palestine. Resonating within a receptive field of globalized Islamophobia significantly amplified since September 11, 2001,
this messaging is reliant on a civilizational narrative about the modernity of the Israelis
juxtaposed against the backward homophobia of the Palestinians. As such, pinkwashing has
become a commonly used tag for the cynical promotion of LGBT bodies as representative of
Israeli democracy. More generally, it is the erasure of hierarchies of power through the favoring of
the “gay-friendly nation” imagery. It is a discourse about civilizational superiority that relies on a
transparent and uninterrogated construction of “Palestinian homophobia” contingent upon the
foreclosure of any questioning about “Israeli homophobia.” Besides making Zionism more appealing to (Euro-
American) gays, part of the mechanism at work that benefits Israel is a disciplining of Palestinian queers into
legible subjects. At the same time, as Haneen Maikey has noted, the most relevant and damning effect of
pinkwashing is its contribution to the processes of internal colonization: the naturalization of
Israeli superiority by Palestinians themselves. The most important targets of pinkwashing therefore
are not actually Euro-American gay tourists but (queer and gay) Palestinians themselves.3 As such, I would
argue that it functions dually, as a form of discursive preemptive securitization that marshals neo-
orientalist fears of Palestinians as backward, sexually re- pressed terrorists, and as an intense mode of
subjugation of Palestinians under settler colonial rule.
For whom is pinkwashing legible and persuasive as a political discourse, and why? First of all, a
neoliberal
accommodationist economic structure engenders the niche marketing of various ethnic and
minoritized groups and has normalized the production of a gay and lesbian tourism industry
built on the discursive distinction between gay-friendly and not-gay- friendly destinations .4 The
claims of pinkwashing are often seen as plausible when rendered through an LGBT
rights discourse that resonates
within North America and Europe as a dominant measurement of teleological progress.5 {This is
an important tactic within the context of a gay and lesbian human rights industry that
proliferates Euro-American constructs of identity (not to mention the assumption of a universal
attachment to sexual identity itself), that privilege identity politics, “coming out,” public
visibility, legislative measures as the dominant barometers of social progress, and a flat invocation
of “homophobia” as an automatic unifying experiential frame. Palestinian queer organizers assert that it is irrelevant whether
Palestinian society is homophobic or not, and that the question of homophobia within Palestinian society has nothing to do with
the fact that the occupation must end. For the political platform of the Palestinian Queers for BDS and Al-Qaws for Sexual and
Gender Diversity in Palestinian
Society queer organizing is anti-occupation organizing; likewise, anti-
occupation work is queer organizing. Palestinian Queers for BDS is not a liberal project that is
demanding acceptance, tolerance, or inclusion within a “nationalist” movement . Rather,
through foregrounding the occupation as its primary site of struggle, Palestinian Queers for BDS
is slowly, strategically, and carefully insisting upon and creating systemic and thorough changes
in the terms of Palestinian society itself. Al-Qaws claims that its primary work is about ending the
occupation, not about reifying a homosexual identity that mirrors an “Israeli” or “Western” self-
serving form of sexual freedom.}These claims make far less sense in the “Middle East,” for example, where there is a
healthy skepticism about the universalizing of LGBT rights discourses and where knowledge of the complexities of sexualities in the
region is far more nuanced. Additionally, in
some senses Israel is a pioneer of homonationalism, as its
particular position at the crosshairs of settler colonialism, occupation, and neoliberalist
accommodationism creates the perfect storm for the normalization of homosexuality through
national belonging. The homonationalist history of Israel illuminates a burgeoning of LGBT rights and
increased mobility for gays and lesbians during the concomitant increased segregation and
decreased mobility of Palestinian populations, especially post-Oslo. I have detailed this point at greater length
elsewhere, but to quickly summarize: the advent of gay rights in Israel begins around the same time as the
first intifada, with the 1990s known as Israel’s “gay decade” brought on by the legalization of
homosexuality in the Israeli Defense Forces, workplace antidiscrimina- tion provisions, and
numerous other legislative changes.6 The idf becomes a notable site of homonationalist
distinction in relation to other countries in the “Middle East,” as “Only in Israel” can “Gay
Officers Serve Their Country.”
The financial, military, affective, and ideological entwinement of U.S. and Israeli settler colonialisms, and
the role of the United States more generally, should also not be minimized when evaluating
why pinkwashing appears to be an effective discursive strategy.7 The United States and Israel
are the greatest beneficiaries of homonationalism in the current global geopolitical order, as
homonationalism operates to manage difference on the scalar registers of the internal,
territorial, and global. Moreover, pinkwashing is an ideological and economic solicitation
directed to the United States—Israel’s greatest financial supporter internationally—and to Euro- American gays who
have the political capital and financial resources to invest in Israel. Thus, pinkwashing’s unconscious appeal to U.S.
gays is produced through the erasure of U.S. settler colonialism enacted in the tacit endorse-
ment of Israel’s occupation of Palestine.8
But pinkwashing has many antecedents; it

is one more justification of colonial rule in the long history of
imperial, racial, and national violence. How has “the homosexual question” come to supplement “the woman
question” of the colonial era to modulate arbitration between modernity and tradition, citizen and terrorist, homonational and
queer? As elaborated by Partha Chatterjee, this
question arose with some force in the decolonization
movements in South Asia, whereby the capacity for an emerging postcolonial government to
protect native women from oppressive patri- archal cultural practices, marked as tradition,
became the barometer by which colonizers arbitrated political concessions made to the
colonized.9 Here echoes Gayatri Spivak’s famous dictum regarding the colonial project: “white men saving brown women from
brown men.”10 Over time the terms of the woman question have been redictated, from the nineteenth- century formulation of
white women’s relation to colonial women as the “white woman’s burden” to present-day liberal feminist scholars who have
become the arbiters of other women’s modernity, or the modernity of the Other Woman. To
reinvoke Spivak for the
twentieth and twenty-first centuries, then: white women saving brown women from brown
men. The white woman’s burden from the nineteenth century is regenerated for contemporary
deployment through liberal feminist frames within human rights discourses.
While the woman question has hardly disappeared as a liberal mission- ary narrative design, it is now accompanied by
another formulation: white queers (queer men?) saving brown homosexuals from brown
heterosexu- als.11 {This trajectory from the woman question to the homosexual question has multiple prongs, subject to
contextualization in various divergent locations. The supple- menting of homosexuality to women is the result
of the merging of the postcolonial hangover (where, vis-à-vis Jacqui Alexander’s work, the postcolonial state
shores up its respectability and legitimacy to prove its right to sovereignty to the colonial father) with the folding in or
acknowledging of homosexual subjects into legal and consumer legitimacy via neoliberal
economies. Some homosexuals, once on the side of death (aids), are now on the side of life, or
productive for nation building.} I call this the homosexual question: How well do you treat your homosexuals? A mere
thirty years ago this question was of no relevance to the evaluation of a nation’s capacity for sovereign
governance. The homosexual question is in fact a reiteration of the woman question, insofar as it reproduces a demand
for gender exceptionalism, relies on the continual reproduction of the gender binary, and as
with the advertisement described above, embraces queer bodies that are cisgender and gender
conforming. The homosexuals hailed by the nation-state are not gender queer or gender nonconforming—they
are, rather, the ones re-creating cisgender norms through, rather than despite, homosexual
identity. Obscured by pinkwashing is how trans and gender-nonconforming queers are not welcome in
this new version of the proper “homonationalist” Israeli citizen. What was also known as “the Jewish
question,” a series of debates in the nineteenth century and early twentieth century in Europe interrogating the capacity for Jewish
populations to assimilate, hinged on religious difference as the defining obstacle to Jews achieving European modernity.12 Pivotal to
my analysis, therefore, is that a quasi resolution to the Jewish question reworks the denigrated effeminate masculinity of
nineteenth-century European Jewry into the elevated, rehabilitated, secular, homonationalist masculinity of the occupying and
settler colonialist Israeli state.
Pinkwashing also obscures the persistent downplaying of the woman question, and attendant feminist
struggles, in relation to the homosexual question. Gender segregation in some ultra-Orthodox Jewish
communities in Israel is still an active practice, for one example .13 Another is how the homosexual question
might eclipse the woman question for gay and lesbian con- sumers. On January 11, 2011, the same day that Tel Aviv’s
dubious honor as the “world’s best gay city” was announced, an amendment to Israel’s
citizenship laws that prohibits the unification of West Bank Palestinians with their spouses in
Israel was upheld by the High Court of Justice. 14 As Nadera Shalhoub-Kevorkian explains, the citizenship law
was approved by the Knesset in 2007 and prohibits Palestinian spouses or children of Is- raeli
citizens from receiving permanent residency or citizenship in Israel.15 {See full discussion in Shalhoub-Kevorkian,
Security Theology, Surveillance and the Politics of Fear, 50–56. The author details the history of the legislation, including
various amendments and provisions and the manner in which the law is used to produce
Palestinians married to Israeli citizens as terrorists and national threats, and how the discourse of
unification is perverted into fears of actualizing Palestinian right of return.} The passage of “social
suitability” laws, attempts at regulating sexual activities between foreign laborers and Israeli
Jews, and the efforts of vigilante groups and social organizations that monitor and agitate against
sexual liai- sons between Israeli Jewish women and Palestinian men: these are forms of (hetero)sexual
regulation that are submerged in the pinkwashed stories of LGBT liberation. Regulation across homo-
hetero divides seeks to con- strict the sexual, ethnic, reproductive, and familial activities of all bodies
not deemed suitable for the Israeli body politic. 16 {In “‘We Are All Israelis,’” Alex Lubin writes: “Hence, in 2002,
Israel amended its citizenship law to prevent ‘family unification’ among married Israeli and non-
Israeli Palestinians when it passed the Citizenship and Entry into Israel Law. The amendment
denied Israeli citizenship through marriage only for Palestinians . In defending and upholding the
amendment in 2006, Israeli judge Michael Chechin argued that the amendment merely reproduced a form of security practiced by
Western governments: ‘The Palestinian Authority is an enemy government, a government that wants to destroy the state and is
not prepared to recognize Israel. . . . Why should we take chances during wartime? Did England and America take chances with
Germans seeking their destruction during the Second World War? No one is preventing them from building a family but they should
live in Jenin instead of in [the Israeli Arab city of] Umm al-Fahm’ (Donald Macintyre, “ ‘Racist’ Marriage Law Upheld by Israel,”
Independent, May 15, 2006). Those opposed to the amendment drew a different kind of comparison, claiming that the
antifamily law mirrors U.S. anti-miscegenation laws in order to preclude increasing numbers
of Palestinian citizens in Israel. The Israeli amendment to its citizenship law relies on a
comparative imaginary that links U.S. and Israeli forms of colonial rule” (685).}
Pinkwashing thus does more than work through an active portrayal of the Palestinian population
as homophobic and thus unworthy of liberation; the biopolitical target is arguably even more
so the control of heterosexual reproduction. Furthermore, we see in the advertisement described earlier that
there are many forms of normativity proliferating. The fact that the opening scene suggests two heterosexual
couples reflects certain versions of gender and racial normativity. Blackness in the video stands in for diversity and seeks to solicit
African American and Afro-Canadian audiences, while also deflecting from the lack of presence of any notably Arab
bodies.17{Yityish
Aynam, an Ethiopian-born Israeli model and former idf lieutenant, was the first black woman to
be crowned Miss Israel in 2013. In the face of protests against racism toward black Jews in
Israel, she has been leveraged as proof that Israel does not have a race problem and has
herself repeated the Israeli right-wing argument that questions the validity of allowing African
migrants to enter or stay in Israel due to their supposed violent nature. See The Stream, “Black and
Jewish in Israel”; Gray, “First Black Miss Israel.”} This is truly notable given the efforts that the Israeli government is making to recruit
African Americans into the Brand Israel project and African American Jews into birthright projects.18 {See Wessler, “The Israel Lobby
Finds a New Face.” To counteract the rhetoric from Palestinian solidarity activists that Israel is a racist
state that practices apartheid, the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), the largest pro-Israel lobby in the United
States, maintains a presence on and recruits students from historically black campuses . AIPAC
lures students by offering career-building opportunities to visit Capitol Hill, meet political figures of the
highest level such as President Obama and Prime Minister Netanyahu, and participate in lobbying and
campaigning on behalf of AIPAC’s agenda. AIPAC educates these students in a Zionist version
of Middle Eastern politics and deploys them to argue that it is a mischaracterization and
offensive to black Americans to use terms like “racist” or “apartheid” to describe Israel. See also
“ ‘Blackwashing’ and the Israeli Lobby,” a roundtable hosted by Al Jazeera’s The Stream. That AIPAC places an emphasis on
leveraging African American support of Israel is especially clear in an April 2012 story published in AIPAC’s biweekly Near East
Report, “Student Leaders across America Oppose Nuclear Iran,” which states that 122 universities and colleges across the United
States had signed a statement that “opposes the development of an Iranian nuclear weapons capability” and supports a “strong
U.S.-Israel alli- ance and Israel’s right to defend itself.” The story specifies that “17 Historically Black Colleges and Universities (hbcus)
are represented, including Morehouse College in Georgia, Grambling State University in Louisiana, and Oakwood Uni- versity in
Alabama.”}
In Israel, Ethiopian Jew- ish women have been subjected to forced sterilization, and African populations have been protesting their
labor conditions and are connecting to Black Lives Matter organizing.19 {Ben-eliezer, “Becoming a Black Jew.” Despite
being
allowed to settle in Israel as many other immigrant Jews have done, Ethiopian Jews and their
descendants continue to face antiblack racism in Israel. For a history of Ethiopian Jewish migration to Israel
and subsequent racial discrimination, see Chehata, “Israel: Promised Land for Jews . . . as Long as They’re Not Black?,” 67–77.
Israeli officials have also admitted to forcibly or nonconsensually sterilizing Ethiopian Jewish
women during and after the settlement process. Some of these women have testified that they were not
allowed inside the country without being administered a long-lasting sterilization shot. See Gordts, “Ethiopian Women Claim Israel
Forced Them to Ac- cept Birth Control Shots.” Israelalso employs a policy of ethnic cleansing through
deportation and detainment on African migrants. As the New Yorker reported in January 2014 in Margalit,
“Israel’s African Asylum Seekers Go on Strike,” undocumented African migrants protested across Tel Aviv
new laws that further criminalized their presence and allowed for the indefinite detainment of
migrant workers, who are primarily from Sudan and Eritrea, in an open-air prison in the Negev
Desert. The Israeli government currently gives undocumented migrants whom they seize a
choice: leave Israel or face indefinite detainment.} Finally, the reclaiming of small size is worthy of mention.
Tourism literature compares Israel to the state of New Jersey—“Israel is the size of New Jersey.”20 {In a speech to AIPAC in 2010,
Prime Minister Netanyahu compared the size of Israel to that of the state of New Jersey in an
effort to impress on his audience the “security predicament” Israel finds itself in, describing
Israel as a tiny nation besieged on all sides by terrorist groups that fire “6,000 rockets into that
small state” and “amass another 60,000 more missiles to fire at you” (Haaretz Service, “Prime Minister
Benjamin Netanyahu’s Speech to aipac Conference”).}The focus on size might reflect the anxious histories of debilitation
and rehabilitation in the establishment and development of the state of Israel. The notation of the
“small” size of Israel is often encased in compensatory rhetoric.
In this chapter I am interested in what else pinkwashing regulates besides and alongside sexual
orientation. I map out a broader biopolitical portrait of sexual regulation in the Israeli occupation of Palestine and elaborate
sexuality as an assemblage not anchored through the prism of queer, lesbian, gay, bisexual, or
trans identities. I am interested in this particular turn for several reasons that encompass both theoretical and pragmatic
organizing issues. First, as a political response to pinkwashing in the U.S. context, I argue that it is crucial not to reiterate
the fantasy of queer exceptionalism by responding to pinkwashing through an appeal to queer
solidarity or queer resistance, but rather to connect the regulation of queerness to the
regulation of sexuality and bodies writ large. The articulation of the specific connections between different
kinds of sexualities—indeed, the sexual regulation of heterosexuality, in fact, miscegenated heterosexuality—not only
provides a more nuanced understanding of how sex and biopolitics work in Palestine/Israel but also refuses to return the
gaze of the exceptionalizing mandate of the Israeli state that insists on propping up
homosexuals as sexual citizens par excellence.21 {The challenge, then, is to not allow the liberal
or establishment gays in Euro-America (who are the primary target of pinkwashing) to redirect the script of
anti- pinkwashing activism away from this radical approach . Failing this, as Maya Mikdashi has so brilliantly
articulated in “Gay Rights as Human Rights,” the rewriting of a radical Palestinian queer politics by a liberal
Euro-American queer politics would indeed be a further entrenchment of homonationalism.
Organizing against pinkwashing through a “queer international” platform can potentially
unwittingly produce an affirmation of the terms within which the discourse of pinkwashing
articulates its claims, namely, that queer identity emboldened through rights is the predominant
manner through which sexual subjectivities should be lived. While one may agree with Joseph Massad’s
damning critique of the “gay international” in Desiring Arabs, it is also important to ask exactly how the “queer
international proposed by Sarah Schulman, in Israel/Palestine and the Queer International, is an alternative or
antidote to the gay international. Is it the case that simply by virtue of being articulated through “queer” rather than
“gay,” and through a global solidarity movement, the pitfalls of the gay international are really avoided? How is such a
positioning of queer one that purports to be transgressive, morally and politically untainted,
and outside of power? That is to say, “queer solidarity” cannot be contingent on “them” producing
a model of sexuality that is acceptable to “us.”} This portrait of biopolitical reproductive and regenerative
mechanisms necessarily implicates convergences of gender, sexuality, race, nationalism, and bodily ability and disability. Finally,
what I am adding to the analysis of homonationalism is its imbrication in a nation-building
project of rehabilitation, reproductive biopolitics, and the capacity and debility of bodies; how
ableism and hetero and homo reproduction are entwined.
Rehabilitation Impact
Tag
The establishment of the Israeli

state itself rests on a model of rehabilitation from two debilitating
conditions: the statelessness of the diasporic Jewish people and the genocide of the Holocaust.
As early as 1830, the terms “civil disabilities” and “Jewish disabilities” were employed to describe the political disenfranchisement of
the Jewish population in England.22 Well before its advent, the
mandate for the new Israeli state was one of an
uncompromising “it has to get better” from the fate of the “sickly Jew” existing in the
stateless diaspora. Max Nordau, cofounder of the World Zionist Organization, famously declared in 1898 that the image
of the muscular Jew was to replace the meek or sickly Jew. From him we have the saying “Zionism is Judaism
with muscles.”23 Sandy Sufian writes, “Zionism—a Jewish nationalist movement that sought to create a homeland in historic
Palestine—tried to change or rehabilitate the Jewish people from their seemingly disabled state in
the Diaspora to a new healthy and ‘normal’ nation in Palestine. Given Zionism’s emphasis upon
redeeming the pathological state of Diaspora Jews, the concept of disability figures as a prominent cultural
signifier that underscores many facets of the Zionist nationalist project .”24 In this regard, as Noam
Ostrander and Eynat Shevil write, “The image of a strong Jewish body became a symbol for a strong
Jewish state.”25 Theological influences concurred. The “handicapped” body is not only shunned by halachic
(traditional Judaic) convention; it also is “a reminder of the Jew’s ‘crippled’ condition in pre-Israel times,
undermining the dreams, the exaggerated visions of naïve Israeli ideology , and is therefore rejected
as counterproductive to the enterprise of rebirth.”26
This new Jewish body and the new state were also gendered masculine and became “the necessary site
for healthy, heterosexual transformation,” as the degenerate diaspora was understood as
feminine and effeminate: a rehabilitation, then, from homosexuality .27 Daniel Boyarin notes that
“European cultures represented male Jews as ‘female’; the new Hebrew culture relentlessly
worked to overturn this representation, and part of how it did so was by turning its back on old
Jewish intellectual traditions and replacing them with a worship of virility, productivization, and
war.”28 This heteronormativization was hailed in the cultivation of the land and earth, a representation of
which is the El Al advertisement of a young muscular man holding a pitchfork and narrating the imbricated regeneration of nation,
land, and body.
Sherene Seikaly and Max Ajl thus argue that “Zionism erased a history of learning, reading, and
intellectualism.”29 This rehabilitation project was also from the onset racialized.30 Claiming that the
racial and eugenic vision of the new state has been “sidestepped,” Nadia Abu El-Haj explains: “Even though
scholars have written extensively about physical regeneration, the literature has sidestepped the role of racial
theory and eugenic thought in helping to frame that vision and desire. . . . there was also
another source of inspiration for the commitment to Hebrew labor . . . the assessment by Jewish
physicians and social sciences of ‘the Jews’ as a degenerate race and their eugenic framework for imagining a ‘solution’ to the
problem, that is, a revived and reborn Hebrew nation in Palestine.”31 The paradox that Abu El-Haj details is that the
creation
of a revived Jewish race is one both distinct from Arabs and simultaneously scientifically
connected to the land of Palestine and thus to its claims to statehood.
Rehabilitation also involved three other facets: first, banishing the Ori- ental in the European
Jew; second, re-creating Europe, in Palestine, for the Jew who was forced to leave it . Seikaly and Ajl
aver, “To become fully Eu- ropean, the Jew had to leave Europe.”32 {In “Of Europe: Zionism and the Jewish Other,” Seikaly and Ajl
write: “Zionism promised Jews, who lived in Europe, full and emancipated membership in the
category of the Western, the European, and the enlightened. But that membership was to be
conditional. To become fully European, the Jew had to leave Europe. . . . Becoming fully European required a
hierarchical understanding of humanity— the ‘clash’ between the enlightened and benighted.
The Zionist thus ‘othered’ and ‘inferiorised’ the other to become European, just as the
European had done to him. Zionism did not merely constitute Jews as being outside Europe. In accepting that
Europe, geographically, could only hold certain kinds of political communities, it constituted
Europe. And in embracing the task of molding a territorially displaced European society,
dependent on the continual displacement of native Palestinians, it has continued constituting
that Europe, culturally and politically” (131). They continue: “Zionism, its proponents argued, would
propel Jews’ entry into history by becoming almost but never quite fully European. But by
geographically displacing the Jewish Question instead of resolving it politically, Zionism ended up keeping that question alive. It
maintained ‘Jews’ as a distinct entity from Europe- ans , perhaps provisionally members of the metropolitan race
but also with an air of difference, as liminal to modernity. . . . Zionism’s reclamation of Jewish pride and honor
was premised on understanding the Jewish past just as Europeans did, deformed and Oriental.
In this discourse, becoming European depended on leaving Europe and the history of penury,
supposed effeminacy, intellectualism, and all else that was linked with exile. The historical
erasure was nearly total” (128).}
And finally, this process could not be complete without severing the Jew from the Arab. As Ella Shohat
has so persistently and precisely shown us, Arab Jews, the linchpin figure of this rehabilitation endeavor, occupy the site
of ambivalence in this racializing and sexualizing assemblage : “Mizrahi [are] ambivalent[ly] position[ed] as
occupying the actantial slot of both dominated and dominators; simultaneously
disempowered as ‘Orientals’ or ‘blacks’ vis-à-vis ‘white’ Euro- Israelis and empowered as Jews
in a Jewish state vis-à-vis Palestinians. ”33 As Shohat notes, then, what was rendered as a Zionist
healing and return was actually a cultural “dismemberment” of the Arab from the Jew.34 Sei- kaly
and Ajl succinctly explain: “Certainly, the Zionists had (and continue) to struggle with the persistent reality
of building a Jewish state on a land whose natives were not Jewish. But the specter of the
Oriental threat did not merely hover in what Zionists understood as the inferior Palestinian . Nor
did it lie only in the Oriental residue still remaining within the Jew from Europe. . . . It was the Jew from the East, in his irreducible
singular- ity, that would pose one of the greatest threats to the rehabilitated, and now supposedly European, Jewish body.”35
A2 – HR
Tag
The transition from stigmatization—“objects of charity” and “religious obligation”—to a rights-based,

empowerment approach has been tricky at best given the lack of resources to implement the
law. Allam Jarar, director of the Palestinian Medical Relief Society’s rehabilitation program in the West Bank and Gaza, writes that
“the question remains whether this change can genuinely affect peoples’ lives and whether the
rights-based approach to disability can be translated from slogans and articles to hard facts
and realities that can make a difference in the lives of people with disabilities .”67 Issues regarding the
implementation of Number Four continue to be ad- dressed, especially as it pertains to the inadequate distribution of resources by
the Palestinian Authority.68 According to the Palestinian Central Bu- reau of Statistics (PCBS) and the Palestinian Ministry of Social
Affairs, in 2011, there
were at least 113,000 Palestinians in the West Bank, Gaza, and occupied East
Jerusalem (2.7 percent of the population) with a disability. In 2007, the PCBS recorded the disability rate
as 5.3 percent, with almost 80 percent of these individuals having no jobs and 55 percent having
no education. In 2011, the PCBS reported a slight decline in the percentage of people with
disabilities who do not have access to education, at 37 percent; yet 84 percent still cannot find
jobs and 76 percent cannot use public transportation.69
Numerous NGOs work on integration and empowerment programs —job skills and employment creation,
access to education, and tackling stigma and discrimination—for people with disabilities in Palestine: the East
Jerusalem YMCA (supported by Y Care International); Handicap International, present in Gaza since 1996;
Maysoon’s Kids (wellness for Palestinian children with disabilities); the Maximizing Potential Program (begun in
2015, focusing on Down syndrome, autistic spectrum disorder, visual impairment, deafness, cerebral palsy, and learning
difficulties); Irada, at the Islamic University of Gaza (begun in 2008 to support the massive increase in the numbers of young
people with disabilities during Operation Cast Lead). Disability in this context may well be instrumentalized as
a form of economic pragmatism to secure funding for bodies through international NGO
networks. These funding flows also may provide a way for international actors to offer
humanitarian aid and simultaneously deflect from addressing the larger concerns of the
occupation. The definition of disability in Palestine also is constantly evolving. The difference between abled bod-
ies and disabled bodies may not be as thoroughly delineated in a context where a population
experiences collective punishment largely meted out through the obstruction of mobility . The
occupation itself can be understood as disabling the entire Palestinian West Bank population
through the restriction of mobility, what Langan refers to as “mobility disability.”
Assemblage Theory and Pinkwasshing
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These are broadly sketched parameters of the biopolitical regulation of sex that complicates the binary
discourse of sexual freedom versus sexual regulation and repression driving pinkwashing
rhetoric, but also complicates the kinds of queer exceptionalism reproduced in anti-
pinkwashing organizing. Here I lay out the stakes of understanding homonationalism- as-assemblage: as a
structure of modernity, a convergence of geopolitical and historical forces, neoliberal interests in capitalist
accumulation both cultural and material, biopolitical state practices of population control, and
affective investments in discourses of freedom, liberation, and rights. I provisionally sketch how
homonationalism-as-assemblage creates a global field within which the discourse of
pinkwashing takes hold. The point is not merely to position Israel as a homonationalist state against which anti-
pinkwashers must resist, but to further demonstrate the complex global and historical apparatus that
creates the appearance of the activities of the Israeli state as legitimate and progressive. The
control of the production of bodily capacity at multiple vector s—national discourse, disability, art, pronatalist
ideologies—entails that pinkwashing is part of a larger assemblage , the goal of which is to modulate
debility and capacity across manifold populations.
In this final section I want to elaborate homonationalism-as-assemblage in terms of thinking about these multilayered and
multiscalar nodes of control. The
stakes of the kind of “queer” activism that is happening in Palestine
are not necessarily in the name of queer or relegated to the dominance of the national .114
Rather, this activism toggles tensions between the “queer Palestinian” and the “Palestinian
queer.” The rearranging of both terms reflects a necessarily ambivalent relation to the identity
reification possible in each. Palestinian Queers for BDS, for example, was an organizing project—the most visible in the
region as well as globally—that is deeply attuned to the spatial triumvirate of (1) colonization, (2) apartheid, and (3) occupation that
informs the quotidian movements of Palestinians both inside and on the side of Israel today. Palestinian
Queers for BDS
claimed that anti-occupation activism is queer activism. Their resistance to dominant global
LGBT activist agendas such as the legalization of gay marriage maintains sexuality as a
contingent assemblage and network, with an axis of signification and an axis of forces that do
not neatly align with the material compartmentalizing of populations.
As an affective assemblage, sexuality entails an axis of signification and an axis of forces that defy
configurations that produce monoliths such as “the Israeli (and his/her modernist sexuality)” and “the
Palestinian (and his/her pathological sexuality)” as supplements of a liberal and yet brutal humanism.
Thinking of both homonationalism and sexuality through assemblages opens up a different
trajectory or plane of territorialization. Even as the staidness of the politics of recognition gets
mobilized by Israeli and global gay discourses through pinkwashing , the materiality of sexual practice and
sexuality itself is so much more complex, mediated, and contingent than the stagnating politics of
control and resistance can grasp. Fur- ther, sexuality is a contingent assemblage that, in the context of some
U.S. academic, left, and liberal discourses, gets reterritorialized at the level of the molar in the form of “queer
solidarity.”
This theoretical framework does not set the “subject” against the assemblage —the subject
remains within the assemblage, but positioned and signifying differently—or the molar against
the molecular. Rather, the framework highlights the differential interplay among these levels or
registers of the political. A molecular politics is recaptured by a molar schema in the liberal
context that can only conceive of an investment in anti-occupation work insofar as it is in the
name of consolidating a “queer international ” or subject-bound political formation that
structurally reiter- ates the Islamophobia of pinkwashing even in a pinkwatching setting.115 This does not
mean that the molar and the molecular exist in a binary opposition, though they may perhaps be nonaligned. This
understanding of sexuality entails theorizing not only specific disciplinary sites but also broader
techniques of social control, given that “feminism” and “queer” and the death or lively potential
of their subjects have already been made to be productive for governance. In this oscillation
between disciplinary societies and control societies, sexuality is not only contained within bod-
ies but also dispersed across spaces. Control societies as a geopolitics of racial ontologies, as
mechanisms of not just highly regulated but also deeply saturated space, and life, are important
to apprehend here in terms of how the positive rhetorical function of queer operates . What is this
saturation of space doing to struggles for sexual rights trans/nationally—how are these struggles being compromised but also
coproduced?
Achille Mbembe writes that the contemporary colonial occupation of Palestine is the “most accomplished form
of necropower,” listing the territorial fragmentation of a “splintering occupation,” a proliferation of sites of
violence (through what Eyal Weizman describes as the triplication of space), and infrastructural warfare—a
“concatenation of disciplinary, biopolitical, and necropolitical” powers. 116 The occupation thus
operates less through Agamben’s “state of exception,” though this legal frame is certainly still applicable, and more so
through this saturation of space and life with increasingly baroque modalities of control. This
saturation of space impedes forms of molar queer organizing. The discourse of pinkwashing
only makes sense through an erasure of the spatial logics of control of the occupation and the
intricate and even intimate system of apartheid replete with a dizzying array of locational
obstacles to Palestinian mobility. That queer Palestinians in Ramallah cannot travel to Haifa,
Jerusalem, or Gaza to meet fellow Palestinian activists seems to be one of the most obvious ways the
Israeli occupation delimits—prohibits, in fact—the possibilities for the flourishing of queer
communities and organizing that Israelis have enjoyed without mobility restrictions.
Instead of understanding congregation as constitutive of queer identity and community, pinkwashing
reinforces
ideologies of the clash of cultures and the “cultural difference” of Palestinian homophobia
rather than recognizing the constraining and suffocating spatial and economic effects of
apartheid. Antagonist accusations about the (mis)treatment of homosexuals in the West Bank and the
Gaza Strip fail to take into account the constant and omnipresent restrictions on mobility , contact,
and organizing, necessary elements for building queer presence and politics. What becomes clear is
that the purported concern for the status of homosexuals in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip is being used to
shield the occupation from direct culpability in suppressing , indeed endangering, those very ho-
mosexuals. Further, the LGBT rights project itself relies on the impossibility / absence/nonrecognition of a
proper Palestinian queer subject except within the purview of the Israeli state itself, as a rescued subject.
And it presents the “gay haven” of Tel Aviv as representative of the entire country, effac- ing
its Arab cleansing, and as a zone free of war and bombings —in effect, a disability-free zone—while also
maintaining Jerusalem as the religious safeguard.
Sexuality as an affective modality is by definition nonrepresentationalist, a distinct version of what
Davide Panagia calls “the ways in which sensation interrupts common sense.”117 The toggling between discipline and
control moves between normal/abnormal (homo/hetero and disabled/abled bina- ries) to variegation,
modulation, and tweaking (sexuality as sensation). Dis- crete sites of punishment (the prison, the mental hospital,
the school) in Palestine—the checkpoints that rotate and dis/appear randomly— are “intended to encourage
Palestinians to slowly evacuate their land,” to coerce Palestinians to “embrace their own ethnic
transfer.” “Bypass roads” carve up the land and converge at “kissing points,” while the “security” wall prevents
Palestinians from getting to their villages, their farmland, and other Palestinians .118 Preemptive
regimes of securitization include pinkwashing; Brand Israel functions as a form of soft securi ty. Gaza is the world’s
largest “open-air prison,” a form of quarantine and enclosure, but then there is also the algorithmic geometry of calorie intake.
Contrary to claims that insist that the Israeli state project is solely about ethnic cleansing and
dispossession of land, there are subtle yet insistent forms of folding in and inclusion at work
here.
Palestinian Debt Trap
Damn
Maim, Duke University Press, 2017. Chapter 3, Page 121-125. Footnotes 119 and 123 included in curly
braces|KZaidi
The “Palestinian debt trap,” for example, is a simultaneous strategy of repression and liberation,
enclosure and inclusion. The Palestinian Authority carries public debt of nearly $5 billion, 70
percent of gdp, $1 billion of that being external debt, while new bank lending programs have spurred the growth of
household debt. Personal income and government revenue are , as in many places, being “swallowed
up by debt service.” State readi- ness is about grooming Palestine for “sovereign debt
worthiness.” As such, “Israel not only profits lavishly from supplying Palestine but also wields direct
discipline through its automatic powers of debt extraction. It can turn the spigot of fiscal pain
on or off at will.” Further beneficiaries are the Palestinian elite and business sectors, many fueling the “cappuccino life-
style” of Ramallah for those who perpetuate the occupation through their complacent privilege, as well
as international actors. For the few who can afford debt, it functions as a “self-disciplining asset, arguably
more effective than any instrument of military pacification .”119 {Strike Debt and Occupy Wall Street, “Colonizer
as Lender,” 16–17. As a solidarity manifesto, this document seeks to link these various movements to the
liberation of Palestine by marking debt as a form of virtual and territorial enclosure that is
crucial to the global capitalist expansion of financial control. The authors also note the limits of anti-austerity
movements that do not engage with the liberation of Palestine as part of their platform, observing that the 2011 protests against
austerity in Israel did not address the forms of Israeli settler colonial control rendered through
debt extraction.}
As another example, there are at least one hundred different types of ID cards that a Palestinian might
have, each delineating a microvariation from each other, performing what Helga Tawil-Souri describes as “low-tech, vis-
ible, tactile means of power that simultaneously include and exclude Pales- tinians from the
Israeli state.”120 The fracturing of populations moves from self/other subject/object construction to
microstates of differentiation and modulation of capacities and debilities. Gil Z. Hochberg makes a
similar point about low-tech control, explaining: “Israel relies on the visual presence of the most primitive
and unsophisticated modes of surveillance and control (namely, watchtowers, aiming guns, and checkpoints),”
entailing that Palestinians are simultaneously subjected to the gaze of surveillance and the
“sight of this gaze as a spectacle of its power.” 121
Disciplining the individual is enjoined with massifying populations, a form of power “directed
not at man-as-body but man-as-species.”122 The annihilation of space by time, theorized by Karl Marx,
David Harvey, and Neil Smith to describe markets expanding across space through (neo)colonization while
compressing the time and costs of circulation to enable speedy return of accumulation, is
complimented with what Jord/ana Rosenberg and Britt Rusert argue is the “disinterring of time from space.” This disinterring refers to,
for example, the verticalization that Weizman describes, a three-dimensional spatial expansion
involving in some part the subterranean and “salvaging [of] fictive origins from within the earth”
so as to order linear continuity of time. 123{Rosenberg and Rusert write: “The settler colonial project in
Palestine produced a narrative of salvaging fictive origins from within the earth : this narrative then
functioned as a supporting ideology for the annihilation or enclosure of spaces of subsistence in
the name of the resuscitation of these origins. . . . The politicization of the subterranean that takes place through
verticalization is a politics not only of space but also of time and of their complex relation. For if verticialization is a form of
enclosure, it is not only an enclosure of spaces and landscapes but a temporal and narrative
kind of enclosure as well. Verticalization, in other words, spatially manifests a fantasy about time. This fantasy is that a
Jewish past is incarnated with the earth and thus can be unburied and produced as a set of
enclosures that function at a political level as a claim to statehood” (“Framing Finance,” 79). What Rosenberg
and Rusert are describing is the function of discipline (as enclosure) within the control practices of the virtualization of space inherent in Weizman’s
schema.} A last (but not least) set of seesawing forms
of discipline and control moves from the public/private binary to
diffuse forms of regulation that transgress these distinctions; from state/economy to the
disorganization of national capital; from enclosed institutions of civil society to the disbursement of collective
care across disparate and discontinu- ous locations; and from the policing of profile to the
patrolling of affect.
This last point about affect is crucial because while discipline works at the level of identity, control works at
the level of affective intensification. Here I am prompted by Amit Rai’s reformulation of sexuality as
“ecologies of sensation”—as affective energies rather than identity—that transcend the
humanist designations of straight and gay, queer and nonqueer, modern and pathological. On
this sexuality Rai writes: “Ecologies of sensation modulate and potentialize the body’s pleasures and
distribute them as con- tagions across segmented populations not as master scripts that
normalize but as self-organizing modes that modulate and tinker.” 124 We can think of (sexual) identity,
and identification itself, as a process involving an intensification of habituation. That is to say, identity is the
intensification of bodily habit, a “returning forward” of the body’s quotidian affective senso- rial
rhythms and vibrations to a disciplinary model of the subject, whereby sexuality is just one
form of bodily capacity being harnessed by neoliberal capital. Similarly, the Brand Israel campaign now
being equated with pinkwashing is only one form of an array of “washing” that composes this campaign. This habituation
of affective intensity to the frame of identity —a relation of discipline to control, or in actuality, disciplining control—
entails a certain stoppage of where the body once was to reconcile where the body must go. It is
also a habituation that demands certain politics and fore- closes an inhabitation of others.
Sensations are thus always under duress, to use Panagia’s terms, to “make sense,” to submit to these
master scripts either as a backformation responding to multiplicity or as a demand to submit to
the master script and foreclose that multiplicity. Taking up further sexuality as assemblage, a strand
invested in viral replication rather than reproductive futurism, this strand might stress the import of moving away
from the call-and-response relay that continues to dominate the “mainstream/global queer”
versus “queer of color/non-Western queer” argumentation. Contemporary efforts to resist
Israeli pinkwashing play out this relay by insisting on the authenticity and legitimacy of the
“Palestinian queer,” thus reproducing the terms of debate valorized by the Israeli state and the
“queer international.” This relay often fails to interrogate the complex social field within which
“queer” is being produced as a privileged signifier across these boundaries.125 One reason for this
import could indeed be found in the “viral” travels of the concept of homonationalism—by which I mean simply the use of
LGBT rights as a barometer by which civilizational aptitude and capacities for sovereign
governance of a population are measured. At some moments homonationalism has been reduced to a political
critique of racism and nationalism in queer communities, or used as an applied analytic to assess the level or quality of the
“homonationalist” state. To reiterate, instead of theorizing homonationalism as an identity positioning or as an adjective that
denounces a state or other entity, I conceive of homonationalism as an analytic to apprehend state
formation and a structure of modernity—in other words, the historical changes that have
produced the homosexual question in the imperative tense.
Discipline and control are mutually entwined, disjunctive from each other yet cynically compatible. This
conviviality is produced through feed- back loops and not through the teleological progression
assumed by Michael Hardt and also most forcefully in the work of Hardt and Antonio Negri.126 I am not claiming that Palestine is an
exemplary site of this collaboration. However, the convergence of settler colonialism within a “post-colony”
neoliberal accommodationist market suggests that a linear trajectory and periodization may
not be complex enough to illuminate the anachronistic operations of power in Palestine.127 At
this historical juncture, the particular spatial coordinates of the occupation—this triumvirate of settler colonization
(reference to 1948), occupation (1967), and apartheid (1992; post–Oslo Accords) positions Palestine/Israel as a
singular site whereby these co-constitutive forms of power operate, a site where, as Weizman writes,
there is “the preference for ever-flexible internal frontiers.” This is an intricate and intimate
territorial project that defies the neoliberal logic of queer accommodationism and therefore
also must challenge any easy configuration of queer solidarity. 128 Taking on the broader biopolitical con-
trol of sexual reproduction complicates a narrative about the purported specific and exceptional interest in homosexuality by the
Israeli state and the purported “co-optation” of LGBT rights. In
the era of decolonization the nationalist
resolution to the woman question was mediated through relegating the domestic to the
feminine and the worldly to the masculine. In the context of the increasing right-wing conservatism of the Israeli
state, the nationalist resolution of the homosexual question (and the unresolved tension between the woman
question and the homosexual question) is mediated through the differi ng spatial registers of the secular
“gay haven” of Tel Aviv and the religious epicenter of Jerusalem. This bifurcation of national
ethos thus reinscribes the pernicious binary of queer secularism versus homophobic religiosity;
those who cannot or will not accede to the relevance of the homosexual question are thus re-
racialized through the fulcrum of religion.129 Here it is important to note that gay rights in Israel began not only as
a racializing project vis-à-vis the Palestinians but also as a secularizing project vis-à-vis ultra-Orthodox Israeli Jews.130 This is a really
important point because some of the most prominent Islamophobic figures in this pinkwashing debate, such as filmmaker Michael
Lucas, are not only anti-Muslim but also vociferously antireligion: that is to say, they are secularist queers.
Pinkwashing is thus not a queer issue per se, or even one that instrumentalizes queers in specific for biopolitical
ends. It is not about sexual identity in this regard but rather a powerful manifestation of the
regulation of identity in an increasingly homonationalist world—a world that evalu- ates nationhood on the
basis of the treatment of its homosexuals. Pink- washing, then, works not only to obfuscate the occupation,
to marginalize and pathologize and temporally quarantine Palestinian queers beholden to a
reification of Palestinian homophobia. More trenchantly, I would argue, it actually works as a foil to the
pronatalist, eugenically oriented practices of sexual reproduction —both homo and hetero—mapping
certain ableist prototypes of homosexuality as a form of capacity that can potentiate, on the
side of life. Disability, with the exception of veterans disabled through war injuries, remains firmly on the side of
debility and death, limited state recognition notwithstanding. Again, thinking about nonrepresentationalist understandings
of sexuality as assemblage is crucial here, as one population “suffers” at the hands of the state through its
representational success, the other through its representational absence/erasure/foreclosure. Given
these interconnected and multiple rubrics, enacted in the name of sex, sexual freedom, and stellar technological achievement (as
with art), anyanti-pinkwashing stance that does not address the biopolitics of reproduction and
regeneration may come dangerously close to reiterating the ableism not only of the Israeli state
but also of (secular) queerness itself. Whereas the effeminate Jew was antithetical to the project of Zionism, and
homosexuality was considered an Orientalist (and therefore, Arab) vice, the rehabilitation project of the Israeli state
now embraces the potential for the new muscular Judaism to be the muscular homosexual
Jew.131 The rehabilitation of the effeminate sickly Jew of the diaspora realizes its apex in the child-rearing gay Israeli man.
Building social movements through disability is a valuable way of countering the sexual
exceptionalism of queerness— homonationalism—pretty much anywhere, but perhaps
especially so in the context of Israel, where the subject positionings of the “queer disabled”
and the “disabled queer” are thoroughly foreclosed. Given the territorial logics of saturation and control of
space, land, and the underground, “disability access” in this context must be redefined not only as
enabling the mobility of those with physical disabilities but also as challenging the re- stricted
mobilities of those living under occupation. The political question, then, remains how to enliven, literally
enliven, the figuration of disability without rehabilitating it into a form of capacitation that
functions to the detriment of so many others, as in the case of the Israeli state itself.
Card
Tag
Maim, Duke University Press, 2017. Chapter 4, Page 128-. Footnotes included in curly braces|KZaidi
This is what is meant by the residents of Gaza being “under siege,” a commonly used refrain that obscures
much of this detail. I have resorted here to a somewhat polemical deployment of empirical information in part to counter this
tendency to cloak the specifics of the occupation. Gaza is also claimed to be the most densely populated place
on earth, and also the world’s largest “open-air prison.” Belying these tidy descriptions are what
Allen Feldman calls the “new forms of imagery, discourse, war, security and state rights being
carved out of the bent backs of Palestinian civilians.”9 Among the biopolitical aspects I have been tracking are
the permeating relations between living and dying that complicate Michel Foucault’s foundational
mapping, in this case, the practice of deliberate maiming. I argue that the Israeli state manifests an
implicit claim to the “right to maim ” and debilitate Palestinian bodies and environments as a
form of biopolitical control and as central to a scientifically authorized humanitarian economy. I
further demonstrate the limitations of the idea of “collateral damage” that disarticulates the effects of
warfare from the perpetration of violence. Finally, I note that the policy of maiming is a productive
one, through the profitability of what I call a speculative rehabilitative economy. 10 This final chapter
takes the biopolitics of debilitation to its furthest expanse, looking at how the population available for injury is
capacitated for settler colonial occupation through its explicit debilitation . It moves the argumentation
about debilitation from the production of populations available for injury to the targeting of populations to be injured.
How is the practice of maiming manifested? Medical

personnel in both Gaza and the West Bank report a
notable “shoot to cripple” phenomenon. Dr. Rajai Abukhalil speaks of an increasing shift from “traditional
means” such as tear gas and rubber-coated metal bullets used to “disperse” protests to “firing
at protestors’ knees, femurs, or aiming for their vital organs.” 11 In Gaza, the Israeli Defense
Forces used flechette shells. While these are not “expressly forbidden under international humanitarian law in all
circumstances,” nevertheless they are considered inappropriate for densely populated areas because they explode upon impact into
thousands of tiny steel darts.12 As
a continuity and intensification of the practice of breaking the arms of
stone throwers in the first intifada, shoot to cripple attempts to preemptively debilitate the
resistant capacities of another intifada, the next intifada.
What is often claimed by the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) as a “let live” praxis, understood in liberal terms as less
violent than killing (and thus less sensational and more under the radar), shoot to cripple appears on the surface to
be a humanitarian approach to warfare.13 Another manifestation of this purported
humanitarianism is the example of the “roof knock,” a preliminary assault on structures to warn
residents to evacuate, sometimes happening no less than sixty seconds before a full assault.
Roof knocks were insufficient, however, when disabled Palestinians with mobility restrictions
were unable to escape the bombardment of the Mubaret Philistine Care Home for Orphans and Handicapped in Gaza’s Beit
La- hiya district; three disabled residents died.14 These were not mobile residents; the capacity of mobility
circumscribes the utility of the roof knock, though the humanitarian intention of a sixty-
second warning—a short, stingy temporal frame—is dubious.15 Civilians in Gaza were also alerted to im-
pending airstrikes through phone calls and texts, often misdirected to the wrongly targeted
households. This purportedly humanitarian practice of warning Gazans of impending strikes with phone calls appears
more like a “reminder of how powerless they are” given the control that Israel has over the
telecommunication networks in the West Bank and Gaza. 16 As the research of Helga Tawil-Souri on “digital
occupation” documents, telecommunication companies owned and operated by Palestinians are routed through servers in
Israel.17
What happened in the summer of 2014 was preceded by much of the same during earlier periods. During the first intifada,
the human rights organization Al-Haq produced a comprehensive report titled Punishing a Nation: Human
Rights Violations during the Palestinian Uprising: December 1987–December 1988.18 This document contains extensive evidence of
both the intent and the effect of Israeli practices of injuring and maiming. Media accounts outline then defense minister Yitzhak
Rabin’s discussion of starting the use of plastic bullets “to increase the number of (wounded)
among those who take part in violent activities but not to kill them.” 19 “Violent activities” is the
term most often used for political demonstrations or rock throwing. Statistics from the United Nations
Relief and Works Agency (UNRWAA), reported by the Jerusalem Post on September 27, 1988, mark sharp increases in
injuries after the introduction of plastic bullets. 20 Al-Haq’s report includes affidavits from individuals describing
incidents of arbitrary and unprovoked beatings unlinked to protest activity; cites the West Bank Database Project report of 1987
detailing the wideningof the “opening of fire” from life-threatening situations to opening fire as
part of deterrence, “shooting first at an 80-degree angle in the air, and then, with intent to
injure, at the legs”; notes that the Israeli army radio con- firms using “special bullets intended to injure while reducing the risk
of killing”; follows debates in the Jerusalem Post about concern regarding the illegality of using certain bullets to increase injuries
among Palestinian protesters; documents further reportage in the Jerusalem Post regarding the illegality of breaking someone’s arm
even if they had violated the law; notes the inappropriateness of high-velocity bullets and assault rifles with high muzzle velocity,
which, as reported by Haaretz, causes the bullets to “spin around inside the victim’s body, damaging the internal organs.”21 Al- Haq
concludes: “The Israeli government’s claims that its response to the uprising is a lawful one do not
fit the facts. The assertion that the cases of illegality are mere exceptions to the rule cannot
stand when seen against a wealth of documented examples showing savage behavior by the
army on a regular basis.”22 As further evidence, Al-Haq cites the Jerusalem Post of November 30, 1988, which specifically
reports that during the month of November, protests in the Gaza Strip were at their lowest while casual-
ties were at their highest, thus contesting the claim that the IDF is merely responding to violent activity.23
During the second intifada, there

were reports that the IDF were using “high-velocity” fragmenting
bullets that created a “lead snowstorm” effect in the body—scattering the bullet throughout and creating
multiple internal injuries—leading to high rates of crippling injuries.24 Dumdum bullets, which are
banned under international human rights law, are difficult to extract after they have entered and exploded outward within the body
and usually guarantee those hit will “suffer for life.”25 Dr. Robert Kirschner of Physicians for Human Rights stated that “the
Israeli soldiers appear to be shooting to inflict harm rather than solely in self-defense,” their
actions amounting to “a form of torture.”26 Dimo Qato, among other global health researchers and practitioners,
argues that the “pattern of injuries cannot be claimed to be accidental.”27
In 2002, Israeli linguist Tanya Reinhart analyzed “the policy of injuries” during the second intifada.28 Reinhart claims that the
“Israelis were not even trying to conceal their shooting policy.” Citing interviews with IDF soldiers from the
Jerusalem Post, she selects a representative example from Israeli sharpshooter Sergeant Raz of the Nashon Battalion ,
who proclaims: “I shot two people . . . in their knees. It’s supposed to break their bones and
neutralize them but not kill them.”29 Reinhart notes that the newspaper explicitly details the IDF
strategy of keeping Palestinian casualties low to deflect attention, sympathy, and solidarity
from the Palestinian struggle. She also turns, as many do, to human rights organizations that are close up enough to
document the situation. A delegation of Physicians for Human Rights concluded “that Israeli soldiers appeared to be
deliberately targeting the heads and legs of Palestinian protestors, even in non-life-threatening
situations.”30
Stating that the injured
do not count in the “dry statistics of tragedy,” Reinhart explicates: “The reason for
this strategy is clear: Massive numbers of Palestinians killed everyday cannot go unnoticed
by even the most cooperative Western media and governments. [Prime Minister Ehud] Barak was explicit
about this. ‘The prime minister said that were there not 140 Palestinian casualties at this point, but rather 400 or 1000, this . . .
would perhaps damage Israel a great deal.’ ”31 Reinhart concludes that the creation
of disability is a tactical military
move on the part of the IDF; injuring Palestinians has remained Israeli military policy: “Specially trained Israeli
units, then, shoot in a calculated manner in order to cripple [sic], while keeping the statistics of Palestinians killed
low.”32
Reinhart’s analysis of the policy of injuries originally appeared on November 14, 2000, in the Israeli paper Yedioth Ahronoth, to
which she was a regular contributor. It is important to note that her assessment relies predominantly (and in some instances solely)
on Israeli media sources in Hebrew and English such as Haaretz (the English version of which, Rein- hart claims, is more censored
than the Hebrew version), the Jerusalem Post, and Ma’ariv.33
Also documented since the first intifada are various modes of obstruction of medical care. Al-Haq reports that the
“obstruction of medical care, in all its various forms, is not new. However the scope of health-
related human abuses has dramatically expanded during the current Palestinian uprising . . . .
Violation of medical human rights have occurred with frightening regularity during the past year in all parts of the Occupied
Territories.”34 The obstructions include blocking ambulances and cars transporting the sick and
injured, raiding hospitals and clinics, denying medical teams access to areas under curfew,
withholding medical treatment from prisoners, and deprioritizing the “right of the wounded to
medical treatment.”35 During the second intifada, “Israeli forces attack[ed] Palestinian healthcare
providers while on duty, and . . . [damaged] Palestinian medical facilities,” demonstrating a blatant disregard
for the principle of medical neutrality, which Israel is bound to by Articles 18 and 20 of the Fourth Geneva Convention.36
The Palestinian Red Crescent Society (PRCS), the main provider of emergency medical care in Palestine, reported 174 documented
attacks on its ambulances during a period of approximately eighteen months from September 2000 to March 2002, damaging 78 out
of 100 total available ambulances. Additionally, it reported 166
attacks on emergency medical technicians and
heavy machine gun fire hitting the PRCS headquarters .37 Another health-related section of the Fourth Geneva
Convention, Article 17, prohibits obstructing the “passage of patients,” in other words, delaying or preventing access to medical
facilities, a quotidian occurrence even in nonbombardment times due to Israel’s checkpoint regime.38 The
Israeli
government’s disregard for international human rights laws in Gaza and the West Bank, over
time, has led to the “large-scale destruction of the developing health system, the inability of local and
international healthcare providers to perform their duties, and a deterioration of the health conditions of
Palestinians.”39
Infrastructural Warfare
Thus, not only bodies but also crucial infrastructures are being maimed in Gaza. In “Necropolitics,” Achille
Mbembe writes of the asymmetric war against infrastructure, or the “war on life support,” as he
calls it: the war on life itself, on the state capacity to preserve and nourish life. 40 Two further examples from the
summer of 2014 should suffice. Gaza’s water system col- lapsed, and waste treatment services were rendered nonfunctional, leaving
raw sewage spewing into streets. Several water authority technicians were killed, thus also compromising maintenance and repair
work.41 Even before the summer of 2014, the deterioration of water infrastructure, according to Ala Qandil, resulted in
“households receiv[ing] running water for only six to eight hours at a time: 25 percent had access on a daily basis, 40 percent every
other day, 20 percent once every three days, and the remaining 15 percent only one day out of four.”42 An apparently new
tactic of infrastructural warfare was employed during Operation Protective Edge, namely, the
destruction of what remained of Gaza’s professional class: “The targeting of the professional class, a key
pillar of Palestinian society generally considered unsympathetic to the political goals of Hamas, was a new front of
economic and social warfare on Gaza.”43 Targeting the assets of the middle class by focusing on
high-rises was a political message to those who remained; others had migrated since the early 2000s through
Egypt when the border regime allowed.
Omar Jabary Salamanca extensively details the Israeli

government’s re- signification of Gaza’s main service
buildings from infrastructural networks to “terrorist infrastructures,” noting that the latter
designation is used to justify Israel’s policy of what he calls “infrastructural violence.” This form of
violence has increased, not decreased, after Israeli “disengagement” from the Gaza Strip in
2005.44 The assault on infrastructure, Salamanca argues, is an essential, even central, component of
the biopolitical regulation of a malleable humanitarian collapse, whereby “the supporting
infrastructure of ordinary life became both target and weapon.”45 The disengagement from
Gaza facilitates the appearance of the end of Israel’s colonial presence while allowing it to retain forms of “remote”
infrastructural control, a continuing yet covert colonial presence. Gaza as open-air prison is crafted
through a “reassembled regime of spatial control,” and works through manufacturing a
“regulated humanitarian collapse.”46 Exemplifying what Sari Hanafi terms “spaciocide,” the terrain is
dependent on the withdrawn colonizer’s infrastructural support, which modulates calories, megawatts,
water, telecommunication networks, and spectrum and bandwidth allocation to provide the bare minimum for survival. The one
fiber-optic cable, for example, that connects the entirety of Gaza to the outside world passes through and is controlled by Israel.
“Spectrum allocation” thus becomes another tool of control, with Israel alternately withholding and releasing bandwidth.
Salamanca calls this an “ ‘asphixatory’ application of power. ”47 This capacity to asphyxiate,
however, is not just one of land enclosure via territorial containment. Nor is it digital enclosure that allows
and regulates access to mobility via virtual worlds. Rather, as Helga Tawil-Souri argues, “Hi-tech enclosure is a multifaceted process. .
. . This combination is what makes the Gazan case unique.”48 Itis this interplay of territorial and virtual
enclosure that complicates the Deleuzian (digital and digitizing) configuration of control societies,
redescribed by Tawil-Souri as “a physical geography cancelled by networks.” What she is pointing to as well is the
co- existence and reinforcement of discipline and control. Topologies overlap, she argues, to the point where “it is
increasingly difficult to distinguish one form of power from another in the Gazan landscape, for
the Israeli space and practice of power has become one of in-distinction.”49 This interfacing of physical
enclosure and virtual high-tech enclosure is what I take to be the epitome of an asphixatory regime of power.
The target here is not just life itself, but resistance itself. Salamanca quotes Israeli politician Dov Wiesglass,
who states that Israel’s policy would be “like an appointment with a dietician. The Palestinians will
get a lot thinner, but won’t die.”50 Because of this asphixatory control, Israel can create a crisis at
will, having already set in place the bare minimum requisite for life that can be withheld at any
moment, what he terms “an elastic humanitarian crisis.”51 There are continuities between these forms of elasticity, with-
holding, and suspension with the practices of “tactical government” that have historically ruled Gaza.52 A provisional, tactical
governmental structure is one devoid of vision and one that avoids legitimacy, capacity, and
accountability through continual reactivity to crises.
Clearly, the capacity to asphyxiate is not a metaphor : while the West Bank is controlled largely through
checkpoints, the Gaza Strip is suffocated through choke points. The intensification of policing and
control thus happens through, and not despite, “disengagement” and disinvestment, not
through checkpoints but through choke points. There is a temporal shift within this asphixatory control
society from a Virilian narrative of increasing speed to other forms of algorithmic, parallel, distributed, and
networked time, working through suspension between states and slow attenuation, in direct
contrast to the always-connected ideal. In fact, slow death itself is literalized as the slowing
down of Palestinian life. In the West Bank, immaculate freeways transport Israeli settlers through a landscape of
dilapidated Palestinian back roads. Checkpoints ensure one is never guar- anteed to reach work on time.
The fear of not reaching work on time produces migration patterns that then clear the land for more settlements.53 Time
itself
is held hostage; time is lived as fear. Distance is stretched and manipulated to create an entire
population with mobility disabilities. And yet space is shrunken, as people are held in place,
rarely able to move far. Unlike theorizations of space-time compression, the increased spatial dispersion is
not remedied with temporal simultaneity. Rather, this simultaneity is withheld.54 Hagar Kotef articulates the
paradoxical relation of freedom to movement: move too much and one is unruly, too little and
one is primitive.55 The geopolitics of racial ontology is a frame that examines the regulation of
affect as a racializing form of control. Accelerationist logics map speed, movement, and their
withholding as an assemblage of racial ontologies. Disciplinary enclosure consorts with
micromodulations of bodily becomings to ensure a population laden with affective reactivity. A
politically regulated and controlled affective logic projected and interpreted as cultural and civilizational reactivity
reinforces Orientalist projections of racial difference. Sensation racializes.
It is not just the capture and stripping of “life itself” that is at stake here but the attempt to capture
“resistance itself.”56 How much resistance can be stripped without actually exterminating the population? Another question
is, of course, what are the productive, resistant, indeed creative, effects of such attempts to squash Palestinian vitality, fortitude,
and revolt?
Framing
Tag
Israeli state practices of occupation and settler colonialism may well be rationalized through the
conventional parameters of living and dying in Foucault’s four quadrants of biopolitical management. The work of
Eyal Weizman, Sherene Seikaly, and others has shown that the calories allowed into Gaza, the plotting of the number of
deaths of Hamas members, the transit of fuel, materials, supplies, all of these parameters are
mediated by expert language, algorithmic calculations, rational science, and framed in a
discourse of humanitarian war.69 Thus what I am explicitly arguing is that from the discursive and empirical evidence
offered by Palestinians, this foundational biopolitical frame is a liberal fantasy that produces “let live”
as an alibi for colonial rule and thus indeed facilitates the covert destruction of “will not
let/make die.” It is from the vantage of the occupied, I argue, and not from state power or from the privilege of the occupier,
that we must apprehend and contend with revising —challenging, in fact—the theorization of the
violent mechanisms of biopolitical population creation and maintenance . How is “will not let die”
expressed? How is the distinction between death and debility mined? And how does the capitalization of this distinction occur
while simultaneously obscuring the practices of deliberate maiming?
The debilitation of the Gazan infrastructure is elaborated in the following statement from Maher Najjar, the deputy general of
Gaza’s Coastal Mu- nicipalities Water Utilities:
There is no water reaching any of the houses right now. We’re facing a real catastrophe. Sewage pumps cannot work because the
power plant has been destroyed, so we have sewage flooding the streets of Gaza. We can’t assess the extent of the damage as we
can’t even go out without risking our lives right now. We had five staff members killed while doing repair work, another two were
killed at home with their families. It will take more than US$20 million to rebuild the water and sewage networks, but there’s no way
they can be rebuilt under blockade. We have the total collapse of all essential services and there’s nothing we can do about it.
Believe me, it would be better if the Israelis just dropped the nuclear bomb on Gaza and get done with it. This is the worst ever
assault on the Gaza Strip.70
In this missive, debilitation is rendered a fate worse than death. Treating Najjar’s statement as political speech
more so than the “truth” of death as a form of mercy, the rhetorical strategy exposes the absolute farce of
Israel’s “let live” praxes. To suggest that the Gazan population is better off dead is surely to
mock Israel’s liberal democratic investment in humanitarian gestures of “let live.” Najjar sharply
contests this investment with a vision of humanitarianism that is startling. It is as if withholding death —will not let or
make die—becomes an act of dehumanization: the Palestinians are not even human enough for
death.
The implication in Najjar’s statement that death is preferable to disability echoes with a general ethos of the nobility of dying for
one’s country. The preference of death over disability is also a stance that contravenes the human
rights model of disability. Maiming is especially striking in this historical moment. In relation to
the rise of disability as a recognized identity in need of state and global human rights
protections, seeking to debilitate, or to further debilitate the disabled, contrasts heavily with the
propagation of disability as a socially maligned condition that must be empowered to and
through a liberal politics of recognition. Sanctioned maiming, capacitated in part through a deflection onto debates
about the “collateral damage” of civilian deaths, bespeaks a profound failure in the global
human rights framing of disability as a protected and supported social difference — protected and
supported unless it is part of the war tactic of a settler colonial regime, one financially buttressed by
the United States. Ironically but unsurprisingly, Israel is a signatory on the United Nations Convention on the Rights of Persons
with Disabilities (as well as for the un Convention on the Rights of the Child).71 The distance between the cripple and the disabled
is further exemplified by the fact that Gaza has a Paralympics team, one that is actually much more successful than the main
Olympics team.72
The Debt of War
Tag
2014. Critics avowed that Israel
was using “unguided, indirect fire with high-explosive shells,” weaponry
widely understood to be “inappropriate for a densely populated area.” Nadia Abu El-Haj writes that Israel’s
allies proclaim
availability of the process of cultural rehabilitation —that is, normalization practices that produce
the indigenous through either genocide or assimilation. It asks us to reevaluate the frame of
disposed of. The productivity of maiming—“will not let die”—is manifold . This third biopolitical vector,
death” begin?
program and expenditure of the Palestinian Authority. Under the guidance of the United States, the European
according to different economic, geopolitical, and domestic metrics. For the Arab Gulf States, this
Al-Sisi, is
cement will be used to rebuild the tunnels.90 Maintenance of the “separation policy” of Gaza from the West Bank
Will Not Let Die
Tag
Maim, Duke University Press, 2017. Chapter 4, Page 147-153. Footnotes 96, 108 and included in curly
braces|KZaidi
Here, there is a tentative answer to the question, why not just “make die”? The act of “make die” is
transferred to Hamas as a wish to “let die.” The anxiety generated by the term “collateral damage”—“the more dead the better”—is
transformed into a favorable rather than damning equation. The
statement, I suggest, serves as more than a ludicrous
projection; rather, it might actually reveal an investment in “will not let die” that grounds the
justification for the right to maim. These words hint at a speculative rehabilitative approach that modulates when to let
die, when to maim, and when to “will not let die.” Allen Feldman alludes to one reason why “make die” and even “let die” cannot
usefully serve the mandate of the postgenocidal Israeli state: “The
alleged manufacture of telegenic death by the
Palestinians implies their subjugated knowledge of genocidal truth that both attracts and
threatens Netanyahu—for in a Euro-American public sphere acculturated to the Holocaust, Palestinians become
more attractive and rhetorically persuasive when dead than when alive, when televisually
spiritualized rather than when protesting or resisting or simply enduring intractable prison-
house materialities. Netanyahu attacks telegenic death because he fears the population bomb of Palestinian dead and
wounded, wherein they become symbolic Jews.”95
Given the prohibition and value of “dead Palestinians” that Feldman maps in his analysis, then, itis worth examining the
repeated claim that Gaza will be uninhabitable by the year 2020. The first question we might want to ask is,
by what calculus is Gaza currently inhabitable? And then: With what metrics is this prognosis computed? Through
which prehensive algorithms, via what naturalized logic does the agent of destruction that
creates and sustains Gaza as uninhabitable drop from syntactical reference, as if the asphixatory
control that Salamanca details reflects—but, in actuality, authorizes—the organic order of things?96 {Luciana Parisi draws on
Whitehead’s notion of the prehensive as a capacity to grasp and transform , suggesting that “the new
function of algorithms within the programming of spatiotemporal forms and relations reveals
how the degree of prehension proper to algorithms has come to characterize computational
culture. Algorithms are no longer seen as tools to accomplish a task: they are the constructive material or
abstract ‘stuff’ that enables the automated design of buildings, infrastructures, and objects.
Algorithms are thus actualities, defined by an automated prehension of data in the
computational processing of probabilities. From this standpoint, digital algorithms are not simply
representations of data, but are occasions of experience insofar as they prehend information in
their own way, which neither strictly coincides with the binary or fuzzy logic of computation nor
with the agency of external physical inputs. Instead, as actual occasions, algorithms prehend the formal
system into which they are scripted, and also the external data inputs that they retrieve” (Parisi, Contagious
Architecture, xii).} How is this inevitability procured? The prehensive authorizes a set of predictive facts-on-
the- ground sutured to the language of risk and probability that extends itself to a predicted
“apocalypse”—in other words, the representation of Gaza as a “natural” disaster likely to happen. As an
addition to reactive and preemptive forms of securitization, the prehensive is about making the present look
exactly the way it needs to in order to guarantee a very specific and singular outcome in the
future. A remark by Michael Oren, Israel’s former ambassador to the United States, unwittingly unravels this grammatical elision
by positing the inverse: “Life in Gaza is miserable now, but if Israel is permitted to prevail [i.e., destroy Hamas], circumstances can
improve markedly.”97 That is to say, the
apocalypse, the inevitable natural disaster, is a political outcome
that can be avoided if a different scene of the present can be produced.
The year 2020 functions as a perverse apocalyptic timeline that is all too familiar to us now, largely through the predictive algorithms
mapping for us the demise of the planet due to climate change. The
prehensive is narratively produced as if this
thing is happening to us, when indeed, we made it happen. (And, in fact, from Netanyahu’s vantage: we
wanted it to happen.) Through prehensive time, it is not only that the terms of futurity are already
dictated in the present but also the terms of the present are dictated through the containment
of the terms of the future, in an effort to keep the present in line with one version of the future that is desired. In
seeding the fixed future into the present, data is fed forward in a retroactive manner that
disallows us out of the present. That is to say, we cannot get out of the present because we are
tethered to the desired future; past, present, and future feel somewhat futile as descriptors of temporal distinctions.
These prehensive futurities are thoroughly resonant now: by such and such year, Caucasians will be the minority in California. X
number of species will be extinct by year such and such. What this prehensive control over the present in order to create a certain
future might suggest is that the“solution” to the “Israeli-Arab conflict” may well be , for Israel, neither one-state
nor two-state but rather the current status quo. In other words, a terrifying implication is that Israel already
has its solution: the permanent debilitation of settler colonialism.
There is another twist to these temporalities: the multiplicity of competing prehensive narratives that
challenge the hermeneutic seal. The year 2020 is also predicted to be when Palestinians will outnumber the Jewish
Israeli population. Palestinians in Israel and the Occupied Territories will outnumber Jews by 7.2 million to 6.9 million.98 Palestinians
inside Israel’s 1948 borders are reproducing 33 percent faster than Israeli Jews.99 If
indeed Israel needs Gaza’s gas
resources by 2017, if indeed by 2020 Gaza will be uninhabitable, these time frames reveal as
much about the contractions and acceleration of pace demanded within the parameters of life
span as they do about slow death.100
But is 2020 only a human timeline? If temporality itself is already suffused with the biopolitical, to claim unfettered access to futurity
is already predicated upon the genocide or slow death of others. The invocation
of 2020 marks the limit of thinking
biopolitical time in human terms, gesturing toward temporalities that are operating in
nonreproductive modalities, since “natural” human reproduction no longer singularly drives the engine of biopolitics.
Gaza is living not only human time and “population time” but also versions of inhuman time.
Mel Chen’s work on toxicity alerts us to the question of the half-life of depleted uranium, approximately 4.5 million years, and
other elements deposited through weaponry and infrastructural warfare.101 Prehensive time thus also signals a
weaponized epigenetics where the outcome is not so much about winning or losing, or about a
solution. As Reza Nagarestani so magnificently shows us, the limits of the nonhuman/human frame are
already apparent through their precise deployment within capitalism, revealing the necessity of
theorizing an inhuman biopolitics; the nonhuman, posthuman, and inhuman are thoroughly
amenable to the circuits of capitalism that inform biopolitical power. 102 Maiming is also necessary for
exploiting the project of verticalization that Eyal Weizman details. For Weizman, verticalization happens through the
production of expanded Israeli military space through three-dimensional renderings of air,
ground, and underground entities, legitimizing Israeli rule through the colonization of space
and time.103 Verticalization is the manufacturing of depth. As Steven Salaita writes in Israel’s Dead Soul, interiority is
accorded to the Jewish Israeli subject through the production of depth—of history, of
archaeology, of presence.104 Through debilitating practices of maiming and stunting, Palestinians are further
literalized and lateralized as surface, as bodies without souls, as sheer biology, thus rendered
nonhuman, part of creating surface economies of control, and captured in nonhuman
temporal calculations.
Anti-Zionist Hermeneutic
Tag
I offer this analysis in the spirit of what Jord/ana Rosenberg has hailed an “anti-Zionist hermeneutic,” one
that insists on speaking the reality of debilitation as another form of biopolitical
governmentality.121 It is an anti-Zionist hermeneutic that seeks neither to exceptionalize Palestine nor to
render it visible through containment in a comparative frame, but to understand intensifications of
biopolitical modes of control that are continuous and resonant with historical modes and, indeed,
across contemporary geopolitical spaces. Palestine in this sense provides an epistemological blueprint, one that opens up
the connective tissue between regions, regimes of power, sites of knowledge production ,
historical excavations, and solidarity struggles for liberation. Rather than an exception, writes Michael Hardt,
“we can see Palestine and the struggles of Palestinians as exemplary—a lesson and inspiration for those fighting back around the
world.”122 Connecting Palestine to struggles elsewhere, Hardt argues that four rubrics of enclosure
link different geopolitical sites: indebtedness, mediatization, securitization, and
representation. This brief schema is perhaps one entrée into conceptualizations that neither
exceptionalize Palestine nor minimize the role of the Israeli occupation in legitimating
geopolitical technologies of securitization and sovereignty around the globe. An anti-Zionist
hermeneutic recognizes the current shifting conditions in the U.S. academy—historically relatively
foreclosed, as the writings of Edward Said remind us—for the possibility of genuine debate about what he
called The Question of Palestine. The subject/object referred to in the phrase “the question of,” explains Said,
signals three things: a matter significant enough to be dealt with separately, an “intractable and
insistent problem,” and something that is unstable or uncertain. 123 That Palestine is all three
simply means that its lessons cannot be put aside or ignored. My goal, however, is not to affirm an
instrumentalist use of such a blueprint or to mobilize Palestine in order to foreground a corrective to Eurocentric theorizations of
biopolitics. The ultimate purpose of this analysis is to labor in the service of a Free Palestine.
Method/Prereq Card
Tag
Maim, Duke University Press, 2017. Post-Script, Page 159-161|KZaidi
And yet, the promise of the articulation of disability by the members of the CBR support group, rendered not
exceptional but convivial—in fact, the conviviality between disability and debility—is marked by the utopian
appeal to collective struggle. Indeed, collective punishment is overturned into otherwise untenable
lines of solidarity. Anti-occupation activism is a focal point of disability activism and includes
supporting hunger strikes for Palestinian prisoners and using wheelchairs on the “frontlines . . .
try[ing] to protect people behind them, thinking that maybe the IDF wouldn’t shoot at them” during confrontations. The
participants face daily the weaponization of debilitation that is maintained to deter resistance
to the occupation, as one Palestinian man with a “permanent disability” explained: “They want
to debilitate entire families so that their main concern becomes the disabled person and
making sure their needs are met. Because disabled people are the responsibility of the entire community and not just of
their families, this ensures that we are unable to fight the occupation. This is the occupation’s calculus.”
What is the main demand of disability activism? A common phrase we heard was “Treatment without checkpoints.” In this context
of the collective punishment of occupation, what
constitutes “disability activism” is multifaceted and
complex. Forms of radical insurgency—rock throwing, strikes, actions, housing demolition
rallies, and civil disobedience—protest not only the legal and economic circumstances of the
occupation but also the ongoing bodily debilitation of the Palestinian population. These acts of
protest must be embraced as forms of disability activism and resistance. There is no type of
resistance in Palestine that is not implicitly, if not explicitly, addressing and contesting the ongoing assaults
to bodily capacity and health that are constitutive of and central to Israeli settler colonial
occupation. There is a lack of grievance structures through rights discourses—and even when they
exist, the world does not hold Israel accountable to even the most agreed-upon human rights violations. This
means that disability justice activism takes on the very form of collectivity and dissent upon
which tactics of debilitation are deployed.
Toward the end of our visit with the CBR self-support disability group at the Al-Dahiriya Youth Group center, we
asked the
twenty-odd people there of varying ages and genders what their dreams were for the future.
Along- side hopes for the full implementation of “Number Four,” a reference to the 1999 constitutional amendment, one
respondent after another articulated desires for rehabilitation: “I hope to walk again someday”; “I want
Palestine to be liberated, so we can have freedom of movement , we can get the treatment we need”; “I want to be
able to know what it’s like to walk.”
These statements of desire for mobility are profound in the context of the mobility impairments
and the enclosures of space that fuel the prime logics of settler colonial occupation. The stigmatization of disability as
deficit justifies the right to maim; the production of widespread debilitation is key to
maintaining colonial rule. But these desires on the part of Palestinians with disabilities point to something more
entrenched. Becoming disabled is not a before-and-after event but an ongoing navigation with
quotidian forms of blockage that draw populations in and out of debilitating and capacitating
experiences. Efforts to claim disability as an empowered identity and to address ableism in Palestine will
continue to be thwarted until the main source of producing debilitation—the occupation—is ended. The
former simply cannot happen without the latter.
Blackpalestinian Breath
Alternative
Tag
Moten'18 |Fred Moten is a professor of English at Duke University. “blackpalestinian breath”, in Social
Text Online. October 25, 2018. https://socialtextjournal.org/periscope_article/blackpalestinian-breath/|
KZaidi
Jasbir Puar’s work in The Right to Maim is crucial to understanding not only that the nature of settler
colonialism is genocidal but also how that genocidal nature operates . Settler colonialism is, in
each and every case, a state operation , but the more fucked up–and therefore better–way to put this, because it bears at
least a tiny potential to shock, is that in each and every case, the state is a settler colonial operation.
Moreover, as Puar teaches us, the statist, settler colonial operation, in its genocidal nature, is given in the
horrific resonance, the brutal articulation, the asymptotic non-convergence, of killing and
maiming. In thinking—along with and by way of Puar—the unlikely and unavoidable locale of Ferguson, Gaza we
encounter the instrumental rationality through which this bloody reverberation is ceaselessly
achieved and announced. What she helps us see is that genocide is regulation unto the vanishing point
of extermination; it is savage attenuation carried out and on with all deliberate speed. We can kill them one
by one, they say, and this will have been interminable. They can’t kill us all, we say, but regulation is given in
the interminable series of my black death. Then, we’re talking our way out of their freedom
because it’s not just that freedom and slavery are in the same place but that their
entanglement constitutes that place. Puar is a vital and indispensable part of the chorus that allows and requires
us to ask, what if the terms and conditions of the ongoing genocide we survive, but wherein
each and every one of us will have been murdered, is way deeper than, and cannot be
encompassed by, the intimate opposition of slavery and freedom, exile and home, occupation
and sovereignty?
Such militantly anti-military thinking requires considering another irreducible entanglement—

that of blackness and indigeneity. This requires understanding, along with Robin D. G. Kelley, that Africa is a field
of indigeneity violated by settler colonial incursion’s constant articulation with the constant
articulation of slavery and freedom, given in what Hortense Spillers might call extended intramural, as well as
extramural, catastrophe. Indeed, Afro-diasporic life, both within the continent of Africa and in all of its
transoceanic variants, doesn’t just bear the trace, but is, more fundamentally, the residual of
settler-colonial violation, recognizing that residuality, in the complex intra-activity of
displacement and derivation, refuge and refusal, that it bears, can never be reduced to being either
the effect or creation of the violator. So that the entanglement of blackness and indigeneity –
given in a mode of solidarity that will have never been wholly voluntary in its ongoing emergence
from and as something way on the other side of what is manifest in the coalitions of political
subjects and their state or pre-state formations–is constantly disbursed in habits of displacement and sub-
communal movement whose energy the political propriety of settlement comes to regulate
and consume. Such disbursal is exhaustive, lived in and as exhaustion, as the solidarity of a
shared atmosphere wherein an alternative (meta)physics of the alternative is implied . Such
implication is manifest gesturally, in social life’s refusal of real politics, something Ashon T. Crawley
might call mutually resuscitative, (pre)occupied, blackpalestinian breath. Ferguson and Gaza are
also entangled—like settler coloniality and the state and like the violent two-state solution (i.e., the United States and the
State of Israel) in which Ferguson and Gaza will have been dissolved— and we need to try to understand the
difference between the people who know that and the people who don’t . Puar knows, and shapes
common knowledge of our common, if neither proximate nor synchronized, aspiration.
In its inveterate statelessness, blackpalestinian breath is both imposed disability and elective affinity,
against the grain of every deadly, fetishistic modality of vitalism given in the state’s serial self-
support and self-consultancy, which takes its most venal form in martial intellectuality, a range
of training protocols wherein scholarship fulfills itself, unto its vanishing point, as a branch of
the armed forces. What are the implications for blackpalestinian breath of the necessarily settler-colonial state’s exercise of
what Puar calls the will “not to let die,” which is a matter of military reason? Do the logic and metaphysics of the
individual life continually lubricate the machine that exercises the right to kill in the will not to
let die? If genocide, in the end, is just this continual maiming, which moves in the non-space
between killing each and every one and the constantly cultivated , measured, and tested
inability to kill all, then how might we offer, in practicing, a form of informal, enforming life
that continually refuses the very idea of a basic human unit and its always already racialized
embodiment? Such embodiment is a disability, a wound, our shared flesh shares and so we
have to ask if debilitative individuation is fundamental to the logic of genocide because it
exposes the limits of genocide’s implied metaphysics . Where attempts at mass death strain against the limits
of accounting, the imposition of the body-in-individuation is this perpetual wounding and
incarceration of the mass–an ongoing maiming that obliterates sacrilege and sacrifice.
But what do we say about the structures of incompleteness that attend and precede this
maiming, which is not simply an imposition of incompleteness but the enforcement of a certain
incompleteness, one given in the chalk-outlined conceptual figuration of the body itself when it
is reduced to stasis, which is, if you’ll forgive me, its natural state. It is necessary, then, to unexplain
such vicious culmination and the amputative diminishment it bears. The very idea of Black Lives, or
Palestinian Lives, those carceral sets of pluralized singularities, bears the incapacitating capacity to be
counted, a burden that is not a matter of mattering but is, rather, the ghoulish convergence of
de-materialization and de-animation. Here, it is important to note, by way of Puar, that this is as much a
denial of death as it is a reductively repetitive and representational death sentence, which
seeks to detach decay from decomposition and, thus, from (re)generation. What’s at stake is something
paradoxical—like a local anaesthesia that seeks to impose a general anaesthetic effect. Blackpalestinian breath is
genocidally cut short in the complex, structurally separable instantiation of Black and
Palestinian Lives, one by one. Meanwhile, the new, co-constituting assemblage of Ferguson, Gaza that
Puar critically celebrates allows and requires us to ask what it would mean to recognize, but also to
embrace and enact, the exhaustion of the state solution. We give life to the state solution
when we breathe air into the dead language of lives and bodies . Perhaps we can embrace and
enact that exhaustion when we say another naming, against the grain of nominalized
individuation and the state and stasis for which such naming inadvertently settles. This would be the
enactment of a healthy incompleteness arrayed against order and its terms , as Cedric Robinson might
say, where blackpalestinian study’s interinannimation of ascent and descent and assent and
dissent—its improper complexities of hostility and hospitality, its jurisgenerative harvest on
unowned land, its sounding ululative height in melismatic underground— works like an organ
without a body, as more + less than one.
The New International
Card
Tag
Moten’09 |Fred Moten is a professor of English at Duke University. “THE NEW INTERNATIONAL OF
INSURGENT FEELING”, November 7, 2009. Palestinian Campaign for the Academic & Cultural Boycott of
Israel. http://www.pacbi.org/etemplate.php?id=1130|KZaidi
1. The justification of the boycott of Israeli academic and cultural institutions is quite simple and
quite clear: the victims of a sovereign brutality instantiated in racial-military domination have come
to an overwhelming consensus, in the very shadow of the state that has come to exemplify The
State and its exception, that boycott is the most immediate form of international support they
require. To be in solidarity with the Palestinian people is to enact and support the boycott. However,
the significance of the boycott is a slightly more complicated matter. Arguments against the boycott that go beyond the rejection of whatever form
either of criticism of Israel or Palestinian resistance or the sometimes open/sometimes veiled assertion of an assumed Israeli exception and exemption, focus on the
negative impact the presumed isolation and withdrawal of support for Israeli dissidents will
have, already a morally obtuse argument insofar as it shifts our primary political and ethical
concerns away from the actual victims of racial-military domination. At the same time, one of the most
crucial possibilities that (the call for the) boycott instantiates is support for the supporters of the
Palestinians not only in Israel but all over the world and particularly in the United States which
is Israel’s outsized and enabling evil twin. Here, support of the Palestinians denotes whatever
operates in conjunction with, but also and necessarily in excess of, criticism of Israel. The
critique of Israel, however necessary and justified, is not the equivalent of solidarity with Palestine which, in the
U.S., can only ever augment and be augmented by our recognition of and resistance to the
ongoing counter-insurgency in which we live. It is, therefore, of great significance that the
boycott can help to refresh (the idea of) the alternative, both in the U.S. and in Israel, even in the midst of
reaction’s constant intensification. Such refreshment takes the form of an anti-national (and
anti-institutional) internationalism—the renewal of insurgent thought, insurgent planning and
insurgent feeling as a radical insolvent exchanged between those who refuse to be held by the
counter-insurgent forces of an already extant two-state (U. S./Israel) solution. Standing with
the Palestinians gives us something to stand upon precisely so that we can stand against the
horrifically interinanimate remains of state sovereignty and exceptionalism in its biopolitical,
“democratic” form.
2. The idea and reality of racial-military domination, whose most vulgar and vicious protocols are in a
kind of eclipse that is properly understood as a kind of dissemination , but whose effects—the very
order that it brings into a retroactively conferred sacred existence— remain as the afterlife of sovereignty in the regime of
biopolitics, is emphatically and boisterously alive in the state of Israel and in the territories it
occupies. Reference to this idea and its continuing necessity for already existing structures of
power helps us understand why Israel is called almost everything but the settler colony that it
is in official media and intellectual culture. This discursive exception turns out to be a reservoir
for the sovereign exception. It is as if the essence of sovereignty remains available as long as it is
manifest somewhere, as a kind of exemplary remainder. Because biopolitical containment often seems to liquidate the alternative, it’s important to note how
the assertion of the right of death and the power over life still must make its presence felt as
the precondition of a liquidation of the very possibility of an alternative. One way to think about all this is to
begin with the axiom that Israel has been thrust into, only partly by way of its own having volunteered for, the role of
the exemplary remainder of sovereignty after its having taken the form of racial-military
domination. The exemplary remainder of sovereignty is constrained, among other things, constantly to claim a kind of exemption
that accompanies its enactment of exception. The state that constantly asserts its right to
exist, and its right to insist that its right to exist be constantly recognized by the very ones
upon whom that right is built and brutally exercised, is the one that bears the standard for the
right of every other state so to exist and to behave. Such behavior is always, ultimately, the exercise
of the right of death and the power over life that now constitutes the residue of sovereignty in
the biopolitical regime. Insofar as the U.S. is also a settler colonial regime whose very essence
and protocols are racial-military domination, it shares with Israel, in an extraordinarily visceral
way, this tendency violently to insist on its right to exist and on the rightness of its existence no
matter what forms that existence takes, no matter how much the everyday life of the state
contradicts its stated principles. But this is also to say that the state form, in whatever materialization of its various stages of biopolitical
development, always shares in this insistence. What’s at stake, precisely, are the stakes any state shares in
Israel’s right to exist, in the residue of sovereignty in the biopolitical, and in the traces of sovereignty that will have
been carried in any state, anywhere. In the most general sense, always already residual sovereignty must respond
violently to what brings it into existence —the already given, constantly performed capacity for the alternative. The alternative is
always under duress and must continually be refreshed and rediscovered.
3. I am speaking for the boycott, in solidarity with the Palestinians , because I am committed to
the insurgent alternative, whose refreshment is (in) the anti-national international. The terms of
that commitment are nothing more than another way of saying that I am committed to the
black radical tradition. In preparing myself not only to speak, but also to write and teach from that commitment, a particular question has become, for me,
quite persistent: how might discourses of globalization and, more pointedly, of diaspora become more
than just another mode of turning away from the very idea of the international? I’ve been dwelling—in a
way that is possibly quite problematic—on this question, which is a particularly urgent question now for black studies and which is deeply and unavoidably concerned with what
There is a particular kind of sub-political experience

the boycott—which is to say solidarity with Palestine—might mean for them.
that emerges from having been the object of that mode of racial-military domination that is
best described as incorporative exclusion that settler colonialism instantiates. It is not the
experience of the conscious pariah, as Hannah Arendt would have it. Her misrecognition of this experience is at
the root of her profound misunderstanding of black insurgency in the United States, which was
not the unruly, sometimes beautiful, and ultimately unstable and pathological sociality of the
ones who are not wanted, but was and is, rather, an unruly, always beautiful, sometimes
beautifully ugly, destabilizing and auto-destabilizing sociality-as-pathogen for the ones whose
desire precisely for that pathogen and its life-forming, life-giving properties is obsessive and
murderous. This more than political, anti-political, experience of the ones who are brutally and
viciously wanted is something to which anyone who has any interest whatsoever in the very
idea of another way of being in the world must constantly renew their own ethical and
intellectual relation. This experience, in its incalculable variousness, in the richness of its social,
aesthetic and theoretical resources, is the very aim of black studies and the source of its
significance. As someone whose intellectual orientation is defined by the study of that experience, I am interested in the refreshment
of that orientation, for which I sometimes feel despair, in a moment that is so often misunderstood as victorious.
I believe this boycott, as a mode of international solidarity and exchange, can bring that
refreshment. I think that anyone who shares this orientation (for peace, justice, freedom of movement and association, freedom from
want and domination), under whatever of its local habitations and names, in Palestine, in Israel, and most certainly in the United
States, simply must be attuned to the necessity, and to this specific possibility, of refreshment.
Selfishly, I am interested in how this boycott might provide some experiential and theoretical resources for the
renewal of a certain affective, extra-political sociality—the new international of insurgent

feeling. This is to say, finally, that these remarks have been nothing other than a long-winded preface to an apology to Palestinians for the fact that, in the end, the
boycott might very well do more for me than it does for you, precisely in its allowing me to be in
solidarity with you and with the richness, impossibly developed in dispossession and
deprivation as payment of a debt that was never promised and never owed, that also
comprises Palestinian social life. Please allow me to augment my apology with an expression of gratitude for the chance that your call for solidarity,
which is itself an act of solidarity, provides.
Israeli Security Forces are Training Cops
Tag
Thousands of American law enforcement officers frequently travel for training to one of the few countries where
Israel.In the aftermath of 9/11, Israel seized on its
policing and militarism are even more deeply intertwined than they are here:
decades-long experience as an occupying force to brand itself as a world leader in

counterterrorism. U.S. law enforcement agencies took the Jewish state up on its expertise by
participating in exchange programs sponsored by an array of pro-Israel groups, like the
American Israel Public Affairs Committee, the Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs, and
the Anti-Defamation League. Over the past decade and a half, scores of top federal, state, and local police
officers from dozens of departments from across the U.S. have gone to Israel to learn about its
terrorism-focused policing. Yet Israel’s policing prowess is marred by its primary purpose:
occupation. Israel has carried out a half-century of military rule in the Palestinian territories of
the West Bank and Gaza, an occupation rife with abuses. The country’s police and security forces also
regularly violate the rights of Palestinians and immigrants inside of Israel’s 1967 borders. “A
lot of the policing that folks are observing and being talked to about in these trips is policing that happens in a nondemocratic
context,” said Alex Vitale, a sociology professor at Brooklyn College and author of a forthcoming book on global policing. “ It involves either military
policing, border control policing, or policing of folks in the occupied territories who aren’t full
legal subjects in the Israeli legal system.” While attention on the militarization of American police forces has intensified in recent years,
spurring some reforms that the Trump administration has already undone, U.S.-Israel police exchange programs have carried on
without much public scrutiny. This week, a delegation of top American law enforcement officers is in
Israel for the ADL’s National Counter-Terrorism Seminar, which includes training on topics, such
as “leadership in a time of terror” and “balancing the fight against crime and terrorism,” according to
literature by the group advertising the trip. More than 200 law enforcement executives from over 100
departments in the U.S. and abroad, immigration enforcement agencies, and even campus
police have participated in the ADL program since it launched in 2004. Among this year’s participants in the seminar is D.C. Metropolitan
Police Commander Morgan Kane, whose attendance at the training earned the department a public rebuke from D.C. Councilmember David Grosso. “I am concerned that we are
not doing enough to prevent the militarization of law enforcement in the District of Columbia,” he wrote in a letter to Metropolitan Police Department Chief Peter Newsham.
it isn’t a good idea, whether in Israel or

“Learning from military advisors is not what local law enforcement needs.” “It just occurs to me that
another place, to go and train with a military or national police — in essence, learning from
people who are better at the violent approach to conflict resolution,” Grosso told The Intercept. “That’s not
appropriate for what we’re trying to do here in D.C.” “We already have the FBI, the CIA, the Secret Service, we have so many national police here, heavily armed,” he added.
“We don’t need more of that, we need more of a community-based approach.” A spokesperson for the D.C. police told The Intercept in an email statement that the department
is participating in the training “to learn best strategies in combatting terrorism.” “Expanding our knowledge on counterterrorism and gaining valuable experience for the next
generation of MPD leadership is critical to the safety and well-being of the residents and visitors of D.C.,” the spokesperson wrote. “This opportunity will not allow us to deviate
In addition to meeting with their Israeli counterparts,

from our commitment to providing fair, unbiased, and constitutional policing.”
American police on the delegations also visit representatives of the Israeli Defense Forces , as
well as border security and intelligence services — essentially taking lessons from agencies that
enforce military rule rather than civil law. “It fits in with this ideology of police as warriors,” said
Vitale. “The focus of this training is on riot suppression, counterinsurgency, and counterterrorism — all of
which are essentially irrelevant or should be irrelevant to the vast majority of police
departments,” he added. “They shouldn’t be suppressing protest, they shouldn’t be engaging in counterinsurgency, and
almost none of them face any real threat from terrorism.” The trainings in Israel also fit within a
broader militarization of U.S. law enforcement that is well underway back home. Last month, President Donald Trump issued an
executive order rescinding limitations imposed by former President Barack Obama on a military program, known as
1033, that allowed police departments to make discounted purchases of excess military
equipment, like armored vehicles and grenade launchers. Obama ordered the restrictions in 2015 after public outrage at the
deployment of some of that equipment during protests against police abuse in Ferguson, Missouri, and elsewhere. Announcing the new measures in
a speech to the Fraternal Order of Police, the largest police union in the country, Attorney
General Jeff Sessions called that equipment “lifesaving,” dismissing criticisms of police
militarization as “superficial concerns.” Marketing the Occupation THE POLICE EXCHANGES WITH U.S.
officers are premised on Israel’s experiences with terrorism and its security forces’ handling of
continued risks. But Israel’s record in carrying out its counterterror policies is checked with allegations of grave
abuses. Founded amid a campaign of ethnic cleansing in 1948, Israel seized the West Bank and Gaza in 1967’s Six-Day
War and has since maintained its occupation — including by building civilian Israeli settlements
in Palestinian territory, itself a violation of international law. Now, the same security forces accused of mistreating
citizens and stateless Palestinian subjugates are training American cops. Last year, the ADL’s training included meetings
with officials from Israel’s internal security service , known as Shin Bet. The security agency was allegedly
behind the surveillance, as well as the torture and targeted assassinations , of Palestinians in
both Israel and the occupied territories. The U.S. law enforcement officials on tour with the ADL also met
with Israeli police special patrol units known as “Yasam” — paramilitary riot police whose excessive
force and abuse of Palestinians is well-documented — and traveled to checkpoints, prisons, and Hebron. In Hebron, a city in the West
Bank, some 200,000 Palestinians are barred from entering the old city center, where fewer than 1,000 Jewish settlers are protected by the same number of Israeli soldiers.
The ADL, a group with a nominal mission to oppose bigotry that has instead expended much of its energies on advocating for Israel, failed to devote
much attention to Palestinian law enforcement. In 2016, the group’s itinerary included a single meeting with a Palestinian police officer
— from the Bethlehem Tourist Police. A spokesperson for the ADL said in a statement to The Intercept that critics’ suggestions that its programs contribute to police brutality
ADL’s law enforcement missions have a goal of doing exactly the

and racism is “false and defamatory.” “On the contrary,
opposite, by strengthening law enforcement’s connection to the communities they serve,” the
spokesperson said. In the past, the group condemned those drawing parallels between police abuse in the U.S.
and Israel’s occupation of Palestine. “There is a long history of using legitimate American social justice issues to undermine the Jewish state,” a top
official from the group wrote in the aftermath of the Ferguson protests. There is “no rational connection between the challenge of racism in America and the situation facing the
Palestinians,” the ADL official added. Yet the criticism persists.The group Jewish Voice for Peace recently launched a
campaign to bring greater public scrutiny to U.S.-Israel police exchange programs. “These
programs transform Israel’s 70 years of dispossession and 50 years of occupation into a
marketing brochure for ‘successful’ policing,” Stefanie Fox, JVP’s deputy director, wrote in an email to The Intercept. “Under the
banner of ‘counterterrorism’ training, high-ranking police and immigration officials visit
checkpoints, prisons, settlements, police stations, and other key sites that are central to Israel’s
policies of occupation and apartheid.” Law enforcement exchanges are marketed as an
opportunity for American police to learn about counterterrorism from the field’s self-
appointed leader, but, for Israel’s advocates, they are also seen as a way to sell a particular audience on pro-
Israel ideology. “[They] come back and they are Zionists,” then-ADL regional director David Friedman said of the delegation’s impact in 2015. “They understand
Israel and its security needs in ways a lot of audiences don’t.” That may just be the intended outcome. “ They are trying to get the U.S. to see
the world as divided into these camps of good and evil, and they want to tighten the U.S.
commitment to Israel on the basis of it being on the front lines fighting terror,” said Vitale, referring to the
groups behind the trips. “The whole project is a political project, which uses the police to answer a
particular analysis of international affairs.” To date, Israel has already been an inspiration to some
controversial police initiatives, like the infamous NYPD Muslim surveillance program, which
was modeled in part on the surveillance of Palestinians in the West Bank. Thomas Galati, the chief of
the NYPD Intelligence Division at the time, had participated in one of the ADL trainings in Israel. Israeli police and security forces may
also be learning a thing or two from their American counterparts. In 2016, for instance, Israel passed a “stop and frisk law” modeled
after its American equivalent, allowing police to “search anyone, regardless of behavior, in a
location that is thought to be a target for hostile destructive actions.” Palestinian residents of Jerusalem said the
legislation is applied with “blatant racism.” “ We see Israeli police taking on U.S. stop-and-frisk policies, further
adding to the state violence already facing Palestinians, ” Fox said. “This deadly exchange goes both ways
and encourages worst practices, such as racial profiling, mass surveillance, police brutality, and
suppression of political dissent that already exist in both countries.”
Reciprocal Solidarities
Pink/Blackwashing Thesis
Tag
What brought us together was a shared commitment to resisting pinkwashing —this is a term
employed by queer Palestinian activists and other people of conscience to describe the efforts by the
Israeli state and its supporters to draw attention to Israel's purportedly progressive record on
LGBT rights to detract attention from Israel's gross violations of Palestinian human rights. Sarah
Schulman, a New York-based lesbian, Jewish, and anti-Zionist writer and academic, has emerged as one of the key figures in the
global queer Palestinian solidarity movement, and her efforts were invaluable toward the recruitment of the delegates on the
LGBTQ delegation to Palestine.1 The delegation was hosted by queer Palestinian organizations, namely Al-Qaws (Arabic for
"rainbow," also known as an organization for "Sexual and Gender Diversity in Palestinian Society"), Aswat (Arabic for "voices," also
known as "Palestinian Gay Women"), and Palestinian Queers for Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (PQBDS). The purpose of
the delegation was not only to connect queer Americans and Palestinians, following upon a
successful speaking tour of queer Palestinians across the United States the previous year, but
also to further establish networks to undermine pinkwashing campaigns , and the cooptation
of queer Western movements by the Israeli state's political project. Other leaders in the global
queer Palestinian solidarity movement have included Judith Butler, the lesbian, Jewish, anti-
Zionist renowned gender theorist; and Angela Y. Davis, the queer, African-American, academic,
civil rights leader and prison abolitionist. For instance, in 2012, Davis spoke as part of the "Queer
Visions" initiative at the World Social Forum in Brazil, the theme of which was "Free Palestine." The growth of the global queer
Palestinian solidarity movement has been heartening and energizing for us, and yet the connections between
pinkwashing and blackwashing need to be theorized. The latter is a term employed by
Palestinian solidarity activists to describe the campaign on the part of the Israeli state to co-opt
Black Americans to support Israeli policies. Thus, African-Americans have been identified by
Israeli consulates across the United States as strategic targets in a similar manner as LGBT
communities. For instance, the American Israeli Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), one of the most powerful lobbies in the
United States, is used to push the Israeli state's agendas on Capitol Hill. AIPAC has been known for
actively recruiting Black college students to its conferences and on campuses across the United
States in order for them to serve as propagandists for the Israeli state (Moore and Mahfuz). As Seth
Wessler of Color lines has reported: Israel is under growing attack from Palestinian and international
activists who call the country a racist apartheid state. In response, its staunchest U.S. lobby is recruiting
black students as moral shields to make the case for Israeli impunity. At historically black colleges and
universities (known as HBCU's) around the country, AIPAC is finding and developing a cadre of black allies to
declare there's no way Israel can be racist. Such forms of blackwashing, and the pinkwashing we
referenced earlier, must be understood as interlinked and integral to the "Brand Israel" efforts
of the Israeli Ministry of Foreign Affairs to improve its image across the world, particularly in
liberal and racial minority communities where support for Israel is diminishing rapidly, while
support for Israel remains solid and steady among rightwing conservative groups such as some
communities of Evangelical Christians in the United States. Israel recognizes that it is facing a
public relations crisis, but rather than improve its treatment of Palestinians to improve its
global image, the state seeks to render its policies of apartheid and brutal, illegal military
occupation more palatable to Western publics, particularly in the United States, given the
unprecedented and tremendous financial, political, and military aid that is provided to Israel.
Nonetheless, key figures such as Angela Y. Davis have not only identified the struggle for Palestinian
freedom as a queer struggle but also insisted that Black Americans and Palestinians are natural
allies. In her own activism and scholarship as a former political prisoner in the United States, and as a queer woman, Davis is able
to elucidate how, for instance, the prison industrial complex links both Israel and the United States.
She is known for compelling arguments against the carceral state. In the cases of Israel and the United
States, both function as carceral apparatuses that permit the mushrooming of prisons and
proliferation of criminalizing policies. Davis publicly campaigns against corporations such as
G4S, the British multinational security corporation and the world's largest security company,
which is complicit in supporting Israel and its illegal detention and torture of Palestinians in
prison facilities, including women and children, in violation of human rights {"Desmond Tutu"). From the
New York Times we know that the United States has "less than 5 percent of the world's population. But it
has almost a quarter of the world's prisoners" (Liptak). We also know that this system targets minority
men, black and brown, disproportionately , as delineated by Michelle Alexander in her book The New Jim Crow. And
according to Addameer, the Palestinian prisoners' rights organization, Israel has detained nearly 20 percent of all
Palestinians in the occupied West Bank, and 40 percent of West Bank Palestinian men. Perhaps the
"special relationship" between the United States and Israel that we are so used to being celebrated by American and Israeli
politicians is precisely that of mass-incarceration and criminalization of bodies that have been
marked as the racialized other. As our friendship has developed over the past two years, it is a shared
experience of the disciplining of our bodies, the pervasive surveillance of a repressive state and
its policing apparatuses in our lives, and the deaths and detentions of our brothers and sisters,
queer and straight, locally and trans nationally, that brings us together and strengthens our
bond. In many ways we realize that queer and trans Blacks and Palestinians are born with prison
sentences, not knowing whether we will see the light of day tomorrow due to racism,
homophobia, and colonial violence. We count our blessings to be alive when we can, and we
celebrate our friendship, together. This is what motivates us to serve as better allies.
Alternative
Tag
space. In fact, it
under the conditions of structural violence if we did not have communities of solidarities,
imperialism, and the role of the United States' unconditional support for Israel. Yet Western allies in
2AC – Ressentiment K – Eprahim
The rhetorical and epistemological framework of the 1NC results in the
transfiguration of material reality towards a psychological doomsday,
materializing in self hatred, panic, and anxiety. Antiblackness writ large is a
byproduct of structural notions of ressentiment - racism is the symptom,
Ressentiment is the pathology.
Ephraim ’03 [Charles Ephraim, doctorate from Yale as distinguished Ford Fellow, professor at
Yale, currently associate professor of philosophy at Mercy College, (The Pathology of
Eurocentrism), pg. 1-2] BLEAKHEAVEN
It is commonly supposed that white racism is a disease of sorts, such that if white people would only come to
understand this, and just cure themselves, then black people would to a large extent and at long last be unshackled
from the chains of their subordination and oppression. Thus construed, racism has been singled out as the
culprit, the primary hindrance to black progress , the fundamental burden placed on the backs of black people. But this
argument is unsound because the basic premise – namely, that racism is a disease – is false. After a long and absorbing study of the
problem of white racism and black oppression, I have come to the contentious conclusion that racism is not the disease that it has been
made out to be, but a mere symptom of an underlying disease, a peculiar and uniquely European pathology
diagnosed by Nietzsche as ressentiment, and by Sigmund Freud as a cultural neurosis which characterizes European
civilization. Ressentiment is the fundamental burden of being black in a white-dominated
world. It is a disease that manifests itself in manifold and insidious ways, with racism being its most
overtly recognized form. Indeed, even racism is a cover to hide an essential aspect of this disease, namely, a
desperate and obsessive need for self-aggrandizement. This obsessive need for self-aggrandizement has
given rise to a host of problems constitution the so-called “pathology of black life conditions.” The “peculiar institution” of
slavery, the disempowerment of indigenous peoples by imperialism and colonialism, as well as the
infamous Jim Crow laws, and the prevailing system of anti-black discrimination, have all been
consequences of the white obsession with self-aggrandizement. Among the manifold ways of its expression, as we
shall see, ressentiment entails elements of xenophobia and misanthropy. It is the psychological project of racism to hide both of these entailments.
Racism would not be possible without xenophobia; and its ruthlessness in the service of imperialism and colonialism would
have been impossible without the misanthropy which it hides. Ressentiment has remained undetected
precisely because of its insidiousness, and because of our habit of interpreting phenomena from the surface. Thus, for example the victim blaming
psychology so well explored by William Ryan in his book blaming the victim (1971) has served effectively to mask the disease of ressentiment. In fact,
victim blaming is a form of psychological projection in which, as I shall show is an essential self protecting mechanism in the modus operandi of
ressentiment. And no one has suffered more from the victim-blaming syndrome than have black
people in a white-dominated world. I shall show why blac k people have been the most logically appropriate, though
profoundly unfortunate victims of the ressentiment projection. As victims of the white mans obsession with self-
aggrandizement black people have failed in their liberation efforts because of their lack of self
knowledge. This is not to cast aspersion on the collective intelligence of black people which would be absurd. Rather, it is to say that historically,
black people have been conditioned to think of themselves as quite other than they actually are:
they have been beaten, coerced, and cajoled into believing – or into professing belief in – these
falsehoods, which have been exclusively negative . These teachings, lessons in black inferiority,
have come from the Europeanswith a single overriding motive, namely, their own self
aggrandizement, which necessitated the myth of black inferiority, has been the greatest
obstacle to black liberation and hence to any meaningful black progress.
2AC – Flattening K – Wright
The alt fails to account for international dynamics and essentializes blackness.
The restrictive economy codes blackness not in a monolithic sense but through
particular textures that their understanding of blackness effaces.
Wright 15 – (2015, Michelle, PhD in Comparative Literature from the University of Michigan,
Professor of African American Studies and Comparative Literature Studies at Northwestern
University, “Physics of Blackness: Beyond the Middle Passage Epistemology,” pp. 147-55,
endnote on p. 188)
When interpellated through the Middle Passage epistemology, Blackness has a limited set of qualitative values or denotations that link it to the events in that epistemology such as the commitment to collective and individual struggle, “racial uplift,” and the
generally, the Middle Passage epistemology like

maintenance of strong communities through “traditional” or heteropatriarchal family structures. More ( other
established Black linear progress or antiprogress narratives e.g. Afropessimism — , Afrocentrism, PanAfricanism, Negritude, )10
links all Black collectives across the Diaspora to the experience of racism
also and the need to overcome it—so how can Ramses II be
“Black”? Even further, what does it mean for us to claim him as “Black”? It is hard to interpellate Ramses (or any of the other African kings, queens, leaders, intellectuals, politicians, scientists, etc., whose physiognomy we would acknowledge as stereotypically
“Black”) within the qualitative definition of Middle Passage Blackness as making common cause with African Americans—or any other “Black” community fighting racism and seeking socioeconomic and political equality in the African Diaspora. In attempting to
interpellate Ramses within this definition, we produce Blackness as a fixed identity that transcends time and space
must ; through this,
Ramses no longer belongs to his own spacetime but retroactively becomes a denigrated “Negro” who must combat his oppression. A paradox or—as Massey terms it, “a dichotomous result”—now confronts us: was Ramses II a Black freedom fighter or a ruler of
It is the qualitative definition of Black progress that

extraordinary and largely unquestioned power, one of the greatest and most oppressive in the history of Egyptian pharaohs?
creates this dichotomy, a paradox that then “empties out” all meaning in qualitative collapse . The
attempt to interpellate Ramses II through a Black progress narrative exposes the continuing attempt and subsequent failure of the progress narrative to interpellate Ramses. He is Black because he is a Black African, but he is not Black, because neither “Black” nor
“African” operated as identities in Ramses’s spacetime. Ramses II’s life speaks to the greatness of African empires, but his unapologetic use of massive slave labor should “expel” him from Black progressive membership, the same way in which some discourses
While we should not lose sleep over the “odd individual” whose
attempt to expel Blacks whose actions deliberately harmed other Blacks. perhaps terrible
behaviors bar them from a Black progress narrative

him, her, or full or perhaps even partial mention in , there are other Black individuals who are barred from mention who have
This dichotomy threatens to create interpellative problems for Blacks

not acted against the principle of striving for collective progress. also
who move across the Atlantic at the same time as millions of Black Africans are being
, unlike the Egyptian pharaoh,
sailed to and sold into the Americas but not in the same directions Black slaves , , veering away from our progress narrative.
transported outside of the Americas to Europe, India, and elsewhere do not retain a collective
identity They .disappear into households factories, fields
are sold individually and roads and city streets , perhaps , or country ,
From the point of view of Black linear narratives

intersecting with populations at large. progress , progress has not been achieved because the collective has evanesced (and is
their histories have become irrelevant to the collective historical

therefore unable to achieve its goal of overcoming racism), or read another way,
theme of overcoming racism Qualitatively speaking, it appears difficult if not impossible to

.
interpellate Blackness using a Black Atlantic linear narrative in a significant and lasting way progress . In “The
World Is All of One Piece: The African Diaspora and Transportation to Australia,” which is included in Ruth Simms Hamilton’s book Routes of Passage, Cassandra Pybus reprises a version of Sidney Mintz’s question about the qualitative limits of Black Atlantic studies:
A transnational historical consciousness and a capacity to encompass experience in disparate

time and space are great strengths of African diaspora studies In so far as there is a weakness, it .
is that the Atlantic world remains the locus of discussion While some attention has begun to .
drift toward the Indian Ocean, less has been directed toward the distant Pacific scholarship . . . . In the diaspora at the detailed
penal transportation records we can find information about the African end of the eighteenth century that is very hard to come by elsewhere and that points in directions in which historians may not otherwise look.11 Pybus understands that her topic is framed by
African Diaspora studies yet constrained by its “Atlantic focus”; she then observes that despite this swirl of scholarly activity in the Atlantic, there is a “drift” and “direction” toward the Indian Ocean and the “distant Pacific.” This passage draws a connecting line
moving horizontally (well, south by southeast) from the moment of the American Revolution in the Middle Passage timeline to other moments in those kingdoms and empires that border the Indian Ocean and, more specifically, to the moment of the British penal
colony of Australia. By moving us horizontally into the Pacific, Pybus traces the journey of those (primarily) U.S. Blacks who allied with the defeated British and accompanied them on their return to England. Once there, the promised support from the Crown never
materialized, and many of these former soldiers, spies, and support staff found themselves on the London streets. These (primarily) men would have been in competition with an already burgeoning class of the dispossessed filling the streets of London and other
industrial centers. As Robert Hughes argues in his monumental history of the settling of white Australia, The Fatal Shore, land grabs by the aristocracy and the replacement of cottage industries with large industrialized factories deprived farmers, laborers, and urban
workers of their former careers as well as prospects for new ones (many machines, such as looms, required fewer adult workers). Theft, especially with the poor now rubbing shoulders with the wealthy in crowded urban centers, skyrocketed, and Parliament
responded with deeply punitive measures; to steal a bit of ribbon or bread could send you to prison or heavy labor or, most fearful of all, condemn you to “transport” (to a British penal colony). With the American colonies no longer available for convicts, Britain
turned to its recently neglected “discovery” of Australia as a convenient replacement, and so white and Black Britons, along with a few U.S. and Caribbean Blacks, found themselves transported as part of the First Fleet settlers. Pybus’s second horizontal reading
comes, counterintuitively, mostly through records created by hierarchies such as court, maritime, colonial, and penal records, due to the paucity of “horizontal” archives (correspondence between peers, diaries, etc.). Pybus, not unlike Hughes in The Fatal Shore,
constructs a horizontal narrative of these Black convicts and settlers through (unavoidably) mostly vertical archival sources: state, judicial, colonial, and penal records that read these human beings as mere numbers filling ships, accepting punishment, and perhaps
enriching the Crown through forced labor. To an even greater extent than Hughes, Pybus works to retrieve the very multivalent human experiences behind these records of discipline and punishment, to see the interactions denoted, denounced, and pronounced
Yet despite two horizontal readings

through their eyes, so to speak, looking out horizontally rather than down from the (at least figurative) heights of the judge’s bench and foreman’s lash. these ,
qualitative collapse looms because Pybus has framed this history as a horizontal connection to
here
what is ultimately a vertical framework that finds meaning in the struggle against racism . Pybus’s Black
Founders offers us a notable exception to our assumptions about Blackness, but in her work, as in other histories she mentions, Blackness evanesces as the convicts and settlers perhaps married, procreated, and most certainly died without moving a coherent Black
Atlantic collective forward in its quest for equality in a majority white society. Or, rather more complicatedly, in Black Founders Blackness evanesces into either the white Australian population or the Australian Aboriginal population, in the latter case an indigenous
Blackness. Most likely reflecting on this, Pybus herself does not think that this discovery of Australia’s “Black founders” radically changes the history of the African Diaspora or Australia: “My point is not that this cohort of convicts is especially significant to the history
of Australia—though it certainly challenges the conventional reading of the colonial experience—but to examine what it can tell us about the wider world.”12 If we add Epiphenomenal time to our Black Atlantic frame, however, we can avoid the qualitative collapse
that (re)produces these histories as interesting in their own right but marginal to our understanding of Black Atlantic history. Interpellated through Epiphenomenal time, the Blackness in Black Founders first changes a person’s relationship to Blackness and
indigeneity. Rather than simply “losing” indigenous status once captured and then sold, Blackness intersects twice more with indigeneity, and on two continents: North America and Australia. In both cases, indigenous peoples sometimes helped Black slaves escape,
the latter often marrying into specific American Indian nations. Middle Passage U.S. Blackness now shares a spacetime through indigeneity and raises questions about Central and South American intersections (such as the Garifunas of Nicaragua).13 One might also
see a third, more controversial intersection, between U.S. Blacks who “returned” to establish the free state of Liberia and the indigenous populations who found themselves oppressed in the resulting socioeconomic and political hierarchy. The qualitative value of
Pybus’s Blackness now meaningfully intersects with the Americas but is not swallowed by it, because the frame is horizontally comparative rather than vertically subordinating. The intersection of Blackness with indigeneity in the Americas, Australia, and Africa also
subverts the notion of a “purely” diasporic Blackness, even within the progress narrative itself, because the latter honors indigeneity as the “origin” to which the collective must eventually return. In this moment of interpellation, origin/home is achieved not
necessarily through return but through intersections with other “first nations” in the Atlantic and Pacific. Even further, we can see how Blackness, in intersecting with indigeneity when (formally) seeking “return,” as in Liberia, might produce not egalitarian unity but
instead oppressive hierarchy. Black Founders also provides us with perhaps unheard of dimensions of Blackness that, once recognized, might usefully connect to other possible spacetimes that share this dimension. As noted before, the “Atlantic Blacks” who arrived
with the First Fleet and on subsequent convict ships experienced a range of lives or careers that cannot be summed up through one collective trajectory, especially that of the progress narrative. Pybus shows that in our present moment of reading, Blackness
becomes ambiguous in its meaning in these early colonies. On the one hand, racial designations are clearly marked in the official records, but unlike in the Americas, socioeconomic and political castes are not created to wholly segregate them. There are many
marriages one would designate as “interracial,” but even if one could access some understanding of how “interracial marriage” would translate in this spacetime, marriage is rarely an ideal that denotes the cessation of difficulties over differences. As more than one
wag has pointed out, the dominance of heterosexual marriage certainly does not reflect an egalitarian harmony of relations between the sexes. The marriages in question are thus racialized outside of social racializations, meaning that to be Black in these colonies
does not automatically designate a subaltern status below that of whites. In cases where Black convicts were executed or subjected to physical punishment (whipping was the most common), we might see racially motivated causes, but in the brutal tide of regular
executions and torturous punishment, it is difficult to extrapolate consistently a narrative in which this Blackness can be separated from the brutal imperial and capitalist caste system that ruled all British subjects, including the white working poor. Blacks intermixing
with the white working poor populations in England and Australia intersect with similar interactions during the earlier spacetime of indentured servitude in the United States and the later one of late nineteenth-century Irish immigration to northeastern urban
centers of the United States. If we step back from Pybus’s initial frame, which connects the history of the Black Atlantic in Australia horizontally, and instead honor the horizontality of her interpellations of Black individuals and their intersections (through marriage,
penal life, executions, manumission, etc.), one can read this history as a series of moments that intersect not only with Black Atlantic histories in the Americas but also with histories in Europe, Africa, and perhaps India. It should be noted that, while we are
discovering intersections of collectives, we do so wholly within idealist frameworks that can be further interpellated only through individuals who make up those collectives; beneficially, however, the collective identities that intersect with these individuals produce
yet more collectives in more spacetimes—more dimensions of Blackness across the Atlantic, Pacific, and Indian Oceans. While the era of the Middle Passage produces many and varied kinds of Blackness through the intersection of linear and Epiphenomenal time, the
conflated eras of World War II and the postwar era offer yet more. I understand World War II and the postwar period as a conflation of eras because it is impossible to pinpoint where one ends and the other begins; however, when we are operating with
Epiphenomenal time, this ambiguity is productive rather than restrictive. Indeed, breadth, depth, ambiguity, ambivalence, and dominance are the strengths contributed by these overlapping eras: breadth because World War II involved almost the majority of Black
Africans and Black Diasporans across the globe, whereas slavery—which forms the cornerstone of the Middle Passage epistemology—did not; depth because the various narratives, such as that of Black African men attempting to resist forcible conscription by French
and British colonial forces, or that of African American men and women who fought for the right to be drafted, require explanation and further research; ambiguity because we find Blackness where we do not expect it and struggle to interpret it, such as Black
German individuals who served in Hitler’s army and Black Brazilian troops tasked with defending Italy; ambivalence because it is a war and its equally destructive aftermath ironically connects the African Diaspora many times over with ease and diversity; and finally,
dominance because World War II and the postwar era constructed an interpellative frame that has been used by so many across the globe, a frame that highlights the contemporary and global importance of Blackness far more frequently than themes of the Middle
Passage ever do. While the rise of the BRIC nations (Brazil, Russia, India, and China), the Arab Spring, and other sociopolitical and economic events seem to signal the framing of a new era, journalists, pundits, and politicians alike still interpret many of these events as
effects of the World War II/postwar era. Even the most rigid histories cannot sustain a completely linear Second World War narrative. For example, the invasion of Poland in 1939 must be explained by the rise of Nazism, which perhaps requires a notation about the
Versailles Treaty. Likewise, the bombing of Pearl Harbor is necessary to explain the entrance of the United States into the war as a direct combatant. The Second World War, therefore, has at least two beginnings and, even by conservative estimates, at least two
endings: the surrender of the Nazis in Berlin and the signed surrender by the Japanese on the USS Missouri in Tokyo Bay. This gives us a war with at least two timelines to which there correspond two themes, two notions of progress, and many ways in which
occupied nations must be understood: as collaborators, as wholly oppressed, as underground resisters, and so on. This nonlinear set of peoples, places, and events forces anyone seeking interpellations through World War II to accept all the exceptions to its linear
progress narrative—that is, it forces researchers to incorporate great nuance into their interpellations (in asking when the Second World War ended, for example, we have to amend the question to reflect all the surrenders and dates that dominant discourses on
World War II cite in response because, whether there were multiple wars or one great war may be a matter of definition, but there is no question that there were multiple narratives that intersected). This means that qualitative collapse will occur less frequently in
interpellations made through a wholly linear progress narrative on the war (because dominant discourses do not offer, really, any wholly linear narratives of it), but when it does, the effect is almost always “deafening,” as if it were drowning out alternative
interpellations.14 Blackness can manifest through this multidimensionality, in most cases quite easily. In contrast to the difficulty involved in explaining how Blacks from the Atlantic found themselves in Australia, the global reach of the Second World War makes it
easy to explain how Blackness has spread almost everywhere. When using both Epiphenomenal and linear spacetimes to interpellate Blackness in these eras, no long, creative narratives are needed to explain the presence of West Africans under British rule, East
Africans under Italian Fascist rule, or the fight for equality both at home and abroad that was the self-appointed task of many an African American man or woman in uniform; moreover, using both spacetimes enables Black European studies to explain without much
difficulty how Blacks of African descent came to fight under Hitler. We can arrive at these explanations by starting with the individual, rather than the collective, as a point of interpellation. We can then link such an individual to his, her, or their variously realized
collective identities (understanding that we should never claim that an individual is fully realized, as we can work within distinct spacetimes only as they are imagined in the now, not in both the present and the past). Unfortunately, many of these dimensions as
interpellated through the postwar epistemology are easily achieved through vertical structures: we need only locate (in ascending order) a military battalion, a regiment, or a division that would contain Black soldiers and its encampments and headquarters. Vertical
readings alone can often interpellate an agential and diverse Blackness: Black soldiers and field nurses with agency, Black civilians with choices, and a whole roster of intersections with a broad variety of peers (soldiers and civilians) across vast geographies. At first
glance, performing vertical interpellations through linear narratives appears to bear the same fruit as a horizontal reading: Blackness with agency and diversity. This might explain why so many Black collective progress narratives of World War II use this
multidimensionality to produce hierarchical, or vertical, interpellations for the collective. The “Windrush narrative” of Black Britain, for example, readily narrates the contributions of Black British Caribbeans in the Second World War, yet uses a progress narrative to
interpellate this Blackness. Like the histories of African American men who fought for the United States during World War I, the “Windrush” narrative underscores the painful hypocrisy of serving the British Crown only to be treated as an undesirable emigrant in the
postwar era.15 Drawing on oral histories of service in the war and archival records from the British War Office, Windrush: The Irresistible Rise of Multi-Racial Britain (1999) interpellates Black Britishness as agential and diverse, a proud component of the history of
World War II but of official British histories of the war more particularly.16 To be sure, even when operating within World War II/postwar frameworks, we encounter obstacles. Hierarchies of power are not (unfortunately) wholly erased, and they can be complicated
by the complexities of global alliances and rivalries (no matter how easily they are manifested in the postwar epistemology). The postwar epistemology’s emphasis on the “now,” in the absence of a geographical center (a component of even the most traditional
narratives of the Second World War/postwar era),17 allows, say, Samoan warriors aiding the Allies to be interpellated through collective identities that certainly include hierarchal structures (e.g., the military command structure) but also relationships whereby
power must constantly be negotiated (e.g., in relationships between soldiers or between soldiers and civilians). The “now” complicates power, meaning that while an Epiphenomenal interpellation enables agency, it will also reflect those vertical hierarchies that
***BEGIN ENDNOTE*** One could read

inevitably accompany so many moments of interpellation in every individual life across the globe.18 18. Smith’s first novel as interpellating
Blackness through U.S. versions of Afropessimism but this is a distinction lacking meaningful ,
difference While it eschews the Middle Passage Epistemology’s progress narrative Blacks are
. (
destined to always be oppressed it needs this linear progress narrative to argue against ),
progress While claiming to be static, U.S. versions of Afropessimism nonetheless doggedly

.
track each moment of the Middle Passage Epistemology to state yet again that no progress
has been made ***END ENDNOTE*** .

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1AC

ADL’s law enforcement

What we are witnessing is a regime of “asphixatory power” which weaponizes

Omar Jabary Salamanca extensively details the Israeli

Thus, we affirm blackpalestinian breath as a reduction of debt/credit

Such militantly anti-military thinking requires considering another irreducible entanglement—

ADL’s law enforcement

Vote aff as an endorsement of domestic and international protest against the

Ending occupation prerequisite to identitarian empowerment.

The trope of 'extinction' enables settler moves to innocence which locks in

This insurgency necessitates a scholar-activist frame that dismantles domestic

It might be useful to begin by thinking of ourselves as existing in a

Conclusion: Abolition and Radical Political Vision

it is precisely the creative and pragmatic work of political fantasy/political vision/political

imagination that is the most underdeveloped dimension of the US establishment left’s

useful to begin by thinking of ourselves as existing in a relationship of deep historical obligation

The transition from stigmatization—“objects of charity” and “religious obligation”—to a rights-based,

Conclusion: Abolition and Radical Political Vision

it is precisely the creative and pragmatic work of political fantasy/political vision/political

imagination that is the most underdeveloped dimension of the US establishment left’s

useful to begin by thinking of ourselves as existing in a relationship of deep historical obligation

This piece of advertising, created by the pro-Israel organization Size

But pinkwashing has many antecedents; it

In detailing the ongoing dispossession of Palestine and the Palestinian people, and linking this

Thus, for Deleuze, the

Israeli Settler Colonialism and Global Capital

Marxist analysis reveals the two complementary movements of capitalism: constantly to

This technological capitalist intensification is traceable throughout Deleuze’s analysis of Zionist

Pinkwashing ignores the settler-colonialism of Israel. Unfortunately, pinkwatching ignores the

3.The Dangers of Exceptionalism

situate Palestine and Palestinian writing within the discourses

In Nizar Zuabi’s story, the Palestinian fugitives

Decolonization necessarily involves an interruption of the settler colonial nation-state, and of

In digging through the earth, the

The land in Nizar Zuabi’s

In the fugitive’s continual tunneling into the land,

Instead of personhood and inclusion founded on relationships of property, the Palestinian

JKP: I developed an even greater appreciation for the phrase “Existence

This piece of advertising, created by the pro-Israel organization Size

But pinkwashing has many antecedents; it

The establishment of the Israeli

The transition from stigmatization—“objects of charity” and “religious obligation”—to a rights-based,

How is the practice of maiming manifested? Medical

During the second intifada, there

Omar Jabary Salamanca extensively details the Israeli

Such militantly anti-military thinking requires considering another irreducible entanglement—

There is a particular kind of sub-political experience

renewal of a certain affective, extra-political sociality—the new international of insurgent

decades-long experience as an occupying force to brand itself as a world leader in

it isn’t a good idea, whether in Israel or

In addition to meeting with their Israeli counterparts,

ADL’s law enforcement missions have a goal of doing exactly the

generally, the Middle Passage epistemology like

It is the qualitative definition of Black progress that

behaviors bar them from a Black progress narrative

This dichotomy threatens to create interpellative problems for Blacks

From the point of view of Black linear narratives

their histories have become irrelevant to the collective historical

theme of overcoming racism Qualitatively speaking, it appears difficult if not impossible to

A transnational historical consciousness and a capacity to encompass experience in disparate

Yet despite two horizontal readings

***BEGIN ENDNOTE*** One could read

progress While claiming to be static, U.S. versions of Afropessimism nonetheless doggedly

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