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Why we must continue to raise our voice against aggressive Israeli settler colonialism


 

As a decolonization theorist, I find the fundamental question of Israeli settler colonialism as a guiding anchor to my theorizing work. As an exemplar of settler colonialism, the state of Israel continues to perpetuate a wide array of communicative tropes that justify its oppressive practices. 

The oppression of colonialism is communicative. It is established, legitimized, and circulated through communicative resources and architectures.

Israeli settler colonialism works through multiple communicative inversions, the turning of materiality on its head to legitimize the infrastructure of colonial violence.

The communicative infrastructure of Israeli settler colonialism marks the Palestinian people as terrorist to perpetuate its terror. 

Palestinian claims to sovereignty are labeled as terrorist to sustain the Israeli apparatuses of colonial expansion.

The marking of the colonized subject as the source of terror is a fundamental communicative inversion that sustains the colonial project. 

The colonizer has historically used this strategy, couched in the language of emancipation, to carry out its colonizing project. To the colonizer, labeling calls for anti-colonialism as racist, oppressive, terrorist, uncivil, and threats to security is intrinsic to the perpetuation of the oppressive colonizing practices.

This communicative inversion is tied to communicative erasure, the violence of erasing decolonizing articulations. Erasures are legitimized through inversions. Once anti-colonial speech is marked as racist, uncivil, oppressive, and terrorist, the colonizer can deploy the instruments of terror to pathologize and criminalize anti-colonial speech. Consider for instance the ways in which the language of anti-racism is deployed to silence the critics of Israeli settler colonialism. Across the globe, the instruments of settler colonialism networks through powerful structures to create the sites of erasure. Silencing the talk of anti-colonialism works to erase possibilities for decolonization.

It is in this backdrop that we must continue to raise our voices against Israeli settler colonialism. For any decolonization theorist, the call to decolonization must turn to the question of transforming the ongoing violence perpetuated by the colonial Israeli power in Palestine. 

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