Statements, news and appeals come in daily from around the world marking the spread of support for BDS. Few have been as eloquent and authoritative as this statement by eminent scholar ANN STOLER
By Colonial Design
As someone who has worked for some thirty years as a teacher and student of colonial studies — on comparative colonial situations, colonial histories, and the violent and subtle forms of governance on which colonial regimes rely — it would be difficult not to describe the Israeli state as a colonial one.
It would be difficult not to recognise Israel’s past and ongoing illegal seizure of Palestinian land, the racialisation of every aspect of daily life, and the large-scale and piecemeal demolition of Palestinian homes, destruction of livelihoods, and efforts to destroy the social and family fabric, as decimation by concerted and concentrated colonial design.
These are the well-honed practices of regimes that define colonialisms and have flourished across the imperial globe. As with other colonial regimes, the Israeli state designates and redraws geographic borders, suspends Palestinian civil rights and arbitrarily transgresses what for Israelis are recognised and guarded as private space.
Israel is particular but it is not unique. Its techniques of occupation are based on unfounded uses of the legal apparatus of Israeli law. These are the practices of a colonial state committed to replacing and displacing a Palestinian population, and committed to its own expansion. That expansion is persistent, both surreptitious and blatant everyday: room by room in the old city of Jerusalem, house by house in the spread of settler communities, meter by meter as the placement of the Wall in the name of “security” cuts through homes and fields, and divides neighborhoods while it infringes further into legally recognised Palestinian territories.
At issue is both a confiscation of history and a confiscation of the future possibilities of those who today find their bedding thrown on the streets in the middle of the night by Israeli settlers.
If democracy is defined, as Hannah Arendt did, by “the right to have rights” for an entire population within the state’s jurisdiction, the Israeli state cannot be considered a democratic one. Nor can a democracy be founded on the principle of expulsion and the creation of a diasporic population shorn of its land, belongings and citizenship — a principle avidly embraced by Israel since 1948.
For these reasons, I confirm my support for the BDS international boycott of those Israeli institutions that actively or passively accept a status quo that condones and expands the occupation, violates international law, enforces military control and denies Palestinian rights to self-determination.
Ann Laura Stoler
Willy Brandt Distinguished University Professor Of Anthropology and Historical Studies
The New School for Social Research, New York
10 September 2010
See also a summary of a detailed South African study of Israel in Documents
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