8 months, 4 weeks ago

So this ‘two-state solution’ is code for neocolonialism, right?

It would be helpful to clarify what the Palestinians are really being offered as part of this much-lauded solution to the conflict in Israel-Palestine. Where the settler oppression of “insurgent Arabs” is delegated to the new postcolonial state’s police so that colonial violence can be represented as “political violence”? Where the torture of resistors and beating of protesters is no longer settler-colonialism’s trade but now “yet another failure of democracy in the developing world?” Will the Israeli military leave Gaza like South African police left Soweto during apartheid – and fulfil the promise of a more ethnically representative baton strike? Will this state’s new president and the “departing” colonial governor – or occupation – make a show of a friendly shaking of hands in the hand-off of power? If so, it explains why liberals in the West are anxiously clamouring for it, embarrassed that the overt founding violence of settler-colonialism has not yet become the backroom violence of the troubled “postcolonial state” and that Israel, for some reason, has not yet exchanged the thrill of the sjambok and demand for white rule for the normalcy of neocolonialism and a multicultural white power where the planters are now foreign direct investment, the railway barons now development experts, NGO directors and CEOs for green startups.

Discover Related