The Truthout news service has generously given us permission to share an excellent interview with Judith Butler by George Yancy, on this most recent Israeli military campaign against Gaza and its people. (31/10/2023)
Judith Butler calls for immediate ceasefire, Palestinians’ right of return and the dismantling of colonial structures.
What’s happening in Gaza is genocide. The bodies keep falling, piling up. This is happening under our collective watch, our moment in history.
Israeli forces have now killed more than 8,300 people in Gaza, including at least 3,400 Palestinian children, and tens of thousands more face an acute risk of death as the Israeli military continues to prevent people in Gaza from accessing adequate food, clean water and functional medical care. The U.S. State Department has reportedly estimated that 30,000 babies under 6 months of age with barely formed immune systems are currently drinking contaminated water in Gaza. I dread to imagine the colossal ways in which illness and starvation wrought by conditions like these may soon push the death toll exponentially higher, even as Israel continues expanding its ground attacks under the cover of the ongoing communications blackout caused when Israeli forces severed Gaza’s phone and internet systems.
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Eyal Weizman: The architecture of power in Israel’s war on the Palestinians
The architecture of colonialism and segregation by Israel is a multi-layered and shifting deployment of techniques of separation and surveillance; multi-layered because the well-known “wall of separation” in the West Bank is but one of a number physical obstacles employed to control, filter and condition the movement of Palestinians, pushing them away from the dominion of the settler colonies, while simultaneously facilitating interventions in nominally Palestinian held territories and shifting because the “walls” can be moved, added to and retracted, while the “walls” of the Palestinian spaces can be bypassed, pierced and/or destroyed.
If a “wall” serves as a physical marker of sovereignty – distinguishing friend from foe –, the plasticity and porosity of “walls”, as state practice-policy, means that who is friend and foe is rendered fluid. Or stated differently, those rendered “barbarians” by separation and exclusion are the creatures of a permanent state of exception, of an “anarchic” power, of the rule of barbarism.
The work of the Israeli architect. writer and activist, Eyal Weizman, has sought to map this architecture of power and violence in ways that reveal dimensions of the exercise of domination that are often neglected or forgotten.
We share below a series of video recorded reports and interviews with Weizman, followed by links to two of his published essays available online.
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