I an almost done with chapter 2 and I don’t even know what to say for discussion. He’s right. Everything he says is incisive and insightful, piercing through the veil of genocidal colonial propaganda and cutting to the roots of the atrocities. I can’t pick any quote out because everything is so important. I’m marking the paper copy and underlining half of most pages.

And it’s truly overwhelming. Refreshing to see someone speaking the truth without tiptoeing around Zionist respectability politics. And also so sad.

There’s a school of thought in critical theory that the whole idea of the Western citizen (and all the brainworms tied up in that) is defined by opposition to the subjugated. In the United States specifically, the white citizen individual is defined as the opposite of enslaved Black bodies and dispossessed indigenous nations. Notably, Black Americans have been enslaved and indigenous people have had their land stolen for the entire history of the USA, and the state continuously reproduces those categories in order to survive. Of course, the only way to do that is constant violence. You have to take Hegel’s master-slave dialectic a little too seriously to see this as conferring humanity instead of legal status, but there’s good evidence that’s how the author meant it. If you don’t exist within the category of citizen, you aren’t actually seen as an individual. i’ve read a bit about how Hegel and Kant were first anthropologists and race scientists before writing their works of philosophy. The definition of a western or european citizen is ultimately rooted in white supremacy. The settler citizen is free, the opposite of the slave or bonded laborer. The settler citizen has land, the opposite of the dispossessed native. i bring up Yankeestan first because i’m from there, so its easy for me to talk about it.

The Zionist project is ultimately a European colonial project, and i think the same pattern holds. The Palestinians are obviously the natives being dispossessed of their land, and in many cases Palestinians do menial low paying jobs (which i understand to be one of few available sources of income thanks to Zionist policy). There are also laborers imported from Thailand and the Philippines to do manual labor that is beneath the dignity of Zionist citizens. The citizen is defined by religion, by skin color, by land ownership, and by employment. A great deal of cultural and psychological effort goes into making these categories, and the boundary of the circle is defined by everything outside of it. When El-Kurd says that the humanizing process accepts implicitly that “that the oppressed must demonstrate their worthiness of liberty and dignity, first and foremost. Otherwise occupation, subjugation, police brutality, dispossession, surveillance, and “extrajudicial executions,” would be excusable or even necessary,” i think that’s a necessary principle for citizens of a settler colony. If the oppressed don’t basically deserve it, if the stereotypes aren’t mostly true, then the self-conception and mental stability of the settler citizen collapse.

El-Kurd also points out the theoretical base for humanization is in bourgeois values. The idea that membership in a common humanity comes from a checklist of certifications is ultimately something that will only help those with money. It imagines “a world where the rich can master roles the poor cannot imagine auditioning for”. I think this bourgeois humanization also exists in contrast to the definition of a citizen i’ve been discussing. You don’t need any amount of money or any degrees or to be actually correct about anything for settler citizens to ‘circle the wagons’ if you are already one of them. The Zionist soldier ‘kidnapped’ out of his tank and Carolyn Bryant (the woman who got Emmett Till lynched) are both citizens according to their societies. They are/ were individuals with value and potential, and so settler society calls them victims regardless of their actions or the facts. By contrast, their enemies are seen as violent thugs who are beyond reason, lurking among the faceless masses who secretly sympathize. The outsider or the non-citizen cannot be individuated or have reasonable complaints in the eyes of the citizen. The idea of humanization is a trap, to waste the energies and resources of non-citizens so that a select few of them can get conditional scraps of citizenship.