Settler Violence is State Violence

There will be no Zoom call this Friday, as I’ll be traveling. I plan to release a pre-recorded interview instead. We’ll be back live on Friday, August 28 at our regular time.

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Things to Read

(Maybe this should be obvious, but I link to articles and videos I find provocative and significant, not necessarily ones I entirely agree with.)

On the Jewish Currents (subscribe!) podcast, Arielle Angel, Professor Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor and Alex Kane discuss socialism, pro-Palestinian politics and Black voters.

On the Foundation for Middle East Peace’s “Occupied Thoughts” podcast, I talked about the American Jewish establishment and American democracy with Ahmed Moor.

In The New York Times, Muhammad Shehada analyzes the choices facing Hamas and the people of Gaza.

On August 23, I’ll be speaking in Sydney, Australia.

See you a week from Friday,

Peter

VIDEO TRANSCRIPT:

It feels like the question of settler violence against Palestinians has broken through in the United States into, kind of, the mainstream media, among mainstream politicians, even in the mainstream establishment Jewish community in a way that it hasn’t before. So, you see people who have pretty strong pro-Israel credentials saying, settler violence is a really big problem, it’s wrong, the Israeli government really needs to stop it.

And it’s better that those people say that than say nothing, than just avert their eyes, which has been happening for a long time. But I think the framework of analysis is often wrong because the framework of knowledge often tries to suggest that settler violence is distinct from the violence of the Israeli state, rather than recognizing the way that they work hand in hand.

And I think that one of the ways that we could understand why it doesn’t make sense to think about these things separately is to think about other systems of group supremacy. So often, when it comes to Israel-Palestine, like, there’s a very particular language and discourse that is created that people kind of move into when they discuss this, and it’s like, they kind of abandon, I think, the moral and intellectual perspective that they would have in other systems of supremacy.

So, I think one can think about the relationship between Israeli settlers and the Israeli state as a little analogous to the relationship between the Ku Klux Klan and state governments in the South during the era of Jim Crow. Which was that the fundamental reality in the segregated South was of white supremacy. And white supremacy was maintained by the state. White people in Alabama, let’s say, could vote. Black people in Alabama essentially could not vote.

To maintain that system of domination, it required the power of the state to prevent Black people from trying to assert their rights. And then you also had a group like the Klan, which perhaps in a kind of rougher way, but, you know, was also doing the same thing. It was terrifying Black people into not trying to register to vote, to not trying to get, you know, to essentially change their system, their role in the society.

And while it’s possible that the state at times might have found the Klan a little bit annoying, because it wasn’t entirely under their control, it was also the case that there was that, you know, many of the people who were in the Klan also had relationships to the state. They might have been off-duty police officers, or people who had government jobs, and while there could have been tactical differences between the way, like, a given governor of Alabama wanted to deal with the imperative of maintaining white supremacy, and the way the, like, local leader of the Klan meant, they were much more allies than they were in opposition. And it wouldn’t have really made much sense to appeal to the governor of Alabama, recognizing, accepting the framework of white supremacy, but saying, you’ve gotta crack down on the Klan.

And similarly, in the West Bank, the state imperative is to maintain the system of supremacy in which Israeli Jews in the West Bank have the right to vote, they have citizenship. They live under civil law. Palestinians don’t have citizenship, the right to vote. They live under military law. And indeed, in the Israeli case, not just the imperative to kind of to maintain this oppression and domination, but also to move towards expulsion of Palestinians, right? Which is deep in Israel’s history, and you see Israel basically, the state will declare entire areas as a closed military zone, for instance, as they’ve done in parts of what’s called Area C, and tell the Palestinians they have to leave those areas. And then you see settlers basically imposing all of this violence on Palestinians nearby, which has the same effect of basically forcing people off of their land.

And also here, you see that the settlers are very often deeply integrated into the Israeli state. They are likely doing their military service. You know, they’re often getting guns and weapons from the Israeli state, something that Palestinians could never legally do.

And so, when we talk about the idea that the Israeli state needs to crack down on settler violence, we’re ignoring the fundamental system of supremacy. I mean, in some ways, I think part of what happens is that people who were raised to want to give Israel and Israelis the benefit of the doubt when they see bad things happening, they kind of want to retreat into saying, okay, well, maybe there are some bad apples, there are some bad Israelis, but we want to still be on the side of the good Israelis.

But I don’t think this is really about good Israelis or bad Israelis any more really than it was about, like, good white people in Alabama or bad white people in Alabama. I think that’s the wrong way to think about it. It’s about a structure, a system of oppression. And the system of oppression, in a certain kind of way, doesn’t really care whether you’re a good person or a bad person, in the sense of kind of, like, whether you’re willing to walk an old lady across the street.

I mean, even if you are an Israeli officer, soldier, politician, who, at some personal level, sees a video in which settlers are doing terrible things and feels some sense that that makes you queasy, the structure is that the Israeli settlers are citizens. They vote. They can vote you out of office. They can write a letter or call your boss and try to get you fired. Palestinians don’t have any of that power. The system is not accountable to them.

So, that it’s in such a reality, it just doesn’t make very much sense to think that an Israeli government that is accountable to West Bank settlers, but not accountable to Palestinians is ever going to act against Israeli settlers in any significant way. The fundamental problem is the problem of two legal systems, of one group where the state is accountable to it, and the other group that is not accountable to it. And the settler violence is just kind of one particularly nasty expression of that, but the state can’t act in a meaningful way in opposition to that, because the state itself is built on and maintains this very system of apartheid, of Jewish supremacy, that enables the settler violence in the first place.

And so, I think that, what I hope is that people who are now appalled at settler violence can kind of think more broadly about the system that enables settler violence, and understand that that system itself will never be able to genuinely crack down on settler violence. And so, the critique has to move from settler violence itself to the system, and it’s only when the United States starts to end its impunity with this system, and force Israeli political leaders to think about fundamentally changing this system so that Palestinians have basic freedom, have basic human rights, that only then will you be able to actually see, I think, a state that can stop settler terrorism.

It just doesn’t make sense to think that a state that is built on Jewish supremacy will crack down on this particular manifestation of Jewish supremacy any more than it would have made sense to think that a state built on white supremacy would have cracked down on the Klan.