 Good evening everyone and welcome to this last session of the weekly series organized by the London Middle East Institute. Director Dr Hassan Hakimian is there and we he's always offering us spaces to to talk about very important issues. I'm it's the last one for this term and we will start the series again in the next academic year. I'm Dean Amater, I'm the chair of the Center for Palestine Studies and I also work at SOAS and I'm a you know kind of a media scholar so to speak. I'm really very very delighted to be chairing this session where we have you know two outstanding colleagues, scholars, activists, you name it, who have been working diligently to try and improve and open up our understanding of Palestine and Israel and the relationship between them. So we have Professor Ronit Lenton whose book Traces of Racial Exception, Racializing Israeli Settler Colonialism is the subject of this discussion tonight and there are copies of the book outside and we are really looking forward to hearing what she has to say around this topic. She was the former director of the Ethnic and Racial Studies at Trinity College Dublin. She is retired but still working really hard as you can see. She has written extensively some of her books I'll just mention a few. They include conversations with Palestinian woman which was published in 1982, Israel and the Daughters of the Shoah, Reoccupying the Territories of Silence 2000. She is also the editor of Gender and Catastrophe and then she has written on several topics related to gender and genocide, gender and the Holocaust, Israeli and Palestinian peace activism and racism in Ireland and I think she will probably I don't want to take too much time explaining but you can you know I'm sure most of you know her and know of her work but we are really looking forward to how she's going to talk about the book and the question of racial exception which is very pertinent this time you know considering the latest Israeli kind of statement regarding Palestinian citizens of Israel and Professor Heim Bersheed, I never pronounce your name properly so excuse me I did okay he is a colleague and again an activist, a filmmaker, photographer and a film studies scholar but I can say he also wears many hats he's you know kind of historian, critical scholar everything put together he has been he has retired from the University of East London where he worked since early 2002 and he has been an associate and he has taught with us here at Shoahs and he is an associate member of the Center for Palestine Studies. He has published widely his books include the best-selling introduction to the Holocaust and the first version was titled Holocaust for Beginners. He also edited volumes including the Gulf War and the New World Order with Nira Ural Davis published in 1992. He has co-edited a volume with Haifa Hamami the conflict and contemporary visual culture in Palestine and Israel a special double issue and a special double issue on third text on Palestinian and Israeli art literature, architecture and cinema and he is on the editorial board of several publications including are you on the editorial board of Journal of Holy Land? Yeah so many editorial boards he's serving on he cannot remember but I'm really delighted because what we're going to do here is I think Heim is going to start and then Ronit will talk that's the order of the day isn't it and then we will have open up the discussion as a conversation with you so you know in a sense what I would like is not long statements and kind of points but it's a kind of conversation so we can come out with a better understanding of why we are talking of the topic of racial exception at this time and thinking about racializing Israeli settler colonialism so without further ado may I may you join me in welcoming our speakers. I'm sure we'll keep with the time so thank you very much Dina and Hassan and everyone and I'm very honored to speak about this book I think it's quite a special volume and I'm speaking about it with some trepidation because it is a very dense volume it's you have to read every word and believe me you will read every word of this book and starting with the preface which is a masterpiece please don't forget to read the preface and every and you will say this to everyone else when you speak to them I'm sure now what this book is doing is something which is very important and and timely and it's not an easy thing to do and I'm quite I quite admire the work that went into it it was very ardent mapping of the debates and theoretical approaches that were taken to the Israel-Palestine situation I don't want to call it conflict because you know the reasons yeah so what I think has happened over the last two decades at least is a lot of Israeli and other including Palestinian academics trying to find a theoretical framework to analyze and understand Israel now Israel as a settler colonial state is not so usual yeah not that there is a typical settler colonial state a lot of people have made that point especially Patrick Wolf and but a lot of these really discussion which I will get to in a minute is using terminology which is problematic so I think what this book is doing and I very much welcome it is trying to map the debate until now the terminologies the problematic of the different terminologies and trying to find and I think finding a way of putting together a number of approaches to concoct quite an accurate and timely way of looking at Israel and Ronit says in the book quite clearly that she's not discussing Palestine of course she's discussing the Palestinians all the time but she's not discussing Palestine she is discussing Israel as an anti-Zionist Israeli living in Ireland now the argument is based on study and following of a number of theorists so I'll very briefly go through it because I think it's important they include Lorenzo Veracini which I'm sure people here know and settler colonial present they include Agamben now when it comes to Agamben Ronit is being very careful to point out the problematic of using Agamben and his limitations his if you want Eurocentrism and the fact that he does not relate to the colonial aspects of situations that he is discussing and he's discussing mainly European situations even in his later work and so while Agamben is very difficult not to relate to in this debate she is actually qualifying this by using others by adding to this amalgam of theoretical approaches others who do the main one I think is Patrick Wolf traces of history and I think the book of course is the book title as you are related to his title and he combines a number of approaches that are useful for Ronit and are useful for discussing Israel and these are both racism and settler colonialism which of course he's been a very important in the last few decades so by adding Patrick Wolf and his very different way of looking at Israel and of course Agamben is not writing about Israel but he's writing about the state of exception and the state of exception is very important for discussing Israel I think what Ronit is doing is actually creating if you wish a theoretical space which is not based on one position only and the limitations of such a position but actually combining those to create a safer theoretical space now she also used Foucault and Foucault is also problematic for different but similar reasons that I've mentioned about Agamben and when discussing concepts like burr life which I will mention also in a minute there are problems which Foucault is not actually able to to resolve or let's say a use of Foucault will not resolve rather and she's using David T. Goldberg on racial palestinization this is very useful in the book because this informs very much the position that she then takes now of course one has to say I know it it should be obvious but I want to say it that Ronit is not treating race as a biological concept or system but as a cultural construct which is basically used in order to racialize communities and exploit them or expel them or both of those so please don't be confused by the term racial traces before you read the book and I think she talks a lot about the technologies of racialization and I think all of us who are connected in any way to what is happening know those technologies and those technologies include most of the ways that life is experienced in Palestine they include disconnecting from services I don't need to tell you about that you see it on the television screens not allowing connection to services where they exist for example Israel has torn up the whole telephone system of Palestine in 2002 of course this was already in the time at the point in time that mobile telephones existed but the mobile telephone system of Palestine is also controlled by Israel indirectly and the Internet is controlled by Israel so actually any connection of very isolated communities like Gaza but also people in the West Bank and to a degree Israeli citizen Palestinian citizens of Israel are actually controlled by racialized technologies the removal of the right to to elect and be elected to represent your community is now well advanced you would know that only by at the moment it seems that the Supreme Court has thrown out the you know the approach to deny some of the Palestinian members of the Knesset the right to stand for election while he didn't deny they didn't actually do anything illegal of course I didn't deny the same right to fascist Jewish legislators who have broken the law and continue to break the law and are actually asking for expulsion and genocide so this is another technology of racialization of the Palestinians the simple issue of building permissions for example most of the Palestinians living in Israel are unable to build for their children or for themselves towns maybe cities I should call them Ramle or Lidda are actually choked and Palestinians cannot because those permissions are not processed by the local authorities I'm not even talking about the sea areas in Palestine where of course only settlers can build the right annuling all rights of citizenship free movement the right to education the right to to to have a job for employment the right to actually have private property and the right for legal support so basically all rights which are normalized in Israel are denied in Palestine and I could continue but you I think are getting this point and when it comes to Gaza it's a denial of life so here the argument about such a state of exception and for cause typification of those who are destined to live and those who are destined to die the whole community of Gaza is basically destined to die they have no right to to life and they have no right to what it means to be living so this is a range of those technologies of exception and racialization which are used to impose the controls through race now I'm coming to a point that I mentioned and that is in the debate that Israelis have had and actually one of them is going to be here tomorrow or an if the hell which is discussed in the book quite a lot Israelis used the concept and term of ethnicity quite a lot I think what is argued in the book that this is very very suspect to say the least of course you would know I'm sure that the framework that theoretical framework that you choose dictates your conclusions in a great way kind of limits and delimits any conclusions that you can come up with and by the time that you have chosen earlier chosen ethnocracy and ethnic as your key concepts you've actually made sure that racism is not discussed and I think that is the function of the use of ethnocracy and ethnicity and there's a number of people who have used that over the last 20 years or any if the hell is talking about an ethnocracy Israel is an ethnocracy some is mocha calls it ethnic democracy and even illan papi used the concept ethnic cleansing I want to actually separate the first two from illan for very good reasons but the first two by using those concepts are avoiding racism altogether also by using ethnicity the assumption is the Jews are of an ethnicity I think we already have quite a lot of people especially shlomo zand who've proven I think beyond any reasonable dad that the Jews are neither a nation nor an ethnicity and therefore by using ethnicity you are you know this is a double crime it's hiding the racial and racialization aspects but also making Israel as a presenting Israel as a race as an ethnic continuity which it is not and of course racism in Israel is not limited to the Palestinians it is actually rampant against black Jews against the Mizrahi's etc so actually by talking about an ethnicity you are actually making something very seriously wrong and the argument against illan's title I think is very interesting and correct in that is that this is a term coined by Milosevic in order to actually give genocide a good press yeah this is what they were doing they were actually committing genocide in ex-Yugoslavia and by calling it ethnic cleansing I mean just think about the concept cleansing this is this is something clean you know they are just cleaning Yugoslavia or cleaning Serbia so the idea of this you know cleansing is actually both a regime or a state terminology using a terminology of fascists like Milosevic without too many qualifications one has to say and so maybe if illan who is a friend of all of us and who you know we we very much support what he's writing if he was calling his book about ethnic cleansing in Palestine genocide in Palestine and the book may not have been published we know the the kind of frantic atmosphere at the moment yeah but it would be more accurate so the idea of using ethnic I think is very suspect and you run it is avoiding doing that at all cost and discusses the terms that do that now the book is divided basically into six chapters and I've more or less done what the first chapter is doing if I got another five minutes and the four chapters I will just go through in five minutes because a very important the structure and especially because I think the book is doing things that other people have not done the first one is probably the one that is been dealt with by other people and that is the rule of law as a racializing system and you know I don't have time to speak about this but we all know that Israel has got over 60 laws who racialize the Palestinians as victims through different you know making in a sense making them into the homosucker of Palestine so that they are in the position of what Agamben calls bare life now on it is actually not happy with concept of bear life because if one uses it on Palestine that is removing agency from the Palestinians I want to present to on it with one question and that is I think that a living in Gaza is probably unfortunately the best example today of bear life and yet of course we know that there is resistance and very strong resistance in Gaza so agency is not removed but the question is what is the relationship between resistance to bear life and the actual situation of bear life and I hope you can relate to that because sometimes of course the Gazans if face the situation where the more resistance they are actually using the less life is spent the less life is left in in Gaza and look by looking at it through Agamben the second the third chapter deals with Israel as a racialized settler colonial state now people have doubt have dealt with Israel as a settler colonial state and the first one is of course Maxim Rodan son in 67 so there's a long history of understanding theoretically Israel as a settler colonial state but Rodan son for example doesn't relate to race so I think this was started mainly by people like Patrick Wolf and I think when it really develops what Wolf of course doesn't do because he's only talking about it in one chapter in his book and this whole book is dealing with the racialized state and the connections the historical connections not just in Israel but in other settler colonial situations between race and the procedures of state of exception and bear life and the first chapter is a critique of the Eurocentrism of Agamben and other theoreticians which I think she uses marvelously but of course always in a qualified manner it would be wrong not to use what is very useful in Agamben or in Foucault so the book does that but always you know where you are in terms of their overall positions and she uses what's useful and she basically leaves along what is highly suspect or inaccurate today and we can see that and five chapter five is very interesting and I probably have to end on this and that is the gender elements of the conflict of racializing Palestine now a number of Palestinian women and very few Israeli women have written about this recently you know more importantly Nadra Shalhoub Kevorkian for example and they are speaking about the racialization of the Palestinian and not just of the Palestinian woman but of course about concepts like feminizing the Palestinian male that's a very important part of destroying Palestine so basically she starts from the obvious using rape as a weapon of war in 1948 for example a subject that was very much silenced even by those who first presented it like Benny Morris who discusses it as an exception though at the same time he says it happened a lot but he discusses it as exceptions but Benny Morris was the first one to tell us that all those cases of rapes were silenced people have been through a procedure a kind of court-martial when they were exposed but they actually you know that the cases were totally silenced because it was bad news for Zionism in Israel so this is part of the toolbox and this is the most horrific tool in that toolbox but there are other parts of that toolbox which one needs to think about and of course the feminization of Palestinians is related in Ronit's analysis to the masculinization of the Zionist male in other words these are the polarities of the racialization process using gender to create the Palestinian male who is less masculine or feminized and the Israeli male who is a Superman of masculinity and this is very interesting when you think that the main task of the IDF and of the Israeli male is fighting little boys and all men and women who are unarmed when Israel has the most advanced arms on this planet and basically these are the Superman they're fighting you know totally unarmed and peaceful civilians and this is what they present themselves as and of course the cases of yeah one minute yeah just one minute an important part of the the feminization of Palestine is the use of rape for example to cause you know expulsions and mass expulsions like in the case of of course the famous cases of massacre where you know some of the communications that were received by the Palestinians is if you don't leave we will rape all the women so the few cases that were known about where enough to prove to Palestinians that this is what is awaiting them elsewhere so I want to finish by saying that I think that what the book is doing is a very timely putting together of the problematic methods that were used over many decades to discuss Palestine and suggesting a framework which is actually much more fitting more accurate and less problematic and more in line especially with black theoreticians writing about race and settler colonialism for example in the two Americas and in Africa so she is actually modernizing the language the theoretical framework the methods and the sources and and builds a new progressive toolkit for us to discuss Palestine thank you well follow that thank you very much first of all so us and the Center for a Palestine studies and each year a professor Matar and we change the party you've done all the organizing for hosting this talk and of course the time who took time for me busy schedule finishing his book to launch the book and I'm also indebted to the Paris born Palestinian artist honey is who allowed us to use his picture painting a low quality love to the cover and I'm delighted to see my son Mickey who took some time off his busy schedule to attend here great to see you here Mick I must put me gave me some challenges he told me about it before but my talk was written already so I try and kind of extemporize and reply to some of the things but I'd like to say first of all a lot has changed since I finished his book and since the book has been published because you know things change every minute in Israel and Palestine and it's very hard to put full stop but put the full stop you must so just a few things that happened since the book was finished first of all the a ongoing wanted massacre of unarmed protesters at the Gaza a border fence which had gone on for almost almost a year now leading according to the recent sources I have to 265 people murdered including 41 children two journalists free paramedics and I know that the figures have been have increased since and injuring almost 15,000 people some of whom maimed for life then there's the ongoing threat of demolishing the so-called unrecognized Bedouin village of a Haner-Achmar whose been defied and which has been defied in the first full time being but still is pending and in fact in January the Minister for Agriculture Urea-Riel has announced a plan to expel 36,000 Bedouin's Palestinians from their so-called unrecognized villages to make room for so-called national projects including trans-Israel highway because Bedouin you see are at the bottom of the racial hierarchy in colonial Israel there's been also some minor events minor but very famous the arrest and the release of the heroic teenage I Tamimi and the arrest and final release of the poet Darlene Tatour for a poem that she called resist my people resist them which was she published on Facebook and above all the passage of the racist nation state bill last year by the Israeli Knesset of which more later and at the moment the racist competition between candidates for elections about how many people a Palestinian that will kill and how many refugees they will expel so what I want to do in this talk is first of all explain why I chose race as my framework and I call it Israel's permanent war against the Palestinians I don't call it the conflict because it's not conflict it's colonization and colonization to understand colonization you absolutely need the lens of race as Patrick Wolfe said racist colonialism speaking in Indians whose diverse diversity reflects a variety of unequal relationships into which Europeans have co-opted conquered populations I also don't call it a Israel stroke Palestine or Palestine stroke Israel because such coupling always hides unequal power so here goes in March 2016 the IDF medic Elor Azaria shot to death Abdul Fattah El Sharif an unarmed Palestinians minutes after the short soldiers have a shot wounded and so-called neutralized him attempting to stab an Israeli soldier while he was lying on the ground unable to move Azaria were charged with murder later it was muted to manslaughter at Sharif was one of 181 Palestinians so-called terror suspects who were extra judicially executed by Israel security forces between October 2016 and March 2016 six month 181 Palestinians were killed the killing was supported by 65% of the Israeli Jewish population in a pole and 67% supported pardoning Azaria who was also supported by Netanyahu Lieberman and various other politicians and also by southern Israeli demonstrators who in the demonstrations shouted best to the Arabs Azaria is far from unique of 186 IDF criminal investigations in 2015 only four ended in indictments it was only tried because it was filmed by a Palestinian cameraman who received many death threats when the video went viral he got a lenient sentence of 18 months third half of it and then a when he was released he became a national hero and became the man of the year in the year he was released but his new Gordon writes Azaria is no way is an aberration of Israel colonial project but rather a clear symptoms of its very structure but what I'd like to say to you here that Azaria the case illustrates the centrality of race to Israel's permanent war against Palestine first the ease with which a Jewish soldier can extra judicially execute an unarmed helpless Palestinian illustrate the racialization and dehumanization of Palestinians by Israeli Jews whose white Jewish supremacy parallels the sense of victimhood and let's talk about this later second Azaria is an Arab or Mizrahi Jew and that demonstrates the racialization of Arab Jews in Israel's complex racial reality according to you the shun have an Israeli sociologist Azaria's trial will not would have gone differently at the bean Ashkenazi he writes a Mizrahi is not one of us we are more moral better the trial expresses superiority these guys as morality third Azaria's conviction heightens Israeli sense of victimhood the one the other side of the colonial race coin colonizes on one hand eternal victims on the other which is a lethal cocktail now I as Heinz suggested I engage three pronged theories to look at Israel route over Palestine first state of exception second is a racial state and third as a settler colony because very few writers about Israel privileged race which is my main objective therefore was to close the gap and position race front and center following the race theories Alexander we're here I understand race not as biological or cultural but rather the sociopolitical process of differentiation which are projected onto the biological body and as presenting visual modalities in which dehumanization and classifications are lived he argues that humans create race for the benefit of some and detriment of others and ultimately race was created to sustain white supremacy and hegemony and differentiate between multiple humans not quite human and non-humans in my previous work I focus as Heim said a on Israel is a classic case of what Agamben called the state of exception Israel route Palestine through a practice of except practices of exception permanent emergency and the whole plethora of emergency laws necessity and security and itself styled exceptionalism position it outside and above international and domestic law regarding Palestinian citizens occupied besieged refugee and diasporan subjects Palestinians are categorized into citizens otherwise known as 48 Palestinians occupied and besieged subjects otherwise known in 67 Palestinians and refugees they are controlled through various technologies of segregation exclusion and surveillance which have been employed since sorry very sorry these were employed since a 1948 plan D for the elimination of the Palestinians the president policies of occupation siege and prevention of the return of refugees but as Heim said I criticize Agamben for his Eurocentrism and he's been critiqued for not taking both colonialism and decolonization and occluding race and it's interesting because the concept of bare life that I mentioned is useful to understand the position of Palestinian subjects but it's interesting too that the whole Agamben started is looking at bare life from the Nazi concentration camps he called the ultimate bare life the Muslim men the people who reached the bottom of the heap and but they were called Muslim men by the Nazis because they actually crouched on the floor like in Muslim prayer and this was a usually racialized concept and nobody really given has given much much attention to the concept of Muslim men that the Muslim men themselves could have seen as people without agency but in fact Agamben finishes his book on a homo sucker with a chapter on the writings by former Muslim men some of them have managed to survive and in fact even they had some degree of agency so when we look at bare life and when we look at zones of exception we have to remember that we're not talking about people without agency and I can prefer to Agamben zones of exception and to a to I prefer his zone of exception not to use the zone of exception in favor of a non-ideal zones and zones of non-being and a Jasper was a concept of slow death and if you look at Gaza is how I mentioned and I'm not kind of going to talk much about Gaza you basically look at a population that's at the mercy of a zone of non-being and living in a way a slow death but yet despite all this having huge agency and I applaud the constant insistence on staging particularly the march for return so another reason for using race is as I mentioned is the tendency to theorize Israel in terms of ethnicity but I won't kind of say what he said but I'm just say that looking at ethnicity at Israelis as ethnically homogeneous actually completely obscures the real heterogeneity and David Goldberg called this homogeneity heterogeneity in denial if you think of it this homogeneity is really a fiction in view of the who a erroneous claim that we all post-racial now the race scholar Barna Hesse argues that even racism the concept of racism was conceived without implicate the implications of race in fact it is a Eurocentric ideology he questions how the racialized experiences and violations of the Jews in Europe rather than those associated with US blacks and colonized non-whites generally came to dominate 20th century concept of racism in international relations and in international scholarship it's therefore highly a hardly surprising in Israel which is a vaudey a establishes a safe haven for the descents of Jewish victims of historical racialization culminating the Nazi genocide using the term race is frowned upon the reluctance to name race means that while the crying Nazi and other non-Jewish racing against Jews Israel is blithely racist against its colonized subjects in the name of white your centrism that doesn't speak its name this is despite Zionism racialization of Palestinians of Mizrahi Arab Jews black Ethiopian Jews and of non-Jewish non-white migrants and refugees which makes Israel a classic what David Theo Goldberg calls racial states that the racial state as he argues exclude and include in racial terms in order to construct homogeneity through very ordinary things governmental technologies of border controls immigration policies military and police forces citizenship regimes surveillance strategies and census categorization but also invented histories and traditions that construct state narrative state memory and state history and also the evocation of ancient roots and this is something Zionist Jews use constantly we were here before talk about the patriarchs the biblical roots and this has been deconstructed many times by various colonists he also argues that the law actually works in the service of the racial state rather than construct a checks and balances I don't know if anybody saw on Facebook the recent a little video of Ayala Chakkaid the current Minister for Justice who is publicizing a new perfume called fascism which to her no it's amazing oh that so yes to her fascism smells like democracy that she says but she talks about demolishing the court system demolishing the justice system which is to her a great aim but the laws as I mentioned there are about 50 laws which are racist laws and they include the 1950 law for turn according to which every one who has a Jewish mother even those who don't have Jewish mothers often a can get automatic Israeli citizenship the 1950 citizenship law that the price Palestinian born on the land of citizenship the 1950 absentee's property law that grants a state ownership of the property of Palestinians expropriated in 1948 who will dubbed present absentees and of course the 2018 nation state bill that enshrines Israel racial regime in law didn't let me of our it's right so about it the Jerusalem district courts ruled that the Jew who was injured in a terrorist attack is entitled to additional compensation because it is due without proof of any damage based on the nation state law which states that the government will strive to protect the well-being of Jews the circle has been closed the rights now it is a real race law from now on two types of blood exist in Israel Jewish blood and non-Jewish blood in the law books as well as in in life the price of these two types of blood is also different Jewish blood is priceless it must be protected that every possible way non-Jewish blood is terrifyingly cheap it can be shed like water and this existed on up to now only the fact or now the court has decreed it and indeed only last week in response to an Instagram post by a TV star Rotem seller Netanyahu clearly stated that Israel is not a state of all its citizens according to the nation's state law that we passed Israel is a nation state of Jewish people and them alone and this completely refutes the existence of 20% of the state's citizens more over Moshe Feiglin who was a former deputy speaker of the Knesset and now an extreme rights election favorites because he vowed to legalize cannabis has published an explicit genocidal plan for the people of Gaza last week and you might Israeli army should designate certain open areas in the Sinai border adjacent to the sea in which the civilian population will be concentrated far from the built-up areas that are used for launches and tunneling in these areas think and companies and companies will be established until relevant immigration destination are found the supply of electricity and water to the formerly populated area will be disconnected and the formerly populated area will be shelled with maximum fire power if this is not genocide I don't know what is now talking about Israel is that the colony Ellen Papa has claimed that Israel is the last active set our colonial project in existence but despite that the Israel Israeli set a colony is not a unique nor the last existing settler colony has demonstrated moves a work compared comparative analysis of settler colonialism in Australia US Brazil and Palestine he theorizes that colonialism I'm sure you'd know that I just go through it very quickly as a structure not an event and it's characterized by a logic of elimination and he argues it's rather than exploiting the native settler colonialism destroys and this replaces what it destroys this is evident in Zionist practices were placing depopulated Palestinian villages and urban neighborhoods with Jewish settlements roads and national parks substituting our placement with Hebrew placements replacing Palestinian orchards with imported European conifers and the current practice of population transfers and demolishing Bedouin villages and these are deemed unrecognized because or as a result of being unrecognized they have no running water electricity roads school and any other basic services the purpose also said that settler colonialism is a new paradigm but as I mentioned it's been going on for a long time people have theorized Israel as a settler colony from the 1940s onwards Palestinian theory satisfies Sayegh and concept in Zurayek, Elia Zurayek, the French Marxist writer Maxime Rodinçon and even Israeli sociologists such as Baruch Kimberling and Gershom Safir have done it in the 1980s while colonialism focused on exploiting resources and colonized populations settler colonials come to stay and regard that colonized terror territory as their own as Israeli Jews do to this day. Wolf understands settler colonialism is in terms of structured genocide that word that nobody wants to mention illustrating the concrete relationship between spatial removal mass killings and biocultural assimilation although assimilation is something that really didn't happen in the Palestinian situation it happened in Australia. Wolf books traces the ways in which regimes of race reflect and reproduce colonialism he says race is a trace of history colonial population continue to be racializing specific ways that mark out and reproduce the unequal relationships into which Europeans have co-opted these populations. But what's interesting is the Zionist themselves explicitly cast the Zionist project in colonial terms. The term Yishuv which is the name of the pre-state polity actually means settlement or colony in Hebrew. In the first Zionist Congress of 1897 that voted to in favor of Jewish immigration to Palestine it was explicitly decided to to establish three types of colonies this is written into the into the protocol and into the minutes in Palestine kibbutz and moshav in a town and nor is Israeli colonization of Palestine disputed disputed today. For instance Netanyahu has who has denied in a recent speech that Israelis occupying Palestine has actually argued that empires have always conquered and replaced entire populations and nobody speaks about it. Note the term empire to describe Israel interesting. Not I didn't say it. However like theories of exception settler colonial theory larger largely obscures race and Patrick Wolf's book is an exception and it has actually been critiqued by indigenous scholars as Eurocentric itself and as a decontextualized white supremacist euphemism for white supremacy, white terrorism, white invasion and seizure. This is what the indigenous scholar Sandy Osalivan in Australia says. So I follow Alexander Weheliye who critiques Agamben and Foucault for Eurocentrism and lack of attention to what Weheliye called racialized assemblages and he positions race front and center in consideration of political violence as sociopolitical processes of differentiation. Note he does not speak of race as a social construct and in fact my daughter Alana Lentin critiques very much the notion that race is merely a social construct. It's more a political construct. Now these processes of differentiation are regularly employed in Israel. Though neither Israel nor most Israeli scholars see these processes racial or even racist but rather as a consequence of Israel's self perception of victimhood and the need to defend itself. In recent years more and more people have used the reality or admitted the reality of racism only very few theories focus on the centrality of race and state racism. Neve Gordon, Yenon Cohen, an article is a bit of an exception. They talk about Israel's bio-spatial strategies of racialization. However what I would like to say that theorizing racism without placing race at the heart of the analysis devised from looking at racism as individual prejudice, exclusion or discrimination where racism ceases to be a concept with a specific history and a particular logic of inditing race. So all this and other things makes for me race at indispensable although either to missing element in theorizing design a settler colonial project in Palestine. But it's also interesting to when I argue in the book that paradoxically for a group of people whose history is replaced with racial persecution Zionist ideology itself articulates the Jewish race constructing homogeneous Jewish people with Jewish self and other racialization as integral part of the Zionist ideology. The Israeli geneticist Raphael Falk reads the history of Zionism as a eugenic race project aiming to save the Jewish genetic pool from the degeneration of the diaspora. Now many permanent Zionist leaders including Theodor Herzl, Max Norder, Arthur Ruppin and others insisted just like the Nazis on constructing the Jews as a race. Norder coined the term muscular Judaism to denote new Jews as masculine warriors opposing not only the Palestinians but also their own despised diaspora past. But just as antisemitism racialized Jews is a separate race which justified the persecution by biological reasoning. So Zionist ideologs adopted the terminology of folk a racial nation shaped by blood and soil and were instrumental in producing a Zionist repertoire of racial categorization and Jewish supremacy. So this is why Prime Minister Beggin could say in the Knesset in 1982, a race is a master race we are divine gods on this planet we are as different from the inferior races as they are from insects. In fact compared to our race other races are beasts and animals other races are human excrement. Five. Our destiny to rule over the inferior races. The masses will lick our feet and serve us as our slaves. Now as Chaim already mentioned, race in Israel is not constructed only in terms of the Palestinians also in relation to Arab Jews and non-Jewish non-white refugees. Interestingly in last year a Pew Research Institute poll found that 57% of Israeli Jews were against accepting refugees more than any other country that participate in that survey. Now I end the book with the chapter on decolonization which Chaim didn't mention and contrary to the legal school of Palestinian legal school arrives rake who argues that decolonization of Palestine entails the duty of the colonized to offer a solution to the settlers as well as the colonized. I concur this finance theory of decolonization is a program of total disorder not in the sense of chaos but rather Steven Selayta writes in the sense of the total rejection of colonial rule and an act of removal or removing order from the structures of foreign authority. So I'll conclude briefly. Writing about victims of oppression is considered more morally edifying than writing about the perpetrators. However I as a Palestinian born Israeli Jewish scholar and activist devoted most of my life and academic career to researching the perpetrator of Israel's war against the Palestinians. This book is a result of life a lifelong commitment to Palestinian freedom and the lifelong often agonizing reflection on my privileged position as a white Ashkenazi Jewish member of Israel settler colonial perpetrator collectivity. What a mouthful. My parents were settler immigrants from Romania and several members of their family have died in the ghettos of Transnistria where they were sent by the Romanians and the Nazis. The thought of us their children is the first generation to redemption from anti-Semitism in what they fantasize what their promised land. I studied one of Israel's elite private schools where education was portioned in style and military in spirit or the other way around and we were indoctrinated with a lethal mixture of victimhood and white Jewish supremacy. We were told that Jewish people those superior were are and would always be victims of anti-Semitism that the whole world is against us and that no one had the Jews during the Holocaust which was the worst crime in the history of humanity and the only genocide that matters regardless of colonialism slavery and the extermination of so many indigenous peoples. Israel they told us is a haven for the entire Jewish nation and it justified in defending itself by whatever mean. I'm inspired by what Robin the Angelo writes about whiteness and I exchange whiteness with Jewishness so you see what I mean here. I can speak as an insider to my socialization into Jewishness. The messages of superiority I've received patterns I have developed, advantages I enjoy and the personal and institutional challenges I face when seeking to counter racism. I'm not in fact innocent of race. Only in my early 20s after the 67 war did I actually realize we were lied to and that Israel was an imperialist settler colonial project in the land already populated by another people whose line is expelled and whose lands and properties we stole. As a lifelong poor Palestine activists I've written obsessively about Israel's war against Palestinians in the face of family rifts and community of problem. However it's taken until now for me to combine my academic work on race and racism in other contexts with my work on Palestine and Israel to reach this junction in this book and this I'd like to put to you I suppose is a nature of passion. Thank you very much.