Criminalities and attacks against Gazan Palestinians, portrayed in the destruction of space, land, and the dispossession of life and livelihood were acknowledged by many internationally renowned entities, including the UN, Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, Save the Children and others; some international actors criticized and even condemned Israeli criminalities against Gaza (e.g., Goldstone Report UN 2009; UN 2014).
Yet Israeli state criminalities against Gazans and Gaza are inflected by a sacralized, state-organized and racialized economy of dispossession (Shalhoub-Kevorkian 2015a; Ward 2014), and discursive histories that supersede the narrative of the colonized (Johnson 2010).
Israeli state criminalities in Gaza, which include, as we have highlighted, a demoni- zation of space, a politics of asphyxiation and overkilling (geopolitical, biopolitical and necropolitical modes of governance), are made possible by Israel’s racialization of Palestinians as non-human Others. This violent racialization emanates from Israel’s settler colonial structure, which produces Palestinians in general and Gazan Palestinians in particular as what we term “living/dead no-bodies”, a native group that is “inherently erasable” (Shalhoub-Kevorkian 2014a, 2015a, 2015b).
...
Thus, examining the past to understand the present politics and criminalities of settler colonial Israel informed our analyses. We suggest that criminologists and others looking to understand Israeli policies against Gazan Palestinians should carefully read the state’s visible and invisible acts of violence – including the hypervisible maiming and killing of bodies during established periods of “war” and those everyday biopolitical policies aimed at managing the population and maintaining them in conditions of “living death”.
The data shared and criminalities analysed in this article are evidence that theologized, racialized state-organized crime can be visible at times but can also be hidden in the microspaces of the everyday.
Done by 🇮🇱 uni