Zionism's Paradigm and Death Ethic of War
Euromodern colonialism and its Zionist settler extension in Palestine is predicated on what Maldonado-Torres (2007) referred to as the “death ethic of war” or the “non-ethics of war." The non-ethical paradigm of war refers to the material and symbolic structures that naturalize the state-sanctioned premature death of colonized and negatively racialized peoples (Wilson Gilmore). Sylvia Wynter proposes that this structure necessarily depends on the denial of “co-humanness”—the negation of the humanity of the colonized Other via the naturalization of superiority and inferiority, which can be understood in biological and cultural terms. For example, That’s why it is difficult to distinguish Euromodern colonial discourses with Zionism’s dehumanizing rhetoric. Take, for instance, the use of the following terms: children of the light, civilized, children of darkness, subhuman animals, savage, and barbaric. As we already know or perhaps should know, these terms dehumanize people to justify whatever atrocities a colonial power is prepared to commit in the name of a “civilized” Western humanity.
To systematically dehumanize others thus requires the racial discourses and practices that position certain groups, includes those who are racialized as white, within a social hierarchy that intersects with other spheres of existence (political, economic, cultural, epistemic). This totalizing racial structure that dehumanizes others can also be conceptualized as the coloniality of power (Quijano), racial capitalism (Robinson), or the racial contract (Mills)—all of which shed light to a deeply entangled structure within which multiple systems of domination and exploitation interconnect. Relationally speaking, coloniality saturates all spheres of social existence and hence configures an intersubjective universe where the majority are, by design, excluded and stripped of territorial autonomy, denied the right to live with dignity in their land, and rendered philosophically insignificant.
Indispensable to material domination is a symbolic colonial structure that seeks to establish legitimacy for former. The colonizing powers present themselves as naturally selected to rule and dominate the colonized. The latter are always already portrayed as a dying people who should serve a purpose on their inevitable path toward death. All material forms of domination depend on a regime of truth—an epistemological foundation—that justifies the greatest of atrocities, including genocide. The non-ethics of war, understood here in paradigmatic terms, is therefore foundational to modernity and coloniality.
Ontologically speaking, the world is conceived as moving in one direction, and that direction is always toward Europe and its many extensions, including the US and Israel. Those positioned as colonized and inferior Others are not part of this dominant ontology. Indeed, they do not form part of the chosen people granted the god-given right to rule over all life (see, e.g., Wynter’s (2003) coloniality of being). Here, one can easily observe the connections between Zionism and Eurocentrism, two interrelated projects that cannot be understood without situated them within the ideological apparatus that legitimates the totalizing imperial/colonial and capitalist designs constituted since 1492.
This ideological apparatus is what makes it possible to speak of the rhetoric of modernity, which has promised ceaseless progress, development, and freedom to those positions on top of the socio-racial hierarchy at the expense of colonized peoples’ right to territorial autonomy. It is this ideological apparatus that obfuscates the reality of colonial domination and exploitation. If one pays close attention, the rhetoric of modernity constituted the dominant narrative or myth that naturalizes the superiority of the West, painting it as the epitome of humanity and culmination of civilization. Western civilization reached its height through the genius of its own people rather than the through incalculable colonial violence. Unsurprisingly, the enslavement of people, Indigenous dispossession, genocide, ethnic cleansing, endless wars, and ecological devastation are not part of modernity’s foundational myth.
As many decolonial scholars have already notes, making visible modernity’s systematically hidden side of coloniality is a political act that, on the one hand, unsettles the dominant discourses (dehumanizing racist rhetoric and coloniality of knowledge), and, on the other, amplifies the discourses and practices of those who fight for liberation. By amplifying the presence of Others, one also disrupts the dehumanizing representation the West has depended on for far too long. As mentioned in other posts, decolonial thought must situate itself in sites of struggle. It must contribute to the project of creating knowledge and social practices seeking to create a world free of all forms of domination.
"From the River to the Sea" (2021) by Palestinian artist Sliman Mansour
More than ever, we need to center subaltern voices whose understanding of colonial reality is indispensable. We must resist the memoricide that colonialism aims to commit. We must refuse to forget the memories of those who have lost their lives prematurely—those whom Israel decided to kill simply because they are Palestinian. As Maldonado-Torres invites us to do, we must not only “reclaim memories of suffering and displacement, but also of happiness and hope in the midst of challenges to human existence by repressive and inhumane social orders.” We must remember that our decolonial liberation movements are material, symbolic, and spiritual. This involves the socio-historical connections to the land, the memories and stories it holds, and the intersubjective and spiritual universe created in those lands, all of which colonialism seeks to permanently erase to absolve itself. However, we will bear witness to memorialize those who are no longer here—those who are more than numbers but aspirations and dreams of a Free Palestine. We will also never forget what the Western world enabled and participated in.
For these reasons, among others, we must continue to write and speak back to power in any capacity. Even if our work is theoretical, it must continue to be “rooted in history and inspired by voices of protest and creation that have shaken the entire world and given new hope to those whom Frantz Fanon called les damnés de la terre.”