- Record: found
- Abstract: found
- Article: found
Theologizing State Crime
Abstract
This article examines a sacralized political economy of state crime, centring Israeli assaults on the occupied Gaza Strip over the last ten years, with a particular focus on the violent attack perpetrated in 2014. Taking the 2006 election of Hamas as a point of departure, the article analyses various manifestations of violence inscribed on the people of Gaza, including killing, injuring, starving, collective punishment, military assaults and other forms of cruelty. Drawing on a settler colonial framework, the article investigates Israel's violence as sacralized state criminality embedded in a local and global political economy of racism and impunity. It argues that Israeli crimes against Gazan Palestinians must be analysed as political technologies of counterinsurgent governmentality embedded in a structure of settler colonial dispossession initiated during the 1948 Nakba.
Content
Author and article information
Notes
In using the term necropolitical state terror, we draw on Achille Mbembe's conception of “necropolitics”, which argues that the ultimate exercise of sovereignty is the power to kill, expose to death or allow to live ( 2003).
It must be noted here that statistics on the numbers of houses and other infrastructure destroyed varies from source to source, and sometimes within the same source at different times. We have attempted to minimize the confusion these varying statistics may cause by being consistent in drawing on data from the UN Office for Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA).
Data solicited directly from OCHA office in Gaza, 21 July 2015.
Gisha is an Israeli not-for-profit organization, whose goal is to protect the freedom of movement of Palestinians, especially Gaza residents.
This quote is based on a discussion with one of the authors during the war on Gaza.
In Israel, there are two national radio stations, one public, that is called “Kol Israel” (the voice of Israel) and the second is the army radio station, that is, Gali Tzahal (the Israeli army airwaves). The army radio station is the most popular one.