Opinion

The relentless brutality of settler-colonialism must not be overlooked

August 22, 2024 


A pro-Palestinian protester holds up a sign reading ‘Death to settler colonialism everywhere! Viva Palestina!’ before a march through central London on 21 October 2023 [Mark Kerrison/In Pictures via Getty Images]

by Ramona Wadi
walzerscent


In a series of posts on X, the Senior Communications Officer of the UN Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees (UNRWA), Louse Wateridge, gave a brief but succinct description of Gaza after ten months of Israel’s ongoing genocide. Palestinians in Gaza, she said, are “never more than a few blocks away from the front line now.” Her statement reflects the way in which Israel has created Palestinian human shields out of civilians.

“Strikes are now relentless… With nowhere else to turn, displaced families live among the rubble,” Wateridge said in another post accompanied by an image of flattened Palestinian dwellings.

While the depictions are accurate, the dissociation between Israel’s settler-colonial structure and the genocide in Gaza still remains. Focusing on the immediate concerns is indeed essential, but the fact remains that Israel thrives on continuity and the international community is doing Israel an immense favour by failing to link the settler-colonial ideology of Zionism with the genocide.

Settler-colonialism is relentless and, as a result, Israel’s genocidal air and artillery strikes are relentless. There is no perforation in the narrative. International complicity in colonialism, though, necessitated not only the creation of Israel on stolen Palestinian land, but also an erroneous focus on human rights violations that shields the coloniser in detached waves of sensationalism. Israel has displaced Palestinians relentlessly, but the international community has preferred to silence the Palestinians, for without the colonised population being allowed to challenge Israel’s fabricated narrative, the occupation state faces no meaningful opposition.

Israel is not striking Gaza in a vacuum.

The apartheid state is aided by major Western powers who are complicit in genocide and also assured of facing no repercussions, legal or otherwise. This is another example of how relentless settler-colonialism is, including its complicity. And when one considers that international organisations are a part of the web sustaining Israel’s colonialism and genocide in Gaza, another piece falls into place. Without international complicity, Israel would fall.

Dismantling a settler-colonial structure built on stolen land is not impossible, but the pretence of its impossibility is also relentless. Which is how Israel and world leaders have turned us all into spectators of its genocide, fuelling the misconception that apart from imparting its destruction, there is nothing to be done for the Palestinians. Western democracy has indoctrinated the world into such thinking, but it’s a false premise of protection under the guise of human rights and diplomacy which helps Israel to kill Palestinians with relentless impunity.

Meanwhile, the remaining Palestinians are expected to await their turn to be killed while the international community busies itself with ensuring that the dots linking genocide and settler-colonialism are not connected. If the international community has its own way, as it has to date, it will continue to fragment genocide into individual incidents of air strikes, displaced Palestinians, mass graves, starvation, diseases, torture and wounded and killed Palestinians. All are discussed in a way that evades the reality of genocide, so that Israel can continue availing itself of the narrative it has created to sustain its theft of Palestinian land and the killing of the indigenous population. Air strikes may stop one day, although the lives lost are irreplaceable, but these lives in Gaza are also interwoven into the plan to annihilate all Palestinians from the rest of Palestine. So, rather than fragment Israel’s actions as relentless, the entire structure of the settler-colonial enterprise should be seen as such.

If Israel’s settler-colonialism had been given short shrift by the global powers 100+ years ago, Palestine would have flourished. Instead, pernicious Zionism has been supported all the way by Western powers. Nevertheless, as the genocide plays out before our eyes, we — and they — must not overlook the relentless brutality of settler-colonialism.