This article explores the paradoxical relationship between politics and violence in the concept of political violence. By examining the works of prominent theorists, such as Hannah Arendt and Frantz Fanon, the article highlights both the difficulty of separating politics and violence, and the improbability of formulating a harmonious relationship between them. Engaging with some of Michel Foucault’s work on power and violence, the article begins to formulate a theoretical approach that conceptualizes political violence in its inherently paradoxical condition.
Through an analysis of Hamas's suicide missions and Israel's strategy of 'shock and awe', this article advances a concept of 'violent dialogue.' Drawing on Gadamer's work, as well as some of the points that emerge out of the Gadamer-Derrida encounter, this concept is meant to explicate how acts of political violence create a certain type of communion between those engaged in violent conflict. It will suggest that the appearance of political violent acts does not represent the end of a dialogue between the violent actors, but rather the emergence of a specific form of dialogue under the subject matter of violence. It is argued that this communion takes place outside the intentions of the protagonists, and despite their attempts to separate from each other. This is significant for academic analysis of political violence in general, and for our perspective and outlook on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict in particular.
This article explores an important feature of anti-Palestinian racism (APR) that is salient in the North American and European academic landscape: the expulsion of the Palestinian critique of Zionism and Israel from rational and even anti-racist discourse. This expulsion takes place through the toxification of the Palestinian other whereby Palestinian epistemology is to be mistrusted and shunned because it is allegedly rooted in an antisemitic disposition. This amounts to a racialization of the Palestinian critique in the name of anti-racism, which can be seen in recent definitions of antisemitism, the debate over the boycott of Israeli academic institutions and harassment campaigns against Palestinian scholars. I argue that we must name this expulsion as a form of racialization that is part and parcel of colonial modernity. The article concludes that without a centralization of the Palestinian critique, decolonial and anti-racist efforts will not live up to their professed ideals.
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