Gayatri Chakraborty Spivak on Israel
Drawing on one of the world’s most influential anti-colonial
scholars and revolutionaries, Frantz Fanon, Professor Spivak speaks on the root
cause of the unceasing waves of violence against and by Israel when she points
out that the violence by the colonizer/oppressor violence generates violence by
the colonized/oppressed. To end this, the colonial conditions must first end.
Maung Zarni on February 9, 2024
In her 13-minutes recorded
message of solidarity with Palestinian people, and against the US-led
de-funding of the UNRWA, the renowned scholar and activist Gayatri Chakraborty
Spivak of India spoke out against Israel’s settler colonialist genocide, still
on-going, in Gaza.
Spivak was scheduled to speak
LIVE in the global protest rally on YouTube on 1 February 2024, co-organized
and co-hosted by a number of international activist networks including Just
Peace Advocates, the Canadian Foreign Policy Institute, Speaking Out of Place
Podcast, Free Rohingya Coalition and the Forces of Renewal Southeast Asia
(FORSEA).
“The
Colonizer’s violence only generates violence”
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The 3-hr LIVE event denounced a long list of
Western governments for their genocidal complicity, or more accurately, “direct
involvement”, as Lemkin Institute points out in the Zionist settler colonial
genocide against 2.3 million Palestinian people in Gaza while shining the light
on the near famine that is fast developing among Gaza’s natives.
Emboldened
by Washington’s unconditional
support, financing and political protection, the Netanyahu coalition
government has been spearheading this genocidal onslaught against the entire
population of Gazans over the last nearly 4-months.
In
his LIVE discussion with US-based Foreign Policy magazine, former Israeli Prime
Minister Euhad Barak, called
the current Israeli government “messianic and Fascist”.
In a
public relations episode reminiscent of US Secretary of State ex-General Colin Powell,
showing up at the UN Security Council with “evidence of (Saddam’s) WMD”, the
Netanyahu government had concocted, with the help of the Zionist mouthpiece New
York Times the convenient story of the oldest UN aid agency or Palestinian
people as “riddled with”, as one Israeli blog put it, Hamas terrorists, their
supporters and families.
On 29
January, the New York Times reported,
religiously, thus: “The Israeli military provided the United States with a
dossier alleging that roughly 10 percent of the agency’s 13,000 employees in
Gaza are Hamas members. That assessment is derived from cross-referencing an
UNRWA staff list with a directory of Hamas members that soldiers found on a
computer during a recent operation inside Gaza, according to the military
officials.”
Falling short of demeaning UN
agency as “a humanitarian arm of Hamas” – the US and Israeli apparently chose
to double down on their utter disregard for the worldwide opposition to
Israel’s weaponization of food, water, power and medicine against the entire
population of Gaza, in the name of fighting Hamas “terrorists”.
In a recent videotaped news clip
by the Middle East Eye, S. African Foreign Minister told an audience in her
country, that Israel is spreading Fake News about her government citing two
specific examples: that S. Africa is painted as a legal arm of Hamas (in the
ICJ genocide case) and S. African government takes orders from Iran.
Almost
8 years ago, in May 2018, former Israeli Prime Minister and Shin Bet assassin Ehud Barak, noted
with apparent honesty, the humanitarian conditions confronting Gaza’s
residents: “We have nothing against the Gazans per se – they want food,
shelter, electricity, a reasonable quality of water, and they don’t have this.
Our struggle is only with Hamas. But we cannot hide behind the fact that Hamas
are manipulating this.
Barak obviously knows that the
wretched conditions result in “terrorism”, which Israel has deliberated
designed to inflict genocidal pains on the occupied population of Palestine –
in the “intellectual father of genocide” Rafael Lemkin’s words “a nation under
occupation”.
According
to the Guardian,
Barak, who was born in a kibbutz without electricity or running water,
expressed his understanding of the Palestinian violence against their occupier:
“if I was [a Palestinian] at the right age, at some stage I would have entered
one of the terror organisations and fought from there”
Drawing on one of the world’s
most influential anti-colonial scholars and revolutionaries, Frantz Fanon,
Professor Spivak speaks on the root cause of the unceasing waves of violence
against and by Israel when she points out that the violence by the
colonizer/oppressor violence generates violence by the colonized/oppressed. To
end this, the colonial conditions must first end.
Instead
of looking at and appreciating the root cause which has given rise to waves of
violence in the Occupied territories, more than one dozen European, Canadian
and Australian governments including a non-European state of Japan – considered
“honorary white” in South Africa during apartheid – decided to openly side with
the perpetrating Jewish apartheid state of Israel. In an obviously coordinated
fashion they all announced k various funding cuts, or suspension to the key
Palestinian lifeline of UNRWA within 24-hours of the International Court of Justice
(ICJ) provisional measures in S. Africa vs. Israel including the
(non-enforceable) order that Israel lift all restrictions on the flow
of humanitarian aid to Gaza.
Gayatri Chakraborty Spivak, giving her closing keynote
at the Berlin Conference on Rohingya genocide, The Jewish Museum of Berlin, 26
February 2018 (photo: Free Rohingya Coalition)
So far, Israel has initially
accused 12 – out of the 13,000 UNRWA Palestinian staff – of having been
involved in the Hamas attack on 7 October. (The grand total of UNRWA staff
serving 7 million displaced Palestinian across the Middle East is 30,000). Even
of the 12, Israel has reportedly produced what it says is “evidence” for 4.
Spivak
who holds the University Professor in
Humanities at Columbia University has consistently taken a
public stand against genocidal regimes in both Myanmar and Israel and lent her
voice to both Rohingya and Palestinian victims of textbook genocides which they
have suffered on their own ancestral lands for decades.
She
was a close friend and colleague of the late Edward W. Said, the
acclaimed scholar of globally influential “Orientalism”, whom she credited with
the bringing Palestinian cause to the world’s attention. Recently, she joined
the London Emergency Meeting of Global Intellectuals who
signed the Declaration of Conscience in support of Palestinian people,
co-organized by Princeton University Professor Emeritus of International Law
and former Special Rapporteur on the human rights situation in Palestine Richard Falk and
former Prime Minister of Türkiye Ahmet Davutoğlu.
Maung Zarni
This compilation of pre-recorded
messages of solidarity with Palestinian people follows the stand-alone
recording by the world-renowned feminist scholar and black revolutionary
thinker Angela Davis of the University of California at Santa Cruz.
A
Global Rally Against US-led De-funding of Palestinian Aid Agency UNRWA:
Messages of Protest
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Banner: Spivak speaking on “The Strength of Critique: Trajectories
of Marxism–Feminism” at the Internationaler Kongress. Wikipedia Commons
Posted by Maung Zarni
Dr
Maung Zarni is a scholar, educator and human rights activist with 30-years of
involvement in Burmese political affairs, Zarni has been denounced as an “enemy
of the State” for his opposition to the Myanmar genocide. He is the co-author
(with Natalie Brinham) of the pioneering study, "The Slow Burning Genocide
of Myanmar’s Rohingyas" (Pacific Rim Law and Policy Journal, Spring 2014)
and "Reworking the Colonial-Era Indian Peril: Myanmar’s State-Directed
Persecution of Rohingyas and Other Muslims" (The Brown Journal of World
Affairs, Fall/Winter 2017/18).
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