NM's blog

A very good piece by Eyal Weizman .  I first knew Weizman when I read his 2007 book Hollow Land . Weizman is director of  Forensic Architecture at Goldsmiths, University of London “The circular logic of Zionist settler-colonialism: settlements are built to mark and protect the state’s border, but that makes them vulnerable to attack and so a buffer zone is established to protect them. Afterwards, this buffer zone is itself settled to mark and protect the newly expanded borders, at which point another buffer zone becomes necessary. In this manner vulnerability is produced and then mobilised in a feedback loop that the genocide scholar A. Dirk Moses has called ‘permanent security’. “The image of luxury towers constructed above mass graves, with tens of thousands presumably buried under the earthworks, embodies the logic of 21 st -century genocide. The Israeli government now hopes, in the words of the former minister Ron Dermer, that what ‘two years of war did not accomplish will...

[Raphael] Lemkin “ breaks genocide into three types : physical, biological, and cultural. He recognized that the events and processes of genocide, which culminate in the loss of a national, racial, religious, ethnic, or political group in whole or in part, could manifest in multiple ways, for different reasons, and include multiple modes of destruction of the group and its members besides the loss of life. Each type manifests differently, but the end result of each is the same: an irreparable and tragic loss of a culture that carries further implications of their shifted future.  The gruesome and violent physical forms of genocide raise the hairs on our sensibilities, and the biological forms tug on our heartstrings with broken families and mistreatment of women, yet both of these horrible forms of genocide occur as events making them both identifiable with an end. The process of cultural genocide, the grouping left out of the legal definition, is a large scale deletion of a cultur...