Israel as Absolute State

• DOI: https://doi.org/10.13169/arabstudquar.38.4.0680
• Published date: 01 October 2016
• Date: 01 October 2016
• Pages: 680-682
• Author: Hamid Dabashi

680 ARAB STUDIES QUARTERLY

www.plutojournals.com/asq/

Israel as Absolute State

Hamid Dabashi

In his seminal essay, “Critique of Violence/Zur Kritik der Gewalt” (1921), Walter

Benjamin proposes a direct link between violence and law. Law is initially insti-

tuted by violence, he offered, and in turn the direct consequence of law is political

domination by virtue of that legalized violence. Just two years before the publica-

tion of Benjamin’s essay, Max Weber in his “Politics as a Vocation/Politik als

Beruf” (1919) had defined “state” as the institution with an exclusive claim to

“legitimate (i.e. considered to be legitimate) violence.” The combined insights of

Weber and Benjamin mark the state as the legalized apparatus of violence sys-

temically geared toward political domination.

In these two critical essays, both Weber and Benjamin were in part respond-

ing to the immediate consequences of World War I (1914-1918) and the

humiliating defeat of Germany in its aftermath. Preoccupied as they were with

their own intra-European predicament, neither of these two pathbreaking theo-

rists of violence, law, and state were particularly concerned with the colonial

context of similar issues, let alone the racialized denomination of state vio-

lence when extended to the non-European world. Theorization of the colonial

world, as indeed the colonial world itself in the shadow of European imperial

conquest, would remain un- and under-theorized until decades later with the

rise of a generation of critical thinkers best exemplified by Frantz Fanon and

Edward Said.

In his groundbreaking new book, Israel’s Colonial Project in Palestine: Brutal

Pursuit (2016), the eminent Palestinian sociologist Elia Zureik continues his ear-

lier work to expand the political implication of such and similar ideas, with par-

ticular attention to Foucault’s work on biopolitics, into Palestinian territories

under the Zionist colonial project. Just like Walter Benjamin and Max Weber,

Foucault was almost entirely oblivious to the colonial shadow of European moder-

nity. For Zureik, the reverse is true. He plants his theoretical tripod right at the

heart of European colonialism in Palestine and offers a corrective lens to theories

of state, law, and violence.

For Zureik, the three interrelated themes of violence, territoriality, and popula-

tion control (all with a strong racialized undertone) are the three-prong strategies of

the settler colony dominating the native population of Palestine. Racialized violence,

racialized demarcation of land, and racialized surveillance are the direct result of this

Hamid Dabashi, Hagop Kevorkian Professor of Iranian Studies and Comparative Literature, Columbia

University, New York, NY, USA.