We ignore the darkness.
Going back hundreds of years, there are countless examples of oppression and discrimination against people who look different or have different defining characteristics than those in power. The Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and in particular, Israel’s assaults on Gaza, is a recent disaster that clearly shows what differences can lead to. We ignore the darkness that comes from systematically oppressing those who are darker and different from us, until that darkness is at our front door.
The Israeli-Palestinian conflict has been going on for decades, dating back to World War II. The area originally was occupied by people of Arab descent but was “given” to Jewish people by the British, who had controlled the region after WWI. The Jews were allowed to settle and create a new national homeland of their own following the Holocaust, the genocide of Jews in Europe, and WWII. This pushed many Arab people out of the area as they fled their farms and villages in what was now considered the “Jewish homeland”. According to BBC News, some Palestinian citizens of Israel, as well as Arabs in many neighboring countries still refuse to acknowledge the legal existence of Israel as Palestinians fight to claim their homeland back. In a conflict that has lasted decades and turned violent time and time again, this disaster is racial, political, and religious in cause.
In the selection “Approaching Abjection” (1–32) from Julia Kristeva’s Power of Horrors: An Essay on Abjection she describes the usage of the concept of abjection (which most literally means the state of being cast out) in multiple settings from artistic to philosophical, and even religious. “Abjection accompanies all religious structurings and reappears, to be worked out in a new guise, at the time of their collapse. Several structurations is this really the word she uses? of abjection should be distinguished, each one determining a specific form of the sacred.” (Kristeva). Her interpretation of abjection and the correlation of it in our lives is “used to refer to the human reaction (horror) to a threatened breakdown in meaning caused by the loss of the distinction between subject and object, or between the self, and the other.” This concept of abjection can be used to explain accounts of horror and discrimination that occur because of religious intolerance, misogyny, and homophobia. In social critical theory it is often used to describe the state of the marginalized (a person or group treated as insignificant or inferior).
The photo above is an image by CNN capturing the aftermath of some of the events happening in Gaza. The recent violence that broke out in Gaza can be viewed in several ways. Some see it as primarily between the group Hamas, which holds control in Gaza and the Israeli government that controls all access to and from Gaza. Tension between these two entities have been high for decades but after a somewhat calm period of time over the past few years, this recent and sudden combat is surprising to some. The mainstream media’s explanation is that the tension turned to violence once again because Gaza is in deep financial and economic turmoil since Israel controls all activity and access to the area. Hamas is viewed as losing power and control and their response was to launch rockets at Israel to pressure Israel to provide greater financial and economic freedom. Other commentators note that the Gazans’ Great March was a period of 6 weeks of mostly nonviolent protests by thousands of Palestinians to mark the 70th anniversary of the Nakba, or “catastrophe,” which is their name for the founding of the state of Israel. In response to Gazans marching toward the border with Israel, the Israeli army fired on the protesters with tear gas and live ammunition, killing 64 and wounding more than 2000. There were no rockets launched from Gaza until after the lethal Israeli response to the protests, which the Palestinians undertook to try to regain political, social and economic freedom. Israel controls and limits the amount of water available to Gazans, power (often limited to 4 hours a day), denies Gazans the ability to fish off their own coast and to travel, whether to get medical care, for educational purposes, or for any other reason.
Palestinians, the first inhabitants of Gaza, can easily be categorized as the marginalized, or in a social critical theory lens as the abjected. Although Jews lived in the region in ancient times, and some have ancestry reaching back into similar areas as Palestinians, the two are still thought of as two very distinct and different races, which creates immense tension between them. In modern times, Israeli Jews have colonized the land that had belonged to Palestinian families for hundreds of years. Racism and religious persecution are two of the leading oppressions that continue to be inflicted on Palestinians despite the fact that they were forced out of their homeland by an outside group claiming territory. This chain of events is scarily similar to the Native American genocide that happened in the Americas by the colonists in the 1600s. Despite the fact that the European colonization of America happened more than two hundred years ago, the continued prejudice and injustice that plagues the United States in particular is a clear foreshadow of what is likely to continue in Israel and Palestine if a solution that is acceptable on both sides cannot be reached.
