Quote of the week
[T]he moral point of the matter is never reached by calling what happened by the name of ‘genocide’ or by counting the many millions of victims: extermination of whole peoples had happened before in antiquity, as well as in modern colonization. It is reached only when we realize this happened within the frame of a legal order and that the cornerstone of this ‘new law’ consisted of the command ‘Thou shall kill,’ not thy enemy but innocent people who were not even potentially dangerous, and not for any reason of necessity but, on the contrary, even against all military and other utilitarian calculations. … And these deeds were not committed by outlaws, monsters, or raving sadists, but by the most respected members of respectable society.
Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on The Banality of Evil
On International Law and Gaza
The powerful ideology that makes us talk about Israel’s right to defend itself, and not the Palestinians’ or the Lebanese, for that matter, is racism as the core element of the broader system of settler colonial racial capitalism that law has played a significant sole in creating and maintaining. If you condemn the killing of one kind of people but not another, what makes one grievable and not the other is centuries of coding done by the marker of race that serves settler colonial racial capitalism. What I am interested in is how such markers, ‘legal categorisations’ become ones that we identify ourselves with, and how those attachments solidify our attachment to law. They make it personal, as it were.
