When a foreigner resides among you in your land, do not mistreat them. The foreigner residing among you must be treated as your native-born. Love them as yourself, for you were foreigners in Egypt. I am your God – Leviticus 19:33-34.
Consequently, you are no longer foreigners and strangers, but fellow citizens with God’s people and also members of his household, built on the foundation of the apostles and prophets, with Christ Jesus himself as the chief cornerstone. In him the whole building is joined together and rises to become a holy temple in the Lord. And in him you too are being built together to become a dwelling in which God lives by his Spirit – Ephesians 2:19-22.
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.
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