Traces of Racial Exception: Racializing Israeli Settler Colonialism(Suspensions: Contemporary Middle Eastern and Islamicate Thought)

Positioning race front and centre, this book theorizes that political violence, in the form of a socio-political process that differentiates between human and less-than-human populations, is used by the state of Israel in racializing and ruling the citizens of occupied Palestine. Lentin argues that Israel’s rule over Palestine is an example of Agamben’s state of exception, Goldberg’s racial state and Wolfe’s settler colony; the Israeli racial settler colony employs its laws to rule besieged Palestine, while excluding itself and its Jewish citizen-colonists from legal instruments and governmental technologies. Governing through emergency legislation and through practices of exception, emergency, necessity and security, Israel positions itself outside domestic and international law. Deconstructing Agamben’s Eurocentric theoretical position Lentin shows that it occludes colonialism, settler colonialism and anti-colonialism and fails to specifically foreground race; instead she combines the work of Wolfe, who proposes race as a trace of settler colonialism, and Weheliye, who argues that Agamben’s western-centric understanding of exception fail to speak from explicitly racialized and gendered standpoints. Employing existing media, activist, and academic accounts of racialization this book deliberately breaks from white, Western theorizations of biopolitics, exception, and bare life, and instead foregrounds race and gender in analysing settler colonial conditions in Israel.

Table of Contents:
Introduction 1. Palestine-Israel: racial state of exception 2. Deconstructing exception: Israeli settler colonialism 3. Beyond bare life: racializing the Israeli settler colony 4. Femina sacra: gendering Palestine 5. Conclusion: traces of race and acts of decolonization Bibliography Index

About the Author :
Ronit Lentin is Former Associate Professor of Sociology, Trinity College Dublin, Ireland and has published extensively on Palestine-Israel and racism. Her books include: Conversations with Palestinian Women (1980), Israel and the Daughters of the Shoah: Reoccupying the Territories of Silence (2000), Women and the Politics of Military Confrontation: Palestinian and Israeli Women’s Narratives of Dislocation (2002), Thinking Palestine (2008), Post-Memory and Melancholia: Israelis Memorialising the Palestinian Nakba (2010) and Migrant Activism and Integration from Below in Ireland (2012).

Review :
[A] scholarly text that provides new ways of thinking about Israel and Palestine and the dynamics of Israeli state crime. It is written in accessible, clear, and concise language, which makes the most complex information straightforward and easy to understand. Therefore, it is suitable for academics and non-academics, students and activists alike. Lentin’s in-depth and engaging work gives one a deeper understanding of the role race plays in Israel and Israel’s relationship to the Palestinians. This book is a timely intervention, given contemporary pushes by Western politicians to insulate Israel from criticism by conflating anti-Zionism with anti-Semitism. Lentin’s emphasis of race opens new ways of seeing the processes informing Israel’s colonial project. It is, ultimately, the same bowl of fruit, but painted in a way that is simultaneously innovative and provocative. Academically, [Traces of Racial Exception] provides an extensive list of theorists and titles on concepts such as settler-colonialism, decolonisation and state of exception that are accompanied with the author's critique of and comments on them. This form of bibliography represents general guidelines and starting points for graduate and advanced undergraduate researchers who seek an in-depth understanding of and an insightful opinion on the Israel occupation of the Palestinians' land. Existentially, this book gives a chance for the general reader to go beyond the biased mainstream news outlets. The empirical richness of the book makes it an extremely timely and compelling read … An important insight of this book is that we cannot think and act ‘decolonization’ without taking race and de-racialization seriously. Ronit Lentin takes readers on the essential journey of understanding the interconnections between the various dimensions of Israel’s permanent war against the Palestinians: settler colonialism, race, and self-proclaimed exceptionalism are explained in this book with a rich and sophisticated theoretical framework and an immensity of illustrations. Lentin’s book demonstrates that the comprehension of the Israeli control matrix is a necessary step in our attempts to contribute to the decolonisation of Palestine. This is a stimulating book for those seeking justice for the Palestinian people. Despite race being constitutive to the Zionist ideology and the apparatus of the Israeli settler state, there has been a neglect of race in the theorisation of the Israeli state. Traces of Racial Exception makes an important and long-due intervention by integrating race and suggesting an understanding of Israel as a racial state. Lentin skilfully shows how Israel has adopted and adapted multiple regimes of racialisation that operate differently in the management and governance of Palestinians, African refugees and Mizrahi Jews. This book is essential reading for those interested in understanding the racial architecture of the Israeli regime. Ronit Lentin’s Traces of Racial Exception is an important contribution to theorizing the state of Israel. It is a bold, daring and brilliant anti-racist critical elucidation of the state of Israel, defining the Ashkenazi state and society as white supremacist with policies of dehumanization and elimination of the Other (Palestinian natives and non-Ashkenazi, Arab/Mizrahi Jews). By going beyond the ethnic/national paradigm, the book establishes race/racism as Israel’s settler colonial prime mover. Race and gender are intersected with the state’s settler colonial rule, enriching existing critical theorization of Israel. Evidence from the racialized everyday life experiences of Palestinian natives and non-white Jewish others is provided throughout the process of theorization. Highly recommended for feminist and other critical scholars and students in general and those of Israel more specifically. The author’s logic, analysis, and methodology in identifying settler colonialism as a process, not an event, carries her argument throughout the book. The result is a cutting-edge look at settler colonialism and racialization that is deeply concerned with the human suffering of its victims. I strongly recommend this book for academics and students of settler colonialism, race and racialization, and Palestine and Israel studies.