Jerusalem: Colonized City

http://www.solidarity-us.org/node/4591
Date Written:  2016-03-01
Publisher:  Against the Current
Year Published:  2016
Resource Type:  Article
Cx Number:  CX21370

An interview with author Thomas Abowd.

Abstract: 
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Excerpt:

Thomas Abowd: I argue that colonialism is a process, a continual process of human rights abuses, land theft, and racial exclusion. Where many writers, scholars, journalists talk about colonialism as something in the past, I see it as a set of policies and practices that connect the past with the present.

Colonialism is not just about a seminal moment of conquest but rather the implementation of various designs that over decades actively and radically alter laws, land use policies, property rights, and that also reconfigure urban spaces with new city planning strategies.

Race and new racist logics are crucial to these violent transformations - and they are usually quite violent in one way or another. Israeli governance, I assert in the book, is consistent with settler-colonialism, a specific form of colonial rule that seeks to replace one group of people with another.