[...] in the wake of September 11, the Israeli government of Ariel Sharon has taken advantage of the so-called "war on terror" to ratchet up the colonial dispossession of the Palestinian people. What is novel about this, I argue, is that it has taken place (literally so) through what Achille Mbembe calls a "necropolitics" - "a generalized instrumentalization of human existence and the material destruction of human bodies and populations" - whose performances of space seek to rationalize and radicalize colonial aggression. These performances assault not only politically qualified life - the space within which a Palestinian state is possible - but also "bare life" itself. Israel's offensive operations were designed to turn the Palestinian people not only into enemies but into aliens, and in placing them outside the modern, figuratively and physically, they were constructed as what Giorgio Agamben calls homines sacri. Homo sacer was a subject-position established under Roman law to identify those whose death had no sacrificial value but whose killing did not constitute a crime: they inhabited a zone of abandonment within which sovereign power had suspended its own law. The prosecution of this necropolitics, as Mbembe calls it, was a radicalization of existing Israeli policies that required the performance of two spacings. On one side, a strategy of consolidation and containment continued to bind Israel to its illegal settlements in Gaza and the West Bank and to separate both from the remainder of the occupied territories; on the other side, a strategy of cantonization institutionalized the siege of Palestinian towns and villages.
The article cited above is from 2004, almost ten years ago. I've been waking up the last few days watching and reading about the suffering at the Al-Nasr Children's Hospital, which has been damaged in repeated attacked, and Al-Rantisi Children's Hospital, which was evacuated after being surrounded by Israeli troops. Reuters quotes doctors working in these hospitals who describe a situation on the ground that makes medical care, which includes the care for infants in incubators, impossible. This " zone of abandonment within which sovereign power had suspended its own law" translates to horrible pictures of broken bodies and pleas for support, supplies, a ceasefire.
