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Loading... Language of War, Language of Peace: Palestine, Israel and the Search for Justiceby Raja Shehadeh
   None No current Talk conversations about this book.  GeorgeHunter | Sep 13, 2020 |  no reviews | add a review
Award-winning author Raja Shehadeh explores the politics of language and the language of politics in the Israeli Palestine conflict, reflecting on the walls that they create - legal and cultural - that confine today's Palestinians just like the physical borders, checkpoints and the so called 'Separation Barrier'. The peace process has been ground to a halt by twists of language and linguistic chicanery that has degraded the word 'peace' itself. No one even knows what the word might mean now for the Middle East. So to give one example of many, Israel argued that the omission of the word 'the' in one of the UN Security Council's resolutions meant that it was not mandated to withdraw from all of the territories occupied in 1967. The Language of War, The Language of Peace is another important book from Raja Shehadeh on the world's greatest political fault line. No library descriptions found. |
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 Google Books — Loading...GenresMelvil Decimal System (DDC)956.04History and Geography Asia Middle East Middle East 1945-1980; 20th CenturyLC ClassificationRatingAverage: (3.5)
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Wikipedia in English
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"Israel’s war/peace framing, however, is dangerous. It results in a methodical individualism to explain current events, in which acts are driven by individual choices contextualised within a tragic fog of war that evenly envelops all actors. Systemic understandings are foregone and one is left with nothing but anodyne paeans for reconciliation and hope for the future. In this way, war and peace are not opposites, as Israel presents them, but work together to avoid raising systemic power asymmetries into our collective consciousness. Israel’s language of ‘war and peace’ comes hand in hand with references to ‘both sides’ in ‘the conflict’. There are moments when the predominance of this framing even trips up Israel’s best critics, as when Shehahdeh himself writes that ’by reducing a colonial occupation to a mere ‘dispute, they fail to appreciate the magnitude of the conflict between the two sides.’ Instead of ‘conflict’ between ’two sides’, of course, one understands Shehadeh seeks to pivot from the language of war/peace to the language of colonialism/decolonisation, apartheid/desegregation, supremacy/emancipation, and ethnic cleansing/pluralism, but is repeatedly hemmed-in by the existing terms of discussion.
Israel’s conquest of the terms of debate with its war/peace lens also implicitly prioritises questions of violence and security – and it does so over questions of justice. The language of security becomes appropriate, self-defence for both sides becomes understood as equally necessary, and it becomes plausible to imagine that Israel might be an equal victim, if not the victim of ’the conflict’. It follows from this thinking that rejectionist actors and proponents of violence on ’both sides’ are to blame – and the violent extremism of these ‘fringes’ become the source of lament, instead of the injustice of reigning colonial systems of theft, segregation and supremacy."
Susan Abulhawa also has a much more articulate takedown of the language of "conflict" near the end of her article here:
http://www.aljazeera.com/news/2015/10/occupied-words-israel-colonial-narrative-1...
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