Systemic Racism in the US and Israel: Analogies and Differences
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- Published on Tuesday, 11 August 2020 02:54
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A Socialist Project e-bulletin ... No. 2166 ... August 11, 2020
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Systemic Racism in the US and Israel: Analogies and Differences
Nahla Abdo
A most relevant analogy between the US and Israel lies in the principal rationale for the force of their establishment as settler-colonial states. Imperialism, which is the driving force of the settler colonial project, is inherently racist and racializing. With the establishment of the state, racialized capital becomes structural and institutional; it becomes systemic. The differences between the two regimes are also there, based on the fact that each case is historically specific.
Without going into details, it is essential to point out that the very establishment of the settler-colonial state, whether the US or Canada or Israel to name just a few, necessitates the elimination of the indigenous people. In the case of both the US and Canada, settler-colonialism began with the removal of indigenous peoples (with quite distinct histories between the two with the long period of European dependence on First Nations in the North and West in Canada) – a process that involved genocide/erasure and conquering indigenous lands by... white European settlers.
In the process, the vast areas stolen from their indigenous owners necessitated vast amounts of labour-power, cheap working hands to work it. Herein lies the enslavement of African peoples and their use as slave labour. For, whereas elimination/erasure and genocide enabled the establishment of the colonial state, slavery was needed to generate, reproduce, and ensure the growth of US imperialism. The US brought Africans as slaves and shackled them as chattel. In the process, many were killed, and the rest sold in bondage. Their racialization continued for hundreds of years until this day.
