After Gaza Ceasefire, How to Beat “Digital Settler Colonialism”?

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FEATURING OMAR ZAHZAH - After two long and horrific years, a relentless Israeli bombing campaign centered on a genocidal project of erasing Palestinians in Gaza, has been put on hold. A ceasefire agreement enabled the release of nearly 2,000 Palestinian hostages, in exchange for about 20 Israeli hostages–a mathematical ratio that starkly symbolizes the dehumanization of Palestinians. 

It’s not just physical attacks and erasure that Palestinians have been subject to, but, as Omar Zahzah suggests in a new book, “digital settler colonialism.” 

Zahzah is a writer, poet, organizer of Lebanese Palestinian descent, and Assistant Professor of Arab and Muslim Ethnicities and Diasporas (AMED) Studies at San Francisco State University. He is the author of Terms of Servitude: Zionism, Silicon Valley, and Digital Settler Colonialism in the Palestine Liberation Struggle. He spoke with Sonali Kolhatkar about the ceasefire agreement and his new book.

ROUGH TRANSCRIPT:

Sonali Kolhatkar: Before we talk about what's happening in your and what you write about, rather in your book, let's discuss the big news since late last week in what seems to have been a desperate bid to win the Nobel Peace Prize, President Donald Trump basically pushed Benjamin Netanyahu into doing what he and Joe Biden could have pushed him to do for two long years, which is to basically have a ceasefire. 

And I'm wondering if you have any opinions on the way in which the ceasefire is being talked about in the media. It's being seen as this big diplomatic coup for Trump, and it is also being seen as the end of something really, really terrible and the beginning of something bright and beautiful and wonderful. How do you view it? 

Omar Zahzah: That's… it's an important question and I think we need to sort of remind ourselves that what we've witnessed for the past two years is the problem of an unchecked colonial expansionist project being allowed to inflict its violence and devastation with total impunity. 

And so, that essential formulation, I don't think is gonna drastically change. Now, I hope that a ceasefire would result in a paradigm shift, but you really cannot have a substantive paradigm shift unless you actually have international pressure being applied to the Israeli state, which, although we've seen, you know, Trump, and there's been a lot of reporting of his dissatisfaction, you know, his anger at Netanyahu, the kinds of international pressure that needed to be applied against Israel in light of what it has done, which is a genocide and only the most recent genocide in terms of the Palestinian context, is strikingly low.