Coloniality and Necropolitics in the Age of COVID-19: The Question of Palestine

Abstract

This article interrogates the necropolitical logics of the Israeli settler-state apparatus towards Palestinians in the Occupied Territories during the COVID-19 pandemic. It examines these logics and practices through the prism of coloniality, which conceptualizes manifestations of colonialism (whether material, epistemic, or ontological) as a diffuse set of practices, opening up the conversation to discuss the ways in which international organizations, other states, and the Palestinian Authority continue to inflict the colonial harm through the employment of particular policies. Centring coloniality as an analytic allows a more global perspective and widens the discussion to include the ways in which Palestinians practise decoloniality, building and imagining “otherwise” worlds. This article maps the ways in which the devastation of the pandemic is not a product of the pandemic itself, but larger legacies of material, epistemic, and ontological colonial intervention.

Contaminating National Identity Through Intercultural Intimacy: (Im)purity and the Pandemic

“…Israel, for example, had a widely publicized early COVID-19 vaccination campaign, but these vaccines-purchased in excess-were denied to Palestinians living under Israel's control in the Occupied Territories ("Covid-19: Palestinians Lag behind," 2021). Scholars, analysts, and pundits rightly saw this policy as a symptom of Israel's discriminatory regime in the territory it controls, between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean, labeling it "medical" and "vaccine apartheid"; they viewed it as a new symptom of Israel's ongoing apartheid regime rather than an entirely new development (Ayyash, 2022;Buttu, 2021;Gabriel, 2023;Israel's discriminatory vaccine push, 2021).…”