Vaccine apartheid and settler colonial sovereign violence: from Palestine to the colonial global economyThis article examines the distribution of the COVID-19 vaccine both in Palestine and globally through a decolonial lens. In dominant Euro-American discourse, the invention, production, and distribution of the vaccine is largely judged as an indicator of sophisticated and advanced health care systems and economies. The underlying premise being that the advanced, wealthy, and capable nation-states have endogenously earned the position of power and prosperity. The world’s poor nation-states are posited as the recipients of charity from these rich states only after the latter have sufficiently inoculated themselves. The entire discourse turns the question of vaccines into a series of technical questions about capabilities, facilities, infrastructure, economic purchasing power, and so on. Concealed in this discourse is a settler colonial foundation – an aspiration towards omnipresent and absolute power – which not only creates the contrast between Palestinians and Israelis, rich and poor, colonizer and colonized, but also seals a forcefully imposed settler colonial contract in which colonizing populations ensure their ability to inoculate themselves by debilitating the colonized.
Ostensibly, the paper is about the larger question of whether it is fair or acceptable for rich states to ensure that their own populations are medically safe before offering help to poorer countries. That is a reasonable question and one worth exploring. (The answer is that the supreme obligation for any state is to protect its own citizens first.)
But the abstract makes it clear that this is only an excuse for attacking Israel. The very title, "Vaccine apartheid," is meant only for Israel. It pretends that the Palestinian issue the paradigm through which the entire world is viewed, when it is nothing of the sort - an analysis of how Australia and New Zealand gave vaccines to their own citizens before providing them to small island nations that depend on them would never been called "apartheid" and yet it is the model for how the entire world acted when vaccines were scarce.
I don't quite know how the paper includes "settler colonial sovereign violence" in this topic, but I bet that the paper does not mention:
1. The Palestinian Authority never asked for vaccines from Israel except in small amounts, which Israel gave them.
2. The PA claimed throughout the process that it will procure its own vaccines.
3. Israel inoculated tens of thousands of Palestinians who work in Israel.
4. The number of deaths per million remained lower in the Palestinian territories than in Israel even during the months that Israel had the vaccine and the PA did not.
This is nothing more than anti-Israel propaganda, and modern antisemites finding new venues to spout their hate.
Either Distinktion: Journal of Social Theory doesn't realize that it is being used - or it does. Given the state of social sciences today, I'm afraid it is the latter.
|
Or order from your favorite bookseller, using ISBN 9798985708424. Read all about it here! |
|
