Tuesday, September 05, 2023
Elder of Ziyon
Ali H. Musleh will be working on his first book project, To What Abyss Does This Robot Take the Earth? Using his dual background in design and political theory, he focuses on Israel's design, development and deployment of drones, autonomous weapons and artificial intelligence, treating them as technological processes of managing and differentiating forms of life.Apparently, this book is a version of Musleh's 341-page PhD dissertation, with the same title. Here's the abstract:
How do weapons make the colonial worlds that Palestinians and Jewish-Israelis inhabit? My dissertation attends to this question starting from an experience shared by Palestinians: that the majority of us have never encountered an Israeli settler, whether in uniform or out of uniform, who is not attached to a weapon, be it an assault rifle, a fighter jet, or a tank, etc. Taking this experience as a philosophical provocation, I subject the settler colony to a form of insurgent study exercised everyday by Palestinians that confronts the settler as contingent and transitory human-weapon ensembles. These studies are bodying and worlding. They reveal and unravel the spatialized embodiments, sensations, affective terrains, orientations and regimes of truth that weapons generate as lived world(s) of experience. In doing so, Palestinians exercise a fleshy sociality that constantly puts into question the self-evidence of the settler and the settler state. Thinking with Palestinians and alongside peoples of struggle, my dissertation is a performance in reverse engineering that moves from micrological sites, scenes and bodies of war, to macro formations of sovereignty. My itinerary focuses primarily on encounters with remote and robotic weaponry as technologies of engineering spatial and procedural distance between the settler and weapon. My task has been to show how that distance became the abyssal site from which forms of war, apartheid, and erasure emerge that consign settlers to martial automatisms that materialize and mediate their existence. The result is a work that dissects settler colonialism as a form of life inseparable from weapon power, as I also consider Palestinian rehearsals of decolonial life in the robotic age of war.
This abstract is a combination of gobbledygook, lies, obfuscation and antisemitism.
Gazans indeed don't have much of a chance to see Israelis., settlers or otherwise, since no Israelis live there. But it is really true that West Bank Palestinians never see "settlers" without weapons? The thousands of Palestinians that visit Rami Levy supermarkets shop alongside Israeli civilians. Well over 100,000 Palestinians work in Israel, and tens of thousands more work in settlements - and most "settlers" do not walk around their towns toting assault rifles. Those "settlers" who roam the Temple Mount, where they are seen by thousands more, don't carry weapons. Most Jews at the Mamilla Mall in Jerusalem, where many Palestinians shop, don't carry weapons. His assertion that most Palestinians never see Jews without weapons is a fabrication.
And then there are Israelis who visit Palestinian towns on their own to go shopping or get their cars repaired. Like Shay Silas Nigreker and his son Aviad Nir who went shopping in Huwara and were murdered two weeks ago because they were Israeli Jews. They weren't "attached to weapons," but they were murdered by Palestinian weapons.
So Musleh's "philosophical provocation" that is the very basis of his paper and book is bullshit to begin with. But what thesis advisor has the knowledge or guts to dispute the falsehood that underpins the text?
To Musleh, all Jewish Israelis are "settlers." After all, how would Palestinians know that Israelis in fighter jets or tanks are settlers or not? And in the first sentence he considers all Israeli Arabs to be "Palestinian" which means that when he says "settlers," he really means "Jews" from either side of the Green Line. Further proof from a similar article he wrote in Politics Today, where he said, "Weeks, months, if not years can go by without an inhabitant of Gaza encountering a settler, but they are more likely to encounter a faceless machine in their day to day life."
To Musleh, every Jew is an implant, who has no business living in the land of their forefathers. If that isn't antisemitic, what is?
Beyond that, to Musleh, every Jew in Israel is not a human being. They are hybrids of humans and weapons. They are essentially cyborgs. The entire paper is meant to dehumanize every Jew who lives in the region.
Musleh tries to sound intelligent by using words that either don't exist or in contexts that make no sense. There is no such words as "bodying" and "worlding." And does his treatise on Israeli evil really deal with "micrological sites"?
Musleh himself characterizes the paper not as reflective of objective truth but as "a form of insurgent study" as well as "a performance" in finding links that simply do not exist in real life, which he falsely calls "reverse engineering" to make it sound quasi-scientific.
Another form of antisemitism we see in this abstract is that it accepts libels against Israel that are not at all universally accepted, and that are provably false, as truisms. "Settler colonialism" and "apartheid" are routinely used in academia and much of the media as fact, but they aren't. By pretending that these lies are truth, the paper is nothing more than naked propaganda.
Yet no one in Columbia University is the least bit bothered by these issues. After all, the social sciences are filled with self-serving propagandistic garbage like this, where the "feelings" of the writer are considered more factual than actual facts.
To Columbia, this self-serving propaganda filled with lies and Jew-hatred are a feature, not a bug.
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