The Media Futures Hub presents Palestine Today, a seminar series grappling with the unfolding genocide of Palestinians in Gaza and the global mass mobilisations that insist on Palestinian liberation. The series is part of the hub’s Racial Technologies stream, which investigates race as technology, as well as race and technology. The former considers race as a technology concerned with the organisation, management, and exploitation of human difference, analysing its evolution in relation to the extractive regimes of colonialism and capitalism. The latter challenges the assumption that technologies are neutral or objective, interrogating how racial logics and forms of discrimination come to be embedded and encoded into technical systems. These twin logics converge in the context of Israel’s siege on historic Palestine with devastating effects. The series will feature scholars from UNSW whose work explores the current and historical situation in Palestine and Israel, thinking across media and cultural studies, law and philosophy, sociology and international relations. The seminar will create a space for critical thinking and will consider what the role of scholarship is in times of catastrophe.
Seminar program:
Seminar 1: Jessica Whyte, War against the People: The ‘Gaza Humanitarian Foundation’ as a Technology of Genocide
Tuesday 15 July, 12 – 1:30pm
UNSW Business School Room 220
Abstract: On May 19th, the Israeli Prime Minister’s office announced that, after blocking all food from entering Gaza for eleven weeks, it would allow a limited amount of “basic food” into the besieged territory. At the same time, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu vowed that “Israel will act to deny Hamas the ability to seize control of the distribution of humanitarian aid in order to ensure that the aid does not reach Hamas terrorists”. This paper examines the new militarised aid delivery system approved by Israel’s security cabinet, with a focus on ‘the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation (GHF)’, an opaque private company headquartered in Geneva, which Israel has tasked with aid distribution. In the first month of its operations, the GHF’s distribution sites became scenes of almost daily massacres and by June 22nd, the United Nations announced that “since Israel eased its total blockade last month, more than 400 people are reported to have died trying to reach food distribution points.” This paper places the GHF in the lineage of colonial counter-insurgency from the Algerian War of Independence to the US occupation of Iraq. Central to that tradition was a claim that separating civilians from fighters was the best means to protect and sustain the former. In this paper, I draw on work with Ihab Shalbak on the Palestinian attempt to challenge this counter-insurgency war in international law. (Shalbak and Whyte, “The War Against the People and the People’s War: Palestine and the Additional Protocols to the Geneva Conventions,” 2023). I argue that while the GHF has been lauded as a means to “sever the ideological and service-based ties between Hamas and Gaza’s population,” (HaCohen, 2024) it should instead be seen as a mechanism of the total “war against the people” of Palestine that Israel has waged in various forms since its inception. The Gaza Humanitarian Foundation is the apotheosis of the instrumentalization of aid—not in the service of survival but in the service of colonial genocide.
Speaker Bio: Jessica Whyte is Scientia Associate Professor of Philosophy and Law at the University of New South Wales and an Australian Research Council Future Fellow. Her work integrates political philosophy, intellectual history and political economy to analyse contemporary forms of sovereignty, human rights, humanitarianism and militarism. Her most recent book is The Morals of the Market: Human Rights and the Rise of Neoliberalism (2019). She is currently writing about economic coercion and economic sanctions after the Cold War.
Seminar 2: Andrew Brooks, ‘Automating Death, Automating Debility’
Tuesday 31 July, 12 – 1:30pm
UNSW Business School Room 220
Seminar 3: Noam Peleg, ‘There are no children in Gaza: racial erasure and live bullets’
Thursday 21 August, 12 – 1:30pm
UNSW Business School Room 220
Seminar 4: Lana Tatour, ‘Narcissim in Times of Genocide’
Thursday 25 September, 12 – 1:30pm
UNSW Old Main Building 150
This series is hosted by the UNSW Media Futures Hub.