Global Palestine (review)

John Collins has packed this volume with a conceptual analysis of humanity-negating global processes emanating from settler colonialism. He grounds his study in the optics of colonialism's victims. Palestine, he insists, embodies the global processes privileging settlers and subjugating the indigenous populations. These processes, he argues, culminate in a state of permanent war whereby the settlers seek to preempt/repress any challenge to their advantaged status. He chastises those who continue to see events through a state-centered system, and who believe a post-colonial period begins when the colonial power departs. Departure does not mean that the colonial structure rooted in environmentally destructive neo-liberal economics is dismantled. It continues to wreak havoc even as the specific territorial spaces are declared "independent." The permanent war against the "independent" natives goes on to keep them in line with the continuing, economically exploitative colonial global structure. Collins' Global Palestine makes it clear that while particular spaces were colonized in the past centuries, the processes involved in colonialism are intertwined and form a global edifice. Palestine is a prime living example of this, and it is also a prime example of how to begin to redraw that architecture.

Collins' analytical schema is based on four concepts: Colonization; Securitization; Acceleration; and Occupation. Regarding Colonization, he focuses on settler colonialism. Colonization was originally horizontal (exocolonialism) seeking space and resources for capital accumulation. When space ran out, the settlers intensified their control and exploitation of the space they had appropriated (endocolonialism). As internal and external resistance to colonialists and trans-state colonial structures developed, the colonial states developed and shared advanced security technology (securitization) to meet the challenges to their privileged power and wealth. The deployment of high speed, i.e., acceleration strategies and technologies gave advantage to the possessors. Drones, high speed surveillance cameras, wireless sound taps, satellite mapping, etc. removed much of the interactive human factor from security, reducing control to a basically automated process with sometimes unanticipated consequences. Collins dubs the acceleration process "dromocracy" and understands that acceleration is related to permanent social war, both individually and collectively. He asks the question: "how can acceleration be politicized in order to construct an effective movement of global popular defense?" (p. 131) He compares this idea to the Marxist politicization of wealth.

Finally, Collins provides a novel take on occupation. While he notes that the settlers are always trying to construct themselves as the indigenous population by destroying native physical and natural environments and replacing them with their own, he spells out how, as in Palestine, Palestinians nonetheless continue to occupy and find creative ways to maintain themselves on the land. This kind of occupation, he says, is resistance.

In his final chapters on real decolonization and using the Palestinian situation, he points out how continued Palestinian occupation of their own land along with their non-violent form of resistance have attracted a worldwide solidarity movement to Palestine. More than that, these solidarity movements see the links between neo-liberalism and the degradation of the natural environment and to the lack of real development in fourth-world areas. No longer is the search for justice and equality territorially based; it is global. For these movements to be successful and overcome colonialism with its accelerated technology of "security," the focus must always be on the requirement to engage with, and whittle away its structure. Anything short of that is not real decolonization or just. Post-colonialism is yet to be achieved.

Collins has written a provocative book which finally pulls back the curtain on what has been heralded as decolonization in the past decades. He insists on revamping the outdated, state-based analytical paradigm. He draws our attention to an international civil society that could yet be the salvation of the globe. In all of this, he puts forward the living events surrounding Palestinian resistance to Israeli settler colonialism as a possible "laboratory" of our future redemption. It's an interesting book though somewhat tedious to read.