Bombing out: David Lloyd, ‘Israel’s Settler-Colonial Bomb: For Refaat Alareer Available to Purchase’, Social Text, 43, 2, 2025, pp. 1-16 | settler colonial studies blog

Bombing out: David Lloyd, ‘Israel’s Settler-Colonial Bomb: For Refaat Alareer Available to Purchase’, Social Text, 43, 2, 2025, pp. 1-16

26Jun25

Abstract: Israel’s ongoing genocidal war on Gaza has entailed the massive destruction of universities and schools, religious and cultural centers, and other sites critical to the survival and reproduction of Palestinian cultural life. At the same time, the death toll of Palestinian writers and artists, teachers and doctors, journalists and researchers has been exceptionally high. Such a level of destruction and killing continues to be excused by Israel and its supporters as the unfortunate collateral damage of a war against a terrorist organization that conceals itself within civilian spaces. This essay, on the contrary, argues that in light of the longer history of colonialism with which Israel’s settler‐colonial enterprise is continuous, the assault on cultural life should be seen as a systematic element of its overall project, the elimination of the Palestinians as a people. What the Kenyan anticolonial intellectual Ngugi Wa Thiong’o once described as colonialism’s “cultural bomb” aims, alongside more material weaponry, to break the will to resistance of the colonized. It intends the psychological destruction of the population and the eradication not only of armed resistance but also of those whose intellectual, artistic, or literary work contributes to the maintenance of the sense of cultural continuity and futurity on which both armed and unarmed resistance draws. The instance of Refaat Alareer, a scholar, teacher, and poet murdered by Israel in December 2023, is emblematic of the long history of Israeli assassinations of Palestinian cultural figures but also of the persistence and dissemination of their work that defies destruction.

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