CURTHOYS, Ned. Anti-racist Jewish Australian philosopher: " Israel ... is a genocidal settler colonial society that since its founding in 1948 continually seeks to destroy the foundations of life of the indigenous Palestinians"

Dr Ned Curthoys is an anti-racist, humanitarian Jewish Australian scholar who is a Research Fellow in the Research School of Humanities & the Arts, College of Arts and Social Sciences. According to the ANU website: “Ned Curthoys completed his PhD in the English Department at the University of Sydney in 2002. His doctorate focused on the dissemination of the humanist tradition of classical rhetoric into twentieth century literary theory, philosophy, and political theory. Post-PhD he has researched and published on the political theorist Hannah Arendt’s cross-cutting interests in literary narrative and biography. More recently he has published on various aspects of the German Jewish experience from the eighteenth to the twentieth centuries, returned to a long standing interest in Albert Camus and the Algerian war, and entered debates about the cross-cultural validity of secularism” (see: http://rsh.anu.edu.au/people/profile_system/public.php?id=123 ).

Ned Curthoys and John Docker on the Palestinian Genocide (2009): “[ We are part of an increasing number of people around the world of Jewish descent who are sickened by the coldly calculated massacre of the Palestinians of Gaza and who utterly repudiate Israel's claim that it acts in the name of Jews the world over… The massacre in Gaza cries out not only for immediate condemnation but for historical explanation. As scholars working in the fields of genocide studies and research into the long history of European colonization, it seems clear to us that Israel - as in the history of white Australia since 1788 - is a genocidal settler colonial society that since its founding in 1948 continually seeks to destroy the foundations of life of the indigenous Palestinians, their health, dignity, livelihood, personal security, access to education, and political organisation, so that the Palestinians can be replaced by colonizing Zionist settlers. Recent genocide scholarship has highlighted how much the original definition of genocide (by Raphael Lemkin in chapter nine of his 1944 book Axis Rule in Occupied Europe) linked genocide and colonization as a two stage process of destruction of the home society (not necessarily by physical annihilation qua Nazism) and replacement by the incoming colonizers.Such has been the continuing historical pattern of Israel in relation to the indigenous people of the land. In 1948 the Zionist forces violently drove out over 700,000 Palestinians by deploying 'admonitory massacres', as the Israeli historian Ilan Pappé has evoked in horrific detail in his recent The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine (2006).” [1].

[1]. John Docker and Ned Curthoys. “The Gaza Massacre:, ABC, The Drum, 9 January 2009: http://www.abc.net.au/unleashed/37828.html .