This paper analyzes the “kill chain” that led to the death of Blessing Matthew, a young Nigerian woman who tried to cross the Franco–Italian Alpine border, in May 2018. It aims to deconstruct the entanglement of laws, regulations, and practices at this borderland, so as to position Matthew’s case within the broader migration and border regime and thus overcome the rhetoric of inevitability and discourse attributing the young woman’s death to the dangers of the mountain environment. The paper highlights a discrepancy between orders and practices, through a critical analysis of the mission order received by the police forces that were deployed to the border region at the time of Matthew’s death, placing responsibility on the officers who were patrolling the border zone. It also points to the liability of senior government officials in giving contradictory orders as well as to the ambiguity of the state-determined rules governing border crossings and controls.

This article examines the phenomenon of Zionist Philanthropy and the synchronicity of tax-deductible gift-giving with Palestinian erasure. Raising questions concerning regulator complicity in Canada, the case study of the Mizrachi Organization of Canada, a popular Zionist charitable organization which arguably mislabels its charitable activities, is investigated. At stake are questions surrounding the arbitrary enforcement of Canadian tax law, international law, and where the Canadian state sits in regard to conducting charitable activity in the Occupied Territories.

Between 2016 and 2018, Black, Palestinian and Jewish organizations, under the banner of the Demilitarize! Durham 2 Palestine coalition, led a campaign in Durham, North Carolina, that successfully passed a City Council resolution prohibiting US police exchanges with Israel. Based on direct interviews with the activists who led the campaign, this article sets out to trace the history of the Demilitarize! Effort, detailing its chronological developments with an eye on highlighting how Black–Palestinian solidarity continues to function as an anti-imperial analytic. Particularly, it illuminates how settler colonialism unsettles the demarcation between foreign and domestic frontiers thus entwining military and police force expressed in transnational state violence against racialized communities. In doing so, the article will offer and preserve a movement archive developed by activists in Durham. The Demilitarize! Durham 2 Palestine coalition is built upon a rich legacy of local Palestine solidarity activism and its coalitionary efforts focused on a narrative of racialized state violence that directly connected militarized US law enforcement to trainings in Israel thus illuminating the local manifestations of US empire. This article also seeks to use the movement archive to consider how seemingly formidable circuits of state violence that undergird imperial domination are simultaneously vulnerable to attack and dismantlement.

This article locates the rising extremism in Israel in the dynamics of the ongoing Zionist settler-colonial project in Palestine. It introduces the concept of process in settler-colonial settings as the interaction between the settler-colonial structure with its inherent violence and the agency of the colonized with its inevitable resistance. It is within that context that extremism is nourished and grown. The article argues that Zionism is entrapped in path of escalating violence, the end of which we have not yet seen, to maintain the goals of Jewish supremacy and subdue the natives’ resistance to taking over their land. Therefore, the article defines the challenge of a peaceful relationship between Israelis and Palestinians as being based on abolishing Jewish supremacy and establishing equal political and national rights for Israelis and Palestinians. The article argues that to achieve full equality, recognition of the right and legitimacy of the Israeli Jewish national group to belong to the land in equality with the Palestinian nation and to establish a common political framework of sharing the land, can be achieved only by imagining a future without Zionism.

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Rimona Afana integrates research, teaching, activism and artwork to document (and counter) state crimes, colonial legacies, violent conflicts, environmental harms, and animal abuse. She is Assistant Professor of Peace Studies at Kennesaw State University and formerly a Visiting Scholar with the Vulnerability Initiative at the Emory University School of Law in Atlanta. Her PhD, completed at the Transitional Justice Institute in Northern Ireland, examined the intersecting crimes shaping the tensions between justice and reconciliation in Palestine/Israel. She convenes the Ecocide/Speciesism symposium and is now working on two book projects: one revisits through vulnerability theory her prior findings on the justicereconciliation nexus in Palestine/Israel; the other examines how jurisprudence can address the ties between ecocide and speciesism.