Mamdani the Elder in 2004

It seems that I never uploaded this post from 2015. But now that his son is running for election as New York City's next mayor with his 2023 Not On Our Dime Bill lurking, I realized it should appear as better late than never.

The things one finds as in “Representing Settlers” by Assaf Harel -

Mahmood Mamdani (2004. Good Muslim, Bad Muslim: Post-Apartheid Perspectives on America and Israel, PoLAR 27(1):1-15), for instance, opened a recent lecture by claiming that “The violence of the settler and the suicide bomber, more than any other, has come to define the contemporary work of terrorism and counter-terrorism.” [he establishes equality and equivalency] The settler has come to represent unbridgeable difference from the secular, liberal humanists of the West. [does the PLO, PA and/or Hamas do something to Western liberalism?] At the same time the settlement project in Israeli post-1967 occupied territories is seen as a break from the previous trajectory of the Israeli state. These depictions have become widely acceptable, especially in liberal academic circles. But they are not only analytically weak, they actually participate in a political purpose that might be unintended. As we have seen, many studies (Lustick 1988; Lustick 1993; Silberstein 1993; Sivan 1995; Feige 2003; Zertal and Eldar 2007) emphasize ideological differences or point to the settler project inthe Occupied Territories as having fundamentally altered the foundations of Israeli society. This discursive construction depicts religious settlers and their project as different from legitimate Israeli state practices by inscribing a moral high ground for those who vilify and denounce the settlers in the Occupied Territories.

The “settlers’” project, it would seem, is not really Zionism at all, [as if all that went on previously, of Jews emigrating and repatriating back to the Jewish historic homeland, resettling and creating agricultural communities throughout the centuries is not Zionism] and so the Zionism of mainstream Israel is morally elevated in its distinction from beliefs and practices in the Occupied Territories. Religiously motivated settlers are often condemned for the violence of their settlement project. This includes both the structural violence of territorial expansion and the face-to-face violence between settlers and Palestinians. Yet if we move beyond demonizing religious settlers and seek instead to apply a post-structural istanalytical framework to them, then we must seek commonalities with those who currently oppose these settlers.

Did Peter Beinart read that and become influenced? 

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