Dr. Kim Alley1
1University of Melbourne, Australia
Biography:
Kim Alley is a Senior Lecturer in Political Science/Indigenous Studies at the University of Melbourne. Dr. Alley is a Aboriginal academic and researcher, whose work focuses on settler colonial histories, settler nationalism and political violence (with a special focus on Australia and Palestine), while also examining social movements for change and liberation, transnational activism, and resistance politics. Her work seeks to highlight how such histories and activism impact and inform Indigenous-Settler relations today.
Abstract:
In her presentation to the International Court of Justice in January 2024, as part of the South Africa’s application to institute proceeding against Israel for violation of the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide, Irish lawyer Blinne Ní Ghrálaigh described the war crimes taking place in Gaza as “the first genocide in history where its victims are broadcasting their own destruction in real time in the desperate—so far vain—hope that the world might do something” (ICJ, 2024, 71). While the South African legal team highlighted the Palestinian use of social media to document the genocide in Gaza, Palestinians were not the only one’s live broadcasting from the region. Thousands of Israeli soldiers over the last year have also used a variety of social media platforms to document the genocide in Gaza, from the perspective of those carrying it out.
Adopting a settler colonial critique, this paper seeks to examine the digital “selfie” militarism of Israeli soldiers during the Gaza genocide and the relationship between Zionist settler nationalism (or the affective creation of a national identity in the service of the settler nation state), frontier violence and Israeli expansionism in Gaza. In doing so, it seeks to examine the depiction of Israel’s settler national identity and use of frontier violence within such digital “selfie” militarism, exploring how it works to normalize both the settler colonial displacement of Palestinians and Israel’s claim to exclusive and permanent territorial sovereignty over Gaza.