9.4 Closing Reflections: Toward a Decolonial Future
9.4 Closing Reflections: Toward a Decolonial Future¶
Zionist settler-colonialism in Palestine is not an anomaly. It is a modern articulation of a global colonial structure that continues to shape the world through land dispossession, racial hierarchies, and the erasure of Indigenous life. From Canada and the United States, through apartheid South Africa, to Australia and New Zealand, settler‑colonialism operates not only through the violent seizure of territory but also through the gradual destruction of identity, memory, and the capacity to resist. This thesis has argued that the Israeli state’s long-term strategies of elimination, whether through incarceration, epistemic erasure, bodily maiming, or spatial fragmentation, form part of a broader pattern of genocide by attrition, where the goal is not always to kill en masse but to unmake a people over time.
My reflections on slow erasure are deeply informed by a decolonial commitment, a refusal to accept colonialism’s framing of knowledge, history, and humanity. Slow erasure, as developed here, is both an analytic and a political intervention. It demands that we rethink genocide, not as a discrete historical event, but as a living structure, a mode of governance that continues to devastate Indigenous peoples in ways often unrecognized by international legal frameworks or liberal human rights discourses. By situating Zionist settler-colonial violence within this framework, this thesis joins other decolonial and Indigenous critiques in refusing the idea that genocide ends when the killing stops, or that life persists unaffected by the erosion of culture, language, sovereignty, and memory.
My closing reflections are not offered in abstraction. They are shaped by conversations with Palestinians who live under occupation, who mourn without being allowed to grieve, who teach in carceral spaces, who resist through care, and who love and live stubbornly in defiance of a regime that seeks their disappearance. Their voices call not only for solidarity, but for structural transformation, for a refusal of settler-colonial logics in all their forms.
To engage with slow erasure is to confront the long duration of colonial violence, but also the equally long endurance of Indigenous resistance. It is to understand that decolonisation is not merely a metaphor or academic gesture, but a lived and ongoing struggle for land, life, and liberation. This work is a small contribution to that struggle.
The greater contribution, however, lies elsewhere, in the uncompromising struggle for decolonial liberation. It is found in the steadfastness of those who resist on the ground, in the barricades of daily life, in the reclamation of land, memory, and dignity. It is found in the work of those who refuse to be erased, not in theory alone, but in living, breathing, resisting.