Vaccine apartheid and settler colonial sovereign violence: from Palestine to the colonial global economy

ABSTRACT This article examines the distribution of the COVID-19 vaccine both in Palestine and globally through a decolonial lens. In dominant Euro-American discourse, the invention, production, and distribution of the vaccine is largely judged as an indicator of sophisticated and advanced health care systems and economies. The underlying premise being that the advanced, wealthy, and capable nation-states have endogenously earned the position of power and prosperity. The world’s poor nation-states are posited as the recipients of charity from these rich states only after the latter have sufficiently inoculated themselves. The entire discourse turns the question of vaccines into a series of technical questions about capabilities, facilities, infrastructure, economic purchasing power, and so on. Concealed in this discourse is a settler colonial foundation – an aspiration towards omnipresent and absolute power – which not only creates the contrast between Palestinians and Israelis, rich and poor, colonizer and colonized, but also seals a forcefully imposed settler colonial contract in which colonizing populations ensure their ability to inoculate themselves by debilitating the colonized.