Just two months after this special issue was finalized Israel launched its catastrophic, genocidal assault on Gaza. We have, for the first time in history watched the carnage, on an apocalyptic scale, play out in real time—we have witnessed the killing of 20,000 Palestinians, the vast majority women and children with many thousands more under the rubble; we have watched the carpet bombing of the Gaza Strip with over 40,000 tonnes of explosives; the destruction of over 100,000 homes and the displacement of 1.7 million Gazans. We have followed trauma-laden marches of the displaced to the dangerous south. In front of the world’s eyes, hundreds of medics have been slaughtered, at least 22 of Gaza’s 36 hospitals destroyed and the Gazan healthcare infrastructure collapsed. We have witnessed Israel’s targeting of the truth-tellers, media personnel and intellectuals—76 journalists killed; two Gazan universities destroyed and their presidents killed; countless thousands injured and permanently disabled; a whole population traumatized beyond comprehension. All this with Western complicity, complicity which extends to direct military aid and unequivocal ideological support for Israel’s genocidal Zionist project.
As this timely and crucially important volume demonstrates Israel’s genocide of the Palestinians is bound both to the logic of settler colonialism and to the necessity of its abolition. Genocide unfolds over years and frequently decades. Israel’s genocide of the Palestinians was set in 1917 with the Balfour Declaration, when Britain simply gave their country to European Zionists looking for a Jewish homeland. What greater act of colonial dehumanization can there be but to dismiss the existence, history and aspirations of a people in order to grant their land to others. Seventy-five years of dispossession, settler colonialism, occupation, structural violence, forced eviction and apartheid discrimination have followed. What we are witnessing now, not only in Gaza but across historic Palestine is the denouement in Israel’s genocide of the indigenous Palestinians. . .a second Nakba and as Knesset member Arial Kallner demanded one that dwarfs the Nakba of 1948.
As the evidence in all the articles published here attests, genocide must be understood, not only in terms of mass violence, but as a process which begins with dehumanization and ends with erasure. In between and often concurrent are a number of recognizable phases—occasions of litmus-testing violence (violence without consequence equals impunity and emboldens perpetrators to commit further violence), structural discrimination (apartheid), forced isolation (Gaza as the extreme ghetto) and systematic weakening. The presentation and nature of these stages may differ slightly between genocides but they are always present in some form.
Israel’s crimes of genocide, embodied in the stages just outlined and underpinned by Zionist ideology, have been well documented by the authors in this special issue and by human rights groups and journalists but include routine settler and Isreal Defense Force (IDF) violence in the West Bank and East Jerusalem; house demolitions, village destruction in the Negev, forced expulsions; the detention without charge of thousands of Palestinians including many children, the apartheid structures of walls, roads and checkpoints that make Palestinian daily lives a misery; discriminatory laws and the process of Judaization as well as the cruel 16-year siege of Gaza.
Genocide requires both intention and action and must include “a coordinated plan aimed at the destruction of the essential foundations of the life of national groups.” Specific evidence of the “plan” can, for example, be found in Israel’s 17-year-old Dahyia doctrine—a doctrine premised on laying waste to a defined “enemy area” through overwhelming and disproportionate force so as to weaken the population to the point where mere survival completely supersedes resistance.
We see the doctrine in force with the relentless bombardments of residential housing and infrastructure and with Israel’s announcement of a state of “total siege” of Gaza—cutting off water, food, fuel, electricity and medical supplies, amounting to a clear statement of intent to commit genocide against the Palestinian people by “deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part.” The genocidal intention of the Israeli state is also embodied in the host of nihilistic, racist and dehumanising statements by its leaders. We now have evidence of what a former Israeli intelligence officer has called Israel’s “mass assassination factory,” a dystopian Artificial Intelligence system called Habsora which can generate targets at a faster rate than it attacks. And it is clear that those targets are specifically civilians and their families. The huge civilian death toll, including the mass killing and disablement of thousands of children is in fact integral to Israel’s genocidal aims. The unchilding of Palestine’s children is in fact an integral part of Israel’s biopolitical and necropolitical genocidal aims. Palestine’s future is to be eradicated.
These crimes, however, must be understood in terms of Israel’s ultimate state organizational goal. That goal, which has animated its genocidal plan and the barbarous execution of that plan, is the establishment of a Zionist-Jewish supremacist state in the territory that was once historic Palestine. This goal requires, as in the case of other settler colonial states, the annihilation of the indigenous population.
Gaza is now in the asphyxiating annihilation phase of genocide. . .but annihilation is not the final stage. Genocide’s final stage combines state crime denial with social and racialized reorganization. During this phase the annihilated population is effectively erased from settler-colonial history, culture, space/land/territory, political and social life. Maps and textbooks no longer refer to the annihilated, their traditions, their places, their contributions to society. Palestine instead will be carried in the defiance of survivors, and the hearts and memories of its diaspora. . .but there is a chance that these final stages may be averted and this takes us to the centrality of civil society as the primary agent of resistance and change in a state crime analysis.
Since October 7th 2023 we have seen global civil society out on the streets in its millions, crucially led by Palestinian resistance to occupation, denouncing Israel’s genocidal siege and murderous bombardments; we’ve seen renewed energy for the boycott divestments and sanctions movement and unprecedented pressure placed on Western elected representatives to demand a ceasefire and an end to occupation. If the final phases of genocide are to be averted it is to civil society we must turn. It is here, animated by the spirit of Palestinian resistance, that hope lies.