The long Palestinian genocide: colonial roots
PART I
by Thomas Aureliani
The well-known Italian journalist Enrico Mentana, during a public event, defined the concept of genocide from his point of view and with a certain emphasis , a perspective that is worth taking up again because it follows two of the arguments preferred by those who think that the Palestinian genocide is not:
“…don't talk to me about genocide. For two reasons: first, because even today—as the Hamas people like to say… from the river to the sea… from the Jordan to the Mediterranean—more Palestinians live there than Israeli Jews, and we've never seen a genocide that stems from conditions like these…
Second, genocide is something else: genocide is the planning on paper of the elimination of an entire people. Genocide was what was conceived in January 1942 at the Wannsee Conference by Hitler's men who decided to plan, as we know, the roundup of all Jews throughout the world […] It happened all over Europe with millions of people rounded up, placed in ghettos, taken to collection centers, put on sealed trains taken to Auschwitz and led to their deaths. This is genocide…
Such arguments, quite common in the Western view, suffer from two very specific pathologies that have tainted the Western debate on the "possible" genocide in Gaza: a colonial vision of the concept and phenomenon—a tendency that simultaneously excludes colonialism and "coloniality" from that very debate—and the exclusivity/uniqueness of the Holocaust as the first (and often only) admissible genocide in history. At the same time, the excessive conceptual anchoring to the definition given by the United Nations in the 1948 Convention has not contributed to deepening a debate that has often remained the preserve of international law experts. A sociological approach to the genocide that highlights its links with settler colonialism and the peculiarities of Zionism, as well as a rereading of the thought of Raphael Lemkin—the Polish-Jewish lawyer who coined the term —could not only help improve the quality of current public and political debate but would also foster a comprehensive understanding of the phenomenon, avoiding reductionist conceptions.
Genocide is defined in the 1948 UN Convention “any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such:
1 Killing members of the group;
2 Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group;
3 Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part;
4 Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group;
5 Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group.
Several international institutions and organizations—including the UN, through the reports of Special Rapporteur on the Occupied Palestinian Territories Francesca Albanese ("Anatomy of a Genocide " and "Genocide as Colonial Erasure "), and Amnesty International —have effectively applied this definition to the current situation in Gaza through first-hand accounts from Palestinian journalists and ordinary people, data, images, videos, and statements from Israeli soldiers and leaders. Thanks also to the mobilizations of Palestinian organizations and the growing solidarity movement in the US and Europe, genocide as a term used to define what is happening in Gaza has entered—albeit reluctantly—into the Western public arena and has been accepted as an interpretative framework by various commentators, journalists, political leaders, trade unions, and grassroots associations. Despite many opposing voices (such as Mentana’s, but in Italy we also remember Life Senator Liliana Segre and historian Marcello Flores ), it is accepted that today in Gaza we can speak of genocide without sounding like aliens from Mars. This is also thanks to the International Court of Justice’s decision to investigate the genocide charges brought by South Africa against Israel.
Rereading Lemkin’s formulation—which pushed internationally for the drafting of the UN Convention—and reflecting on the ways in which the sociological debate on the topic has evolved, it is possible to conceive the entire Palestinian issue—not exclusively what happened in Gaza—through the interpretative prism of genocide . This perspective is not very common when discussing about Israel and Palestine. Following current events, genocide studies themselves have seen a revival of internal debate on the subject: although significantly delayed, on 31 August 2025 the International Association of Genocide Scholars passed a resolution recognising the massacre in Gaza as such. All this after decades in which the Palestinian question remained not only on the margins, but was deliberately removed from the reflections and studies of experts in the field. Western academic research has instead focused predominantly on the Jewish genocide—from which an autonomous branch, Holocaust studies, has developed —and on other cases such as the Armenian, Cambodian, Rwandan, and Bosnian genocides. Even on the possibility of a Palestinian genocide perpetrated by Zionism/Israel, Western academia – with a few very rare exceptions – has never even opened a debate.
This denial stems from a series of flaws that have affected the entire reflection on genocide. First, much research and study has been grounded in a vision that defines the term—and thus the associated phenomenon—essentially as a synonym for mass murder. This interpretation is strongly influenced by the immense tragedy of the Holocaust, which made the extermination of the Jews the absolute paradigm of the destruction of a people, rendering any other violence hierarchically inferior. This is Mentana's vision, as outlined at the beginning: the exclusivity/uniqueness of the Holocaust and the idea that genocide is exclusively the deliberate physical elimination of a human group, of which the story of the Jewish people serves as a paradigm. This reductionist interpretation of genocide excludes the validity of the experience of other victims of genocide, for example colonial genocide: the affirmation of the Holocaust as the threshold of trauma in Western modernity renders invisible the experience of trauma of minorities and peoples displaced for centuries, including, significantly, the Palestinians and all other colonized and oppressed "non-white" human groups. As Aimé Césaire recalled , French poet, writer, and politician originally from Martinique, in his " discourse on colonialism ," the crimes committed by Nazism were deemed so terrible by the "distinguished, humanist, Christian bourgeois of the 20th century" (read: European or American, in any case Western) "because ultimately what does not forgive Hitler is not the crime itself, not the crime against man, not the humiliation of man as such, but the crime against the white man, the humiliation of the white man, the fact of having applied in Europe those typically colonial treatments that until then had been the exclusive prerogative of the Arabs of Algeria, the coolis of India, and the Negroes of Africa" by the European colonial powers. Therefore making the Holocaust unique and incomparable had a dual function: on the one hand, it served to circumscribe the Nazi abomination as an exceptional experience and therefore extraneous to European tradition; while on the other hand it was an excellent option to exclude and make invisible the brutal European colonial violence from the list of genocides that have gone down in history.
Colonial genocide brings us back to the need to distinguish between the concepts of mass murder and genocide. In his works (especially in Axis Rule in Occupied Europe , 1944, in chapter IX on genocide), Lemkin highlighted how the elimination of a people could materialize through various "methods and techniques" other than physical elimination, and emphasized the need—in view of the 1948 Convention—to avoid explicitly referring to a specific case. His concern was well-founded: although he began by analyzing the genocide perpetrated by the Nazis against the Jewish people (and other human groups), assuming a specific case as a paradigm of the phenomenon would have compromised the Convention's potential application to other contexts. According to the author, genocide is not mass murder but "rather to signify a coordinated plan of different actions aiming at the destruction of essential foundations of the life of national groups, with the aim of annihilating the group themselves... the objectives of such plan would be the disintegration of the political and social institutions, of culture, language, national feelings, religion, and the economic existence of national group, and the destruction of the personal security, liberty, health, dignity and even the lives of the individuals belonging to such groups".
These "techniques and methods" develop within different "fields" identified by Lemkin: the political, social, cultural, economic, biological, physical, religious, and moral. Many years later, sociologist Martin Crook added the "ecological field" in which "ecocide" is committed, that is, the destruction of the environment as a necessary and fundamental tool for the life of a people. Alongside or as an alternative to "physical" genocide, therefore, genocide can take shape as a "form of prejudice against the way of life" of a people. Mentana's vision begins to crack here: it doesn't matter how many Palestinians there are still "between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea," what matters is the various ways in which Zionism/Israel/Israeli settlers make Palestinian life unbearable.
Lemkin was particularly attentive to the issue of "cultural genocide," which he believed was crucial to address in the drafting of the Convention. Several states with colonial histories (France and Great Britain) or established through settler colonialism (the United States, Australia, Canada) influenced the debate and rejected the inclusion of cultural genocide in the Convention, aware of the consequences it could have for local indigenous populations. The Genocide Convention was therefore born with a sort of "colonial bias" that protected states that were carrying out forms of cultural genocide after having effectively carried out the physical elimination and/or ghettoization of indigenous people on reservations.
The erasure of the Palestinian case also stems from the erasure, for several decades, of the topic of settler colonialism/colonialism in the sociological (and even public) debate on genocide. However, as seen above and as Lemkin himself emphasized, genocide is profoundly linked to colonialism, settler colonialism in particular. On page 1 of the chapter on genocide in Axis Rule in Occupied Europe, Lemkin emphasizes how genocide essentially occurs in two phases: "one, destruction of the national pattern of the oppressed group; the other, the imposition of the national pattern of the oppressor. This imposition, in turn, may be made upon the oppressed population, which is allowed to remain, or upon the territory alone, after removal of the population and the colonization of the area by the oppressor’s own nationals."
Patrick Wolfe, one of the great theorists of settler colonialism, highlights the crucial relationship between settler colonialism and genocide . Societies born from settler colonialism are characterized by what he calls "structural genocide," a long-lasting process based on the "logic of elimination" of indigenous peoples through various methods (including mass killings, biocultural assimilation, spatial technologies) to secure their land, resources, and sometimes their labor.
It is therefore essential to understand genocide as a structure/process that foregrounds culture as a key concept, where culture is the glue that holds the group together and ensures its structural integrity and, ultimately, its physical well-being. The cultural (but also political, social, economic, and ecological) annihilation of a people is no less important than its physical elimination in understanding and, above all, attempting to prevent genocide. Its intrinsically colonial character should therefore raise a red flag: in colonial systems, it is probable—though not always certain—that a genocide has occurred or is underway. As we will see in the second part of this work, the Palestinian case is paradigmatic.
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