The long Palestinian genocide: the methods of elimination
PART II
by Thomas Aureliani
The Palestinian genocide is unique because it can be interpreted as one of the longest-running processes of elimination of a people in contemporary history. It is a continuous but "intermittent" genocide in the literal sense of the term, that is, a persistent process occurring at more or less regular intervals in which moments of dramatic physical elimination alternated with cultural, political, social, economic, religious, moral, and biological genocide—the fields cited by Raphael Lemkin, the inventor of the term genocide, to which the ecological field must be added.
Interpreting the Palestine-Israel context as settler-colonialism, Israeli Zionist forces have always pursued the "logic of elimination" of the Palestinians as a people "as such." Since the late 19th century, Zionist-Israeli thinkers and political leaders, even before the birth of the state of Israel, have longed for a state for the Jewish population alone through the elimination and/or deportation of the Arab population, explicitly denying Palestinian identity and history even through political discourse.
The latter was articulated through statements that completely erased the Palestinians. Former Israeli Prime Minister Golda Meir stated in 1969 that "Palestinians simply don't exist." Defense Minister Gallant declared in October 2023 that "we are fighting human animals." Even before the ground offensive in the Strip in late October 2023, Netanyahu instead revisited the biblical story of Amalek: the "Amalekites," according to the Torah, were the first people to wage war on the Israelites—therefore synonymous with absolute evil, to be eradicated even by eliminating women and children. These statements aim to dehumanize and criminalize an entire people.
From the perspective of "physical" genocide, it manifested itself in Palestine through wars, the use of famine as a weapon, massacres, and ethnic cleansing. As scholars Rashed and Short point out , ethnic cleansing is not an alternative to genocide, but a specific method of perpetrating it: the forced removal of groups with a territorially delimited culture can leave the group "socially dead," even if non-lethal measures are used to expel its members. Such genocidal actions were implemented on a massive scale.
From the Nakba of 1948, when approximately 750,000 Palestinians were driven from their homes by Zionist forces, some 500 villages were destroyed and thousands tortured and killed; through the massacres perpetrated against civilians such as the one in the Lebanese refugee camps of Sabra and Shatila in 1982 by the IDF which cost the lives of 3,500 Palestinians; the killing of over a thousand people in retaliation after the first intifada of 1987-1991 ; the thousands of Palestinian civilians killed following the various assaults on the Gaza Strip in 2008-2009, 2012, 2014, 2021, 2022, and ending with the current massacre of civilians in Gaza that began after October 7, 2023, with over 55,000 people killed, according to official figures, but at least 40% more are estimated , including thousands and thousands of women and children.
Precisely the persecution of civilian targets—both non-combatants and places not designated for military purposes—defines the dividing line between war and genocide. According to sociologist Martin Shaw, what unites genocides is not so much the perpetrators' focus on a particular identity, or "race," but rather the targeted targeting of civilians. No less serious is the forced depopulation of civilians, which in Palestine was facilitated by actions and policies carefully planned by the Zionist state of Israel, such as the demolition of Palestinian homes or the revocation of residency permits, practices widely used especially in the West Bank and East Jerusalem but also within the Jewish state.
However, alongside physical extermination and displacement, the Palestinian genocide materialized through the destruction of cultural heritage. Over the decades, and not only during wars, we have witnessed the looting and destruction of libraries, places of worship, mosques, museums, historic buildings, archaeological sites, schools, universities, and entire villages, first forcibly emptied and then razed to the ground or literally covered with vegetation imported from Europe, simultaneously annihilating the memory, collective conscience, and identity of the local population.
In the early 2000s, the construction of the separation wall alone resulted in an estimated 1,100 archaeological sites being looted, damaged, or destroyed, while Israel's latest military operations in Gaza have devastated at least 200 sites in the Strip. The desire to eradicate Palestinian identity and memory—several scholars speak of " memoricide "—has subsequently materialized through the "Judaization" of the Arabic names of villages, rivers, springs, parks, streets, and even road signs. The process of erasing Arabic from the public sphere has gone hand in hand with the denial of Palestinian history and trauma : in 2009, the Israeli Minister of Education decided to ban the use of the word "Nakba" from Arab children's textbooks, while in 2011, the Knesset approved the Budget Foundations Law (known as the "Nakba Law"). The latter allows the state to reduce or eliminate funding to any institution, community, or other entity that engages in activities that challenge Israel's definition as a "Jewish and democratic state," commemorates Israel's Independence Day as a "day of mourning," or damages Israeli national symbols.
One of the most striking examples of "memoricide" was the construction of the Yad Vashem Holocaust memorial—one of the most visited in Israel—near the ruins of the Palestinian village of Deir Yassin. Here, one of the worst massacres of civilians took place perpetrated during the Nakba by Zionist fighters belonging to the Jewish clandestine armed groups Irgun and the Stern Gang. Practices such as these are typical of the genocide of settler colonialism: the overwriting of the traumatic memory of the occupiers over that of the occupied.
Zionism and Israel's "eliminative" intent toward Palestinians has manifested itself in other areas, such as the political and social, with the occupation of Palestinian territories since 1967 and the never-ending, and indeed intensified, process of colonization of the West Bank in recent years. The establishment of Jewish-authorized settlements and " outposts ," as well as the growth of the settler movement , have undermined the construction of a strong Palestinian authority and political identity and a cohesive society. Social and family ties and relationships are difficult to maintain in a territory characterized by a long series of physical obstacles that make free movement and movement impossible, including checkpoints constantly manned by Israeli forces, private security companies, or settlers, roadblocks, barriers, and walls.
From an economic and ecological perspective are equally genocidal, in the sense proposed by Lemkin, the deliberate attempt to impose policies restricting the movement of goods in the Occupied Territories and Gaza in particular, especially foodstuffs, a phenomenon that has developed with frightening intensity during the current humanitarian crisis; but also the control of natural resources, water in particular; the grabbing of arable land; restrictions on fishing; deforestation; the replacement of local crops, such as olive trees, and their destruction; and the relocation of highly polluting factories and landfills on Palestinian land, with a consequent deterioration of the inhabitants' health.
Israel plays an important role in what Lemkin calls the "biological" field, that is, the set of measures that induce demographic decline among populations considered "of different blood," in this case the Palestinians, while simultaneously supporting the birth rate of its own population, Israeli Jews. While killings, blocking humanitarian aid, using hunger as a weapon, and controlling goods entering Gaza can be considered examples of the actions that have caused demographic decline and the containment of Palestinian birthrates and fertility rates, regarding the second type of measures , Israel has always pursued the national political imperative of increasing the Jewish population by encouraging Jewish immigration and promoting measures to increase the birth rate.
Especially after October 7, 2023, the Jewish state has encouraged posthumous assisted reproduction (PAR) , which refers to the removal of gametes—sperm, and to a lesser extent oocytes —from a deceased individual (e.g., death soldiers) for later use in reproductive technologies such as in vitro fertilization or intracytoplasmic sperm injection (ICSI). Israel is the only country to allow postmortem sperm extraction even without prior consent, relying solely on the deceased's expressed wish. These policies are bearing fruit: Israel has the highest birth rate among OECD countries.
These examples demonstrate how Zionist settler colonialism has always expressed a genocidal intent against the Palestinian population. This intent has materialized not only through massacres and forced expulsions but also through a highly nuanced process of "native elimination" in the various camps identified by Lemkin. Viewing genocide as a multifaceted historical-social structure-process fueled by various techniques and methods—while avoiding the assumption that the only historically permissible Holocaust is the Jewish Holocaust experienced in the West—would allow us to more effectively understand the diverse contexts in which the annihilation of a human group "as such" has occurred or is occurring. This exercise would also allow us to restore dignity to the history, memory, and trauma of oppressed peoples like the Palestinians.
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