One Year of Horror: Israel’s Genocide in Gaza and Its Percussive Violence Beyond

Illustration by Nidal Khairy Illustration by Nidal Khairy

One Year of Horror: Israel’s Genocide in Gaza and Its Percussive Violence Beyond

By : Jadaliyya Co-Editors

It has been one year since 7 October 2023. One full year of watching unfathomable levels of death and destruction of the Palestinian people, particularly in Gaza, as well as that of people in surrounding countries. One year of unceasing shock and horror. To paraphrase Palestinian attorney Lara Elborno, every day has been the worst day

The Israeli military has besieged the Palestinians of the Gaza Strip, conducted a continuous aerial bombardment campaign, and invaded and sacked major urban centers. Official counts point to over 41,000 Palestinians killed, over 96,000 more injured, and over 90 percent of the Gaza Strip’s population displaced. But these are underestimates. A study in The Lancet argued (in July 2024) that more than 180,000 Palestinians will be killed by year’s end, even if the Israeli genocide in Gaza had stopped that summer. The dedicated work of journalists and ordinary citizens have enabled us to witness many of the over 16,500 murdered children incinerated, decapitated, or otherwise slaughtered—only to watch others dug up from beneath buildings, collected into bags, or otherwise endlessly searched for. They have recorded countless videos confirming Israeli snipers targeting anything that moves, including their own captives. Israel has targeted and killed more than 172 journalists, 296 aid workers, and 885 health workers. More than 10,000 Palestinians are reported missing or presumed dead under the over 40 million tons of debris and rubble

Israel’s targeting of civilian infrastructure, its dramatic restriction of the flow of medical and food supplies and cutting off of electricity in the Gaza Strip, has damaged or destroyed 84% of health facilities, 87% of school buildings, 60% of residential buildings, 80% of commercial facilities, 92% of primary roads, and every university in Gaza. Israel has deliberately starved the Palestinians, producing famine in parts of Gaza, while gunning down those collecting flour in other parts. Mass graves and sites of mass executions continue to be discovered in the aftermath of Israeli military raids across the territory. The International Court of Justice (ICJ) determined that the South African government’s charge of genocide against the Israeli government is plausible and has issued multiple sets of provisional measures against Israel, all of which it has ignored.

Just as Palestinians had warned that Palestine is a paradigm and Gaza is both a site and a method, Israel unleashed a new level of ferocity in the West Bank. Its armed forces, alongside deputized setters, have intensified land confiscation, settlement construction, home demolitions, and generalized repression of political organizing. Before then, local and international human rights organizations were already decrying 2023 as the worst year in terms of rights abuses for Palestinians in over two decades. Since 7 October both the Israeli military and settlers have killed over 770 Palestinians, injured more than 14,600 Palestinians, and displaced over 4,500 Palestinians in the West Bank. This is to say nothing of the over 9,500 Palestinian political prisoners currently held in Israeli prisons, a number that represents double the pre-7 October figures. More than 3,300 of these political prisoners are “administrative detainees” (i.e., held without charge). These Palestinians, many of them children kidnapped in the middle of the night, are never afforded the label of “hostages.” The Israeli government has imposed an effective siege on its prisoner population, drastically reducing access to electricity, water, and food, while escalating its cell block raids and prisoner assaults. Leaked videos and mainstream media reports of systematic torture and rape have exploded in the past year, and as with Gaza, these Israeli policies have a longer history.

Today, the Israeli state is viciously applying the paradigm of Palestine and the method of Gaza to Lebanon as it blockades the country, levels entire apartment blocs, and initiates its long-awaited and hoped-for invasion. In the past year, Israel has killed over 2,000 people in Lebanon, injured another 10,000, and displaced over 1.2 million. This death and destruction preceded its current ground invasion and relies on the targeting of civilian infrastructure.

The past year has made horrifyingly vivid, often in real time, the cost of maintaining and intensifying the regimes of settler colonialism, apartheid, and genocide that constitute Israel. Israel as a political and military establishment, rather than a single leader or government, is responsible for the current campaign to obliterate the Palestinian people in and from their homeland. It is similarly responsible for the wholesale destruction of apartment blocks, villages and towns, and critical civilian infrastructure in Lebanon—and, as we write this, in Yemen as well. The realities the Palestinians, Lebanese, and so many others throughout the region confront today are a predictable culmination of the imperative to establish a Jewish-majority state in Palestine against the will of its native people and the surrounding African and Arab peoples. It could not be achieved nor sustained without the force of arms, and the colonial logic that renders inferior all other collective life and claims to sovereignty.

Zionism, in its various right-wing, liberal, and left-wing manifestations, continues to be the animating ideological force that justifies cruel violence while marking entire peoples, communities, and neighborhoods for death. It was Labor Zionism that pioneered supremacist strategies, such as the conquest of both labor and land, in the early twentieth century. Labor Zionism planned and executed the Nakba, developed Israel’s nuclear arsenal, occupied the West Bank, Gaza Strip, and Golan Heights, annexed East Jerusalem, and established the first settler colonies in these territories.

The United States enables and sustains these racial and colonial logics. Unequivocal diplomatic, military, and economic support for Israel with zero red lines remains a core pillar of US foreign policy since at least the 1970s. The United States does not only bear responsibility for the actions and policies of Israel—it is actively waging genocide against Palestinians in Gaza, expropriating land in East Jerusalem and the West Bank, committing war crimes against residents of Lebanon, and threatening any and all who dare to challenge Israeli and US policies. It is supplying the military equipment, sharing intelligence, and deploying its navy, air force, and troops to buttress Israel’s position, threatening would-be challengers, and imposing its shared vision of the future. Domestically, the unprecedented suppression of anti-genocide and anti-war protest and speech, on university campuses and throughout the public sphere, is another front on which the United States is fighting alongside Israel.

US and Israeli insistence on “finishing the job” of genocide in Gaza and their attempts to eradicate armed resistance in the region have dealt an irrevocable blow to the international order and promise to unravel it altogether. Several beacons of hope emerge in the face of this crumbling edifice, not least of which has been the Republic of South Africa’s charge of genocide against Israel at the International Court of Justice, followed by Nicaragua’s charge of aiding and abetting genocide aginst Germany because of its provision of arms. These interventions have illuminated a chasm between the Global North and the Global South regarding the unrealized promise of equality between states and the application of universal norms. Efforts like those by Malaysia to restrict the use of veto at the UN Security Council in cases of atrocity crimes signal faint glimmers of hope of much-needed and overdue reform.

A year into this genocide, the learning curve when it comes to understanding Palestine as a liberation struggle remains steep. Similarly, far too many refuse to see Hamas as a sociopolitical phenomenon integral to Palestinian society and politics, now and in the future. This failure to understand Palestine as a site of anti-colonial struggle makes it impossible, even for those who might feel some “sympathy,” to effectively resist the statist logics and justifications of counter-terrorism. “Human shielding” has become a euphemism for describing an unconventional armed force so that there is no distinction between Hamas’s military and political wings, no distinction between active participation and idleness. It is as if there is not an entire body of law legislated by a global anti-colonial majority in the late 1970s that regulated this very confrontation. Instead, the United States and Israel insist that they confront a novel adversary and have the unregulated right to obliterate. The same colonial logic is now being imposed upon Hizballah and the Lebanese, Syrians, Palestinians, and many others in Lebanon. It is an eliminationist logic that will never stop of its own accord.

While there is no military solution to the broader historical dynamics that produced the moment we are in, armed struggle is a right of colonized peoples and the liberation of Palestine requires multiple forms of resistance, armed and otherwise. History has shown that the logic of Zionism and the policies of successive Israeli governments is to obtain the maximum amount of Palestinian land with the minimum number of Palestinian people. Palestinians, Lebanese, and Arabs have the right to self-defense and to realize self-determination. Israel and the US fully understand that the Hamas attack sought to shatter the status quo, and have responded with a determination and ferocity that shed all pretenses of proportionality.

The atrocities Israel is carrying out against Palestinians and Lebanese have been met with complicity at best, and with enthusiasm at worst, by the United States, Western European states, and the states of the Arab League. The racial and colonial frame through which Zionism has repeatedly attempted to dehumanize Palestinians, Lebanese, and Arabs as a whole has paved this path. Everyday people have rejected this attempt, in Palestine, in Lebanon, and far beyond. The future is unclear, and could very well be worse than the present. It is that future which is now at stake.

  • ALSO BY THIS AUTHOR

    • Jadaliyya Co-Editor Noura Erakat Awarded Laureate of the Amnesty International Chair

      Jadaliyya Co-Editor Noura Erakat Awarded Laureate of the Amnesty International Chair

      Every year, Ghent University awards the Amnesty International Chair to a person who makes a special contribution in the field of human rights. The laureate gives a public lecture at Ghent University and additional guest lectures for students. This year laureate of the Amnesty International Chair is Noura Erakat, a prominent Palestinian lawyer and activist, whose courageous and relentless work as a human rights academic and attorney has reshaped legal and political discussions on the Israel-Palestinian conflict.

    • Jadaliyya Co-Editors Statement on “Impossible Solidarity”

      Jadaliyya Co-Editors Statement on “Impossible Solidarity”

      As we announced previously, the article titled “Impossible Solidarity” was taken down when it was discovered that proper in-house editorial procedure had not been followed prior to publication. After a full review that included relevant Page Editors as well as Jadaliyya Co-Editors, the article was removed permanently, and the author was notified. The editors fundamentally disagreed with the article’s placing of settler colonial genocide and authoritarian state repression on equal footing, regardless of what the author’s intentions may have been. The article also included several questionable and/or patently incorrect statements. The consequence of the publication of this piece has been temporarily costly to our mission, regardless of whether readers understand the decentralized and volunteer-based nature of how Jadaliyya operates.

    • The War on Palestine

      The War on Palestine

      As we write these lines, Israel is committing war crimes and crimes against humanity in the Gaza Strip, with a brutality and on a scale unprecedented since 1948. The full-throated military and diplomatic support of Western governments is enabling this ethnic cleansing. The genocidal rhetoric and threats that Western politicians and media have directed at Palestinians this past week are playing out on the ground, as we speak.

Past is Present: Settler Colonialism Matters!

On 5-6 March 2011, the Palestine Society at the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS) in London will hold its seventh annual conference, "Past is Present: Settler Colonialism in Palestine." This year`s conference aims to understand Zionism as a settler colonial project which has, for more than a century, subjected Palestine and Palestinians to a structural and violent form of destruction, dispossession, land appropriation and erasure in the pursuit of a new Jewish Israeli society. By organizing this conference, we hope to reclaim and revive the settler colonial paradigm and to outline its potential to inform and guide political strategy and mobilization.

The Israeli-Palestinian conflict is often described as unique and exceptional with little resemblance to other historical or ongoing colonial conflicts. Yet, for Zionism, like other settler colonial projects such as the British colonization of Ireland or European settlement of North America, South Africa or Australia, the imperative is to control the land and its resources -- and to displace the original inhabitants. Indeed, as conference keynote speaker Patrick Wolfe, one of the foremost scholars on settler colonialism and professor at La Trobe University in Victoria, Australia, argues, "the logic of this project, a sustained institutional tendency to eliminate the Indigenous population, informs a range of historical practices that might otherwise appear distinct--invasion is a structure not an event."[i]

Therefore, the classification of the Zionist movement as a settler colonial project, and the Israeli state as its manifestation, is not merely intended as a statement on the historical origins of Israel, nor as a rhetorical or polemical device. Rather, the aim is to highlight Zionism`s structural continuities and the ideology which informs Israeli policies and practices in Palestine and toward Palestinians everywhere. Thus, the Nakba -- whether viewed as a spontaneous, violent episode in war, or the implementation of a preconceived master plan -- should be understood as both the precondition for the creation of Israel and the logical outcome of Zionist settlement in Palestine.

Moreover, it is this same logic that sustains the continuation of the Nakba today. As remarked by Benny Morris, “had he [David Ben Gurion] carried out full expulsion--rather than partial--he would have stabilised the State of Israel for generations.”[ii] Yet, plagued by an “instability”--defined by the very existence of the Palestinian nation--Israel continues its daily state practices in its quest to fulfill Zionism’s logic to maximize the amount of land under its control with the minimum number of Palestinians on it. These practices take a painful array of manifestations: aerial and maritime bombardment, massacre and invasion, house demolitions, land theft, identity card confiscation, racist laws and loyalty tests, the wall, the siege on Gaza, cultural appropriation, and the dependence on willing (or unwilling) native collaboration and security arrangements, all with the continued support and backing of imperial power. 

Despite these enduring practices however, the settler colonial paradigm has largely fallen into disuse. As a paradigm, it once served as a primary ideological and political framework for all Palestinian political factions and trends, and informed the intellectual work of committed academics and revolutionary scholars, both Palestinians and Jews.

The conference thus asks where and why the settler colonial paradigm was lost, both in scholarship on Palestine and in politics; how do current analyses and theoretical trends that have arisen in its place address present and historical realities? While acknowledging the creativity of these new interpretations, we must nonetheless ask: when exactly did Palestinian natives find themselves in a "post-colonial" condition? When did the ongoing struggle over land become a "post-conflict" situation? When did Israel become a "post-Zionist" society? And when did the fortification of Palestinian ghettos and reservations become "state-building"?

In outlining settler colonialism as a central paradigm from which to understand Palestine, this conference re-invigorates it as a tool by which to analyze the present situation. In doing so, it contests solutions which accommodate Zionism, and more significantly, builds settler colonialism as a political analysis that can embolden and inform a strategy of active, mutual, and principled Palestinian alignment with the Arab struggle for self-determination, and indigenous struggles in the US, Latin America, Oceania, and elsewhere.

Such an alignment would expand the tools available to Palestinians and their solidarity movement, and reconnect the struggle to its own history of anti-colonial internationalism. At its core, this internationalism asserts that the Palestinian struggle against Zionist settler colonialism can only be won when it is embedded within, and empowered by, the broader Arab movement for emancipation and the indigenous, anti-racist and anti-colonial movement--from Arizona to Auckland.

SOAS Palestine Society invites everyone to join us at what promises to be a significant intervention in Palestine activism and scholarship.

For over 30 years, SOAS Palestine Society has heightened awareness and understanding of the Palestinian people, their rights, culture, and struggle for self-determination, amongst students, faculty, staff, and the broader public. SOAS Palestine society aims to continuously push the frontiers of discourse in an effort to make provocative arguments and to stimulate debate and organizing for justice in Palestine through relevant conferences, and events ranging from the intellectual and political impact of Edward Said`s life and work (2004), international law and the Palestine question (2005), the economy of Palestine and its occupation (2006), the one state (2007), 60 Years of Nakba, 60 Years of Resistance (2009), and most recently, the Left in Palestine (2010).

For more information on the SOAS Palestine Society 7th annual conference, Past is Present: Settler Colonialism in Palestine: www.soaspalsoc.org

SOAS Palestine Society Organizing Collective is a group of committed students that has undertaken to organize annual academic conferences on Palestine since 2003.

 


[i] Patrick Wolfe, Settler Colonialism and the Transformation of Anthropology: The Politics and Poetics of an Ethnographic Event, Cassell, London, p. 163

[ii] Interview with Benny Morris, Survival of the Fittest, Haaretz, 9. January 2004, http://cosmos.ucc.ie/cs1064/jabowen/IPSC/php/art.php?aid=5412