It’s Gazacide

There are too many examples of extreme barbarity by states both currently and in the recent and more distant past.

Each is different both in its trajectory and in its mechanisms of dehumanisation, destruction and killing. The term genocide while it is essential for potentially ensuring culpability of the perpetrators is also flattening in concealing the differences between each. In a recent essay, Israel’s Descent, Adam Shatz explores the use of domicide, scholasticide, and ecocide and cites Sara Roy’s use of econocide as descriptors. He concludes that each of these is accurate but fail because they separate the aspects of the catastrophe and do not describe the whole, so he reverts to the generic genocide. Earlier Israeli sociologist Baruch Kimmerling suggested the use of politicide to describe attempts to undermine Palestinian political identity and prevent them acting on their own account as a self-aware people. This was insightful in describing the actions and intentions of Israeli politicians but diverted attention from the brutal physical action that accompanied and enforced the political and diplomatic manoeuvring.

What we are witnessing in Gaza is indeed a genocide and we must hope that the ICJ soon upholds the South African claim and makes the essential judicial ruling that indeed, as the great majority of global civil society has observed, it meets the legal definition.

However, what we are seeing in Gaza is not a ‘normal’ genocide. It is, in the scale of its ambition and multiple dimensions of its destructiveness, sui generis, in a class of its own. Some historical episodes of horror stand out and demand their own names. We describe the Nazi attempted destruction of European Jewry not as A genocide but as THE Holocaust to underline its singularity.

Because of its intensity, Israel’s assault on all aspects of Gaza’s existence above and beyond the slaughter of tens of thousands of Gazan people should have its exceptional nature recorded by its own title The Gazacide.

Gazacide has many dimensions beyond direct killing of 42,000 people and counting, including, horrifically, more than 16,000 children. There is as yet, no accurate count of the numbers already killed but lying undiscovered under the rubble or those dying from disease and malnutrition as a direct consequence of the Israeli blockade and punitive restrictions of food, medicines and health materials entering Gaza or of those who will die in coming years because of the damage inflicted. The killing will not end with a ceasefire.

It is essential to have a new term for the destruction of buildings and infrastructure in Gaza. Dresden and Hiroshima and Nagasaki established certain precedents in the second world war. However, intense as they were, and just as Rome ploughed over Carthage two millennia ago, they were limited to a single city not a whole territory where almost 60% of every building has been destroyed or damaged. Even by November 2023, researchers from Harvard and elsewhere found 35% of health, 40% of education and 36% of water facilities were functionally destroyed. Now US researchers analysing satellite data estimate two-third of all buildings in Gaza are either destroyed or damaged. Not only will the rubble from this destruction take billions and years to clear, much of it is contaminated with asbestos and will kill for decades. This is Gazacide.

Gazacide includes the destruction of every university in Gaza with the deliberate intent of preventing Gazans from gaining the knowledge necessary to rebuild and run their territory as the modern society is was 12 months ago.

The scale and success of Gaza in building up and running, under siege, a successful higher education system, for both young men and young women is insufficiently recognised. This is beyond scholasiticide or, in Neve Gordon’s term, educide: it is part of the wider Gazacide.

Despite blockade and siege Gaza had a moderately successful agricultural economy, feeding the local population, even if it could not export its produce as it used to. Not only are the farming buildings and machinery destroyed along with everything else of value but the land is poisoned by the detritus of war and it will be decades before it recovers its fertility, if ever. Again, Gazacide beyond ecocide.

Not since the Nazis forced Jews to move from one overcrowded and insanitary ghetto to another worse one has a population been forced to move and move again and again. Each time the Israeli authorities declare that people are moving to a safe zone. Safe that is until it shelled and bombed and invaded in turn. At each move the weakest die and the rest despair. These treks can only be termed death marches. Frances Ryan has gruesomely described the harshness this imposes on disabled Palestinians. Ryan also points out how “Israel’s use of explosive weapons in densely populated areas is causing more children to become disabled”.

Most genocides are conducted secretly, knowledge about the extent of the killing only becomes known later. Israel has tried to ensure this continues by banning journalists from entering Gaza and killing Palestinian journalists already there. To Israel’s embarrassment, technology has changed all this. Gazacide is the first livestreamed genocide despite Israel’s unstinting efforts to prevent contact between Gaza and the world. The ubiquity of mobile phones has not only allowed Palestinians to show the world what is being done to them it also allows Israeli soldiers to record not only their wonted destruction and theft of Palestinian property but also their glee in the killing and humiliation of Palestinians. I have just finished reading Rudolf Vrba’s Escape from Auschwitz. Vrba describes not only the Nazi’s deprivation of Jewish inmates of their humanity but also the pleasure the guards took in inflicting violence and degradation with impunity. It was impossible not to be reminded of this when viewing Al Jazeera’s compilation of the soldiers’ prideful videos.

Each element is a state-run breach of international human rights law and is indefensible criminality but states are impersonal entities. It is those Israeli politicians from Netanyahu downwards and Israeli army soldiers from Chief of Staff Herzl Halevi down and all their media and judicial enablers who must be held personally responsible. It takes many hands to actively enforce Gazacide, many of them outside Israel. We’re going to need a bigger Hague.