Jew World Order

On October 31, the red “Breaking News” banner announced that Israeli warplanes had bombed a residential block in Jabalia refugee camp in northern Gaza. Telegram channels then delivered more devastating news, revealing that the airstrike had targeted the al-Sanida neighborhood in Jabalia, where I grew up my entire life.

As I watched Al Jazeera, staring at the screen aghast, I recognized some faces covered with blood and dust, neighbors and relatives rising from under the rubble, some standing over piles of limbs and dead bodies. In that incident, Israel had carried out at least six airstrikes on the refugee camp, flattening an entire housing block within a few minutes and killing at least 400 people.

The Jabalia massacre made headlines for the devastation it caused and the cold calculus underlying the strike, most prominently shown when an Israeli military spokesperson effectively told Wolf Blitzer on CNN that killing 400 Palestinian civilians in order to kill one Hamas commander was acceptable. In less than 24 hours, Israel carried out another airstrike in the overcrowded camp; by the end of the next day, the number of killed rose to 1000 Palestinians.  

But the Jabalia massacre was one of at least 2000 massacres that Israel has perpetrated so far since October 7. As of the time of writing, the war has claimed the lives of at least 28,000 people, the majority of them women and children, while thousands still lie under the rubble, and tens of thousands have been maimed and injured. 

Legal scholars, including Israelis and independent UN experts, warned that the Israeli assault on Gaza was a textbook case of genocide. And indeed, anyone with a modicum of reasonability should be able to detect the genocidal patterns in Israel’s war of extermination, especially when taken together with the statements of Israeli officials and the actions of Israeli soldiers, which were prominently brought to light during South Africa’s presentation of its case against Israel at the International Court of Justice. The ICJ ruled that South Africa made a convincing case that the risk of genocide in Gaza was “plausible,” hence allowing the case to advance forward at the Court.

Yet the ICJ may still conclude that some of Israel’s atrocities do not qualify as genocidal acts. That is why it is important to stress that genocide is not, in all cases, the defining feature of Israel’s policy toward the Palestinians. Rather, the basic feature of Israel’s settler colonial project is the logic of elimination. 

This is not quibbling with words. The Zionist movement’s ultimate goal of exterminating and replacing the indigenous Palestinian population has historically been achieved through a variety of tools, which included mass ethnic cleansing on a large scale (1948, 1967, and the current genocidal war), or small-scale and incremental ethnic cleansing (such as in Area C of the West Bank or in different neighborhoods in East Jerusalem).

During historical periods when Israel was unable to eliminate the Palestinians from their lands on a grand scale, its gradualist approach required a political and administrative framework to manage the day-to-day process of incremental colonization. That framework was apartheid. Activists and human rights groups have caught on to this feature of Israeli domination in Palestine, documenting how Israel confined different groups of Palestinians into separate Bantustans and enclaves and treated them as second or third-class citizens.

But apartheid, ethnic cleansing, and genocide are mere tools in service of Israel’s larger goal — to create an exclusive Jewish state between the river and the sea. 

Settler colonialism is not simply a form of genocide

Many have already examined Israel’s nature as a colonial state with a settler society, concluding that the logic of elimination is a part of the state’s ongoing structure. This means that the Gaza genocide is not the spontaneous outcome of forced circumstances triggered by the October 7 attacks but a natural outcome of Israel’s colonial structure.

As if to underscore this point, Israeli officials have repetitively invoked several 19th-century colonial tropes to justify their barbaric attack against Gaza, most notably in Netanyahu’s post on X (later removed) about the war being a “struggle between the children of light and the children of darkness, between humanity and the law of the jungle.”

Australian anthropologist Patrick Wolfe first introduced the framework of the “logic of elimination” in an influential 2006 essay, arguing that settler colonial projects primarily seek to secure control over indigenous land and eliminate the indigenous population in service of that territorial goal. That is why Wolfe alerts us to the fact that the question of genocide is never far from discussions of settler colonialism. But this is not to say that settler colonialism is invariably genocidal. 

Settler colonialism may exist without genocidal behaviors, even as the settler colony actively works toward the elimination of the natives. In this sense, Wolfe argued that settler colonialism is a “structure” that stretches through time and adopts a range of practices in service of elimination, including forced expulsion, mass killings, confining the natives to certain enclaves, delegitimizing and wiping out their heritage and language, and cultural erasure through forcible assimilation.

If several of these practices sound similar to what is happening in Gaza, that should not be surprising. But it is also important to note that not all of these practices are captured in Israel’s current barbaric conduct.

What’s more, many colonial practices of elimination that contributed to the erasure of indigenous populations never made it into the Genocide Convention. These include forms of cultural genocide, such as the destruction of the moral and historical existence of a specific group, often achieved through the prohibition of using their language, the destruction of historical monuments, books, and documents, among other practices.

Colonial dehumanization

We could see the logic of elimination at play during the early days of the war on Gaza. Here, the Israeli army did not exclusively focus on genocide as a necessary endpoint but was one of several options it entertained throughout the course of the war. One of those options was the forcible ethnic cleansing of Gaza’s population to the Sinai. Israeli leaders of all political complexions did not bother to hide their wishes to “thin out” the population of Gaza and depopulate vast swathes of it, best exemplified by Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich’s eliminatory plan suggesting the removal of around 90 percent of Gaza’s population.

Once this option was, for the moment, foiled by Egypt’s refusal to open Rafah, genocide became a more active part of the Israeli military and political agenda.

On the ground, Israeli soldiers acted upon this policy, internalizing the injunction of Defense Minister Gallant in fighting “human animals,” publicly articulating President Herzog’s statement that there are “no uninvolved civilians” in Gaza, and enabled by Prime Minister Netanyahu’s urging of the soldiers to “wipe off the seed of Amalek.”

Following the mass destruction Israel has systematically wrought in Gaza (particularly in the north, where almost 85 percent of buildings have been flattened), it is now creating large depopulated “buffer zones” along the Palestinian side of Gaza’s fence. According to media outlets, the suggested buffer zone “could be 1 km or 2 km or hundreds of meters (inside Gaza),” which would cram the 2.3 million people into an even smaller area, if not contributing to pushing them to leave altogether.

Four months of indiscriminate and barbaric bombing has also obliterated dozens of heritage sites and millennium-long archaeological structures. The Heritage for Peace reported in November that at least 104 out of 195 architectural heritage sites in Gaza were destroyed or damaged. These barbaric attacks against Gaza’s culture and heritage denote malicious colonial intentions to erase the very essence of indigenous Palestinians in Gaza and silence their history.

The current war against Gaza has further exposed a colonial nostalgia that permeates the Israeli government and is held by its cabinet ministers. In the past weeks, there were increasing voices on the other side of the fence calling for the resettlement of the Gaza Strip. What the “resettlement” of Gaza necessarily means is the removal of Gaza’s population (or at least some) to erect new colonial settlements in their place, as in any classic settler colonization process.

The traces of elimination can be spotted in the ongoing Israeli war against Gaza. While the ICJ is yet to render a final decision on the genocide case brought to the court by South Africa, which presumably will take years, the gruesome atrocities of genocide and ethnic cleansing in Palestine will carry on as long as the Zionist colonial project is not dismantled.  

Source