The military operation in Gaza has altered the shape, perhaps even the meaning, of the struggle over Palestine – it seems misleading, and even offensive, to refer to a ‘conflict’ between two peoples after one of them has slaughtered the other in such staggering numbers. The scale of the destruction is reflected in the terminology: ‘domicide’ for the destruction of housing stock; ‘scholasticide’ for the destruction of the education system, including its teachers (95 university professors have been killed); ‘ecocide’ for the ruination of Gaza’s agriculture and natural landscape. Sara Roy, a leading expert on Gaza who is herself the daughter of Holocaust survivors, describes this as a process of ‘econocide’, ‘the wholesale destruction of an economy and its constituent parts’ – the ‘logical extension’, she writes, of Israel’s deliberate ‘de-development’ of Gaza’s economy since 1967.
But, to borrow the language of a 1948 UN convention, there is an older term for ‘acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group’. That term is genocide …
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Or in the words of the nation-state law of 2018, which enshrines Jewish supremacy: ‘The right to exercise national self-determination in the state of Israel is unique to the Jewish people.’ It’s no wonder Palestinians and their supporters proclaim: ‘Palestine shall be free from the river to the sea.’ What many Zionists hear as a call to ethnic cleansing or genocide is, for most Palestinians, a call for an end to Jewish supremacy over the entirety of the land – an end to conditions of total unfreedom.
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Opposition to anti-black racism is embraced by elite liberals; opposition to Israel’s wars against Palestine is not. They braved doxxing, the contempt of their university administrations, police violence and in some cases expulsion. Prominent law firms have announced that they will not hire students who took part in the encampments.
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short-term impact is undeniable: Operation Al-Aqsa Flood thrust the question of Palestine back on the international agenda, sabotaging the normalisation of relations between Israel and Saudi Arabia, shattering both the myth of a cost-free occupation and the myth of Israel’s invincibility. But its architects, Yahya Sinwar and Mohammed Deif, appear to have had no plan to protect Gaza’s own people from what would come next. Like Netanyahu, with whom they recently appeared on the International Criminal Court’s wanted list, they are ruthless tacticians, capable of brutal, apocalyptic violence but possessing little strategic vision.
Israel’s Descent , Adam Shatz in LRB
