In Gaza, we are witnessing the genocidal economy at scale

The following is adapted from a presentation to the Gaza Tribunal in Sarajevo, Bosnia and Herzegovina, earlier this year.

In this talk, I plan to trouble (or unsettle) the ways in which genocide studies has engaged with the ongoing genocide in Palestine, and the political power embedded in invoking genocide.

To begin, I must state that what guides my theorisation are Palestinian voices and testimonies from the beginning of the Nakba in 1948 through the ongoing genocide today.

Palestinian voices, like the voice of Fatmeh, the Gazan mother who went viral in October 2023 when she went to get food for her children, only to come back and find their scattered body parts, ashlaa’,  as she said: “My kids died hungry … I went to get them food and came back to find them ashlaa’, body remains, scattered all over the place, ashlaa’… hungry… my kids died hungry.”

I also speak for the unheard voices of Gazan newborns, left to decompose in incubators on 9 November 2023, in Nasser Hospital’s ICU ward. CNN reported: “The tiny bodies of babies, several still attached to wires and tubes that were meant to keep them alive, decomposing in their hospital beds. Milk bottles and spare diapers still next to them on the sheets.”

My analysis of the ongoing genocidal Nakba stages the centrality of death and overkill apparent in the ashlaa’ of decomposed babies in incubators and Fatmeh’s dismembered ashlaa’ of her children.  It brings to our view the ordinary terror inhabiting the most vulnerable bodies of newborns and children, and most vulnerable spaces: homes, schools and hospitals.

Reducing children and newborn bodies into decomposed, dismembered objects that can be used to support the larger project of demarcating the ontological boundary between the human and the non-human that should be shredded, decomposed and killed to disappear, is at the centre of my analysis.

The genocidal brutality of indiscriminate attacks to kill, including leaving newborns abandoned in incubators, inscribes both in the flesh and Zionist consciousness that Palestinian bodies can and should always be in a state of death and overkill. It is such an inscription of power on babies’ flesh, as on the Palestinian flesh of men and women, old and young, that I ontologically link their slowly dying bodies to the settler-colonial state.

A colonial prism

As Frantz Fanon has explained, the notion of ontological difference involves seeing below the notion of being, and even below the notion of nonbeing, hence his insistence on talking about the colonised and the tensions that emerge in the flesh/land and, I would say, the cut, scattered, burned flesh and bones. Seen through the prism of the incomprehensible ashlaa’, the racialised being, voided of life, is deprived of their humanity and Palestinian unwholeness is maintained and extended.

The violent horrors we are seeing in Gaza over the past 20 months have made us witnesses to the strangulation of newborn babies, a strangulation that demands their submission to the occupying power. What we have witnessed through these horrors is part of the Israeli necropenological global and local regime.

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We witnessed another glimpse just recently this month through the intentional starvation of Palestinian children and their communities by Israeli expansionist greed.

Another blatant example of Israel’s necropenological regime happened on 5 May, when a group of Israeli soldiers filmed themselves blowing up a building in Gaza, while laughing that the blue colour of the smoke represented a “gender reveal” to celebrate the birth of a baby boy.

This horrific act of celebration came as the Israeli army was abandoning newborns in incubators, and bombing entire families while at home or in their tents, in hospitals, while care-taking. The indiscriminate assassinations of doctors, journalists, educators and more reveals the hunger for unending Palestinian death.

The indiscriminate assassinations of doctors, journalists, educators and more reveals the hunger for unending Palestinian death

It is from the silent voices of those shredded newborn babies as ashlaa’, and through the necropolitical brutality of the “gender reveal” using the Palestinian ashlaa’, that I read the brutality of the occupier. It is against this deadly enfleshed ontology, and the centrality of death in this ontology, that I read the scattered body parts – the ashlaa’ – the decomposed babies’ overwhelming presence as a strong voice to guide my analyses. 

My ontological analysis is guided through the figurative occupation and possession of the decomposed Palestinian body. It is on this body that we can read the Zionist wanton use of violence to understand the centrality of death, killing and overkilling to the settler-colonial project.  

The emotions of pleasure and joy expressed by the Israeli soldiers during the “gender reveal” in May that I just mentioned, expresses the Zionist coloniser’s ideology. This ideology rejoices over Palestinian maiming, death and suffering. As they literally blew up Palestinians’ bodies, the soldiers celebrated by chanting “it is a boy”.

What does this suggest about Zionist ideology, that soldiers can and do celebrate in the exact moments they destroy the colonised’s geography and home? This convergence of violence and pleasure so spectacularly live-streamed, demonstrated through the gender reveal/bombing with its monstrosity, exposes the local and global ontological politics and dilemmas facing genocide studies today. 

Commitment to violence 

Palestinian dispossession and death as a result of Zionism reveals a genocidal economy – an economy embedded in white supremacy/racism that dispossesses Palestinian humanity, even the newborn babies, with its codes, technologies, aesthetics and visuality. This is what enables the ongoing genocide and/in its ontological consumption.

The genocidal economy is constituted through the enmeshment of ashlaa’ and the viscerality of it, living in such a scale of death and the geopolitics of racism. It is rooted in the colonial state’s commitment to violence, and its exercise of power over the non-human, always killable Palestinian body – an ontological stand that can be detected in all aspects of the settler-colonial genocidal criminalities of the state.

Under such conditions, Palestinian ashlaa’ becomes more visible in the settler state’s infinite desire for expansion, even over shredded or sick bodies, empty stomachs and collective graves. Palestinians are always kept in a state of neither life nor being.

This enduring ontology depends on attacking the wholeness, integrity and continuity of the Palestinian body and land. It has turned Gaza/Palestine into a collective graveyard for slow and fast death, a slaughterhouse of maiming and wounding for the political functioning of the state – and hence the continuous Nakba.

I stand against the settler-colonial assertion of turning the Palestinian body/flesh, geography and economy into a death zone. This stand grounds my analysis as a criminologist and scholar. My imperative is not the legal apparatus, nor the human right conventions, but rather human life, dignity, integrity and futurity of the people. I also do not believe in the system of the state, or the “security of the state”. The people are my centre.

The views expressed in this article belong to the author and do not necessarily reflect the editorial policy of Middle East Eye.