Israel's war on Gaza has escalated into a genocide aimed at displacing Palestinians, with targeted assassinations and indiscriminate bombings as part of a broader colonial and expansionist strategy.
From Jabaliya to Rafah, there are destroyed buildings and scattered rubble, the remnants of lives that have fled or are no longer with us today. Israel’s war on Gaza has systematically undermined the basic conditions for the possibility of life. Not only have 70% of the tiny strip’s croplands been destroyed but almost half of 35 hospitals in the region are only partially functioning while the other half are either not functioning at all or fully damaged. Francesca Albanese, the UN special rapporteur on Palestine, has observed that a genocide is in progress in Gaza and this is a view widely shared by many international organisations from the International Criminal Court to Amnesty International. We have a scenario in which Palestinians in Gaza have literally no way to run from Israeli bombs, missiles, drones and bullets. Against this backdrop of human tragedy, the completely incidental killing of Yahya al-Sinwar, Hamas’s political head, in a firefight reveals not the brutal effectiveness of Israel’s war machine and intelligence services but rather the clumsy and seemingly indiscriminate waging of a war that has degenerated into a genocide against a racialised enemy – the Palestinian.
For al-Sinwar’s life and death epitomise the struggles and challenges experienced by millions of Palestinians as they seek to survive the dehumanising effects of a colonial occupation that denies their very existence, at both symbolic and physical levels. Acts of violence by Palestinian groups are perceived as nothing less as resistance to occupation. The refugee-turned-fighter is not a unique development in Palestine, common to other colonial contexts. Netanyahu’s determination to punish Gaza and the West Bank as well as the policy of the elimination of Hamas leaders is not necessarily, contrary to official statements, about settling scores. It may very well indicate a strategy that uses war to reshape the Occupied Palestinian Territories to achieve political objectives: large scale dislocation of Palestinians and Zionist (re)colonisation of Gaza and the West Bank.
The targeted assassinations of Hamas leaders from Saleh al-Arouri in Beirut to Ismail Haniyeh in Tehran indicates another aspect of Israel’s strategy of weakening an anti-colonial movement. According to this colonial logic, what use is it to negotiate with the leaders of Hamas or Hezbollah to bring this regional war to an end? It is futile. War feeds into expansionist land grabs and expansionist land grabs feed into war in a continuous cycle until they are indistinguishable. As Netanyahu expands the theatre of war to Lebanon and Syria, the elimination of actual and potential negotiating partners sends the signal that his irredentist plan for the Arab world proceeds without any interruptions or restraints. A religious Jewish state without Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank and headlong in the process of normalisation with Arab states under American direct or indirect shepherding.
While the Israel war cabinet is publicly determined to assassinate the alleged masterminds of 7 October incursion that killed 1,139 Israeli civilians and soldiers and to bring back the hostages taken as a result, the war on Gaza has killed over 42,000 Palestinians, the overwhelming majority of whom are civilian victims and a significant number of women and children among them. The displacement of a people already displaced and the current humanitarian crisis appear to be calculated acts to create a refugee problem that ends up outside the borders of the Occupied Palestinian Territories.
And if this is indeed the case, the talk of ceasefires and the shuttle diplomacy of international and regional actors between Cairo and Doha have bought Netanyahu the much-needed time to not only spectacularly fail in getting the Israeli hostages back but to push the degeneration of Israeli military policy from ethnic cleansing to a genocide. Evading peace in Gaza, negotiations for the Israeli war cabinet are depicted as a needless distraction at best and a cover for Hamas to regroup at worst. This is a view repeated by American and European politicians whose calls for a ‘humanitarian ceasefire’ in Gaza are a mirage hiding their refusal to acknowledge a Palestinian right to resistance, whether peaceful or violent, and to condemn Netanyahu’s irredentist Zionism that denies the existence of a Palestinian state.
Author: Dr. Mohammed Moussa
Dr. Mohammed Moussa is an assistant professor in the Department of Political Science and International Relations at Istanbul Sabahattin Zaim University. His expertise centers on political movements and the history of political thought.
