Image: Qassem, a Palestinian shepherd from Umm al Fugara, is being investigated by Israeli military police and army for land ownership, after a settler wrongfully accused him of assault. Philippe Pernot.
Whether within the lexicon of international law or the parlance of everyday conversation, invoking ‘genocide’ is pregnant with explosive and abrasive intent. Lawyers and activists alike employ the word’s singular expressive power to condemn and to galvanise. We have seen this in the case of Israel’s assault on the Gazan population over the last year. Initially, genocide was uttered in a number of circles in slightly faltering tones, but it is now used with increasing confidence and conviction in diverse circles even in the face of trenchant opposition. While practices of indescribable pain have become normalised, speakers of the law have tried to resist this trend through creative and abundant genocide anachronisms and neologisms. We understand ‘genocide anachronisms’ as adjacent terms and approaches that were either subsumed or overlooked in the drafting of the 1948 genocide definition. While these broad conceptualisations were capable of capturing the variegated elements of collective annihilation, we suggest that ‘genocide neologisms’ speaks to more recent efforts to reinvigorate the potentiality of genocide, whether as a non-legal scholarly mode of analysis or as an attempt at norm creation. Thus, when trying to characterise the carnage that is Gaza today, for many, it is no longer enough to speak of genocide. Instead, we can see a proliferation of killing (‘cide’) words to try to capture the variegated contours of genocide. Well-worn terms sit alongside newer variants, all jostling to articulate the nature of Israeli criminality. We identify these ‘cides’ as: spacioicide, domicide, ecocide, politicide, economicide, sociocide, scholasticide, memoricide, medicide, Gazacide and related terms such as ‘unchilding’, and Nakba.
Part of the reason for resorting to this cacophony of criminalisation is to undercut anxieties around the purported limitations and rigidities of genocide, especially in relation to intent and its focus on physical destruction. Rather than rejecting the law or the notion of genocide then, we understand these efforts as ways to build on traditional renderings of genocide and make these resonate with the situation in Gaza today. Such efforts perhaps speak to a widespread need by legal and non-legal scholars alike to have their respective fields be seen as relevant in the face of such suffering. It is striking that genocide and its related ‘cides’ often crowds out other paradigms, especially focused on the situation in Gaza as one of numerous crimes against humanity.
Here, we first consider the imagined ‘traditional’ international law approach to genocide before exploring the evolution of ‘cide’ discourse on Palestine before and after October 2023. We suggest that the discipline now straddles a paradoxical moment of significant linguistic and legal creativity even though – and precisely because – international law’s normative foundations are under assault while Gaza is being razed to the ground.
The Genocide Convention
Since its drafting, the Convention has been interpreted extremely narrowly. To date, the ICJ has never found a State responsible for genocide, which requires a substantive finding of a specific “intent to destroy” a protected group “as such” as the only possible inference which is then attributable to the State. Intent was proven in the Bosnian Genocide case, though attribution was not. In the case of Gaza, it remains to be seen whether this intent will be found in the case brought by South Africa, which has cited dozens of statements made by high-level government officials in support of its case against Israel (pp.59-67). In the interim, we will see whether the Court finds Myanmar responsible in the pending proceedings brought by the Gambia.
Intent is crucial to determine because of the unquestionable fulfilment of the actus rea as enumerated in Article 2 of the Genocide Convention. More than 42,000 Palestinian civilians have been killed with unknown numbers unaccounted for in the rubble (Art. II(a)). More than 93,000 have been injured and hundreds of thousands are likely suffering from PTSD, depression and other mental health issues caused by the military campaign and associated relocations (Art. II(b)). Israel’s refusal to allow the necessary humanitarian and medical aid to enter Gaza has led to widespread famine and medical suffering (Art. II(c)). Indeed, it appears that the totality of Israeli actions in the Gaza Strip amount to a deliberate targeting of life- and group-sustaining infrastructures and spaces in a way that goes beyond the mere destruction of hospitals and goes to the very possibility of communal or safe spaces (pp.20-24). The totality of these actions and policies (illustrated most acutely by Israel’s recent outlawing of UNRWA) also indicates the spatial and temporal limits of the genocidal intent criterion when it comes to the Palestinian issue (Ibid). However, these acts do not capture the totality of the Palestinian experience over the past year, indicating the limits of genocide as a legal concept.
Sidestepping the Genocide Convention? Earlier Scholarly Characterisations of Israel’s Social Destruction of Palestine
While the ferocity of the past year is unparalleled, it builds on earlier patterns of generalised Israeli destruction that has been extensively documented by historians, political scientists, geographers and sociologists alongside extensive reporting by human rights NGOs and various UN bodies. From the 1980s onwards, revelations from the Israeli archives enabled Israeli historians to confirm what Palestinians already knew about the 1948 Nakba as the ethnic cleansing of Palestine. This critical work emerged in the shadow of Israel’s occupation of remaining Palestinian lands in the West Bank and Gaza Strip after 1967. Scholars thus could observe directly the effects of Israeli control as the planned destruction of a people and its future, which at its most basic level can be characterised as ‘sociocide’. This was the preferred term used later by the Russell Tribunal in 2013 to capture Palestinian existence: ‘The systematic destruction of the essence of a social group’. Over a decade ago in its concluding remarks, it acknowledged that ‘sociocide’ was absent from positive international law, but it still chose to invoke the term for its expressive power. It juxtaposed sociocide with self-determination.
Relatedly, we simply note here Kimmerling’s coinage of ‘politicide’ in 2003 alongside a focus on the economy through ‘economicide’ by Kubursi and Naqib (2008) or ‘de-development’ in Sara Roy’s work on Gaza before and after the Oslo Accords. The bulk of this scholarship has been advanced beyond the field of international law, often due to fears over the law’s inability to capture the scope and extent of Palestinian experiences. This has become only more acute over the last year and it is currently forcing legal and non-legal scholars alike to reassess how to position their research and their disciplines in relation to genocide and its seemingly strict strictures of intent (especially see Goldberg (2024)).
Newer and reinvigorated cides: medicide, scholasticide, spaciocide, ecocide
Medicide
The Convention makes a connection between health and the continued existence of a group: all acts in Article II, barring the killing of members of the group, speak directly to individuals’ physical and mental health. The destruction of maternity wards and denial of entry to deliveries of baby formula and nappies, coupled with stress-induced labour (which eventually takes place in appalling sanitary conditions), could fall under Article II(d) as safe birth has become impossible in Gaza. We argue that these actions, taken together, go beyond the Convention in that the removal of healthcare closes off potential long-term reproduction of the group and diminishes the quality of life of the surviving members for generations.
Medicide has been used in the past year to describe the repeated military attacks on health infrastructure, including hospitals, healthcare and rescue personnel and medical vehicles. The term specifically relates to this destruction as conducted “with the aim of obliterating or damaging the conditions needed for saving and sustaining the lives of the sick and the wounded.” This is related to the wider term ‘medical lawfare’, which encompasses the pre-existing discrepancy in healthcare and quality of life between Israel and Palestine: also evidence of an encompassing Israeli intent to degrade the Palestinian existence. Israel’s sustained and deliberate destruction of the healthcare system in Gaza, combined with its long-term denial of essentials such as medicine, food and shelter, have degraded the long-term quality of life for generations. The erasure of the group through the denial of such care speaks to an intention to bar that group from flourishing.
Scholasticide
Since October 2023, over 600,000 Palestinian students have lost a vital year of education and almost 11,000 university students and more than 500 university and schoolteachers have been killed. There are no feasible prospects of education resuming soon: the few education buildings left standing have been repurposed as shelters or makeshift wards or morgues. We note that this is merely an explosive iteration of embedded structures which politicise and hollow out Palestinian childhood.
Article II(e) implies the important role children play in the reproduction of a group’s identity. However, the Convention is silent on the precise link between group identity and education, thus explaining why a specific term has arisen to describe how Palestinians’ ability to pass on traditions has been significantly undercut by the war. Education is a crucial tool for the preservation (or destruction, as other settler states have found) of a collective identity. The term has ballooned in the last 12 months: a brief Google Trends search reveals that the term first spiked in April-May 2024, with two smaller upticks in September and October 2024. It has, since its inception in 2009, been tied to the Palestinian commitment to education as an emancipatory force.
Beyond the disproportionate harm these attacks cause to students and civilians alike, the destruction of education infrastructure (schools, universities, libraries and archives) deals a deeper blow to the Palestinian identity. We see this in the December 2023 bombing of the Central Archives of Gaza City, where culturally important documents were destroyed. Sadly, the damage dealt to these sites is likely to be irreparable: parts of Palestinian culture and history are now lost forever as memoricide.
Education can also act as an important way of connecting to others within the group. The local initiatives to create their own courses in refugee tents (p.4) indicates the appetite for learning and the drive to create alternatives when established infrastructure is attacked.
Domicide/spaciocide/urbicide
The terms ‘spaciocide’ and ‘urbicide’ highlight the connection between the common/public space and the formation or perpetuation of a collective identity. Over the past year, the Israeli Army has destroyed more than two thirds of the Strip’s buildings. Most of these buildings of course were houses, but also homes, constituting a private space of refuge and security for individuals and families who could then participate in public life. Infrastructure which has sprung up in the wake of such domicide is appalling: we have witnessed the emergence of the ‘tent city’ as the ‘new’ (temporary, pending relocation) common space for the second time.
For a group identity to be formed, individuals must be able to come together to exchange ideas, stories, goods and experiences: the public space is the prerequisite to any collective. The destruction of communal infrastructures can take place through military bombardment of such common spaces but also through the reshaping of conditions in ways which disincentivise entering the common space at all. In the West Bank, we see this through the fragmentation and surveillance of Palestinian movements through the Areas (see Peteet’s book on this). In Gaza, we see this through the constant mobilisation of internally displaced Palestinians from one so-called safe zone (which is then targeted anyway as ‘humanitarian violence’) to another. These relocations have served to not only displace more than 90% of the population, severing the crucial connection between safety and the home; they have also obliterated the sense that there is any safe space in Gaza.
Ecocide
Although originating in the 1970s in the context of the US’ unrestrained use of Agent Orange in Vietnam, ecocide has also been reinvigorated in the past year to describe the repeated, unjustified attacks on the Gazan natural environment. Most of these attacks, at first blush, fall neatly into Article II(c) insofar as the unavailability of foodstuffs obviously prevents conditions for life. However, this reading of the facts misses the deeper significance that independent agriculture has for the Palestinian people: it speaks to an implicit control over precious land, over the passing down of traditions to the next generation. Forensic Architecture finds that such destruction has changed the geological nature of Gaza per se; levels of toxicity deep in the soil bring about an ‘ungrounding’ of the Indigenous people from their lands. Additionally, the visual discrepancy of before/after pictures showing entire plots of land now flattened and grey disrupts the anthropocentric understanding of victimhood: Palestine, a landmass connected to yet independent of its people, is being destroyed. Genocide cannot encompass this type of harm.
We note here that ecocide has been the subject of a recent campaign for its inclusion as a crime in the Rome Statute. This has led to the crime (understood as unlawful or wanton acts committed in the knowledge of substantial likelihood of severe or widespread long-term environmental damage) being formally introduced for consideration by member States in September 2024. Given that the ICC has jurisdiction over crimes occurring in the Occupied Palestinian Territories since 2014, the continued widespread destruction of the Gaza Strip’s flora and fauna may fall under this provision, should it come into effect.
Coming Full Circle? Nakba as Genocide
In 2009, Jewish Israeli scholar Grinberg wrote forcefully of his disdain for neologisms and scholarly efforts to analyse ‘The Thing without a Name’ – the past and ongoing erasure of Palestine and its people. He argued that each new term erected was vulnerable to caveats and to collapse. Ultimately, he concluded his article on ‘speechlessness’ by reiterating the power of Arabic terms that have been available since the creation of the Israeli state itself. Nakba as a word used in English discourse in particular has moved beyond its specialist lexicon, most notably through its invocation by South Africa at the ICJ in December 2023. As a term that refers both to an historical event, but far more crucially, as an ongoing process of social destruction, it provides the most robust way to speak of the genocide taking place in Gaza today and it also invites us to adopt a powerful alternative approach in (re)reading the Genocide Convention itself.