A year has passed since the genocidal war on the Gaza Strip, and the epistemic debates in social sciences about how to diagnose what is happening in Gaza, how to classify it, its examination tools, and which conceptual frameworks might be effective continue among currents still under the dominant paradigms that selectively deal with specific historical cases. There are those who reject even bringing these approaches forward and others who see the necessity of decoupling this knowledge erasure. Globally, in different contexts, fierce wars have been waged and continue to be fought over the classification of atrocities committed within the category of genocide. In the context of this journal issue, all data emerging from the fields of killing and savagery from a research perspective show the legitimacy of usage and, indeed, the right to make historical comparisons, thus ending the monopolistic tendencies in dealing with specific cases.
This opens the door to a project for rethinking the uniqueness of the Holocaust’s historical experience and its complex historical handling by various researchers worldwide. Many global theorists remain preoccupied with denying the application of the genocide concept to the genocidal war on Gaza under pretenses of objectivity, epistemic neutrality, and validity. They pose questions such as whether Israel’s practices in Gaza amount to genocidal crimes, while Gaza has become a laboratory for grinding down human dignity in a very performative way, as well as a site of genocidal violence. This includes general extermination, which encompasses the destruction of nearly 3% of the population, the annihilation of living and intimate spaces, the obliteration of spatial territories, the eradication of cultural histories and collective memories of cities and identities, the demolition of the architectural heritage of Gaza’s cities and landmarks, the extermination of scientific, educational, community, and health institutions, and the destruction of bodies through attempts at control and organ theft, along with a range of genocidal health policies, death and life policies, and manifestations of savagery within them.
Genocide can be defined as a process aimed at the total or partial destruction of a social group identified as different or inferior. It involves the definition of a group and the imposition of a limit (political, social, or religious) upon it. Genocide can occur over a long or short span of time and may involve generalized killing or the physical and symbolic destruction of specific populations. Some people focus on specific manifestations of killing and extermination characterized by quantifiable aspects, meaning they concentrate on victim numbers as a criterion for evoking the concept of genocide. However, social sciences guide us to consider genocide through recalling certain foundational historical works, such as Christopher Browning’s “Ordinary Men” (Browning, 1993), or works in social psychology, such as Stanley Milgram’s studies (Milgram, [1974]; Milgram, 2017), which allow us to understand genocide and massacres on a deeper level through interdisciplinary approaches in comparative historical contexts, as Didier Fassin (Fassin, 2023) did by comparing the genocide of the Herero and Nama peoples with the Palestinian extermination context, focusing on structural similarities.
Here, we are concerned with genocide aimed at attempting to eliminate a community or a relatively vast area controlled or desired by a power, linked to the idea of “cleansing” or “purifying” this space of the presence of the “other,” deemed undesirable. Hence, it is organically linked to the concept of “extermination,” which in its essence refers to the idea of “cutting roots,” “removal from the land,” or, in other words, “uprooting,” much like what we say regarding a pest or a contagious disease. It also means the enforcement of excessive violence as a form of actions that occur “beyond violence,” characterized by unrestricted extremism. This term encompasses two interlinked types of destruction and a collective obscuring of civilian or isolated populations (massacres and deportations).
The extreme violence, as defined here, refers to quantitative (collective violence) and qualitative phenomena (actions aimed at harming the physical or psychological integrity of a population group). Ironically, its usage implies remaining at a level of generality and abstraction. The brutal practices inherent to such severe violence are connected to the perpetrators’ desire to inflict the maximum physical and/or psychological suffering on their victims. According to Véronique Nahoum-Grappe (Nahoum-Grappe 1996: 273-323), cruelty involves something that transcends violence, as it is a cruelty that goes beyond the intended objective.
It is essential to account for the consequences of the discourse we build about others as subjects of study, as indicated by Bowen (Bowen 2002a: 382-395). Considering this manifestation in genocide evokes a discourse of animality—not referring to animalistic behavior, but rather to the annihilation of human qualities, reducing humans to less than animals representing their species, thus removing what connects them to themselves and others. This invocation is central to the justifications of colonial leaders in the ongoing genocidal war. It clearly indicates dehumanization, i.e., stripping them of their humanity, and the inclination to inflict suffering by eliciting pain that should peak, at which point violence manifests as an end.
This brand of violence is expressed through several non-exclusive action types: the seizing of bodies (rape, concealment of corpses, operations intending to dismember and erase victims; subjecting individuals to suffering and/or death, either through the representation of horror or through situations where victims’ bodies are displayed in performative, grotesque ways), defilement of the sacred places of others (destruction and looting of graves, killings in holy sites, etc.). These action patterns are based on a desire to cause suffering at an extraordinarily high degree of intensity while also attempting to create a certain mental and behavioral state based on pleasure or even enjoyment derived from pain, manifesting in laughter or mockery or, conversely, in a complete absence of feelings or emotions. These determinants appear in most technical operations in current genocidal practices.
Undoubtedly, there is a profusion in the legal usage of the genocide concept in its procedural sense since its popularization through the contributions of Raphael Lemkin (Lemkin, 1946: 212-222), focusing on the characteristics of genocide in the legal sense. While the approach we aim to emphasize is how to read it as a persistent violence, which I term “total violence,” encompassing genocide as one of its manifestations. The extreme violence in the context of war refers to a very broad range of practices linked to brutal forms of actions varying in severity and intensity; the adjective “extreme” only holds meaning concerning the social standards produced by a group. Borrowing from Arendt (Arendt, 1966 [1991]) as an embodiment of the foulest and most ordinary evil.
Some classical approaches focus on the idea that war is intrinsically connected to the state, as Charles Tilly (Tilly 1990: 20-28) notes: “States make war and war makes states.” Significant approaches link genocide to modernity, such as Mark Levene’s study (Levene, 2005: 10) which sees it as producing cultural discourses that legitimize the extermination of certain ethnic and racial groups as acceptable. Or as Alex Alvarez (Alvarez, 2001) posits that modernity has reshaped modernity to become more effective and rational, capable of industrial killing by replacing old methods with new mechanisms of extermination. Foucault (Foucault, 1997) highlights the moment when racism became part of state mechanisms since racism existed prior to that time but elsewhere; with the emergence of biopower. Biopower represents that form of authority distinct from classical sovereign power in that it is exercised over life by training bodies and organizing populations in a political system based on biopower, i.e., the protection of life, while racism becomes the means through which the authority of death is exercised. In fact, racism enables the division of humanity, fragmenting populations into subgroups, and races. Moreover, racism makes it possible to establish a positive relationship between the death of the other and the life of the individual: the death of the other ensures the biological reinforcement of the self; thus, the colonial state operates, albeit not within Foucault’s research interests. However, we view it as an approach that establishes an understanding that it is part of the structure of the state itself and a product of its birth as institutional mental structures within the colonial state itself.
In different contexts, but reminiscent of the practices of the colonial state itself, we can see spatial isolation and the social exclusion of certain populations in the ghettos of American urban centers, as explained by Loïc Wacquant (Wacquant, 1997: 340-348). This comparison reminds us, in a different context, of the colonial policies aimed at creating isolated Palestinian ghettos and reminds us of the historical underpinnings of the colonial state within the current genocide context amidst binaries: the ordinariness of evil, good and evil/civilization and savagery/enlightenment and darkness, the animalization of the Palestinian, the “Israelization” of progress against the backwardness of the Palestinian, civilization/barbarism, the call for displacement, urban extermination, the destruction of homes, the obliteration of families and their erasure from civil records and targeting them as collective structures upon which Palestinian society depends, extermination of children, and the eradication of social incubators for various Palestinian groups, along with attempts to alter social roles by undermining economic, social, and symbolic structures assigned to them. Furthermore, the destruction of homes and the assault on their intimate spaces, both materially and symbolically.
In the context of the settler colonial condition that characterizes the Palestinian case, we must view the current genocide as an advanced form of the Nakba itself and its repercussions, grounded in the concept of “total violence” for analyzing the colonial structure of “Israel” and its systematic structural control mechanisms. As a central tool for understanding the nature of the violence perpetrated by the colonial state, it is exercised by the colonial state as a deliberate attempt to disrupt all components of society and attempt to erase and eradicate it, encompassing the destruction of all aspects of political, economic, and social life, and oscillating between severe violence as attempts at obliteration and killing and general daily violence (Al-Saqa, 2022).
As researchers in the social sciences within the Arab region, it is imperative for us to reevaluate the current genocide and compare it with forms of genocide elsewhere in the world, distancing ourselves from prevailing biases, rethinking modernity, the state, and war, and examining the politics of death and life and systematic mortality as we start to contribute original insights that encourage this type of theorizing.
By Abaher Al-Sakka: Dean of the Faculty of Arts at Birzeit University and Editor-in-Chief of the Arab Journal of Sociology (Idafat).
Al-Saqa, Abaher (2022). “Toward Rethinking Conceptual Frameworks for Analyzing the Palestinian Colonial Context.” Omran for Social Sciences: Volume 10, Issue 39, pp. 39-60.
Arendt, Hannah (1966). Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil. French translation A. Guérin. Paris, Gallimard, 1966; Pocket Edition, Paris: Gallimard, 1991, “Folio” series, 1991.
Bowen, John R. (2002a). “Culture, Genocide, and a Public Anthropology.” In: Alexander L. Hinton (ed.), Annihilating Difference: The Anthropology of Genocide. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, pp. 382-395.
Browning, Christopher R. [1993]. Ordinary Men: Reserve Police Battalion 101 and the Final Solution in Poland. New York: HarperPerennial.
Lemkin, Raphael (1946). “Le Crime de génocide.” Revue de Droit International, de Sciences Diplomatiques et Politiques: Vol. 24, pp. 212-222.
Levene, Mark (2005). Genocide in the Age of the Nation State. 2 vols. London; New York: I. B. Tauris, Vol. 1: The Meaning of Genocide, p. 10.
“Le Spectre d’un génocide à Gaza.” https://aoc.media/opinion/2023/10/31/le-spectre-dun-genocide-a-gaza/.
Milgram, Stanley ([1974]). Obedience to Authority: An Experimental View. New York: Harper and Row, translated [Milgram 2017].
Nahoum-Grappe, Véronique (1996). “L’usage politique de la cruauté: l’épuration ethnique (ex-Yougoslavie, 1991-1995).” In: Françoise Héritier (ed.), De la violence I. Paris: O. Jacob, “Opus,” pp. 273-323.
Tilly, Charles (1990). Coercion, Capital, and European States, AD 990–1990. Cambridge, MA: B. Blackwell, pp. 20-28.
Wacquant, Loïc (1997). “Elias in the Dark Ghetto.” Amsterdams Sociologisch Tijdschrift: Vol. 24, Nos. 3-4, December, pp. 340-348.
