Genocide has been catching up to Israelis ever since Zionism’s inception

“We fought simply to stop the Germans alone picking the time and place of our deaths.”

Marek Edelman

“We will die with dignity and with pride, but we are not going to be killed according to the Israeli army orders and instructions.”

Raji Sourani

I remember the minor but serious pause many Israelis took in the spring of 2002 when it was revealed that some Israeli soldiers were putting numbers on the arms of Palestinians they detained in the Tulkarem refugee camp in the West Bank. It’s hard to think of something the IDF could have done to provoke a more visceral revulsion in Israeli society, where the Holocaust is a singular historical point of reference. Defense Minister Binyamin Ben Eliezer and IDF Chief of Staff Shaul Mofaz launched a public investigation in the face of protests and public condemnation by Shoah survivors, especially Knesset member Tommy Lapid. The IDF said it was to sort the Palestinians they detained. Prime Minister Ariel Sharon’s spokesman, Ra’anan Gissin, said that “it was badly received by the media and we should find another means of identifying prisoners.” But elsewhere, he suggested it might not have been solely a surveillance technique, instead saying, “If the idea was to convey a message of deterrence, clearly it conflicts with the desire to convey a public relations message.” It was eventually written off as a practice by one commander that was quickly ended.

In early December 2008, Hebron settlers carried out an attack against Palestinians that Fauda co-creator and eyewitness Avi Issacharoff described as follows: “Stones land on the roof of the home, the windows and the doors. Flames engulf the southern entrance to the home. The front yard is littered with stones thrown by the masked men. The windows are shattered and the children are frightened. All around, as if they were watching a rock concert, are hundreds of Jewish witnesses, observing the events with great interest, even offering suggestions to the Jewish wayward youth as to the most effective way to harm the family.”

Prime Minister Ehud Olmert said, “We are the children of a people whose historic ethos is built on the memory of pogroms” and that “The sight of Jews firing at innocent Palestinians has no other name than pogrom.” 

May 2012 saw Knesset members Miri Regev, Michael Ben Ari, and Danny Danon address a mob before it rampaged through south Tel Aviv, attacking African migrants, refugees, as well as those assumed to be migrants and their supporters, calling them “infiltrators” (a term in Israeli discourse tied to a post-Nakba racialization of Palestinians trying to return to or access the homes Israel drove them from). This was also a period where we saw a marked increase in grassroots fascist marches carrying out mostly small-scale, but often fatal, attacks on Palestinians while yelling “Death to the Arabs!”, “Death to the leftists!” and “Leftists to the ovens!” A phenomenon that has incrementally increased ever since.

Most of these events were initially reported with some shock and public response in Israel. But Israelis now perpetrate small-scale pogroms like the one Issacharoff reported on such a regular basis that they are barely considered newsworthy. Also no longer newsworthy is the increasing presence of “Death to the Arabs” in marches and graffiti. All this points to an Israeli society becoming increasingly genocidal, which is borne out with the Netanyahu regime’s declaration of its intent to depopulate wide swaths of the Gaza Strip. It’s easy to wonder, “How did we get here?”

But there is a problem with seeing this as a recent development. A few weeks after the media reported on the IDF sorting Palestinians in Tulkarem Camp in 2002 by numbering their arms, Israel launched Operation Defensive Shield and killed some 500 Palestinians. A few weeks after the settler pogrom in Hebron that so grieved Prime Minister Olmert, he ordered Operation Cast Lead, killing some 1400 Palestinians. In 2014, while marches were chanting “Death to the Arabs,” Israel launched Operation Protective Edge, killing over 2000 Palestinians. Electronic Intifada contributor Benjamin Doherty noted this in a short film he made during the 2014 Israeli attack on Gaza, where he juxtaposed the fascist marches with Israeli military strikes.

The ongoing Israeli mass killing and displacement of Palestinians in Gaza follows not only prior massacres but three mass population expulsions from 1947-1949, 1949-1956, and again in 1967. While the 1947-1949 Nakba displacing over 700,000 Palestinians into refugee camps and the diaspora is well known, that Israel drove tens of thousands more Palestinians, especially Bedouins, into Egyptian and Jordanian-controlled territory in the following half-decade is less known. We popularly conceive of the 1967 war as when Israel invaded and conquered the Gaza Strip, Golan Heights, Sinai Peninsula, and West Bank. Less often do we recall that the Israeli conquest created another 300,000 refugees, half of whom were already refugees now displaced for the second time. Israel also carries out other expulsions more piecemeal rather than en masse. Between 1967 and 1994, Israel revoked the residency of over 100,000 Palestinians in the Gaza Strip, 140,000 more in the West Bank, along with tens of thousands more in Jerusalem.

During the Second Aliya — a wave of Zionist colonization between 1904-1914 — settlers created the proto-state programs of Labour Zionism that would largely guide Zionism for the next seven decades, including the first decades of Israeli statehood. They aimed for three kibushim, or conquests: land, labor, and guarding. The “conquest of land” aimed to enclose land away from the Palestinian land market. The “conquest of labor” sought to create segregated labor fields where settlers would not have to compete with Palestinian workers. The “conquest of guarding” sought to establish settler relations of force instead of relying on local relations of force, primarily Circassian and Bedouin guards for the early Zionist settlements. These three conquests shaped Zionism as a structure of settler colonialism, a system to displace Palestine and Palestinians and create Israel and Israelis.

Because Israel calls itself a Jewish state, and so many Holocaust survivors and their descendants reside in Israel, the Nazi holocaust against European Jews hangs heavy over the idea that Israel is genocidal to Palestinians. Whether it’s the mass shootings carried out by the Einsatzgruppen or the Fordist production of the death the Nazis carried out in the camps, the image of genocide is of a short duration of slaughter like what the Nazis did. But Israel doesn’t meaningfully resemble the Nazi regime. Israel is a settler colony like the United States, Canada, and Australia, and, like them with regards to their indigenous populations, Israel’s genocidal system against Palestinians is carried out over many decades rather than spiking into a singular moment of horror. It is endless small acts interspersed with large ones.

Israel, under both Labor and Revisionist regimes at the municipal and national level, has been removing Palestinians from all or part of Palestine since even before Israel was a state — sometimes through expulsion, sometimes through creating the need for flight, sometimes through direct killing. Periodically, Israel does this via military attacks like in 1947-49, 1967, and now. Sometimes, it does so through a necropolitical bureaucracy that removes or restricts Palestinian lifespace through zoning and planning restrictions or residency requirements.

And because Zionism is a movement to create Israel at Palestine’s expense, this structure of Palestinian removal is inherent to Zionism. This ongoing rise of grassroots fascism is not an aberration from Israeli politics. It is instead an aspect of how settler colonialism shapes the settler society; Zionism was genocidal before most Zionists were, and it has been catching up Israelis ever since. We’re seeing it now in Gaza, where the non-partisan army carries out at scale the “Death to the Arabs” chants of the Israeli far right.