Punishing the Land

Israeli symbolism during the Gaza genocide

An audio of me reading and commenting on this piece is available at the end for paid subscribers.

In Beit Hanoon, north Gaza, Israeli soldiers carved the Star of David on what used to be agricultural land using, apparently, tanks.

This is what I told Al Jazeera’s Justin Salhani (who is also a regular contributor to From The Periphery):

We’re seeing what absolute impunity looks like in an army that is given everything it needs to destroy Palestinian life. As in any genocide, those committing them often take pleasure in displaying their superiority by forcing their symbols on their victims. The Israeli army also utilises religious figures who speak of this genocide of Palestinians and the colonisation of Gaza as a religious duty. The IDF has rabbis on the ground and soldiers have brought the menorah and shofar to the battlefield. This is not new, it’s just much more widespread now. The Israeli religious philosopher Yeshayahu Leibowitz described these attitudes as that of Judeo-Nazis in the 1990s, warning that it could become the norm if not stopped. Sadly, he was right.

Al Jazeera also reported that this seems to have been made by the IDF's 97th Netzah Yehuda Battalion because what looks like the number 7979 is carved next to it. That battalion, which translates to Judah's Victory in Hebrew (in case you thought the Israelis are subtle about their intentions), is all-male and ultra-orthodox. As a result, I've seen folks focus on that detail and explain it away as being the act of a small number of religious extremists.

I was on Al Jazeera for a brief comment:

Putting aside the question of why the IDF includes religious extremists in its ranks - spoiler alert: because they share the same goal as the Israeli secular mainstream- I think this misses the point, which is to celebrate.

This act is an act of celebration during a genocide by the genocidaires. It's not exactly novel to see the deployment of symbolism during genocides. When the Nazis marked Jewish shops and homes with the star of David, they were not ‘only’ humiliating their victims, but also signaling to one another that the time has come. It's one thing, for example, for ISIS to destroy the heritage of those they sought to erase. It's another thing for them to film themselves doing it, for them to leave a very visible embodied declaration: ‘We are here to stay.’ Public acts of violence have a specific connotation that is not the same as those committed in the dead of night, in secret, or without much thought to publicize them as widely as possible. This is why the White supremacist march in Charlottesville was so important, and why the far right in the US, emboldened by their fascist icon Trump, has adopted the Black Lives Matter slogan ‘whose streets? our streets!’

What the IDF did in Gaza is as far away from a secret as it gets - it can literally be seen from outer space. Even if Palestinians erase it, as I'm sure they will, the damage has been done. That battalion announced that it is here to stay. It may leave temporarily because of a ceasefire, but those soldiers know very well what the Israeli state means by ceasefire: you cease, we fire. They will try to come back. They even have Trump publicly declaring ethnic cleansing as policy, and their man Smotrich is already working on a plan to turn that into a reality. Whether they manage is highly unlikely, but in some sense that doesn't matter. I mean, obviously it matters and they must be stopped, but my point is that it doesn't necessarily matter to them. The goal is to colonise Gaza and ethnically cleanse it of its native inhabitants. If not all, then as many as they can. That's what the entirety of the state of Israel is built on.

That's why we call it the Nakba, the catastrophe, because what other words could be sufficient enough to describe the Israeli obsession with destroying as much of the land as possible, the same land it ostensibly wants for itself, for the sole purpose of making sure that the indigenous population cannot use it. What else explains the Israeli obsession with destroying olive trees, for example? Do olive trees speak Arabic? Are they Arabs? As ridiculous as it sounds, yes, to the Israeli state, the olive trees are also Arabs. That's why they are fine with replanting newer olive trees after destroying the older ones. The older ones are a reminder of who was there before they came along. That's what the Hebraization of Palestinian place-names was always all about (yes, that's what it's literally called - that's what the Israelis called it. Check out the Wikipedia article as it is well-cited and includes useful maps.)

It is important to understand that punishing the land itself has always been part of the settler colonial process. The land is wrong, ugly. It must be corrected and beautified. It cannot serve as a permanent witness to what you have done to be here. It must be maimed by the same machine that maims Palestinian children and that has created the “the highest number of children amputees per capita anywhere in the world” in Gaza, to quote the UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres.

The war on the land is the same war that is committed against children. Questioning the innocence of children must necessarily be part of the process of genocide. The impossibility of their guilt is what the Israelis sought to bomb away, and that's what they achieved in Gaza: it is now completely normal in mainstream Israeli discourse to talk about killing large numbers of children.

Unlike with Russian genocidal discourse vis-a-vis Ukrainians, the Israelis do not believe Arabs are just Jews in denial. To quote one Israeli woman (who has a thick New York accent), there is no such thing as a Palestinian. They are just Arabs.

It's at 3:35.

Palestinian children, like the land of Palestine, are marked for annihilation. If they could just stop being Palestinians then they could be treated like any other Arabs as far as the Israelis are concerned.

To quote our New Yorker friend again: "the natural instinct of a Jewish woman is to protect her children. A Palestinian woman doesn’t have that.” This is not outrageous discourse in Israel. What's rare is that she said this in English when these words are usually uttered in Hebrew. It is very important for her to tell herself that Palestinian mothers are not like Jewish mothers. Otherwise, she would have to wrestle with the fact that she is wishing something upon mothers that she would rightly find horrifying if done to her. She doesn't have to, however, and that's the point. She does not have to think about what it is her people are doing to another people. When asked whether she knew how many civilians have been killed in Gaza, she responded “who gives a shit?” because “children grow up to be Arabs.”

Isn't that interesting? She sort of admits to seeing them as children first which is why she had to add that they grow up to be Arabs. So as children, they are not yet guilty of being Arabs, but they grow up to be Arabs, so it is justified to kill them.

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Okay I'll stop here. If you want, I recommend checking out the episode I did with my friend and colleague Daniel Voskoboynik on the Holocaust and the Nakba, and in particular why I found the movie The Zone of Interest to be so relatable as an Arab.