Crowds waiting for food, empty pots in hand. Children missing an arm, a leg, sometimes both. Emergency workers killed and buried in a mass grave beside their crushed ambulances.
Palestinians gunned down at aid distribution sites. Families facing mass displacement from Gaza City. Journalists like Anas al-Sharif assassinated for bearing witness.
As many have pointed out, these are not scenes of death. They are scenes of elimination – the systematic destruction of life through relentless bombing, starvation, thirst, life-altering injury, untreated illness, trauma, exhaustion, and the deprivation of shelter from cold, floods, and heat.
In the occupied West Bank, Palestinians have also faced deadly Israeli raids and settler attacks, with hundreds killed since the Gaza war began.
Such genocidal killing is made possible by decades of western dehumanisation of Palestinians, reducing them to “terrorists” and “human animals”.
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As many have also noted, the elimination of Muslim life in Palestine is not a recent or exceptional event. It is the structure of the settler-colonial project itself, which has long made slow death its policy: by maiming, targeting knees, femurs and vital organs with high-velocity, fragmentation or rubber-coated metal bullets; restricting the entry of calories into Gaza; and destroying water systems, waste treatment facilities, and hospitals.
The elimination of Muslim life in Palestine reinforces a necropolitical logic that will enable mass Muslim death globally in the coming years
Over the past 22 months, Israel has only tightened its stranglehold on Gaza.
What has not yet been fully reckoned with, however, is what the destruction of Palestinian life, racialised as Muslim – including its Christian population – means for the world’s Muslim communities, themselves racialised as a terrorist threat to be eliminated.
Palestine has long been a key site where techniques of population control and racial logics are forged and exported across the world.
Together with other devastated landscapes, from Iraq and Afghanistan to Yemen, the elimination of Muslim life in Palestine reinforces a necropolitical logic that will enable mass Muslim death globally in the coming years.
Counterinsurgency laboratory
Palestine has long functioned as a laboratory of counterinsurgency.
Under British colonial rule and Israeli occupation, Palestine served as a site of knowledge production, where disciplinary methods and technologies of surveillance, repression, and militarised policing were tested and refined before being exported to control Muslim populations worldwide under the war on terror.
Launched after the attacks on the World Trade Center on 11 September 2001, the war on terror remains a global campaign to disrupt “terrorism” that draws on both hard and soft power strategies.
Soft power strategies can be found in national counter-extremism policies implemented across the globe under the Countering Violent Extremism agenda.
Many of these strategies owe much to the occupation of Palestine, which produced the knowledge on which they rest.
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During the Palestinian revolt between 1936 and 1939 under the British Mandate, knowledge of counterinsurgency – an approach to suppressing colonial uprising – was consolidated in Palestine.
This knowledge travelled across the world as the imperial policemen and soldiers based there went on to become mid-level and senior officers in colonial counterinsurgencies after World War Two.
Indeed, Palestine was a central node in a global circuit of knowledge exchange through which the “best practices of colonial control” – techniques of governmentality, racial logics, and systems of discipline – circulated between colony and metropole, among the colonies of a single empire, and across imperial powers.
Today, the continued significance of Palestine in the global exchange of counterinsurgency knowledge is exemplified by Mini Gaza, a 600-building “ghost town in the middle of the desert”, where Israeli soldiers simulate urban warfare and US officers are trained in tactics of surveillance, profiling, and protest suppression later applied to American policing.
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From this view, it is likely that Israeli surveillance and counterterrorism techniques were deployed to suppress the student encampment movement on US college campuses.
It is also safe to say, given that counterextremism policies are modelled on the military doctrine of counterinsurgency, that global Muslim populations are managed through the knowledge accumulated through the military occupation of Muslims in Palestine.
Beyond counterinsurgency techniques, death-dealing technologies also owe much to the occupation of Palestine. As journalist Antony Loewenstein writes in his book The Palestine Laboratory, Israel “uses the occupied, Palestinian territories as a testing ground for weaponry and surveillance technology that they then export around the world to despots and democracies”.
Israeli weapons and surveillance technology can be found at the sites of Muslim death across the globe: the Serbian genocide of Muslims in Bosnia between 1992 and 1995, the genocide of the Rohingya Muslims in Myanmar, and the Mediterranean Sea where refugees meet a watery end as they attempt to cross in unseaworthy vessels.
In short, occupied Palestine must be seen as a laboratory for the development of the techniques and technologies of control and elimination that are later used to manage Muslim populations around the globe.
Racial grammar
As a site of knowledge production, Palestine has also shaped the war on terror’s racial grammar – the knowledge system that makes Muslims visible and invisible as a racial category to be managed and eliminated.
While discourses of terrorism first emerged in the 1970s in response to decolonisation and the ascendancy of the US as a global superpower, they did not acquire their current tone and tenor until the 1980s with the end of the Cold War and the waning of Soviet influence.
In 1979, a conference on international terrorism was held in Jerusalem that sought to remake terrorism as a threat to “civilisation” and “the West”.
Writing the introduction to the conference report was none other than current Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who argued that terrorism signalled a shared “abhorrence of freedom and a determination to destroy the democratic way of life”. This shift framed Israel as part of the civilised West.
At this time, terrorism became equated with the political violence committed by so-called Islamist groups. Named as the “new terrorism”, it constructed the “new terrorist” as “extraordinarily irrational” and bent on committing “unprecedented levels of violence”.
This construction was in contrast to the terrorists of the Soviet era, who were described as “honourable opponents” and their political violence as “rational, intelligible, and political”.
It would be none other than the Palestinian suicide bomber who gave substance to the figure of the new terrorist, becoming the symbol of the irrationality of “Islamist terrorism” and the barbarity of the Muslim terrorist.
The construction of terrorism as anti-civilisational and pathological is in fact a racial grammar: it racialises the Muslim terrorist as unable to progress into the age of the rule of law due to biocultural reasons.
As the western-led war on terror drew on the “clash of civilisations” and theories of radicalisation to explain away terrorism as “psyches gone awry”, it can be said that occupied Palestine gave it its racial grammar.
Necropolitical logic
Occupied Palestine is one of the central sites where disciplinary and racial knowledge are produced and exported to the rest of the world under the war on terror.
It is here that the elimination of Muslim life establishes the threat of extending such violence to Muslims worldwide.
The scenes of elimination coming out of Palestine encode a necropolitical calculation: for Israelis to live, Palestinians must die.
Palestinian death is framed not as murder or massacre, but perversely as life-giving. The maximal dispersal of Muslim death is presented as a political necessity
It is a calculation assented to by US congressional members, European parliamentarians, and leaders across the globe who have ensured the continued flow of weapons to Israel, voted against a ceasefire, and continued to insist that “Israel has the right to defend itself” even after its aims of elimination were clear.
It can be said that the elimination of Muslim life in Palestine has acted as a testing ground for the development of a generalisable necropolitical logic: Palestinian death is framed not as murder or massacre, but perversely as life-giving. The maximal dispersal of Muslim death is presented as a political necessity.
The ongoing elimination of Muslim life in Palestine renders Muslim life knowable only through its killability. It is ungrievable, unburiable.
Chillingly, like the disciplinary techniques and technologies and the racial grammar of the war on terror, this necropolitical logic – trialled and tested in Palestine and politically approved on the international stage – risks being exported to other parts of the world under the same banner.
This danger persists so long as the discourses of the war on terror continue to dehumanise Muslim life by rendering it a threat to be destroyed.
The occupation of Palestine has long served as a crucible of elimination, where methods of control and destruction are developed and normalised. What begins there rarely ends there.
Unless these logics are dismantled, the genocidal violence Palestinians are enduring today risks becoming the template for how Muslim life is targeted worldwide.
The views expressed in this article belong to the author and do not necessarily reflect the editorial policy of Middle East Eye.
