Over the past two years, the world has witnessed such intensification of atrocities emanating from the Israeli state that each one threatens to obscure the last.
This invariably means that responding to each new outrage risks distracting from the key issue: the relentless Zionist project of ethnically cleansing Palestine in favour of an ethno-nationalist Jewish state, and the creation of a neutralised and neutered regional environment, where states abandon the Palestinian cause out of self-interest or because of bullying by Israel and the US.
Israel’s recent attack on Iran all but wiped out coverage of the ongoing genocide in Gaza.
This, in turn, has obscured the violent assaults, land theft and ethnic cleansing taking place in the occupied West Bank. Palestinian citizens face such a multi-levelled onslaught against their lives and livelihoods that, within this maelstrom, many single actions that deserve scrutiny and analysis are overlooked, especially if they are not seen to have lethal outcomes.
To understand the purpose to which Israel’s genocide in Gaza is being put, it is useful to pause and take account of the connections between this extermination project and the regular hate marches in Jerusalem, with all the linguistic violence they embody.
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While the wider world has focused on the incriminating genocidal statements made by Israeli leaders since October 2023, Palestinian commentators have been far more attuned to their decades-long history.
It is thus important to look back on the racist and eliminationist rhetoric that has emanated from “Jerusalem Day” since long before the most recent Netanyahu government, with its cabinet of avowed extremists and racists.
Violent incantations
A retrospective glance enables a more thorough understanding of the connection between the racist rhetoric of right-wing thugs and the genocidal actions we are now witnessing.
The work of Palestinian scholar Nadera Shalhoub-Kevorkian is crucial in this regard. Her work encompasses the broad political and historical landscape of settler-colonialism, and explores in intimate detail how its practices infiltrate Palestinian lives.
In two powerful and prescient publications from 2017 and 2019, she drew attention to the exterminatory rhetoric manifested during the annual Jerusalem “flag marches”, and its implications for colonised Palestinians. As a citizen of the Old City, she has directly experienced the violent and racist incantations of the mobs, and understands their toxic impact at a both a bodily and an intellectual level.
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In a paper from 2017 in which she describes this “carnivality of state violence”, Shalhoub-Kevorkian also draws attention to the use of the Old City’s walls as a tool of colonisation: “This more explicit use of Jewish imagery [through projections onto the walls] is a means of declaring to whom the space belongs. The projections are intended for both self and other – not only signalling to Jews that they are the owners and masters of the city, but also sending an exclusionary message to Palestinians. Such aesthetic Judaization of the space mirrors the actual process of replacing the native with settlers”.
The message, on multiple levels, is that Palestinians are intended to simply disappear. If they are “disappeared” from language and visual imagery, their physical disappearance becomes increasingly attainable.
As right-wing mobs in Jerusalem celebrated racial dominance and incited extermination, we watched their desires being realised in the killing fields of Gaza
Shalhoub-Kevorkian’s work highlights the crucial connection between rhetoric and action. Referencing a horrific event in July 2015, when a group of religio-nationalist Israeli settlers burned the home of an entire Palestinian family in the occupied West Bank village of Duma, killing an 18-month-old baby and his parents and severely injuring his four-year-old brother, she argues: “Such extreme forms of embodied violence, directed towards a family in their home space, may be viewed as the logical culmination of parades which promote the expulsion of Palestinians from the polis.
“In addition to invading the senses and the public and private spheres, violent, state-approved marches also reproduce the structures of Jewish supremacy which give legitimacy to such cruelty.”
In her 2019 book, Incarcerated Childhood and the Politics of Unchilding, Shalhoub-Kevorkian described how 11 years ago, during Israel’s 2014 onslaught against Gaza, Jerusalem’s fanatical mobs marchers in Tel Aviv were already celebrating the annihilation of Gaza’s children.
Their chants were chilling: “In Gaza there’s no studying / No children are left there / There’s no school tomorrow / There’s no children left in Gaza! Oleh! / Gaza is a graveyard.”
‘May their villages burn’
Thus, what has been systematically enacted since October 2023 in the form of genocide and “educide” – the wholesale destruction of Gaza’s school system – was presaged and celebrated a decade earlier. Genocidal dreams have become genocidal reality.
The linguistic violence of “Jerusalem Day” marchers, with their repetitive chants of “May their villages burn”, “Muhammad is dead” and “Death to Arabs” – alongside full-scale gloating at the tally of dead Palestinian children in Gaza – is obscene in and of itself, but other aspects also need to be emphasised.
One is the almost-total lack of constraints on the use of such violent, racist and genocidal language. Israel has laws against hate speech, but their application is massively disproportionate, with enforcement mainly directed against Palestinians.
During this year’s marches, participants cavorted in an orgy of triumphalism, calling for the annihilation of the Palestinian “Other”. They appeared to be further excited by seeing their desires materialise; both in their immediate environment – the closed shutters of Palestinian stores, and the retreat from the streets of Palestinian citizens – and in the destruction of Gaza.
According to a report in the Guardian, one large group chanted “Gaza is ours” and carried a large banner reading: “Jerusalem 1967, Gaza 2025” – in effect, “threatening full military annexation of the strip to echo the capture of East Jerusalem”.
These mobs have been joined and supported by far-right ministers such as Itamar Ben Gvir and Bezalel Smotrich, who recently boasted that Israel was “destroying everything that’s left of the Gaza Strip”. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who held a cabinet meeting in the Palestinian district of Silwan and walked through a tunnel under Al-Aqsa Mosque, eagerly celebrated the visuals: “Jerusalem has been wrapped in blue and white, with the flag parade which marched in full force.”
The extreme and unabated recklessness with language permitted every year in the Jerusalem marches could not stand in greater contrast to the hypersensitivity displayed over any statements that might possibly be construed as anti-Israeli or anti-Jewish. The more war crimes Israel commits, the more vigorously the language of protest is policed.
As commentator Mohammed el-Kurd put it: “A drone is one thing, but a trope – a trope is unacceptable”. Shalhoub-Kevorkian herself was censured by her university for daring to sign a petition about Palestinian children that included the word “genocide”, and she was detained by police over an interview exposing Zionist criminality.
With the main propagators of racist, genocidal language now ensconced in the government and enthusiastically urging the Jerusalem mobs of mainly young men into further frenzies of triumphalism and hate, there was, of course, little attempt by Israeli authorities to curb them. Inevitably, it was Palestinians whose spaces and senses were violated, as they were urged by police to stay indoors and out of sight.
Conditions of impunity
These ritualised and unconstrained manifestations of racism, with their gloating performances of elimination constituting a harbinger of the genocidal rhetoric that would accompany and justify Israel’s current onslaught against Gaza, Israel’s fanatical mobs cannot be seen as a deluded fringe.
We can trace how both a context of impunity, and a lack of any restraints on genocidal rhetoric, connect directly to the use of such language by the genocidaires of today.
As anyone in the psychological professions knows, when no external boundaries are set – when no consequences follow from abusive or violent behaviour – perpetrators are emboldened to pursue only their own interests, fantasies, desires and obsessions, while objectifying and dehumanising others.
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Cruelty and sadism flourish in conditions of impunity, as we have seen in the escalating monstrosity of Israel’s violence in Gaza. The impunity granted to Israel by its key allies is not just a matter of failing to stop the violence; it actively creates the conditions for it to intensify.
Using the microcosm of the Old City of Jerusalem, the unconstrained “carnival of violence”, with its rituals of deliberate humiliation, has now been replicated with deadly effect in Gaza, where a proud and steadfast population is being deliberately reduced to a desperate and starving horde, corralled into cattle pens in the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation abattoirs that pose as feeding stations and murdered as they seek food.
As right-wing mobs in Jerusalem celebrated racial dominance and incited extermination, we witnessed their desires being realised in the killing fields of Gaza.
The untrammelled power, diplomatic cover and unlimited access to lethal weaponry granted to Israel by the US and most western governments has revealed, time and again, how a failure to constrain fuels further excess. Wars provide a convenient cover for ethnic cleansing and extermination.
Recent attacks on Lebanon, Iran and Syria reveal an Israeli prime minister in the grip of unrestrained hubris. Alongside intensifying efforts to drive Palestinians out of their ancestral lands, he appears to be indulging in the absurd and psychotic fantasy that not only Jerusalem, but the entire Middle East, may come to be draped in blue and white.
The views expressed in this article belong to the author and do not necessarily reflect the editorial policy of Middle East Eye.
