A Settler Colonial Perspective Is Needed To Grasp The Full Extent Of Israel's Genocide
The mainstream discourse, lacking this perspective, obfuscates the reality that Israel has been committing genocide, not for months, but decades - and that even a ceasefire won't end it.
When the National Inquiry Into Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls released its long-awaited final report to the Canadian public in 2019, concluding that thousands of Indigenous women, girls and 2SLGBTQQIA people were victims of a “Canadian genocide”, it was not indulging in hyperbole or choosing its words on the basis of their shock value. The inquiry was a major undertaking that had cost $92 million and taken three years to be completed; accordingly, its conclusions were carefully constructed and deliberately worded. This was a serious accusation leveled against the Canadian state — an accusation of, not just genocide, but ongoing genocide.
The authors must have known that this conclusion was not going to be readily accepted by the Canadian government — the guilty party — nor by the general public, for whom the word “genocide” tends to conjure images of the Holocaust or Rwanda in 1994. But they stuck to their guns. Pointing to the disproportionately high rates of homicide, violence, incarceration, child separations, poverty, discrimination, and drug overdoses that Indigenous communities continue to endure as a result of state policy, they argued that:
“colonial genocide is . . . a slow-moving process [that] does not conform with popular notions of genocide as a determinate, quantifiable event.” (emphases added)
This concept of colonial, or settler colonial genocide has since been further refined by Canadian Indigenous studies scholars like Pauline Wakeham. According to Wakeham, settler colonial genocides do not differ from other genocides like the Holocaust or the Rwandan Genocide in kind but rather in the degree to which they rely on certain methods of destruction relative to others. In other words, genocides that are perpetrated in the context of what Wakeham calls “settler colonialism’s persistent structure of invasion” contain the same toxic mix of ingredients but in different proportions than genocides that are perpetrated in other contexts. For example, methods of what is referred to in genocide studies literature as “genocide by attrition” – while being common if under-appreciated features of all genocides, including the Holocaust – are typically much more salient in settler colonial contexts.1
Wakeham has also advanced convincing arguments as to why it can be accurately said that a genocide is being perpetrated in Canada even though the destruction of Indigenous groups is not an overt, unanimously-agreed aim of the current government, and even though there is no mass support for such a policy. While acknowledging that this makes it harder to prove intent — which is a critical component of any accusation of genocide since any meaningful definition of the word must exclude unintentional destruction of groups —, Wakeham argues for what she calls a “knowledge-based interpretation of intent”: that is, if the genocidal effects of state policy become apparent and yet the policy is not changed, this amounts to intent.
Scholars have also advanced convincing arguments against the idea that genocides are defined by the scale of the population declines they result in, arguing that genocide does not necessarily involve mass death but rather the destruction of group life, which is more than just the sum of the individuals in a group. In fact, for what it’s worth only one of the five defining aspects of genocide listed in the United Nations Genocide Convention specifies direct killing.2 The fact that group life is the essential casualty of any genocide is important because it highlights the fact that genocide can be accomplished by both lethal and non-lethal means (such as land dispossession, intimidation, mass incarceration, forcible removal of children, destruction of cultural sites, and so on). Moreover, it underscores the important fact that, in the words of one scholar:
“Population increases can be sufficiently large to statistically camouflage any effects of genocide, as [groups] that undergo substantial levels of trauma may simultaneously undergo rapid demographic changes unrelated to genocide”.
Thus it can be accurately said that Canada is committing ongoing genocide against Indigenous groups even despite the fact that the Indigenous population of Canada is currently growing.
This may seem counter-intuitive, and so it is worth emphasizing that reaching this conclusion does not require a redefinition or broadening of the word “genocide”. The concept of settler colonial genocide is true to the original meaning of this word as intended by Raphael Lemkin — the man who coined it and who, in doing so, was greatly influenced by his study of the destruction of Indigenous groups in so-called North America. It is simply a useful if not indispensable concept for the purposes of: (A) specifying the process by which many Indigenous groups have been destroyed – in whole or in part – by settler colonial states; (B) explaining why these acts of destruction qualify as genocide even though they have historically been dismissed as not rising to this level of criminality; and (C) rebutting assertions that these intentional acts of destruction are confined to a regrettable but immutable past.
Israel’s settler colonial genocide
This concept of settler colonial genocide is also entirely relevant to the debate currently raging over whether Israel is committing a genocide against Palestinians. However, because it is almost entirely absent from mainstream consciousness, this debate has centered almost exclusively on Israel’s actions post-October 7th instead of on the decades-long process of its destruction of Palestinian group life by both lethal and non-lethal means. The case South Africa has brought to the International Court of Justice, for instance, presents the tragic and blood-soaked events of the previous 75 years — the Gaza blockade, the longstanding standard practice of incarcerating Palestinians without charge, the mass slaughter of peaceful protesters during the Great March of Return, the Nakba, and so on — merely as relevant “background” to the genocide that it is accusing Israel of committing.3 Not only does this risk downplaying Israel’s pre-October 7th behavior, but it creates an unfounded expectation that this genocide will suddenly end in the event of a ceasefire.
Viewed as a settler colonial genocide, on the other hand, the current assault can be more properly understood as just the latest, bloodiest event in a decades-long process of elimination intentionally perpetrated by the Israeli state against the indigenous inhabitants of Palestine.
Of course, application of this concept to Israel is premised on an understanding of Israel as a settler colonial state, which, while prevalent on the political left, has itself yet to gain mainstream acceptance. By way of illustration: the term “settler” is almost exclusively reserved for Israelis who live in the so-called “occupied territories” that Israel occupied in 1967; it is almost never applied to residents of Tel Aviv (an ethnically-cleansed city formerly known as Jaffa), for example. Moreover, many people — albeit mostly Zionists — continue to outright reject this conception of Israel, arguing that:
“There is no Israeli mother country, such as Britain is to Canada.”
My response: Did the US cease to be a settler colonial state after its independence from Britain? At a certain point, settler colonial states can become their own “mother country”, directing settlement of the frontier from a domestic metropole.“Jews have a historic connection to Israel-Palestine, and therefore they are not settlers but indigenous people returning to their land — in fact, Palestinians are the colonizers!”
My response: Sorry, but practicing a culture/religion that was predominant in a region thousands of years ago does not in and of itself make that region your native land.“Many Jews came to Israel not as settlers but refugees.”
My response: But these two categories are not mutually exclusive! Refugees who come to Canada, or the descendants of those who fled the Irish Potato Famine, are still settlers!“Some Jewish families have been living in the region continuously for many generations.”
My response: This is true, but does not change the fact that, while not all Israelis are settlers, Israel is a settler colonial state that is premised on dispossessing indigenous Palestinians of their land.
But despite the reluctance of the mainstream media and the objections of Zionists, Israel is increasingly being recognized as a settler colonial state by the general public — just as it has been by leading scholars in settler colonial studies such as Patrick Wolfe and Lorenzo Veracini. And rightly so. In fact, although the term “settler colonialism” is relatively new, this hardly stopped early Zionists from essentially admitting that they were engaged in a settler colonial enterprise. The “founding father” of Zionism, Theodor Herzl, famously wrote in his allegorical manifesto/novel Old-New Land that:
“If I wish to substitute a new building for an old one, I must demolish before I construct”.
Others were less allegorical. For example, during the 1947 hearings of the UN Special Committee on Palestine a representative of the Jewish Agency named Ayel Weizman openly described the Zionist project as “the colonization of Palestine”.
Even more importantly, the situation on the ground in Israel-Palestine clearly warrants the term — indeed, it very efficiently summarizes the Israel-Palestine conflict, which is often otherwise misleadingly described as being “complicated”, or as a clash between two national groups — a characterization that fails to encapsulate the profound divide that exists between colonizer and colonized and which makes no distinction between opponents of Zionism (such as myself) and opponents of Israeli nationhood (which I am not). The fact that Israel recognizes a “right of return” for all Jews — even if their ancestors have never set foot in the country — but refuses to recognize this right when it comes to the thousands of Palestinian families who were dispossessed of their land in 1948 or 1967 illustrates the settler colonial nature of this state very well.
Equipped with this understanding, in addition to a familiarity with the concept of settler colonial genocide — both of which have eluded mainstream commentators — it becomes a relatively simple matter to comprehend the full scale of Israel’s crime against humanity: genocide committed, not in the heat of the moment, but quite deliberately and over a long period of time. It is immaterial that the Palestinian population has concurrently grown; or that this genocide has no obvious start date; or that many Israelis, including some of those in government positions, do not want to see the Palestinians eliminated. It is enough to establish that Palestinian group life is being intentionally destroyed by the Israeli state in the course of its protracted settler colonial invasion of the Palestinian people’s native land.
The fact that Israel has been committing genocide with impunity for decades — in fact, with significant support from the US and Canada, among others — reveals in sharp relief the utterly farcical nature of international law and the capitalist “rules-based order” (as, indeed, does that fact that no settler colonial state has ever been held to account for this crime even though settler colonialism is arguably inherently genocidal). It is a reminder that powerful states enforce, write, and comply with theses rules at their convenience, and they achieve and maintain their power by themselves committing grievous crimes against humanity, up to and including genocide.4 Unsurprisingly, therefore, while the International Court of Justice’s recent interim ruling calling on Israel to abide by the UN Genocide Convention is certainly good news, it isn’t justice — nor can justice be expected of the “rules-based order”.
It is also important to understand that Israel’s genocide will not be brought to an end simply by means of a ceasefire, but will continue just as Canada continues to commit a peacetime genocide today.
Of course a ceasefire is urgently necessary, but to truly put an end to these crimes Israel, Canada, and all the other imperialist states — which aid and abet each other like some kind of international genocide-committers support group — must be commandeered, transformed, and ultimately done away with by the poor and working classes in solidarity across borders. And a new socialist rules-based order must be established: one that is not dominated by intrinsically immoral imperialist powers; one that respects the right of Indigenous people to exist; one in which no one is above the law.
Where “settler colonialism” is defined as a form of capitalist imperialism that seeks to acquire land and to replace the indigenous inhabitants of that land with another group of people who are more amenable to the imperialist project.
Article II of the United Nations Genocide Convention defines as genocide as any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnic, racial or religious group, as such:
(a) Killing members of the group;
(b) Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group;
(c) Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part;
(d) Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group;
(e) Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group.
In South Africa’s defense, this is probably a sound legal tactic given the historical and still widespread denial that settler colonial genocides fit the legal definition of genocide.
The exclusion of so-called “cultural genocide” from Article III of the United Nations Genocide Convention — despite the wishes of Raphael Lemkin and many colonized countries, and thanks to votes cast against it by colonial powers like the UK and France and settler states like the US and Canada — goes some way toward explaining the narrowness of the legal definition of “genocide”. (Indigenous people, it goes without saying, were given no say in this vote.)