~ by Stavros Stavrides ~
Many of those who initially supported Israel’s right to self-defense have to admit now that this is indeed a genocidal war. And it seems that more and more people realize that Israeli bombs aim at killing Palestinians indiscriminately without distinguishing between military targets and non-military ones.
Urbicide is a term invented to name war expeditions that destroy entire cities aiming at urban infrastructures and housing areas along with prominent symbolic buildings. The systematicity with which Israeli army executes such an urbicidal plan is beyond any dispute. Images of cities and settlements reduced to rubble are transmitted even from mainstream media. And of course, under those ruins real people are buried but never appear in horrific images in the news.
Systematic efforts to efface the Palestinian presence from Palestine characterize the Zionist program. And unfortunately, despite the heroic resistance of a brave Jewish minority, this program is dominant in today’s Israeli state’s policies. As we know, and as it is repeatedly documented, it is not only during this period of outward war that this systematicity unfolds. Living in conditions of an endless state of exception, Gaza, Palestinians have to face every day humiliating controls, extreme so-called “safety measures” that deprive them of their basic rights and the possibility of being detained for unlimited time in hell-like prisons without even been accused for something they have done.
Systematicity is the endpoint of an industrial rationality based on a meticulous planning that turns it to a murderous machine. Instrumental rationality has been accused already from the 20’s as a kind of perverted version of the liberating promises of reason. However, instead of humanity being emancipated by escaping from the dark entanglements of prejudice and superstition, with instrumental reason it re-enchants the future by trapping it in endless capitalist “growth”.
In such a prospect, certain people can be considered by definition malignant to be treated as enemies in a war to subjugate and control nature. Those “others” easily may be considered as wild “animals”. Threatening animals which even the project of violent domestication, (once an option for Israeli politics) cannot include.
Instrumental rationality uses technology as a tool in its project to control and exploit nature. But it turns technology to a murdering machine when obstacles to this project appear. The Palestinians are considered not worthy of being included in Western civilization according to prominent Israeli officials (including today’s Prime minister). They are allegedly backward peasants attached to their land. So, they deserve to be trapped in zones of open-air detention (as the cities and villages of Gaza strip or the neighborhoods of East Jerusalem are). And when they appear as dangerous or become obstacles in the settler colonialist project, they can be bombed or held prisoners or even killed on sight depending on the decisions made effective each specific period.
Palestinians may be killed but not sacrificed, to remember Agamben’s suggestion on the status of “bare life”. Let us recall that he used this term to describe the conditions of Jews and other chased minorities “living” in Nazi camps. This kind of state of exception is being imposed in today’s Palestine, perhaps not yet to the full extent of its historic predecessor. What however seems compatible to this unforgivable black hole in Western civilization, the Holocaust, is the systematicity of extinction. No one can really doubt that hospitals, holy places, refugee camps, urban infrastructure and neighborhoods, are razed to the ground not because of bombing accidents or because they were hiding places of Hamas members.
Systematicity, this prominent characteristic of instrumental reason, targets not simply the places in which people used to live but also the symbolic geography of their presence: The condensers of collective memory, the material proofs of their right to be there along with the necessary means to sustain their presence (cultivated land and a wide spectrum of life subsistence infrastructure). Urbicide and “landcide” are just the other side of genocide. And, what is more, they destroy the very possibility of coexistence between Jews and Palestinians in a future liberated from every kind of racist and religious fundamentalism.