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Genocide, as many of us already know, denotes the Greek word genos (race, tribe) and the Latin root cide (killing). In A Century of Cultural Genocide in Palestine, Daud Abdullah draws on the work Raphael Lemkin, the lawyer who coined the term genocide and campaigned to establish the Genocide Convention. In this piece, Abdullah conceptualizes the dual paradigm of genocide that takes place in two stages. The first is the “destruction of the national pattern of the oppressed group”, which is the systematic destruction of the ability to sustain the life of a people. The second is “the imposition of the national pattern of the oppressor”, which, since 1492, has been a Euromodern/colonial and Eurocentric mode of seeing and being in the world. The eight feature of genocide are the following: “disintegration of political and social institutions, of culture, language, national feelings, religion, and the economic existence of national groups, and the destruction of the personal security, liberty, health, dignity, and even the lives of the individuals belonging to such groups.”
Let me focus on both stages to show the gravity of what Palestinians have endured during the ongoing Nakba, a key feature of zionist settler colonialism’s dual paradigm of destruction and imposition.
The Nakba not only consisted of ethnically cleansing historic Palestine of over 750,000 people, with over 500 villages and towns “depopulated” and razed to the ground, but it also entailed the systematic disappearance of maps, archives, and books. Zionist settler colonialism’s deliberate effort to disappear everything that it reminds it of its original sin is what Palestinians refer to as memoricide1, which can be understood literally as the killing of memory. The Zionist state of Israel went as far as cutting thousand year old Olive trees and planting non-native pine trees on top of villages to cover the historical presence and existence of Palestinians. The killing of memory depends first on the destruction of the physical presence of all that represents the Palestinian people and their deep connections to the land. Memoricide proceeds from there by distorting Palestinian history where, as Gold Meir, who Bernie Sanders praises every time he’s given a chance to do so, stated in 1969, “There was no such thing as a Palestinian people…They did not exist.” Memoricide is therefore about the imposition of a system of knowledge, historiography, and archeology to create the “facts on the ground” that give license to and naturalize the violent presence and permanence of Israel (Abu El-Haj, 2001). From Israel’s inception, founded upon incalculable colonial violence, a settler colonial curriculum was designed from the beginning to try to kill the collective memory of Palestinians as a means to solidify the master zionist narrative that there was indeed “a land without a people for a people without a land.” Genocide and memoride are thus two sides of the same colonial coin.
From Israel’s violent material and epistemological foundations, one can see that (mis)education was and continue to be at the heart of its colonial project. So much so that in the first decades of its existence, Israel did not only surveil the commemoration of the Nakba but it also “actively encouraged the so-called ‘Israeili-Arabs to celebrate the Zionist colonisation and destruction of historic Palestine” (p. 8).
With the coerced collaboration of Palestinian teachers, village and religious leaders, and “notables,” Palestinians living in what became in Israel and the occupied territories, including those in refugee camps, were imposed a distorted history, one that would praise those who displaced, tortured, and killed their parents and grandparents. This is certainly an insult to injury, to put it mildly. It is the humiliating experience of having one’s dignity attacked with little means to resist in material terms. Colonized peoples everywhere share this experience, until, that is, when an insurgent struggle breaks free, until an intifada shakes off the material and symbolic world imposed by the colonizer.
From this account, one may wrongfully assume that Israel’s state-sanctioned memoricidal project was successful. Paradoxically, the Nakba remains the central ‘site of memory’ (Pierre Nora, as cited by Masalha, p. 3) and dispossession, a historical trauma that is ever present in the everyday experience of Palestinians living in the diaspora or under zionist settler colonial occupation. It is commemorated collectively and thus has shaped Palestinians’ identity, both in political (or insurgent) and cultural terms.
The insurgent political consciousness of Palestinians has undoubtedly been forged by this history and recovery of the memories, stories, and radical discourses of those who, despite the Nakba and Israel’s memoricidal project, created their own archives for future generations to uncover. When one refers to the materiality of discourse in academics spaces, Palestine reminds us of the concrete implications of this statement. The Nakba is a watershed moment in Palestinian’s collective memory no matter where they reside. It is precisely the presence of Palestinian history, identity, knowledge, and resistance that shapes Israel’s genocide and memoricide/scholasticide in Gaza since 2023 (and certainly before then). It is the sumud or steadfastness of Palestinians that, no matter how systematic past efforts were to kill their collective memory and thus the possibility of resisting in the present, Israel failed miserably. It is this failure that shapes Israel’s genocidal actions in the present to achieve what previous zionists could not, that is, permanently erase Palestine and Palestinians.
Not only did Palestinians reject zionism’s ideological apparatus, they also reclaimed and reconstituted their history, collective memory, and knowledge system under occupation or in the diaspora. Palestine, then, creates an insurgent decolonial paradigm to see the world not only from the perspective of colonialism’s victims but also from a radical position to think and do otherwise even under the most violent conditions. Ultimately, it unsettles the dual paradigm of material destruction and epistemological imposition. It is this insurgent decolonial project, aspiration, self-determination, and collective resistance, including armed resistance, that Israel now seeks to destroy, particularly in Gaza but also anywhere this insurgent decolonial paradigm informs collective action. Hence the genocidal onslaught in Gaza, as well as scholasticide.
1 Memoricide, according to Nur Masalha, “is a systematic erasure of the expelled Palestinians and their mini holocaust from Israeli collective memory and the excision of their history and deeply rooted heritage in the land, and their destroyed villages in town for Israeli official and popular history” (p. 10). The recovery of stolen archives, the reclaiming of Palestinian history, and the search for oral histories of those who survived the Nakba. As Masalha argues, the recovery and articulation of narratives and discourses constitute the protracted anti-colonial struggle of the Palestinian people. Insurgent discourses and narratives simultaneously inform and are nourished by popular uprisings.