This article examines the logic behind Israel’s actions in Gaza, arguing that it constitutes a case of systematic erasure backed by American imperialism.
Gaza is not just the site of a war but of an administrative logic, a Foucauldian apparatus that structures surveillance, confinement, and elimination. As Michel Foucault demonstrated, power does not simply repress; it produces subjects, discourses, and truths.
Gaza is not merely a space of violence; it is a stage where a biopolitical logic is on display, one that organizes life by exposing it to death. It is not just a bombarded territory; it is a governed carceral space where every breath is regulated.
This is not an accidental cruelty but a systematic reduction of existence to its most vulnerable form: a life stripped of rights, political meaning, delivered to a sovereignty that decides who may live and who must die.
The Zionist machine is not aiming to defeat an army; it seeks to erase the very idea of a Palestinian future.
The Psychology of Erasure
Frantz Fanon understood that colonial violence does not simply suppress; it distorts. It does not only kills, it reconfigures subjectivity itself.
Gaza is the ultimate realization of this logic. Its destruction is not only material but psychological, designed to break the will, to render resistance unthinkable.
In The Wretched of the Earth, Fanon describes the colonized as trapped in a structure that denies their humanity, until even their reflection becomes that of a specter.
The Banality of Evil
In besieged Gaza, extermination is not limited to bombs: it is embodied in a system that regulates the most basic conditions of existence. Water, food, electricity, medical care become tools of control.
The occupation does not just destroy; it creates a discourse where Palestinian suffering is understood only as collateral damage. Palestinian death is no longer an event but a given, an expected, normalized fact. This is what Hannah Arendt called “the banality of evil.”
However, here, this banality is neither gray nor bureaucratic; it is staged, broadcast live, legitimized by institutions that claim to defend human rights. It does not aim merely to kill but to erode the very capacity to endure: as a people, as a memory, as a narrative.
If The Human Species by Robert Antelme evoked a humanity in decomposition, Gaza today embodies a humanity to whom even the right to disappear with a cry, a lament, is denied. Gaza is suspended in an in-between—neither quite alive nor quite dead—a collective body trapped in a war machine whose goal is not only destruction but erasure.
Echoes of Historical Genocide
This logic of gradual annihilation is neither new nor isolated. Léon Poliakov, in his History of Anti-Semitism, showed how centuries of dehumanization culminated in the industrialized violence of the Holocaust.
Today, a similar ideological machine grinds down the Palestinian people. Raz Segal, an Israeli historian and genocide specialist at Stockton University, calls what is happening in Gaza a “textbook case of genocide.”
Omer Bartov, a professor of Holocaust and genocide studies at Brown University, shares this assessment, as does Barry Trachtenberg of Wake Forest University.
Norman Finkelstein, known for his harsh critiques, has long described the treatment of Gaza as a state-organized atrocity.
The Weaponization of Language
The language of security and self-defense, repeatedly invoked by Israel and its Western allies, serves the same function as the justifications for past genocides. Palestinians are rendered disposable, their suffering excused by the imperatives of conquest.
Edward Said exposed this imperial grammar in Orientalism, showing how the West forges a language that renders the colonized invisible, incapable of speaking for themselves. This machinery functions fully in Gaza: Israel does not massacre families there; it “eliminates threats.” It does not bomb hospitals; it “neutralizes enemy infrastructure.”
The language itself becomes a weapon of war, making atrocity acceptable to the Western world. Said would have seen in Gaza the culmination of this ideological violence, where words no longer describe reality but annihilate it.
This discursive machine does not merely justify war; it transforms atrocity into management, ethical concern into logistical necessity. In doing so, it strips Palestinians not only of protection but of recognition.
They are no longer mournable lives, but shadows placed outside the realm of morality. The crime lies not only in the act but in the fact that it has become expected, absorbed, and rationalized.
Empire and Complicity
But Zionism does not operate alone. It is bound, by blood and fire, to American imperialism, which provides not only the weapons but the moral alibi: the certainty that every atrocity will be justified, every corpse rationalized.
The massacre of Gaza is an American massacre, carried out by agents bolstered by billions in military aid, protected by a political culture where unconditional support for Israel is a dogma.
The United States does not merely assist; it orchestrates, it enables, it covers. Their silence is not indifference; it is complicity.
Technology and the Machinery of Death
The control system extends beyond physical brutality; it now includes the use of artificial intelligence to target Palestinians, manipulating algorithms to make life and death decisions mechanical and anonymous. Technological tools, meant to embody modernity and science, become instruments of systematic destruction.
By their relentless use, they do not just rationalize extermination, but perfect it, making barbarism even colder. This illusion of civility, reinforced by scientific and technological dominance, masks an increasingly refined savagery, where the powerful, although convinced of their superiority, embody a form of technologically sophisticated barbarism.
This contrast, this contradiction between the supposed civilization and the reality of their violence, is what makes the crime so atrocious in the eyes of the world.
The Bloody Meridian of Empire
Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian offers a grim parable of this savagery. The Glanton gang, traversing the frontier in a frenzy of racial extermination, kills not out of necessity but by pure logic of massacre, convinced that existence is a war of all against all where only the cruelest deserve to survive.
The Zionist project, nourished in the belly of the American empire, embodies this ethos. It is not about security, nor even survival; it is about domination, the assertion of power through the annihilation of the other.
The people of Gaza are not an obstacle; they are proof of an unfinished conquest, a reminder that the land still speaks its own name. Their existence is intolerable because it testifies to the limits of this dreamed omnipotence.
Theological Drive of Violence
But Zionism does not only embody the nihilism of McCarthy’s Judge Holden; it also inherits the blind fury of Ahab in Moby Dick. Like Ahab, Israel is possessed by an all-consuming obsession, unable to see beyond its need for destruction.
Its violence is not strategic; it is theological, metaphysical, existential. The whale must die, even if it sinks the ship.
Every Palestinian home reduced to dust, every child buried under rubble, every life erased is a harpoon thrown against a people who refuse to disappear. This is not a war; it is an exorcism, an attempt to purge history of the specter of Palestine.
– Mohamed El Mokhtar Sidi Haiba is a social and political analyst, whose research interest is focused on African and Middle Eastern Affairs. He contributed this article to The Palestine Chronicle.
Superb. Heart breaking but superb. May the ship sinks before the whale dies.
That reference to “the blind fury of Ahab in Moby Dick” is very apt and describes it perfectly. It’s exactly how Israel is behaving in the Pogrom on Gazans. In the end, the white whale sinks the Pequod, and Captain Ahab drowns with the rest of his crew.