The construction of Palestinian death

Blog post by Revital Madar, European University Institute, Italy

At the time of writing this text, more than 30,000 Palestinians have been killed by the Israeli army in Gaza since Hamas attacked the south of Israel on October 7, 2023. It’s a number that one cannot really grasp. Yet, it is a number that spreads terror. Especially when it indicates that this number includes the killing of more than 12,000 children and that, as terrible as these numbers are, they do not include those who were buried under the rubble and people who died because they didn’t have access to medical care and simple essential nutrition and drinking water. 
 
Yet, according to a poll conducted in the middle of January this year, 51% of Israeli Jews consider the Israeli army to be using an appropriate amount of force in Gaza. Another 43% consider the current attack on Gaza not enough, force-wise. A more recent poll (February 12-15, 2024) found that nearly 70% of Jewish Israelis do not support transferring humanitarian aid to Gaza, even if this aid is transferred by international bodies that are not related to Hamas or UNRWA. 

Are these numbers, which translate into a profound indifference to Palestinian lives among the majority of Israeli Jews, surprising? Yes and no. On the one hand, just as it is hard to grasp 30,000 bodies, it is harder to understand how one can justify the killing of more than 30,000 people. On the other hand, if we put aside the question of numbers, as terrible and horrifying as they may be, and concentrate on the basic, perhaps even individual, value of human life, then Israeli-Jewish apathy to Palestinian lives should not surprise us.

If anything, it should alert us as to how you educate a given society, over nearly eight decades, to consider the killing of Palestinians by Israeli security forces and their civil militias a non-event.  In this state of affairs, in a place in which news items about Palestinians killed by Israeli security forces appear daily in Israeli news outlets long before the current military campaign on Gaza – most of the time without making it into the news cycle – one should not be astonished by Israeli-Jewish indifference to Palestinian lives in the present.
 
As I show in my Identities article, ‘The construction of Palestinian death as an exceptional repetition in Israel’, the state of apathy surrounding Israeli-Jewish society concerning Palestinian lives is so deeply rooted that even in the small number of cases in which Israeli soldiers are tried in civil and military courts for the killing of Palestinians, there is no room for the death of Palestinians in the courtroom. Through the trial, and with the aid of Israeli open-fire regulations that serve as a litmus test for the legality of the killing, the death of the Palestinian victim is stripped of its singular and universal meaning while being treated in isolation from other cases in which encounters between Israeli soldiers and Palestinians ended up with the killing of the latter.

In that sense, there is a double movement: on the one hand, the court does not question why the death of Palestinians in Israel is so compartmentalized; why is it that in too many cases, one Palestinian death in the hands of Israeli security forces is so similar to the deaths of other Palestinians in the hands of these forces’ agents? Nor does the court reflect on why the openness of death, as both a singular and a universal event, is confiscated from too many Palestinians living under Israeli control.

On the other hand, the court’s deliberation over the legality of the killing of a Palestinian by an Israeli soldier, in circumstances that are shared with other Palestinians, does not alert the court to consider the political meaning and context of the Palestinian death it deliberates about. Instead, this death is treated as an exceptional event, deprived of any sense of repetition that should raise questions about technologies of Israeli state criminality.

This process takes place in a courtroom. In a trial that at least formally offers accountability for the killing of a Palestinian victim, Abd al-Fattah Al-Sharif, at the hands of one Israeli soldier. Yet, even there, there is little to no place for Palestinian death. To the extent that the trial analyzed in my article pinpoints the incapacity of colonial settings and settler colonial societies to be accountable for the death of the native. In that respect, the article shows that, in some contexts, processes of legal accountability can replicate the reality leading up to the trial. It can shed light on the reasons leading up to the Israeli-Jews’ apathy for Palestinian lives.

In light of the numbers cited above, the article’s focus on a case that involves one victim (at least legally) and one soldier, in connection with similar cases in which Israeli security forces killed Palestinians, constitutes a different road for exploring what maintains and enables overall Israeli-Jewish apathy for Palestinian lives: from the singular case, from the extrajudicial killings that take the lives of individuals, one by one, towards the societal capacity of Israeli-Jews to stay indifferent even to any Palestinian death tool. Even today when the death toll in Gaza is over 30,000. 

In other words, we cannot and should not be alert only when the numbers become ungraspable. Eventually, the capacity to justify the killing of one Palestinian by one Israeli security agent over nearly eight decades is what enables, in the end, justifying the killing of tens of thousands of Palestinians. 

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Image credit: Photo by Ash Hayes on Unsplash

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Read the Identities article:
Madar, Revital. (2023). The construction of Palestinian death as an exceptional repetition in Israel. Identities: Global Studies in Culture and Power. DOI: 10.1080/1070289X.2023.2259218   OPEN ACCESS

Read further in Identities:

The Palestinian-Israeli market: ‘feels like somewhere else’   OPEN ACCESS

Necropenology: conquering new bodies, psychics, and territories of death in East Jerusalem
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The two deaths of Basem Rishmawi: identity constructions and reconstructions in a Muslim‐Christian Palestinian community