THERE ARE NO legal terms or language for many of the forms of violence inflicted by Israel on Palestine. There is no specific word for the mass killing of children, for the mass obliteration of an entire society, for the mass toxification of air or of water, for the mass annihilation of trees.
Here, then, is a compilation of some of these unnameable violences. Together, they reflect the capaciousness and multifariousness of colonial practices of domination: targeting the total web of relations upholding Indigenous life (ex. Environmental Nakba), from before birth (ex. Zygoticide) to after death (ex. Necropenology); erasing the colonized’s history (ex. Memoricide), their present (ex. Journacide), their future (ex. Collective Maiming, Pedocide, Scholasticide); some operating in defiance of the law (ex. Medicide), some through the law (ex. Humanitarian Camouflage, International Legal Subalternity, Organized Irresponsibility, Reverse Reparations), some to rewrite the law (ex. Legal Demoviction).
Many also pertain to settler projects beyond Palestine, from Canada to Kashmir: a reminder that Palestine is not an exception, but an exemplification of the global colonial present and the brutality through which it is sustained.
