A Dictionary of Unnameable Violences: From “Aerocide” to “Zygoticide” in Palestine
Introductory Note:
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.
“Genocide,” as legally defined by colonial powers, is confined to a restrictive list of atrocities against humans. Acts of destruction against non-humans, excluded from personhood, are all collapsed together as “ecocide” – not an independent concept or crime under international law.
How telling, that terms like “arboricide” and “herbicide” refer not to the killing of trees and other plants, but to the commercially marketed chemicals sold to eradicate them: not a crime, but a profitable product.
The elimination of words is often described as “Orwellian”; but how much more Orwellian to have never had the words at all?
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.
See below for all the terms in the dictionary or download a PDF version here.
Post Script:
Of course, naming does not guarantee justice – Israel’s impunity extends to acts that have long been named as illegal under international law: torture, annexation, apartheid, genocide – but unnaming enables even the possibility of justice to be perpetually denied. As Israel’s persecution and punishment of Palestinian intellectuals like Nadera Shalhoub-Kevorkian (some of whose terms appear above) demonstrates, the illegibility of coloniality is neither passive nor natural but actively produced. Unnaming thus not only protects violence, but is a form of violence itself.
Azeezah Kanji
Azeezah Kanji (JD, LLM) is a legal academic and journalist, whose work focuses on anti-colonial and anti-racist perspectives on international law, constitutional law, and the "war on terror." Her opinion writing has appeared regularly in Canadian and international media, including Al Jazeera English, Haaretz, Jacobin, and the Toronto Star.
