Description
The Israeli military destruction of Gaza’s life-sustaining infrastructure during a livestreamed genocide, ongoing since 2023, extends a decades-long project of settler-colonial displacement originating in the 1948 Nakba and rooted in the British colonization of Palestine. This paper argues that the systematic targeting of schools, universities, hospitals, mosques, agricultural land, including ancient olive groves, water systems, and energy grids is not collateral damage, but a deliberate necropolitical strategy of erasure. Justified by a doctrine of divine promise and a political claim from the 1917 Balfour Declaration, this strategy aims to dismantle the past, present, and future of Indigenous Palestinian life, envisioning a modern riviera in its place. Through the lens of Gaza’s annihilation, the study interrogates how this ecocide embodies a post-liberal era where Western commitments to human rights and international law are weaponized to enable racial-settler colonial elimination. Drawing on UN documents, international law treaties, historical archives, and globally broadcast Palestinian testimonies, the analysis deconstructs how the dismantling of life is justified through a liberal grammar of "conflict" and "self-defense," semantically evading the reality of a live-streamed genocide. The uprooting of olive trees and bombing of cultural archives constitute an epistemicide, destroying social reproduction and collective memory. Engaging TWAIL criticism, this paper frames Gaza as a historical fulcrum. It examines the Global South’s mobilization, from South Africa’s ICJ case to BDS campaigns, as a nascent counter-order that exposes a fracture between Western publics and their governments, and within Arab and Muslim states normalized through agreements like the Abraham Accords. The paper contests whether the systematic ecocide in Gaza signals liberalism’s terminal crisis or its adaptation to preserve imperial sovereignty. By centering the destruction of the life-sustaining environment, this research contributes to critical debates on the decline of Western moral authority and the link between reparative environmental justice and decolonial liberation.
