One component of the definition of genocide is the “physical destruction in whole or in part” of the targeted group of people; and in Gaza, a central category is precisely that of physical destruction. Already in the first two months, Gaza was subjected to utter and complete destruction. Already before the end of December, the Wall Street Journal reported that the destruction of Gaza equalled or surpassed that of Dresden and other German cities during the Second World War.
One of the bravest voices outside of Palestine is Francesca Albanese, the UN special rapporteur on the territories occupied in 1967. She begins her recent report with the observation that “after five months of military operations, Israel has destroyed Gaza,” before going on to detail the “complete destruction of life-sustaining infrastructure.” The emblematic image is that of a house smashed into pieces and survivors frantically digging through the rubble. If they are lucky, a boy or a girl all covered in dust might be pulled from the mass of debris. The estimate now is that some 12,000 dead bodies remain to be extracted from the pulverized houses of Gaza (this figure was later revised to around 10,000).
While it has never before approached the scale we are now seeing, this is not exactly the first time the Palestinians have experienced this sort of thing. The script can be found in the 1948 Plan Dalet, where Zionist forces were instructed in the art of “destroying villages (by setting fire to them, by blowing them up and by planting mines in their rubble).” During the Nakba, it was commonplace for these forces to invade a village during the night and systematically dynamite one house after another with families still inside them. A peculiarity of the Palestinian experience is that this has never come to an end.
The original act of destroying the houses over the heads of their inhabitants is repeated again and again: in the village of al-Majdal in 1950, from which the people were driven into Gaza; in Gaza in 2024; and, in between, through any number of eternal recurrences. To pick just one: Beirut in 1982, described by Liyana Badr in A Balcony over the Fakihani, with words that could fit any other occasion:
I saw piles of concrete, stones, torn clothes scattered about, shattered glass, little pieces of cotton wool, fragments of metal, buildings destroyed or leaning crazily [. . .] White dust smothered the district, and through the gray of the smoke loomed the gutted shells of blocks and the debris of houses razed to the earth [. . .] Everything there was mixed up together. Cars were upside down, papers whirling in the sky. Fire. And smoke. The end of the world.
This is the end of the world that never ends: fresh rubble is always poured over the Palestinians. Destruction is the constitutive experience of Palestinian life because the essence of the Zionist project is the destruction of Palestine.
If the Amazon were to lose its forest cover—a dizzying thought, but entirely within the realm of a possible near future—it would be a different kind of Nakba.
This time, unlike in 1948 or 1950, however, the destruction of Palestine is playing out against the backdrop of a different but related process of destruction: namely, that of the planet’s climate system. Climate breakdown is the process of ecosystems being physically destroyed, from the Arctic to Australia.
In our book The Long Heat: Climate Politics When It’s Too Late, forthcoming from Verso in 2025, Wim Carton and I discuss, in some detail, how rapidly this process is now unfolding. To take but one example, the Amazon is caught up in a spiral of dieback that might end with it becoming a treeless savanna. The Amazon rainforest has been standing for 65 million years. Now, in the span of a few short decades, global warming—together with deforestation, the original form of ecological destruction—is pushing the Amazon towards the tipping point beyond which it will cease to exist. Indeed, much recent research suggests that it is perched on that point at present.
If the Amazon were to lose its forest cover—a dizzying thought, but entirely within the realm of a possible near future—it would be a different kind of Nakba. The immediate victims would, of course, be the indigenous and Afro-descendent and other people of the Amazon, some 40 million in all, who would, in the most likely scenario, see fires rip through their forest and turn it into smoke and so live through the end of a world.
Sometimes, this process takes on a remarkable morphological similarity to the events in Gaza, even in geographical proximity. On the night of September 11 last year, less than a month before the start of the genocide, Storm Daniel hit Libya. In the eastern city of Derna, on the shores of the Mediterranean, about 1,000 km from Gaza, people were killed in their sleep. Suddenly a force from the sky destroyed their homes on top of them.
Afterwards, reports described how random furniture and body parts poked up through pulverized buildings. “Corpses still litter the street, and drinkable water is in short supply. The storm has killed whole families.” According to one native of the town, it was “a catastrophe unlike anything we have ever seen. The residents are searching for the bodies of their loved ones by digging with their hands and simple agricultural tools.” There were Palestinian first responders rushing to the scene; according to one of them:
The devastation is beyond all imagination [. . .] You walk through the city and see nothing but mud, silt and demolished houses. The smell of corpses is everywhere [. . .] Entire families have been erased from the civil registry [. . .] You see death everywhere.
During its twenty-four-hour visit, Storm Daniel dropped a load of water, around seventy times the average rainfall for September. Derna was located at the mouth of a river running through a wadi towards the sea, normally within narrow banks, if indeed it ran at all. This was desert country. But now suddenly the river rose, burst through two dams and crashed into Derna, the water, sediment, debris forming a bulldozer that ripped and roared through the city in the middle of the night of September 11—a force of such speed and violence as to drive structures and streets into the Mediterranean and turn the former town centre into a brownish muddy bog.
Using today’s refined methodologies of weather attribution, researchers could quickly conclude that the floods had been made fifty times more likely by global warming—mathematical code for the cause of the disaster. Only this warming could have brought about that event. During the preceding summer months, the waters off North Africa had been no less than five and a half degrees warmer than the average from the previous two decades. And warm water holds heat energy that can get packed into a storm like fuel into a missile. Some 11,300 people were killed in one single night by Storm Daniel in Libya—the most intense event of mass killing by climate change so far in the decade, possibly the century.
“If you’re doing something that hurts somebody, and you know it, you’re doing it on purpose.”
These scenes formed a striking prefiguration of those that would begin to play out in Gaza twenty-six days later; but there were also direct connections between the places. Because rescue teams in Gaza have long been used to dealing with this kind of destruction, they moved swiftly into Derna to help out. At least a dozen Palestinians who had fled from Gaza to Derna were killed in the floods. One Palestinian, Fayez Abu Amra, told Reuters, “Two catastrophes took place, the catastrophe of the displacement and the storm in Libya”—the Arabic word for catastrophe here, of course, being Nakba.
So, according to Fayez Abu Amra, the first Nakba was the one of 1948, which drove his family and 800,000 other Palestinians out of their homeland; his family ended up in Mukhayyam Deir al-Balah, a refugee camp, and then some members moved on to get away from the Israeli wars of aggression, to the town of Derna; and then came a second Nakba. Fayez Abu Amra lost several relatives in the storm. He himself survived because he had chosen to stay behind in Deir al-Balah, where mourning tents were erected for the victims. And then, just a few weeks later, came the genocide. God knows if Fayez Abu Amra is still alive.
Now, as we recognize the similarities and entanglements of these processes of destruction, some significant differences also strike the eye. The forces that bombed Derna were of another nature than those bombing Gaza. The anonymous sower of death from the sky in the former case was not an air force but the cumulative saturation of the atmosphere with carbon dioxide. No one had the specific intention to destroy Derna, as the state of Israel has had the express intention to destroy Gaza; there were no army spokesmen announcing a focus on “maximum damage,” no Likud MP howling “Bring down buildings!! Bomb without distinction!!’”
When fossil fuel companies extract their goods and put them up for combustion, they do not intend to kill anyone in particular. They know, however, that these commodities will, as a matter of certainty, kill people—it might be people in Libya, or in Congo, or in Bangladesh, or in Peru; it is of no consequence to them.
This is not genocide. In our book Overshoot: How the World Surrendered to Climate Breakdown, now out from Verso, Wim and I toy with the term “paupericide” for what is going on here: the relentless expansion of fossil fuel infrastructure beyond all boundaries for a liveable planet. The initial purpose of the act is not to kill anyone per se. The goal of extracting coal or oil or gas is to make money. Once it becomes fully established that this form of money-making actually kills multitudes, however, the absence of intention begins to fill up.
As a corollary of the basic insights of climate science, the knowledge is now more or less universally spread: fossil fuels kill people, randomly, blindly, indiscriminately, with a heavy concentration on poor people in the Global South; and they kill in greater numbers the longer business as usual continues. When the atmosphere is oversaturated with CO2, the lethality of any additional quantum of CO2 is high and on the rise. Mass casualties are then an ideologically and mentally processed, de facto accepted result of capital accumulation.
“If you’re doing something that hurts somebody, and you know it, you’re doing it on purpose,” prosecutor Steve Schleicher said in his closing argument against Derek Chauvin, later convicted for the murder of George Floyd; mutatis mutandis, the same applies here. Indeed, the violence of fossil fuel production becomes more lethal and more purposeful with every passing year.
Compare this with one bombing in Mukhayyam Jabaliya on October 25, which killed at least 126 civilians, including 69 children. The stated target of this act was a single Hamas commander. Did the occupation intend to also kill the 126 civilians, or was it just callously indifferent to that kind of mass collateral damage? Intentionality and indifference here blur. So, too, on the climate front—still qualitatively different from that of Palestine; but perhaps the difference is diminishing.
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From The Destruction of Palestine is the Destruction of the Earth, by Andreas Malm. Courtesy Verso Books.
