“It felt like a computer game,” one Israeli soldier told +972 Magazine just a few months back about his experience working in an operations room. “Every once in a while, a building comes down … and the feeling is, ‘Wow, how crazy, what fun.’”
When the power to kill thousands lies at the push of a button, who gets to decide who is disposable? It’s a blatant illustration of what the Cameroonian political theorist Achille Mbembe called necropolitics — literally, the politics of death.
As Mbembe argues, governments and ruling authorities’ sovereignty is rooted in their power to dictate who lives and who dies, to manage populations by creating the conditions of life and death. In its occupation of Palestine and its genocide of Gaza, the apartheid state of Israel has very consciously made these decisions for the last 11 months, and indeed over the last 76 years.
We often look at genocidal states as abstractions, inaccessible and detached from our reality: These power structures exist at the center, both literally and figuratively, and the people affected sit at the social, cultural and geographical margins. While this system that builds and pushes the button may seem abstract, it comprises real people and real decisions about which lives are dispensable and which group’s death is profitable.
These decisions are deep rooted in a fantasy of violence, white supremacy and capitalist systems. Just look at any first-person narratives from Israeli soldiers or at the recent blow-up at southern Israel’s Sde Teiman detention facility.
Guards that had been arrested for gangraping a Palestinian prisoner — attacking him so brutally that even Israeli authorities felt they must be punished — were released following mass public outcry, as mobs demonstrated with slogans that justified the brutal rape against what they saw as a sub-human creature. The guards were canonized by some mainstream Israeli media and politicians as saviors of the democracy; Israel’s national security minister Itamar Ben-Gvir, who is responsible for the prison service, said it was “shameful” for Israel to arrest “our best heroes.”
Rape is neither incidental nor a private act. It regularly serves a strategic function in war and acts as an essential tool for achieving premeditated military goals. The colonial state has a violent preoccupation with the bodies of indigenous people: Palestinians in Gaza know well how rape is weaponized as a power play, as do Kashmiri women in Indian-occupied Kashmir and Native women in the Americas. From the time of Serbian “rape camps” in Bosnia to Russian soldiers’ use of rape in Ukraine, politically-sanctioned sexual violence has always been a deliberate necropolitical act and tactic of war.
Achille Mbembe’s 2003 essay on necropolitics and his 2016 book Politiques de l’inimitié describe the formation of “death worlds”: spaces of social existence in which thousands are subjugated to conditions of life that confer upon them the “status of living-dead.” We can understand this concept through three examples that take us inside Israel’s death worlds — and remind us of the conditions of suffering manufactured by our own states closer to home.
Large-scale death
Palestinians today live and die in an open-air prison, subjected to conditions of death every single day. Nearly all of the 36 health care systems in the Gaza Strip have been besieged or destroyed. The remaining health system cannot take on the burden of care that this genocide is creating. This destruction is not incidental, but part of a war strategy to strategically deny wounded and disabled Palestinians life-saving care.
Death worlds aren’t limited to the destruction, but also the repeated imagery of violence and death that the colonized begin to see as their inevitable fate. Just a few weeks back, Palestinians in Gaza trying to identify their 6-year-old children were handed 11-kilogram bags of severed parts gathered from the rubble.
This imagery of despair is created by the state of Israel to control the masses. Necropolitics extends to mental and psychological oppression and occupation.
Confinement and control
For Israel and its allies, certain people can be reduced to campsites and refugee tents as a way to control and govern “unwanted populations.” The blockade of the Gaza Strip and the constant displacement of Palestinians over the last 11 months to alleged safe zones is one such example of this “management.” People are forcibly displaced, then bombed.
The resurgence of the polio virus is directly related to this confinement. Since Oct. 7, over 70% of the water and sanitation facilities in Gaza have been damaged, with the U.N. estimating 340,000 tons of solid waste to have accumulated near populated areas. With Israeli soldiers receiving booster shots to protect them against the polio virus back in July, and Palestinian children under 10 only now receiving the first vaccine dose in an emergency mass inoculation campaign, the message is clear: This is a health crisis anticipated by Israeli forces.
This isn’t the first time health of the oppressed has been a variable at play in the larger, global necropolitical structure. You don’t have to look beyond the last four years of the COVID-19 pandemic to identify which strategically underserved groups were disproportionately affected by the pandemic, which communities were the last priority for vaccination drives and who was eventually prioritized. Disenfranchisement is a policy choice, one made at the expense of oppressed people.
Economies of death
Language plays an important role in the way we view market value. What is the distinction between killing someone and letting them die?
Humanitarian crises are produced by an economic system that “lets people die” in service of the market. Necro-economics works along this very idea — that people simply die of famine, poverty, illness and war, rather than actively being killed by capitalism’s primary death function.
Over 2 million Palestinians crammed into the occupied territories, with a system of apartheid controlled by the colonial state, results in a necro-economy. See the harrowing images and stories of the manufactured famine in Gaza, putting people with disabilities, children, the chronically ill and elderly at chronic risk of malnutrition and death. What few food items that are available are obscenely and prohibitively expensive. A dozen eggs cost $73.80 USD, per numbers recently made available by the Gaza Freedom Flotilla.
The necro-economy works at the expense of oppressed people. If you feel this to be a reality far detached from yours, I ask you to look at the prison industrial complex in your country. Which racial, ethnic, linguistic or caste minority fills up the prison cells? Who calls for free prison labor? Which private conglomerates have been able to line their pockets because certain systems created policies that legalize slavery?
Moving beyond despair
A look inside these death worlds alone can create despair enough to become complicit. The imperial state capitalizes upon the bystander’s attention economy. It waits for the genocide to exit the news cycle, oversaturated dead babies on screens slowly desensitise you to violence and real lives become bleak statistics.
In such a time, a ceasefire seems to be the only solution which we can hold onto and pray for. But we must realize that a ceasefire is barely the tip of the iceberg, as are arms embargoes, sanctions and other economic and diplomatic tools. Palestinians who have escaped death and have been forcibly displaced multiple times are now facing not just airstrikes and overhead snipers, but infectious diseases and contagions — destined to face a certain slow death due to a non-existent health system that simply cannot provide care at the pace that the wounded and disabled require it.
So what do we do? As we fight for these policy changes, we can work toward resisting this necropolitical paradigm in our states, moving beyond allyship to embrace the broader movement of abolition. A radical thought, to be sure. But abolition asks us to first notice the state’s control over our bodies and the loss of our autonomy — and then rethink what it means to exist in systems built on white supremacy, capitalism, and the military-industrial and prison-industrial complex. By engaging in the broader abolition movement, we can begin to identity and resist the necropolitics at play in our communities.
While pushing for boycotts, sanctions and divestments through the Palestinian-led BDS movement is a critical strategy we should work to advance, it is equally necessary to draw connections locally and realize that no one is free until we are all free. As we approach one year since Israel’s current genocidal campaign in Gaza, we must not let this genocide fall out of the news cycle as the world inevitably moves to yet another manufactured crisis.
