Spaciocide

Abstract

Compared to other colonial and ethnic conflicts such as Rwanda-Burundi, Serbia-Bosnia, ect, the 1948 war did not, relatively speaking, produce many casualties. The notion of al-Nakba (the Catastrophe) is based on refugeehood and the loss of land, rather than the loss of life. Even after five years of Intifada, the number of victims is relatively low,¹ certainly if compared to the six week killing rampage in Rwanda which saw some 800,000 people massacred. The Israeli colonial project is not a genocidal project but a “spacio-cidal” one. In every conflict, belligerents define their enemy and shape their mode of action accordingly. In the Palestinian-Israeli conflict, the Israeli target is the place. The Jerusalem Emergency Committee, a working group set up by Jerusalem-based NGOs (nongovernmental organizations) after the April 2002 Israeli invasion of the West Bank, reported on the systematic destruction of public places: all but two Palestinian ministries and 65 NGOs were partially or totally destroyed. What was striking about this wanton destruction was the vandalism. To seize documents and computer hard drives from the Ministry of Education can be “understood” within the framework of a military quest for information that would “prove” that the Palestinian educational system “produced incitement and engendered suicide bombers,” but why did soldiers also have to smash the computer screens and tear apart the furniture?

As of October 2005, the figures are 3,891 Palestinian dead and 29,222 Palestinian injured; 1,074 Israeli dead and 7,520 injured. For Palestinian numbers see Palestinian Central Bureau of Statistics in www.pcbs.org/martyrs/list.aspx; for Israeli numbers see www.idf.il/SIP_STORAGE/DOVER/files/7/21827.doc.