Palestine and Political Holocaust: From Material Extermination to Political Cancellation

Despite the reference implied by the term "Holocaust," accompanied by its definition related to the context of the extermination suffered by Jews at the hands of Nazism in collusion with fascism, its invocation in the current political field, following the events of October 7, 2023, does not come outside its original historical context. It is not meant to establish comparisons, nor is it about appropriation or skepticism, for the Holocaust, as the pinnacle of organized violence and deliberate extermination, remains a tragic and decisive event aimed at transforming the human being into a displaceable number. What concerns us here is the logic that has politically framed the event until today, not the event as a past history.

However, the most dangerous consequence of the "Holocaust" back then was the serious attempt to void the victims' issue of its political meaning, that is, to transform the Jewish person into an undesirable being, who must be pushed outside of public action and outside the right to express themselves. Here, the term precisely moves from the realm of memory to invoke directly the second decade of the third millennium, where patterns of systematic extermination have been repeated and continue to do so, aimed at excluding the Palestinian actor from geography and history, in addition to denying their rights and suffering.

From this entry point, "political holocaust" is not invoked as a historical event but rather as a logic that has functioned and continues to function by framing a certain pattern of managing conflicts through savagery. The aim is not only for the victim to be physically exterminated but also to be cancelled both physically and existentially, a cancellation that replaces the question of justice with the question of aid, the question of liberation with the question of stability, and the question of sovereignty with the logic of administration.

The political holocaust, in this sense, does not deny the crime, nor does it obscure the victim, nor does it erase the actor, but it shifts the conflict from its political square to its humanitarian issue, where the former is besieged and the latter is drained. Thus, the question of recognition is replaced with the question of definition, and instead of the essential question: Does the world recognize the Palestinian right? The question becomes: Which Palestine are we talking about? The Palestine of national rights, or the Palestine managed under humanitarian banners? The Palestine of the people? Or the Palestine of the land? The latter, which the occupier wants as land without a people.

In times of extermination, this path becomes clear. While all Palestinian lands, not just Gaza, are subjected to physical extermination, the process is complemented by a parallel political extermination, in which the issue is fragmented into separate humanitarian and geographical files; one humanitarian file, another security-related, economically strategic, and a tactical process of negotiation; all of this without any unifying sovereign link, as if solutions have come to complete a long path that reached its peak with Donald Trump's first administration, which proposed what was then known as the "Deal of the Century." This was not just a plan to liquidate the Palestinian issue that was crowned with political failure, as we might have believed, but rather a structural success to lay the foundations for changing the rules of the conflict. For the "Deal" did not seek to solve the conflict politically, but to dismantle it temporarily by deepening the separation of geography from politics, transforming national rights into economic projects, and replacing the idea of the state with the logic of "improving living conditions." Thus, it did not fail, nor did it remove the Palestinian issue from political history, but rather prepared the geopolitical environment to adapt to its subsequent transformations.

And because major issues are not usually exterminated solely through military power, alternative visions are proposed in a more dangerous manner, especially when these major issues are drained of their political meaning, to be redefined outside of their historical context as a humanitarian tragedy that can be managed, rather than as a national liberation issue that demands political solutions. This has driven the Zionist-American political mind to attempt to provide an international cover that could involve it under the pressure of the war of extermination.

In this context, Trump's plan was, from its very first moment, not a peace project in the traditional sense, nor even an unjust settlement in the classical sense; it did not pose the question of the state, nor the question of sovereignty, nor even the occupation, but it was the other face of the "Deal of the Century" aimed at redefining the conflict. In this sense, the deal was a premature training for the plan that the international system got embroiled in, perhaps unintentionally, under humanitarian slogans that pushed it to focus almost exclusively on the humanitarian aspect, detached from the structural context, as if its requirement was to prevent the region from collapsing due to Palestine, not to rescue its people. This means that legitimacy here was not invested to produce a political path but was used to control the explosion and prevent its regional expansion.

Ultimately, one cannot understand what is happening in Palestine today as merely a moment of violence or an excess of military force, but rather as a complex path that combines material extermination and attempts at political cancellation, between killing the body and disabling meaning. Here exactly, "political holocaust" becomes a description not intended for historical comparison but rather for revealing the logic, the logic of saving the human being while disabling their issue, and protecting life while draining it of its right to sovereignty and representation, condensing the paradox carried by the title: Palestine and political holocaust, between an expanding recognition and a closing reality; between a world that calls it a state and a land managed as if it were a surplus of politics and need.