The Pedagogy of Violence: Netanyahu, the IDF, and the Ongoing Erasure of Palestinians

“Genocide is not just a murderous madness; it is, more deeply, a politics that promises a utopia beyond politics, one people, one land, one truth, the end of difference.” - Michael Ignatieff

“The importance of the term ‘genocide’ for many Indigenous Peoples is that it is more than a term or an accusation; it is a word created in the wake of the Shoah in Europe to describe what happens when a people are targeted by a government for extermination …” - Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz

When the cameras finally turn away, when the hostages return to their families and Palestinian prisoners shuffle back through the shattered glass, twisted iron rebar from blown up buildings, and rubble of former schools, hospitals, universities, and homes and streets obliterated in Gaza, what then? What awaits the Palestinians in Gaza and the occupied West Bank when the world's fleeting attention moves on to the next crisis?

Make no mistake. The nightmare of genocide will not end. The Palestinians will remain targets of genocide. The IDF, operating behind the veil of normalcy, will continue its work. The orders will come quietly, as they always have: shoot to maim, and shoot to kill. Anyone deemed a threat, anyone who steps out of line, anyone who refuses to accept their subhuman reality, they will be made examples of. This is the pedagogy of Israeli government and IDF oppression. The lesson is taught through broken bodies, through psychological torment, through the systematic destruction of economic life, political aspiration, and social cohesion. The occupation does not rest. It merely shifts its methods of the Israeli apartheid and the genocide of the Palestinians.

How does the world reconcile itself with Benjamin Netanyahu's name calling all of the Christian and Muslim Palestinians of Gaza and the West Bank that they are Amalek, that biblical call for total annihilation? How do we move past an Israeli government that openly embraced the language of genocide, that gave its soldiers not just permission but divine sanction to erase a people?

The crimes are not abstract. They are not rhetorical. Crimes against humanity have been committed in broad daylight, documented in real time, broadcast on our phones, computer screens, and televisions. Genocide, yes, let us use the word without flinching, has unfolded while the international community offered little more than hand-wringing and hollow statements of "concern," due to the Trump government and American Congress 100% unconditional support for the Israeli IDF genocide against the Palestinian people. Only the international criminal court and experts on crimes against humanity and genocide have spoke out against the Israeli government and the IDF genocide against the Palestinians.

Netanyahu and his government gave the order. Gaza was to be destroyed. And it was. Nearly all of it reduced to rubble. Homes, hospitals, schools, mosques, churches, the entire infrastructure of life, obliterated. The land itself has been martyred. And to never forget that both PM Benjamin Netanyahu and the President of United States Donald Trump, openly discussed to the world, their idea/plan of ethnic cleansing of the Palestinians of Gaza to other countries such as Egypt and Jordan and the annexation of Gaza by Israel and USA to rebuild it into a Trump casino Mediterranean Paradise.

How do the Palestinians forget this? How does the world? Can there be forgiveness without justice, without accountability, without even the pretense of remorse from PM Benjamin Netanyahu who gave the orders, and the American government and the Congress supplying the IDF military with thousands of bombs and drones to kill innocent lives in Gaza?

These are not rhetorical questions. They are the moral historical reckoning that awaits us, if we have the courage to face it.