MADRID - One way to analyze the situation in Palestine is through the concept of necropolitics, a term coined by philosopher Achille Mbembe. In a 2003 essay and his 2016 book Politiques de l’inimitié, Mbembe describes the formation of "death worlds"—spaces where thousands of people are subjected to conditions that reduce them to the status of "the living dead."
Necropolitics refers to a form of power that can kill through exceptionally brutal measures imposed on Palestinians and, more recently, on Lebanese people. Beyond the immediate loss of Palestinian lives, Israel's necropolitics operates on a broader timeline, normalizing extermination, expropriation, domination, and exploitation. This slow death manifests through induced starvation, the systematic destruction of Gaza's healthcare system, and the imposition of premature deaths. In addition, even worse conditions than death, such as brutal torture, exacerbate the suffering of Palestinians.
This creates a state of constant anticipation of death—what has been described as "worse than death" conditions. The colonized individual lives in expectation of degradation, humiliation, and murder. In this framework, the colonized subject is defined as a "living dead," stripped of sovereignty over their own body and life, as Mbembe explains. Their existence is akin to living in a torture chamber, where life itself feels worse than death. Similarly, to be colonized is to live in constant fear that one's body could be violated or seized by the colonizer.
This politics of death is not only directed at the living Palestinians (and now, Lebanese), but also extends to the deceased, who are denied the right to die as humans due to a prior dehumanization. Countless reports describe how Palestinian dead are hastily buried without proper funeral rites, often in mass graves. Even the buried are not spared, as Israeli forces have destroyed cemeteries, dug up graves, and confiscated bodies. Similar incidents have occurred in hospitals, where the bodies of deceased patients have been seized.
Necropolitics dictates who lives and who dies, seeking to manage populations by creating the conditions of life and death. In this context, even the dead are "managed," divided between those considered human enough to die and those denied even a "normal" death. The dehumanization is so extreme that "it is as if withholding death—denying the ability to die or ensuring they do not die—becomes an act of dehumanization in itself: Palestinians are not even considered human enough to die.
Necropolitics, as defined by Achille Mbembe, is rooted in a colonial hierarchy of humanity, distinguishing between those deemed human and those classified as non-human or insufficiently human. In this context, genocides often begin with signs in language. Recent statements from Zionist politicians exemplify this dehumanizing rhetoric: the term "savage" is easily interchangeable with other dehumanizing labels like "subhuman," "cockroaches," "cancerous manifestation," "parasites," or "human animals."
The politics of death, as Mbembe theorized, revolves around the power to decide which populations are entirely disposable. In the case of Zionism, its settler colonialism is built on a fusion of white supremacy (understood as ideology), fantasies of violence, and the capitalist system. This death-driven structure not only seeks to physically eliminate those designated as disposable but also to create a population that lives in a constant state of stress and debilitation. In the Zionist fantasy, this would prevent resistance to oppression. Thus, necropolitics also encompasses mental and psychological occupation.
Another crucial aspect of necropolitics is what experts call the "necro-economy." This means that death and conditions worse than death are not only compatible with the market but are complementary to it. A clear example of this relationship between the creation of death-bound populations and capitalism is the construction of settlements on colonized land, or the often-repeated narrative that Israel "made the desert bloom" to develop an agro-industrial sector for export—built on the occupation, elimination, and oppression of Palestinians.
The death complex that defines necropolitics is perpetuated through the ongoing racialization of populations meant to live under conditions worse than death or face premature death. When discussing "race," this does not refer to phenotypes or biology but to a mechanism for managing human differences. Its primary goal is the production, reproduction, and maintenance of white supremacy, both locally and globally.
Understanding this helps clarify that resistance to Zionist colonial oppression is not merely a fight against physical elimination but also a struggle to reclaim sovereignty over bodies and rehumanization in the face of Zionist brutality, which offers only death. Politically, resisting Zionist necropolitics means imagining an alternative world where the colonized and brutalized can create new ways of being, acting, and living.
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