My most recent column was headlined “Genocide in Gaza? Why it is increasingly difficult to deny.” I was planning to explore the topic in greater depth this time, as the horrors of starvation in the Gaza Strip continued to mount and intensify, but a part of my brain kept telling me that, even if that dire accusation were merited, it was not the whole story. For now, we have a ceasefire, and welcome as that is, it doesn’t erase how Israel has waged this war. Genocide describes the destruction of a group, but there was, I thought, another also unsavory dimension to the conflict, a purely political one, involving the determination of the Israeli right wing to forestall the creation of a Palestinian state, something the United States and much of the rest of the international community had long supported.
Maybe, I thought, there could be an alternate term for this aspect of the matter. Would nationcide be too awkward, or silly? I typed it into Google Search, expecting no results, but to my surprise the term was shown to be already in existence and could be used to describe the destruction—political, economic, cultural—of a nation-state. This made it different from genocide or ethnocide (destruction of a culture). Still, Google noted, it’s not in any dictionaries, and Google tried mightily to autocorrect it to “nationwide.”
The first mention I was able to find in that search came from 1794, when Gracchus Babeuf, a French revolutionary, used the term in his The War of the Vendée and the System of Depopulation. In August 2024, American Political Science Review published an article about how, after the defeat in 1867 of their French occupiers foisted on them by Napoleon III, Mexican republican liberals accused the European powers of attempted nationcide (nacioncidio) of their country. In 2019, Julien Philippe, a French IT technician—self-described as “into geopolitics, ex-Yu Balkan & linguistics” on the question-and-answer website Quora—took credit for inventing the term (spelling it “nationicide”), and posed this question: “If we coin the term ‘Nationicide’ on a parallel with Genocide in order to address the attempted or realized elimination of a Nation instead of a People, how would we properly define a nationicide & what could be [examples] of it…?” And in 2022, Christopher DeMuth, writing for The Wall Street Journal, suggested the word “nationcide” could describe “the extermination of the national civilization a people have built—customs, traditions, civil associations and practices of self-government.”
The United Nations, in its Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide, defined the crime as: “Acts committed with the intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnic, racial, or religious group, as such.” In his Quora discourse, Julien Philippe suggested the following phraseology for a similar, hypothetical Convention on the Crime of Nationicide: “acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national entity as such.”
Here, it might be objected that the Palestinian people do not constitute, and have never constituted, an actual national entity, and therefore a charge of nationcide against Israel would be moot. I have a twofold rejoinder to this claim. First, the Palestinians have long experience in governing themselves at the local level, for centuries under the Ottoman Empire and then under the British from the end of World War I to the creation of Israel in 1948. That the Palestinians developed a strong sense of nationalism after the large influx of Jewish people into what had been their lands for centuries was amply demonstrated by their ferocious uprising against British rule in 1936 (Britain had committed to supporting a Jewish state in Palestine in the Balfour Declaration of 1917).
Second, there is now widespread international recognition of the existence of a Palestinian state, as hypothetical as that state might be; 157 out of 193 member states of the United Nations General Assembly, or 81 percent, have recognized a Palestinian state.
The world’s attention has focused on possible genocidal intent on the part of the Israeli government, including suspecting the deliberate creation of famine in the territory. But there is another dimension to the conflict, involving the future not only of Gaza but of the West Bank. With respect to Gaza, Israel’s continual, implacable bombing of the strip has decimated its infrastructure. Neither Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu nor any other Israeli official has breathed a word about reconstructing the strip, leaving many to speculate that he may have some form of ethnic cleansing in mind for the area (his American doppelgänger Donald Trump has suggested as much).
As far as the West Bank is concerned, it would be the heart of any Palestinian state, and that is where the Palestinian Authority, which has some limited governing control there, is located. It was birthed into existence by the 1993 Oslo Accords and was thought to be a precursor to full-fledged Palestinian self-rule, but Netanyahu now aims to carve up the West Bank in ways that will render a contiguous Palestinian state impossible.
In doing everything in its power to destroy the possibility of ever creating a coherent Palestinian state, Israel stands guilty of the crime of nationcide.
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Nationcide appeared first on New Republic.
