Theory Brief #16: Ontocide: The Despair of Gaza

Ontocide destroys the will to care about things in the world. Together with politicide and genocide, it forms the “dark triad of occupation”: destroy the state, the people, and meaning as such.

Gaza is being decimated. There are reports of polio virus found in Gaza’s sewage by the World Health Organization (WHO). Mountains of garbage are piling up as basic services have collapsed. The UN reports that clearing 40 million tons of rubble may take 15 years, with housing stock not rebuilt until 2040 at an estimated cost of $40 billion. And as of July 2024, some 39,000 Palestinians have been killed in Gaza. The real body count may prove much higher, given the significant destruction of civil infrastructure by Israel’s armed forces, making recovering and registering fatalities difficult, with thousands likely buried beneath the rubble of the bombed-out enclave.

That the War on Gaza may one day be classified as genocidal by the International Criminal Court (ICC) seems increasingly likely as international legal institutions dare to condemn Israel’s government. Recently, the International Court of Justice (ICJ), the UN’s top court, determined that Israel’s “continued presence in the Occupied Palestinian Territory” was “illegal” and should end as “rapidly as possible” (even as the Court limited their scope to East Jerusalem and the West Bank). In May 2024, the ICC prosecutor applied for arrest warrants against Hamas’s leadership as well as Benjamin Netanyahu and Yoav Gallant.

The Israeli sociologist Baruch Kimmerling has described Israel’s policies as a form of politicide, involving the “gradual but systematic attempt to cause Palestinians’ annihilation as an independent social, political and economic entity.” If politicide involves the denial of statehood and/or destruction of the basic trappings of an autonomous polity (including, as Max Weber pointed out long ago, the right to collect taxes which serves as the fiscal basis of the state), then genocide is the deathly acceleration and lethal concentration of a state’s firepower against the Other, the maturation of a still-nascent germ at the core of politicide.

Less commented upon than the “polity-destroying” (politicidal) or “people-destroying” (genocidal) nature of war and occupation, however, is the Gaza War’s deeply damaging effects on the continued belief in existential meaning and hope. This overwhelming destruction of meaning can be said to constitute what we can call ontocide (from the Greek, ὄντως [ontos] or “being”): Like any besieged, bombed, and starving population, Gazans are not only being killed and displaced in the thousands but are also facing a destruction of belief in the future, of meaning-in-existence, and of certainty that their personhood will advance into the future, under reasonably safe and secure conditions, respectful of their human dignity. Ontocide is the killing of belief in existence as such, the destruction of faith that the world, and the people who live in it, will go on, achieved through the concentrated intensification of multiple, overlapping agonies. Needless to say, ontocide is a terrible crime, because it tends to grind down the survivors—and all genocides in modern history have left survivors to pick up the pieces.

Ontocide is taking place in Gaza. By April 2024, after 200 days of war, some 75,000 tons of explosives had been dropped on Gaza—more than the bombing of Dresden in 1945. The result of this atrocity is pure negativity and despair: As someone has written on the walls of Gaza’s European Hospital: “We don’t care anymore about anything.” And who can blame them? The Israeli human rights organization B’Tselem has collected eyewitness testimonials from Gaza’s population, which vividly demonstrate the deep despair into which the enclave’s civilians have been thrown. One 30-year-old man “recounted how his entire family was killed while sheltering in a Rafah warehouse, after repeatedly being displaced”:

Since then, I’ve been alone in the world. I lost my family. I have no home and no future. I cry every day. I go to sleep alone and wake up lonely and lost…My mother really wanted me to get married. We hoped the war would end and we’d go back to our lives, but they killed my mother, my father and everyone else in my family. They killed everyone…My life is black now. I don’t think I’ll ever get over the trauma.

The Doctors without Borders psychologist Davide Musardo has recorded similarly harrowing eyewitness accounts from the ground:

Children maimed, with burns or without parents. Children having panic attacks, because physical pain triggers psychological wounds when pain reminds you of the bomb that changed your life forever. […] ‘I haven’t had a glass of fresh water for months. What kind of life is this?’ another patient asked me…I have seen people break down when receiving news of another evacuation order. Some people have changed places as many as 12 times in eight months. ‘I won’t move my tent anymore, I might as well die,’ I have heard people say. […] In Gaza, one survives but the exposure to trauma is constant. Everything is missing, even the idea of a future. For people, the greatest anguish is not today – the bombs, the fighting and the mourning – but the aftermath. There is little confidence about peace and reconstruction, while the children I saw in the hospital showed clear signs of regression.

To repeat: “Everything is missing, even the idea of future.”

Despair is a weapon of war, and ontocide is a tool for destroying hope and meaning, instilling existential emptiness in the Other.

Are not Gazans today slowly being turned into a kind of “living dead,” husks of humanity for whom little remains but bleak despair, with those fortunate enough to survive the 500-, 1000- or 2000-pound bombs, mostly supplied by the United States, left to attempt to reconstitute fragments of meaning in a totally abyssal, meaningless world? For these seemingly lucky ones, trauma is too weak a word; for them it is as if the world itself has ended.

For the survivors of genocide, the problem of existential meaning can prove intractable. Adorno famously wrote that “to write poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric.” Finding or reclaiming meaning after the destruction of meaning—the subjective experience of ontocide—is among the primary difficulties facing survivors. There can be great cruelty in having survived the guns and bombs—only to find that nothing matters, that “we don’t care anymore about anything,” as the anonymous graffiti in the Gazan hospital writer phrased it. Speaking to B’Tselem in February, a 45-year-old Palestinian mother of nine said: “We’re exhausted. We’re broken and have no strength left…I don't know where else we can run. We’ve been displaced four times. I don’t know what fate awaits us.”

When 24-year-old Muhammed Bhar, a Gaza resident with Down’s syndrome, was bitten by an Israeli army dog during a military raid on his family’s apartment, according to a BBC report, and found two weeks later, dead and on the floor by his displaced family, the question of despair naturally sets in: We find ourselves thrown into an abyssal horror story, that of a totally defenseless, innocent disabled person mauled in the course of a military raid. As his brother Nabila described to the BBC: “This scene I will never forget…I constantly see the dog tearing at him and his hand, and the blood pouring from his hand…It is always in front of my eyes, never leaving me for a moment. We couldn't save him, neither from them nor from the dog.”

Reclaiming existence after existence as such has been shattered is a near-insurmountable task. Think only here of Samuel Beckett’s famously paradoxical phrase: “I can’t go on. I’ll go on.”

Politicide smooths the way to genocide, and genocide naturally pairs with ontocide—its natural consequence for those escaping lethal destruction. The triplet of politicide, genocide, and ontocide might even be said to constitute the dark triad of occupation: destroy the state, destroy the people, destroy meaning as such.

Faced with this “dark triad,” the question confronting the international community is raised poignantly by two volunteer medical doctors returned from the Gaza Strip: “We must decide, once and for all: are we for or against murdering children, doctors and emergency medical personnel? Are we for or against demolishing an entire society?”

To this we can add: Are we for or against the destruction of belief in meaning as such? How can those who must go on, still go on? And what chance for poetry “after Gaza”?