Opinion: The mutilation of Palestine has been a strategy of Israel since its inception
"Mutilation" means to severely cut off one part of the body from the rest, to disintegrate a part from the whole, but also to leave a mark of violence on the whole, where every look at the mutilated body invokes the memory of violence and inspires terror.
Mutilation also impacts the perception or purpose of the body: if a book has been cut through using scissors, it remains a book, and yet it cannot be read in the same way prior to mutilation. Perhaps the intention of mutilating a book is precisely so that it cannot be read.
The history of mutilation, therefore, is the history of suffering and the experience of violence that intends to change the existence of the object/subject.
Israel is an ethnonational state, or what I call a carceralopolis, which privileges the Jewish citizens of the state based on fictive ethnic roots, and grants them extraordinary carceral control over native Palestinians.
Such a state racially oppresses a subordinate group through invisibilisation, spatial stigmatisation, and what the German filmmaker Hito Steyerl described as the "design of killing", an extensive and planned amalgamation of military and technological force, perversion of law, and population transfer.
Since October 2023, the military assault against Gaza and its inhabitants has revealed another strategy that the Zionists have long had: the mutilation of Palestine, which dates back to the early 20th century.
Read more: The mutilation of Palestine has been a strategy of Israel since its inception by Aarushi Punia
