Laala Bechetoula
31 January 2026
The first projectile was a word
Wars don't begin with tanks, drones, or sirens. They begin with language. Long before the first missile, words had already done their work. They had prepared the moral ground, categorized human beings, redefined categories, and shifted entire peoples from the realm of humanity to that of a problem to be managed. At that precise moment, killing ceased to appear as a transgression. It became a rational necessity.
Gaza is not the product of a sudden lapse or an accidental escalation. It is the culmination of a long process during which the Palestinian was progressively stripped of his status as a political actor, then as a moral subject, before being reduced to a security variable, a burden, a civilizational obstacle. From the colonial formulations of the late 19th century to the most blatant Trumpism, the grammar has remained the same: deny existence, dehumanize presence, sacralize force, and then solicit Western approval in the name of civilization, security, or peace. What has changed is not the logic, but its degree of exposure.
The Colonial Grammar of Erasure
Early Zionist political discourse did not simply describe Palestine. It reinvented it through language. The land was presented as empty or under-exploited, while its indigenous population was relegated to the status of a marginal, backward, or invisible element. This operation was not accidental, because every colonial project requires a foundational linguistic gesture, one that transforms a living society into a technical problem.
Once this threshold is crossed, expulsion becomes administration, domination becomes development, and violence is morphed into planning. Violence never initially appears as cruelty. It presents itself as a program.
This is where the first phase of erasure takes place: not physical elimination, but conceptual degradation. When a people is deprived of the right to be perceived as a historical subject, it becomes available to be treated as mere matter.
1948: When Violence Becomes Procedure
The Nakba of 1948 is often recounted as the tragic consequence of war. Yet, placed within the continuum of the discourses that preceded it, it appears differently. The expulsion had already been conceived, discussed, and justified. The war did not create the outcome; it facilitated its execution.
The issue is not so much one of intentions as it is one of the enduring nature of the political imagination. A people long designated as a “demographic problem” was suddenly treated as a logistical matter. It is here that violence becomes procedure.
One of the major lessons of this trajectory is that modern atrocities do not require hatred. They require preparation. When an outcome has been sufficiently rehearsed and normalized by language, its implementation appears administrative, cold, almost banal.
Occupation as Destiny
After 1967, the occupation ceased to be presented as temporary. It crystallized into destiny. Palestinians are no longer seen as parties to a conflict open to negotiation, but as a permanent security condition requiring indefinite management. The permanent threat justifies permanent measures.
From this point on, moral time is suspended. For one people, history continues—elections, diplomacy, development. For the other, time is frozen in an endless emergency, where the law becomes flexible, rights conditional, and survival negotiable. Injustice no longer needs justification. It becomes routine.
Dehumanizing to Govern
Over the years, the discourse crosses a further threshold. Animal, parasitic, or pathological metaphors cease to be marginal. They permeate institutional language. Their importance lies not in the insult, but in their effectiveness.
Dehumanization reduces the cost of violence, transforms the deaths of civilians into background noise, renders hospitals suspect, and makes children statistically negligible. When a system succeeds in converting victims into categories, suffering no longer disrupts the established order; it reinforces it.
Gaza, a contemporary laboratory of force
Since the early 2000s, Gaza has functioned as a laboratory. Sieges, collective punishment, and disproportionate deterrence are being experimented with there. The lexicon of the “war on terror” provides the ideal camouflage: preemption, disproportion, deterrence.
In the years between 2023 and 2025, the process reaches its full maturity. Innocence is openly denied, famine is reclassified as pressure, displacement becomes a humanitarian necessity, and mass destruction is narrated as legitimate self-defense. Gaza ceases to be a space governed by law; it becomes a space of exception. It is not chaos, but a methodically organized disorder.
Trump: Violence Without Euphemisms
Donald Trump did not create this architecture. He simply stripped it of its euphemisms. When he speaks of taking control or possessing Gaza, he makes explicit what has long been implicit. Gaza is no longer treated as a society under occupation, but as an asset to be redistributed.
The break is qualitative. Violence is no longer justified solely by security. It is reformulated in the language of property and redevelopment. War gives way to real estate. Palestinians are no longer enemies to be defeated, but populations to be displaced, absorbed, or eliminated—variables in a transactional equation.
The “Peace Council”: Administering Without Judging
The “Peace Council” project fits perfectly into this logic. Presented as a stabilization mechanism, it nevertheless detaches itself from international law, universal responsibility, and the consent of those most directly affected.
Its logic is selective: legitimacy through invitation, authority through proximity to power, peace defined as conformity. This is not a peace founded on justice, but on the management of outcomes. When power abandons the language of law, it adopts that of administration—and calls it order. The Council does not seek to address the crime. It administers its consequences.
Identity, Immunity, and the End of Accountability
When Trump agrees to be publicly designated as “the first Jewish president,” the gesture transcends mere symbolism. It signals a cultural shift: politics is no longer defended by legality or ethics, but by identity alignment.
In this climate, criticism becomes treason, and accountability becomes hostility. The destruction of Gaza is no longer debated as a crime, but absorbed into a ritual of belonging. Thus, extremist policies acquire not legal, but emotional, immunity.
Gaza and the World to Come
What Gaza reveals is not merely the collapse of safeguards, but the emergence of a new governing imagination: a violence that no longer needs to be denied, a suffering that no longer demands resolution, a peace divorced from justice.
The old international order, despite its many hypocrisies, still claimed universality. The new one is openly conditional: rights are earned, protection is selective, law becomes optional. This is not a return to barbarism, but something more disturbing: a civilized administration of cruelty.
Fall
The trajectory is now clear. First words. Then policies. Then weapons. Today, structures. Gaza is not merely destroyed; it is replaced by plans, councils, frameworks, and deals designed to stabilize the outcome rather than confront the crime. The first projectile was a word. The second, a policy. The third is an administration. If this model prevails, Gaza will not remain an exception: it will become a precedent.
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