{"id":304212,"date":"2025-10-06T12:00:52","date_gmt":"2025-10-06T11:00:52","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/?p=304212"},"modified":"2025-10-03T09:42:45","modified_gmt":"2025-10-03T08:42:45","slug":"gaza-and-the-economy-of-genocide","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/2025\/10\/gaza-and-the-economy-of-genocide\/","title":{"rendered":"Gaza and the Economy of Genocide"},"content":{"rendered":"
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People walk with humanitarian aid packages that they received from a distribution centre run by the US and Israeli-backed Gaza Humanitarian Foundation (GHF), at the so-called “Netzarim corridor”, in Nuseirat in the central Gaza Strip, on 30 Sep 2025. The US president on 29 Sep laid out a plan to end the war in Gaza and Israeli PM Benjamin Netanyahu said he backed the proposal. The two allies demanded approval by Hamas with Netanyahu warning he will “finish the job” if Hamas says no.
(Photo by Eyad BABA \/ AFP)<\/p><\/div>\n

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Even before 7 Oct 2023, Gazans had been reduced to the role of a surplus population with minimal employment within Israel. Their expulsion from Israel\u2019s capitalist economy helped to lay the groundwork for genocide.<\/em><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

1 Oct 2025<\/em> – The world watches in shame and fear as Israel invades Gaza City, bringing its genocidal campaign against the Palestinians to a new level of horror. Public opinion throughout the world, including the United States, has long since turned against Israel\u2019s aggression. The highest organs of international governance have all issued calls to cease and desist.<\/p>\n

But while some European governments have begun to distance themselves from Israel, the Western bloc\u2019s most powerful states still back it unflaggingly. US secretary of state Marco Rubio even flew to Tel Aviv to personally pledge the Trump administration\u2019s \u201cfull support.\u201d Israeli president Isaac Herzog, who infamously declared Gaza devoid of innocents, was warmly received by British prime minister Keir Starmer in September.<\/p>\n

Israel is a small state, entirely dependent on the United States and other Western sponsors. Why are the leaders of these countries so steadfast in supporting it despite overwhelming public disapproval, and even at the cost of their own electoral<\/a> chances<\/a>? Is a latent inclination to eliminate non-white populations simply part of the West\u2019s ideological DNA, as the dominant variant of settler-colonial theory<\/a> argues? Or is there something about the dynamics of the capitalist world-system that makes genocide possible, even probable?<\/p>\n

At first glance, such a claim may seem doubtful. Capitalists rely on human labor for their profits; so what useful purpose could they possibly see in the destruction of human labor power? However, the history of capitalism is also the story of growing numbers of people being expelled from productive employment.<\/p>\n

Palestinians in general and Gazans in particular have been among those to be thus turned into \u201csurplus populations,\u201d which global capital is happy to consign to destruction when they turn to resisting their fate \u2014 as they inevitably do.<\/p>\n<\/section>\n

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Surplus Populations<\/h1>\n

While individual capitalists can only make a profit by exploiting workers, competition with other capitalists forces them to economize on labor. As Karl Marx showed in Capital<\/em>, this rising productivity results in a long-term growth of the number of workers surplus to capital\u2019s requirements \u2014 and thus unable to find productive employment. Recent<\/a> research<\/a> estimates the size of this \u201csurplus population\u201d at approximately 40 and 60 percent of humanity today. This ratio is also clearly growing.<\/p>\n

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Palestinians have been among those turned into \u201csurplus populations,\u201d which global capital is happy to consign to destruction when they turn to resisting their fate.\u00a0<\/strong><\/em><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

The longer capitalism endures, the more often the average worker, globally, will be exposed to unemployment and poverty. But there is no pure dichotomy, here: rather than divided into two stable pieces, the proletariat tends to be stratified into different fractions, each associated with a particular level of access to stable employment. Most often, this is tied to categories such as race, caste, religion, and gender. Increasingly stringent border controls make citizenship, in particular, a crucial factor of relegation to the surplus group.<\/p>\n

Even if capital doesn\u2019t constantly need their labor, it often finds other uses for surplus populations. It is happy to utilize surplus workers, including immigrants, as a \u201creserve army\u201d that can be hired quickly in boom times, fired during downturns, and otherwise manipulated to push wages down. Capitalist development also progressively lowers the cost of basic necessities, making it relatively affordable to keep surplus populations alive with humanitarian aid<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Yet capital is fundamentally free of any commitment to these populations\u2019 long-term reproduction across generations. Given the chance, it is happy to experiment with methods that combine<\/em> exploitation with depleting their living standards. The destruction of state support for social reproduction in Global South countries like Bangladesh through \u201cstructural adjustment\u201d has not hindered global capital from exploiting their increasingly immiserated working classes.<\/p>\n<\/section>\n

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From Hyperexploitation to Genocide<\/h1>\n

Monstrous as it may be, such hyperexploitation is not genocide. It can, however, shade into it, as Adam Tooze\u2019s history<\/a> of the Nazi economy demonstrates. Tooze links the annihilation of the Jews of Eastern Europe to Adolf Hitler\u2019s settler-colonial Generalplan Ost, <\/em>which sought to turn the region into Germany\u2019s agrarian hinterland. Under this plan (enthusiastically supported by German capitalists), all the region\u2019s Jews and many of its other inhabitants would become surplus, and thus destined for expulsion or death.<\/p>\n

But Nazi logic demanded both the utilization of all available labor-power and the conservation of food and other means of subsistence for German soldiers and civilians. Hence the structure of the Auschwitz-Birkenau complex, which aimed at a \u201crational\u201d combination of exploitation and annihilation. Those prisoners who could not provide any surplus labor were murdered immediately, while the rest were worked to death, as maximum effort was extracted from their undernourished bodies, as scientists experimented with optimizing the relevant physiological functions. Though not accompanied by the same ultraracist ideology, the British policy of \u201cforced transfer<\/a>\u201d of calories from Indian civilians to the military also led to the starvation of millions (as did analogous practices in the Soviet Union).<\/p>\n

In the decades following World War II, growing agricultural productivity made it much cheaper to feed people, and imperial states no longer had to choose between feeding the metropole and the colony. As critical<\/a> agrarian<\/a> scholarship<\/a> has shown, the dumping of food surpluses in the Third World as \u201caid\u201d shored up Western profits while undermining the Southern peasantry\u2019s hold on its land, paradoxically rendering it more vulnerable to hunger despite global food surpluses. Deepening market dependency in the South led to the further growth of surplus populations, now concentrated in urban areas.<\/p>\n<\/section>\n

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The Formation of the Gaza Strip<\/h1>\n

In the Middle East, today the world\u2019s most food-dependent region, this dynamic has been particularly stark. Within the Middle East, the Gaza Strip is a particularly extreme case. The Palestinian peasantry, largely expelled in the Nakba of 1948 and collected in refugee camps surrounding the new state of Israel, became the region\u2019s quintessential surplus population.<\/p>\n

The tiny coastal territory, which would become the Gaza Strip, emerged from the catastrophe as an Egyptian protectorate hosting hundreds of thousands of refugees from all over southern Palestine. In this, it was quite different from the Jordanian-occupied West Bank, a larger zone where the local peasantry managed to hold on to much of its land.<\/p>\n

Following the occupation of both territories in 1967, Palestinians from Gaza and the West Bank entered the Israeli labor market. By 1986, 46 percent of the Gazan workforce was working in Israel, helping to fuel the country\u2019s long economic boom. But Israel\u2019s policy of de-development<\/a> perpetuated Gaza\u2019s precarity. It prevented the emergence of a productive base within the strip, while working to prevent Israeli businesses from becoming unduly dependent on Gazan labor, which it saw as a potential political liability.<\/p>\n

This potential became real with the First Intifada of 1987\u201391, which triggered the gradual expulsion of Palestinian workers, and Gazans in particular, from the Israeli economy, and their replacement<\/a> by migrants from the Global South. The Oslo \u201cpeace process\u201d and Israel\u2019s strategy of \u201cseparation\u201d accelerated this trend, and by 2022, only 3.5 percent of the Gazan workforce was employed in Israel. With the outbreak of war in 2023, they were entirely locked out. Thus, virtually all Gazans have been pushed even out of the ranks of the periodically employed layer of the surplus population.<\/p>\n<\/section>\n

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Meager Autonomy<\/h1>\n

The arrangement forced on the leadership of Gaza between 2007 and 2023, described by Tareq Baconi in Hamas Contained<\/em><\/a>, indicates what is on offer to surplus populations in today\u2019s world. Blockaded on three sides by Israel and one by Egypt, Gaza was granted a measure of internal autonomy and food aid sufficient to ward off famine.<\/p>\n

In return, the strip\u2019s residents were expected to acquiesce in routine rounds of punitive violence, grinding poverty, separation from the rest of the Palestinian people, and international oblivion. This deal, notably, involved not only Hamas\u2019s adversary Israel, which committed to refrain from overthrowing its rule, but also its ally Qatar, which provided the funds necessary to keep Gazans alive but in a state of economic and political suspended animation.<\/p>\n

On October 7, 2023, Hamas upended this arrangement by launching a surprise offensive on the Israeli region surrounding Gaza, targeting civilians and soldiers alike. The very same day, the Gazan population (which was not somehow consulted about plans for the attack) began paying the price: an Israeli onslaught of indiscriminate bloodletting, replete with a kill ratio of at least seventy to one (to date) and deliberate, wholesale destruction of infrastructure including hospitals and schools.<\/p>\n

Palestinian scholars and activists, citing the declarations of Israeli leaders as well as their actions, immediately declared this an incipient genocide, an opinion by now corroborated by any number of legal and academic authorities. Regional actors acting in solidarity with Gaza \u2014 Hezbollah, the Houthis in Yemen, and Iran \u2014 have been targeted one after the other, always with the tacit or enthusiastic support of the United States, the EU, and Israel\u2019s \u201cAbrahamic\u201d allies in the Middle East. Even Israel\u2019s recent attack on Qatar, a faithful US ally, has not shaken this support.<\/p>\n<\/section>\n

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The Cost of Rebellion<\/h1>\n

Obviously, Israel\u2019s genocide cannot be explained exclusively by economic factors. Other levels of analysis, from Benjamin Netanyahu\u2019s expert manipulations<\/a> of the Israeli political scene to the ideological confluence between Evangelical and Zionist messianism<\/a>, are also relevant. But understanding how capitalism leads to the emergence of surplus populations, and why capital is indifferent at best to their fates, helps us grasp why those manning the commanding heights of empire are now committed to supporting Israel\u2019s castigation of Gaza.<\/p>\n

The motive, to put it simply, is to set an exorbitantly high price tag for these populations rebelling against their containment. To that growing portion of humanity that can see its own immiseration in the figure of the Palestinians, Israel\u2019s Western-backed annihilation sends a precise message: stay in your \u201cshitholes\u201d (as Donald Trump calls them), and you will be allowed a meager, vegetative living, but no productive work or meaningful control over your collective future. Attempt to break out \u2014 and you will be destroyed.<\/p>\n

Bloodcurdling as this message is, there is nothing in it that is opposed to the interests of capital. Genocide is never inevitable \u2014 it is always the criminal responsibility of particular individuals and states. But in a world governed by a system that treats humans themselves as superfluous, it is an ever-present and growing danger.<\/p>\n

_____________________________________________<\/p>\n

Dr Matan Kaminer is an anthropologist, activist on the Israeli left, and a lecturer at Queen Mary University of London.<\/em><\/p>\n

Go to Original – jacobin.com<\/a><\/p>\n<\/section>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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