My new open-access article in Genocide Studies and Prevention examines the neglected question of OCCUPATION AND GENOCIDE – from Raphael Lemkin’s Axis Rule in Occupied Europe to contemporary Palestine.
Israel’s genocide in Gaza has been identified through its extreme destructiveness, but it is now being consolidated through a new occupation—while Israel’s longstanding occupation of the West Bank and East Jerusalem also shows ever more extreme violence and dispossession of the Palestinians.
Together, these developments highlight the importance of examining occupation in a genocide perspective, but this question has been systematically neglected in the academic genocide field.
This is despite the fact that when Raphael Lemkin first defined genocide in 1944, he did so in an analysis of the Nazi German occupation of continental Europe. For him, occupation was a prime context of genocide and genocide was a method of occupation.
Moreover, Lemkin defined two main options for the genocidal occupier: to impose its “national pattern” on the population which was allowed to remain—through “crippling” its society and institutions as well as the population itself—or by removing the population and introducing its own colonists.
I examine the implications for our understanding of genocide, of occupation in general, and Palestine.
I argue that genocidal dynamics have been at work in the occupations of Palestine over the last century, and especially in the post-1967 occupation, accelerating in the 21st century and especially since 2023. The article discusses:
Lemkin and Occupation
The Occupier’s Dilemma
The Problems of Lemkin, and Subsequent Research
Genocidal and Non-Genocidal Occupation
Occupation and Genocide in Palestine
The Pre-1967 Occupations
Post-1967: A Hybrid Occupation and its Dynamics
Occupation and the Gaza Genocide
Conclusion
Martin Shaw 