Disabling Palestine: the case of Gaza’s Great March of Return

Abstract

This article examines Israel’s policies of deliberate disablement and debilitation during the Great March of Return in Gaza between March 2018 and December 2019. The orchestrated attacks on Palestinians during the Great March of Return were the latest incidents on a trajectory of premeditatively produced mass injuries and impairments in the Israeli settler-colonial context. The disabling of Palestinians and the debilitation of Palestinian health and rehabilitative infrastructures should be seen as part of Israel’s settler-colonial ‘logic of elimination’. Disabling the Palestinian body politic is a way to systematically erase indigenous people from the land, in this case from Gaza which has, in the words of Rashid Khalidi, refused to be a ‘docile ghetto’. Injuries should therefore not be seen as mere by-products of war, categorised as collateral damage, or even as a ‘humanitarian’ alternative to death.