Gaza.Two Centuries of Colonial Campaigns Continued

Information gathered by attorney and scholar Janan Abdu made it possible to document from May 2024 the systematic organisation of collective punishment in Gaza and an “endless series of torture, humiliation and killings” at Sde Teiman, the secret military prison in the Negev desert¹. The thousands of Palestinians arbitrarily detained since October 2023 under the Israeli law on the “detention of illegal combatants” enacted in December of that same year, were subjected to attacks by dogs, beatings and sexual assaults. In August of that same year, the Israeli human rights organisation B’Tselem published its report “Welcome to Hell”, confirming the “systematic, widespread and protracted use of torture.”

Since then, similar accusations have been leveled against many Israeli internment sites such as Ofer, Ananot, Ketziot, Megiddo, Damon and Nitzan. Experts appointed by the UN Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights, Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International have also collected many eye-witness reports which tell of detainees locked in cages or tied to beds, naked or wearing diapers. They are also subjected to techniques of sensory deprivation, and deprived of medical care, sleep, food and water. They are also suspended from the ceiling, subjected to water-boarding, and burning with cigarettes or electric shocks, particularly on the genitals.

A system rooted in history

These forms of violence are of course reminiscent of those perpetrated by the French Army in Algeria or by the US Army in Vietnam, but their systematic use against civilians may be found throughout history on every colonial battleground. The combination of mass incarceration on a racial basis, torture, rape and lethal starvation were commonplace during the entire transatlantic slave trade and the “conquest of the Americas”. Some of the first modern concentration camps, linked to systems of extreme violence, were set up by the Spanish army as counter-insurgency measures in Cuba between 1895 and 1898, and then by the British army in southern Africa where 100,000 civilians were interned during the Boer War (1899-1902).

In South-West Africa (present-day Namibia), Germany incarcerated the local populations and committed the first genocide of the 20^th century against the Hereros and the Namas. After being remodelled as concentration and extermination camps by Nazi Germany, mass racial internment was used by France as a tool of counter-revolution in Indochina, and later in Algeria as “centres for processing and transit,” “accommodation” or “regrouping”². In each of these instances, the camps acted to implement governmental regimes by crushing lives or mass extermination.

Israel stands apart in this field by redefining displacement and internment as techniques of “social engineering” aimed at emptying the “human terrain” and reformatting the personalities of the detainees. It is also one of the rare countries to have officially legalised torture under the euphemism “moderate physical pressure”. Prior to October 2023, many observers had already called Gaza a huge open-air concentration camp and a testing-ground for new counter-insurgency technologies. Since then, Israel has used this know-how to turn the enclave into a mass grave.

Techniques of counter-insurrection

A report from the International Association of Genocide Scholars (IAGS), a group of nearly 500 experts, also confirmed at the beginning of September 2025 the “systematic and large-scale” character of the genocidal process, the crimes against humanity and war crimes perpetrated by Israel in Palestine. And yet the eradicative dynamic of Israeli colonialism has been documented ever since the 1947 1948 Nakba. The words of the operations officer of the Carmel Brigade, assigned to “de-Arabise” Haifa following the departure of the British in 1948, are well-known : “Kill every Arab you come across, burn everything that will burn, and blow down doors with explosives” ³.

The militia had bombarded refugees with mortar fire. The object was to prevent the reorganisation of native resistance. This counter-guerilla technique originates in the struggle against the indigenous peoples of that America described as “terra nullius”. It served as a model for Zionist leaders such as Zeev Jabotinsky who deals with it in his article “The Iron Wall : We and the Arabs 1923” (Jewish Virtual Library, 2022).

A genocidal dynamic was also involved in the French conquest of Algeria in the I9^th century which caused, historians estimate, between 500,000 and 1,000,000 deaths from a population of 3,000,000 Algerians. The strategy of causing or allowing the mass death of colonised subjects - especially through organised famines - was also at the heart of the counter-insurgency wars waged by Belgium in the Congo and by the British in India, Sudan and Kenya. The systematic bombardment of Gaza since 7 October 2023 echo the cannons of the British fleet which massacred Levantine populations in 1840, just as the premises of the Zionist project were beginning to emerge⁴. The first aerial bombs in history were dropped by a colonial power on civilians when an Italian plane attacked a camp near Tripoli in 1911.

The white phosphorous and poison gas used to render Palestine uninhabitable echoes the use of toxic weapons throughout the European and American “pacifications”. Invading Algeria, the French army massacred the populations of whole villages who had found refuge in caves by filling them with smoke. After flooding the WWI trenches with poison gas, these were sprayed for the first time on civilian populations by France and Spain to crush the resistance of the Moroccan Rif. They were later used on the battlefields of WW2 and by Nazi Germany to exterminate the Jews of Europe.

The French army again used gas to massacre the Algerian rebels during what is known as “the war of the caves” in the fifties. In the Aurès mountains, they dropped napalm before the US army followed their example in Vietnam where they also dropped Agent Orange to terrorize the population and make the land uninhabitable. In Algeria as in Vietnam the use of such weapons was directly associated with internment camps and separation walls, yet they never succeeded in crushing those rebellions.

From Ireland to India

According to the researcher Laleh Khalili, the counter-revolution in Palestine has in common with those of South-East Asia and Algeria that it constitutes “an archetypal laboratory and a crucial node for counter-insurrections world-wide”⁵. Zionist domination is firmly rooted in the tactics of Western imperialism with certain adaptations. The mechanism took shape when the British occupation undertook to merge the various forms of colonial expertise in keeping order, especially dealing with the Great Arab Revolt of 1936-1939. The British officer Charles Tegart, who led the counter-guerilla operations, had made his reputation fighting the independence movement in Northern Ireland before heading the Calcutta police and normalising the practice of torture to fight the Indian uprising⁶ . He was sent to Palestine in 1937, where he built many fortified police stations, a border fence and torture facilities called Arab Investigation Centres. But his reign of terror was not enough to stem the soumoud, the Palestinian spirit of resistance.

And so, just as in Haiti, paramilitary units and Dobermanns were used to hunt down the rebels. Copied from French colonial methods in Syria and Algeria, a huge system of profiling, mass arrests and administrative detention was conjoined with torture and collective punishment, deportation and summary executions⁷. General Orde Wingate, descended from a family of British settlers in India, had served, in particular, in Sudan before creating the Special Night Squads, police commando units composed of Jewish settlers assigned to night patrols, sometimes disguised as “Arabs”, to carry out punitive expeditions against Palestinian villages. All these techniques of war applied to civilian populations have deeply influenced the development of the Israeli military-security apparatus.

Israeli counter-insurgency techniques have continued to evolve through regular exchanges with the transatlantic powers. In January 1960, two Israeli generals, Yitzak Rabin and Haïm Herzog, one a future Israeli Prime Minister and the other a future President, went to Algeria to observe French methods of “counter revolutionary war”: separation walls, population displacement and mass internment, the normalisation of torture and rape, forced disappearances, massacres by bombing and chemical weapons, all associated with propaganda designed to promote the general militarisation of society. This regime of violence did not prevent the Algerian people from seizing their independence.

Enlisting the new technologies

In his book War Aginst the People (Pluto Press, 2015), the researcher Jeff Halper describes Israel as a “model security state” based on a permanent counter-insurrection war. The daily management of the country’s apartheid regime as well as its genocidal dynamic are deeply embedded in a global imperial mechanism ensuring the circulation of know-how between the centre and the periphery, in which the experience of the French plays a major role. The State of Israel stands out by engaging in intensive research and development.

The ongoing fragmentation of the occupied territory has been assured since the year 2000 by “smart” walls and “innovative” military bases. The biometric data registered in ID cards and identification systems include information regarding the private life and politics of Palestinians. The mass internment system incorporates the latest technological innovations while the genocidal process is now handled by different AI applications such as Lavender or Where’s Daddy? These latter accelerate the designation of targets and thus drive the intensive action of a “mass assassination factory”, as a former Israeli intelligence officer actually described it⁸.

The genocidal war waged against the resistance of the people of Palestine thus constitutes a global laboratory for the automation of counter-insurrection. Backed by the weaponry and financing of the western bloc, the imperial mechanism is now running at full capacity for the benefit of the “Greater Israel” project of colonisation of the whole region. But Palestine has also become the name of world-wide resistance. And in the wake of the Haitian, Vietnamese and Algerian revolutions, there is no sign that the intensification of colonial ferocity is capable of exhausting the determination of oppressed peoples.