Andreas Malm

‘The colonist is an exhibitionist. His safety concerns lead him to remind the colonised out loud: “Here I am the master,”’ Frantz Fanon writes in The Wretched of the Earth.2 Every suggestion of a limit to the destructive power of the settler-colonial state is received as a questioning of its unlimited mastery, and so it must be met with a frenzy of recidivism. The free unfolding of this dynamic can end only with scorched earth in Gaza and beyond.

What, exactly, is it that ties the state of Israel and the rest of the West so closely together?

explanation, still as popular as ever on parts of the left, is the power of the Zionist lobby. I will come back to this.

Beirut in 1982, described by Liyana Badr in A Balcony over the Fakihani, with words that could fit any other occasion:

I saw piles of concrete, stones, torn clothes scattered about, shattered glass, little pieces of cotton wool, fragments of metal, buildings destroyed or leaning crazily […] White dust smothered the district, and through the gray of the smoke loomed the gutted shells of blocks and the debris of houses razed to the earth […] Everything there was mixed up together. Cars were upside down, papers whirling in the sky. Fire. And smoke. The end of the world.9

This is the end of the world that never ends: fresh rubble is always poured over the Palestinians. Destruction is the constitutive experience of Palestinian life because the essence of the Zionist project is the destruction of Palestine.

If the Amazon were to lose its forest cover – a dizzying thought, but entirely within the realm of a possible near future – it would be a different kind of Nakba.