If you are expecting to read my usual Left Coast column, I tell you now that you will be disappointed. I write, today, from a place of horror—about the massacre unleashed against civilians in Israel this past week, and about the morally cretinous bloodlust reaction some who fashion themselves as being on the “left” seem to have experienced in its aftermath, but also in despair at the ghastly collective punishments being unleashed from the air on Gaza residents by Netanyahu’s far-right government and the Israeli military.
Settler/indigenous is a material relation though, which means it can change if the political landscape changes. If the Palestinians emerge victorious and create a Palestinian state and everyone living in that territory becomes a Palestinian, then those former Israelis aren’t settlers anymore. Realistically that process involves killing or driving off the settlers in large numbers to destroy the strength and morale of their political movement, but they aren’t some kind of gray goo that you have to eradicate down to the last molecule. Historically most decolonization movements, e.g. in South Africa and Algeria, just won the war, a large majority of settlers fucked off because they didn’t get to be colonial lords anymore, and the rest capable of being decent human beings stayed, paid some measure of restitutions, and remained as citizens of the new indigenous state.
Genocide doesn’t require the absolute eradication to the last molecule either; the destruction of a national group through mass killing is genocide.
Which is exactly what you describe: destroy Israel by first killing lots of settlers and then destroy the Israeli national identity by making everyone Palestinian.
… so this conversation has made me realize “genocide” is an imprecise word. Israel committing genocide means mass killing and then expulsion of all Palestinians to the last child. Hamas committing “genocide” means protracted warfare where a huge number of reservists and bystanders die and then a reconciliation process afterwards where Israel’s state is dismantled. Calling that “genocide” is technically correct and doesn’t really match what Israel wants to do at all, and I don’t know what to do about that.