COLE MEINTJIES

We must keep asking ourselves about the way this world operates. What is the world if, in it, a settler-colonial state can exist? What is the world if, in it, a settler-colonial state is enabled to escalate its already violent existence and practices into an internationally recognised genocide? What is the world if, in it, an internationally recognised genocide is —as a result of the sustained efforts of people, movements and organisations— part of the international news media circuit, in public discourse, publicly acknowledged as shaping international relations, and yet…? Why do we continue to fail?

Such questions, unfortunately, are not as new as we might want them to be. We must keep asking ourselves about the way the world operates. But this is not an individual practice. And so, we must keep thinking with those who keep asking about the way this world operates. In this article, we hope to think with the questions of biopolitics.

Regimes of rationality and power over life and death

Discussions of biopolitics tend to flow from Foucault’s usage of the term. In considering biopolitics, we might situate ourselves within Foucault’s (2000) project. In particular, it is worth noting the consideration of regimes of practices. Here, Foucault (2000) highlights the

[A]im of grasping the conditions that make [practices] acceptable at a given moment; the hypothesis being that these types of practices are not just governed by institutions, prescribed by ideologies, guided by pragmatic circumstances … but to a point, possess their own specific regularities, logic strategy, self-evidence and “reason”, the planned and taken-for-granted meet and interconnect (Foucault, 2000, p. 225).

Israel acts hypocritically and transgresses myriad boundaries but this is not the same as saying it simply acts on whims or without rationality. At the meeting ground of what is said and done by the genocidal state (and the minimal acceptance, insofar as it continues, by the world) what are these regularities, logics and strategies? The aim here is not to apply the lens by which Israel’s actions can be judged as “unacceptable” but, rather, to consider the way the rationality is minimally coherent to itself, first and foremost, and in the context of the world. It is a question of the internal “intelligibility” and consistency of regimes of power (Foucault, 2000). The emphasis for Foucault is not the ‘hidden schema’ that is retroactively uncovered but “explicit programs; […] sets of calculated, reasoned prescriptions” (Foucault, 2000, p. 231). Foucault insists that such programs are not unified, perfectly implemented, etc., on the contrary, there is a focus on “different strategies that are mutually opposed, composed and superposed” but can nonetheless be understood, together, in terms of their rationality (Foucault, 2000, p. 231).  What are the ends, mechanisms, axioms and so on that underpin the varying practices of Israel? With biopolitics, our focus partakes in the question of a regime of practices but is more focused:

Biopolitics refers to power in relation to life and death.

As Mbembe (2003) states in beginning Necropolitics, following Foucault, “the ultimate expression of sovereignty resides, to a large degree, in the power and the capacity to dictate who may live and who must die” (p. 11). This is often captured in the following formulations: ‘make die’, ‘let live’, ‘make live’ and ‘let die’ (with the latter two being associated with more ‘modern’ sovereign rationalities). For Foucault, techniques of government emerge through a change in the ‘object’ of sovereignty. As Hanafi (2009, p. 113) puts it: “[Foucault] stressed the transition from the ‘territorial state’ to a ‘state of its population’ and the resultant increase in importance of the nation’s health and biological life as a problem of sovereign power”. That is, generally speaking, the modern state and statecraft is at least purportedly organised around the notion of advancing the condition of/for its object, the population. Biopower is thus generally conceived within the context of the aim of government to advance the condition of its population (or through the neglect or inverting of this aim). For example, biopolitics is in effect when a state sets healthcare budget and policy —there will be consequences for who lives and dies in the context of the state’s role in advancing the condition of its population. States are constantly making decisions that reflect the power over life. For Foucault (2000, p. 416), the inverse of biopolitics is thanatopolitics: because the state has the right to ‘take care’ of the population it is “entitled to slaughter it if necessary” (and by necessity Foucault means ‘in accord with its rationality’).

In beginning to shift the thinking to that of necropolitics (in contradistinction to biopolitics and even thanatopolitics), Mbembe (2003) foregrounds the form of the power over life and death’s expression where its primary objective is the death or destruction of its ‘enemies’, or target populations. Necropolitics accounts for the production of conditions marked by the availability of death and the destruction of persons. Returning to the example of healthcare budget and policy as expression of biopower (for the state’s ‘own’ population), this seems distinct from the expression of power over life and death that occurs when a state engages in warfare or commits genocide (which is against a target population).   

But biopolitics and necropolitics are not disconnected, they are both sustained by the rights arrogated by sovereignty. While the rationality of rule has altered so as to centre sovereignty’s provision for its population, there remains, in this world, necropolitical programmes of sovereignty which have the explicit aim of producing death, debilitation and other forms of violence on target populations (Mbembe, 2003). The concern is not the break with, but the shared inhabitation of, the same political regime of rationality by such figures of sovereignty. Sovereignty’s proximity to death, however, is not its definition and rarely its explicit claim. The question of how and why death haunts sovereignty is an important one but it is beyond our scope. What we will say here, is that sovereign entities have enacted various forms of necropolitics (whose regimes of practices differ in accordance with a variety of factors).

From slavery, to the holocaust to colonialism, sovereign entities have brought their necropower to bear on the world. To emphasise, this is not only killing but the production of the availability of death and injury; the creation of death-worlds. The power over life and death, deployed in large-scale, intentional, violent, injury-producing, death-making regimes of practices as the expression of sovereignty. Technologies of necropower become technologies of sovereignty. Sites of necropower are laboratories for sovereignty (and its necropolitical capacities) and necropolitical regimes often appear as amplification of sovereign political practices (such as surveillance and law enforcement). When Israel deploys necropower it draws from the ongoing history of necropolitics and enters into the community of death-worlds. It tinkers and experiments with the technologies of death-making. 

Sovereign state of the death-makers

In this 2003 article, Mbembe (p. 27) wrote: “The most accomplished form of necropower is the contemporary colonial occupation of Palestine”.  It is a specific form of late-modern colonial occupation which draws upon, within the global state infrastructure, a “divine” right to exist and an identity it ties to the “terror of the Holocaust” (Mbembe, 2003, p. 27).  The sovereign power of the state, and its regime of practices, not only draw upon the late-modern state infrastructure (and its model of political unity) but combine this with a narrower form of political unity and exceptionalism. This can be seen in both in combinatory and disruptive aspects to expand its claims to sovereignty (which allow and ‘justify’ its necropolitical action).  

What does this mean? Insofar as modern sovereign is more-or-less organised around providing for its population, and exists within a community of sovereign states, its sovereign powers are not unlimited. This is what the genocide convention reflects (or is meant to); a Sovereign entity supposedly has no right to commit genocide. However, the sovereign has power over states of exception: sovereign powers create conditions where law is suspended (justified by their claim to sovereignty). The question is how the ‘Palestine exception’ is produced. According to Hanafi (2009, p. 114) “the most obvious and classic, [type of state of exception is] the state of emergency. In Israel, Jews and Palestinians are governed by administrative rules deriving their force from the ‘state of emergency’ invoked at the formation of the state which were never cancelled”.

In a state of emergency, the ‘normal’ rule of law is suspended, expanding the space for violence.

More generally, states of exception allow sovereign entities to act ‘beyond the law’ as a justified expression of sovereignty (such as in a state of emergency). What we might note, in hearing this with Foucault (2000), is the echo of two former paradigmatic epochs of sovereignty appears in Israel’s logic. One, as mentioned, is the divine, where governance aimed at aligning the earthly realm with the will of God. The second is an earlier ‘reason of state’ whose aim was to strengthen the state itself (not for the benefit of individuals per se) and to defend the state from internal and external threats; its end was itself. The primacy of the ‘right to exist’ in Israel’s claims has some echoes of this second point. This sovereign right to defend against internal and external threat is what appears in necropolitics as an expression of sovereignty; the right to identify target populations which threaten its sovereignty. “Defenders of Israel”, writes Schwartz (2021, n.p.), “often accuse Israeli security policy critics of undermining Israeli sovereignty and seeking to destabilize the Zionist state”.^{[1]When the USA was the only country on the UN security council to vote against the position of the council that called for an immediate ceasefire in Israel the acting US ambassador, Dorothy Shea, stated: “The United States has taken the very clear position since this conflict began that Israel has the right to defend itself, which includes defeating Hamas and ensuring they are never again in a position to threaten Israel”} Part of what it means to situate Israel within the ongoing relation to necropolitics is to recognise the particular way Israel mobilises its claims as a state for necropolitical regimes of practice — but to not allow its violence and claimed exceptionalism to produce a backdrop of the ‘unexceptional sovereign state’. Israel, however, utilises this chimeric combination of claims to sovereignty and draws upon multiple discourses to manufacture states of exception to expand its necropolitical ‘rights’.

Creating death-worlds

At this point let us introduce some of the work of Jasbir Puar. Puar (2015, p. 8) extends the formulations of biopolitics put forward by Foucault:

As Foucault writes, ‘The [old] right of sovereignty was the right to take life or let live. … And then this new right is established: the right to make live and to let die’ (Foucault 2003, p. 241). Foucault notes that sovereignty’s old right was not replaced, rather complemented by this new right ‘which does penetrate it, permeate it.’ (p. 241).

Puar supplements the ‘right to kill’ with the eponymous (for the article and book) ‘right to maim’. Biopower is not reducible to the binary of death/life but is intertwined with the production of, and linkage, to disability. Puar (2015, p. 8) offers that, in the ‘right to maim’, “[m]aiming masquerades as ‘let live’ when in fact it acts as ‘will not let die’”. One of the aspects Puar (2015) draws out in this framing is Israel’s mobilisation of a neoliberal humanitarian discourse to support its practices of death-making and necropolitics. Israel has advanced its modes of violence through the militarisation of ‘humanitarian’ protocols; This includes ‘shoot to cripple’, the ‘warnings’ of airstrikes as psyop and the weaponisation of aid (Puar, 2015). Alongside the unbearable death toll is a vast number of injuries and disabilities at the hands of Israel. In September 2024, the WHO found that, since October 7, 2023, 22, 500 Palestinians had sustained injuries since that were estimated to be life-changing. As the destruction of health care services and infrastructure continues and medical intervention is disabled this estimate increases. The UN also noted that with the dismantling/decimation of services, thousands of Palestinians already living with chronic conditions and impairments are placed at higher risk (UN, 2025).

Israel has merged blatant and brazen onslaught with insidious and calculated strategy. This is apparent in ‘infrastructural warfare’, introduced by Mbembe (2003) and expanded by Puar (2015). As Puar (2015) notes, the debilitating violence of Israel is not only aimed at bodies but at territories. Mbembe (2003, p. 29) refers to techniques of disabling the enemy: “An orchestrated and systematic sabotage of the enemy’s societal and urban infrastructure network complements the appropriation of land, water, and airspace resources”. This orchestrated destruction of the means of life extends suffering and debilitates resistance (expressing necropower as the ‘right to maim’) while also expanding Israel’s necropower i.e. enabling future capacity for violence. Shatahi et al. (2025, p. 222) illustrate cases^{[2]Shatahi et al. (2025, p. 222): Case 3 was a 7-year-old child with explosive injury to the left foot, resulting in an open, comminuted ankle fracture. This injury was managed with an external fixator spanning the ankle joint. Due to the lack of services, the fixator was left in-situ for 3 months and the ankle joint could not be reconstructed. In normal circumstances, this child would have been managed in a trauma centre with extensive reconstructive surgery and rehabilitation to preserve function of the foot. However, prolonged use of the external fixator led to recurrent infections around the pin sites. Due to limited access to physiotherapy and poor skin graft healing, the child had developed an equinus contracture of the ankle. These issues were further complicated by malnutrition, which contributed to recurrent breakdown of the skin grafts and a significant deterioration of the child’s mental health. This case highlights the need for coordinated physical and psychological rehabilitation through orthopaedic and plastic surgery.} of children with severe injuries in the context of infrastructural warfare before stating:

Children with new traumatic injuries and pre-existing conditions in Gaza have complex rehabilitation needs. However, the dwindling healthcare workforce and collapsing infrastructure make it impossible to meet these needs.

The destruction of healthcare infrastructure increases harm to Palestinians with injuries and disabilities and, further, means that future violence has increased morbidity/mortality, as it exists in the context of reduced medical intervention. So, necropolitical action is carried out by destroying infrastructure that sustains and supports life and life-worlds providing access to means of life. Death-worlds are created by the destruction of infrastructure.

Not only has Israel destroyed infrastructure that supports access to the means of life (and resistance) but has enacted infrastructural warfare which involves producing necropolitical infrastructure: the means for further necropolitical practice. This includes a ‘splintering occupation’ and ‘vertical sovereignty’ (Mbembe, 2003). The splintering occupation divides the target population as a form of debilitation and control, creating the spatial organisation of land in Gaza. The bordering, enclaving, separation, control of movement and surveillance of Palestinian people:^{[3]aljazeera. And this operation is ongoing: “Israel has given final approval for a controversial settlement project in the occupied West Bank that experts say would damage plans for any future territorially contiguous Palestinian state in the territory” (Al-Jazeera English, 2025, n.p.)} Military checkpoints, walls, settler-only roads, and buffer zones splinter Palestinian territory. In terms of vertical sovereignty, Israel aims, not only to organise the ground in accord with its necropolitical technologies, but also the skies and the underground.  Israel occupies Palestinian airspace with drones and airstrikes while the underground remains a target of Israel’s military operation and ‘Hamas tunnel network’ has featured strongly in public discourse. Israel’s infrastructural warfare is the destruction of the means of life and the institution of technologies of necropolitics. It is a naked display of sovereign power’s ability, within neoliberal humanitarian discourse, to build its power to kill and disable. This article places a particular focus on this productive aspect, the creation of the means for further violent practice.  

On the edge of exception

This expansion of necropower (and not just the expanded use of that power) is seen again in the futural dimension of ‘asphixatory’ power (Salamanca, 2011, as cited in Puar, 2015). Asphixatory power targets (or attempts to target) the resistance (of its target population) itself by targeting and then controlling the means for life.  “Because of this asphixatory control, Israel can create a crisis at will, having already set in place the bare minimum requisite for life that can be withheld at any moment” (Puar, p. 5). This means, that by placing people on the threshold of crisis, the Zionist regime requires relatively little activity to bring this crisis into effect. It is a violence that makes its targets susceptible to further violence. The asphixatory is also a technology of necropower for Israel to insidiously produce ‘exception’ and bypass the rule of law. By placing people on the threshold of crisis, Israel could produce devastating effects without spectacular violence (although it has recently shown little hesitation with the latter). Spending time manipulating the margins of the rule of law, the moments of exception are not simply momentary, but precise detonations in carefully mapped and constructed operations. Puar (2015) refers to the scientific and algorithmic calculations of Israel, framed again in humanitarian discourse, in their decision-making. For example, the number/amount of calories,^{[4]theguardian} fuel, material supplies etc. allowed into Gaza, is carefully adjudged in accord with their various strategic lines including their usage of humanitarian discourse and the capacity for asphixatory escalation. Or crisis inducing action. This is also not a binary situation; Israel has some control over the level and even nature of ‘asphyxiation’. For example, the International Crisis Group (2024) notes that, in relation to food it is not only the total calories but the type of food and nutritional content of that food matters.^{[5]crisisgroup} When the flour is ‘most of what has reached Gaza’ this is inefficient for dealing with the acute famine and malnutrition. In other words, even in cases where aid is received, a mismatch can be produced. Specific forms of malnutrition are produced and ‘aid’ can be allowed which is incapable of responding to the problem. The necropolitical manipulation of food access (with its scientific and algorithmic potential) has an array of methods available to it for multiple ends. A statement by Humanity & Inclusion (2024) reads “Malnutrition is closely linked to disability. Malnutrition both worsens and, in many cases, causes disabilities due to its severe physical and cognitive impacts”. The asphixatory also speaks to the targeting of Palestinian youth, not for death, but for ‘stunting’ (Puar, 2015):

“for physical, psychological, and cognitive injuries, is another aspect of this biopolitical tactic that seeks to render impotent any future resistance, future capacity to sustain Palestinian life on its own terms, thereby debilitating generational time” (p. 17).

Here, the attempt to target resistance itself through debilitation and produce asphixatory power, with a targeting of the youth, demonstrates the immediacy of violence with long-term strategic consequences (generational time). The bringing to the edge of crisis and the play with the margin of rule-of-law/exception, alongside infrastructural warfare’s building of necropolitical capacity show the futural dimension of necropolitical action.

What should not go unmissed is the critique of the forms of neoliberal identity formation and their accompanying discourses. In particular, here, Puar (2015, p. 9) questions the “propagation of disability as a socially maligned condition that must be empowered to and through a liberal politics of recognition”. The question of Israel’s ‘right to maim’ should be situated within a broader question of the way disability is conceived. In the theoretical framework offered we can begin to move from, defetishise even, the notion of disability as ‘identity’ to a consideration of the way that all bodies are subject to biopolitical configurations and regimes of practice. What types of bodies receive what type of support, access, care on the one hand, and neglect, exclusion and harm on the other? Israel capitalises on the inadequacy of neoliberal discourses of disability.

A new epoch

In 2009, Hanafi (p. 106), although characterising it as misleading, wrote that, “In the last two decades, the Arab–Israeli conflict has been considered a ‘low intensity’ conflict, based on a typology which simply takes into account the number of casualties”. Hanafi (2009) offers the term spacio-side in contradistinction to genocide: “The Israeli settler-colonial project is not a genocidal project but a ‘spacio-cidal’ one” (p. 109). The framework offered by Hanafi considers the way Israel had produced states of exception and employed military strategy so as to maintain this (always dubious) claim to low-level conflict. This remains useful but there has been change. After decades of the regime of practices briefly sketched above, the decision has been made to tighten the asphixatory apparatus, deploy the necropolitical capacity which has been building and push its masquerade of humanitarian discourse to farcical extremes. A large part of the foregoing discussion revolved around the expansion of necropolitical capacity. We are now faced with a different question. The hastened advance of Israel’s violence. This question can be asked with a Foucauldian impulse:

“How is it that at certain moments […] there are these sudden take-offs, these hastenings of evolution, these transformations which fail to correspond to the calm, continuist image that is normally accredited?” […] [T]his extend and rapidity are only the sign of something else — a modification in the [rationality] (Foucault, 2000, p. 114).

How is it that at certain moments in history, we see substantial changes? Foucault’s claim is that these are not explained by advances in technology or changing conditions (although these are not inconsequential) but by modifications in the rules which guide approaches. Modifications in how choices are made and problems are approached. If the discussion of biopolitics/necropolitics has provided some of the groundings for Israel’s approach in previous decades then October 7^th 2023 marks a new era of Israel’s regime of violence. Having escalated its genocidal assault, stepped up the openness of its transgression of international law, with a callous dismissal of a level of scrutiny (despite its inadequacy) which ­— given their actions — seems untenable (and yet…), it appears that there has been a shift in the rationality which underpins Israel’s practices.

n+1’s (2024) article, Who Sees Gaza, highlights the that, on the one hand, “Israel’s social media activity since October 7 has been a crash course in hasbara, Israel’s word for propaganda, or diplomacy”. On the other hand, however, it names shift in the use of hasbara as, irreverently and facetiously, “chaotic” and “badly executed” and even “absurd”.  The article states that: “There is something uniquely disturbing about this type of cultural production, which feels like it should be satire but is not” and it is even noted that Israel is aware of this “decline in hasbara’s quality after October 7” (n+1, 2024).^{[6]See also: Some of the visual hasbara posted to @Israel on X is corny but evil, like the picture of the Israeli soldier standing in front of a tank with a rainbow flag. Some of it beggars belief, like the photos of a copy of Mein Kampf ostensibly found in “a child’s room of a home in Gaza used by Hamas as a terrorism hub,” with pages highlighted and marked with Post-it notes and a full-color illustration of Hitler brooding on the cover. Some of it is sloppy, like the video clip, since deleted, that claimed to show “23,000 tons of tents and shelter equipment” provided to Gaza but actually depicted tents in Moldova provided to Ukrainian refugees in 2022 […] [M]ost of the visual material produced by IDF soldiers in Gaza is made for social media, for fun. Call it victory content — casual, quotidian, composed in a TikTok vernacular with one video creating a template that others imitate endlessly. There is the “comedic” real estate tour video, in which a soldier guides another through a destroyed and evacuated Palestinian home and makes comments about how the kitchen needs some work. The “door” video, in which the camera tightly frames a hand knocking on a door — then zooms out to show the door is the only part of the building standing. And then there is the bomb dedication video. “I dedicate this explosion to my daughter, princess Ella, for her birthday,” one soldier says to the camera. “Today, she turns 2. I miss you.” He counts down from ten in Hebrew and a bomb detonates in the distance. There’s a moment where the cell phone camera doesn’t know where to look; it pans just in time to catch a cloud of smoke rising from an edifice at the end of the block.} The article is appropriately incredulous and attributes this ‘decline in quality’ to the “the prevailing belief that everything is hasbarable” and the denialism of Israel which sees its citizens ‘disconnected from reality’. This reads Israel’s new propaganda as simply failing to achieve its ends due to being ‘disconnected from reality’.

We offer an alternative hypothesis.

This shift in propaganda coincides with a more general shift in a change in approach. Segal (2023) notes that “Israel’s genocidal assault on Gaza is quite explicit, open, and unashamed”.^{[7]Segal (2023): In its murderous attack on Gaza, Israel has loudly proclaimed this intent. Israeli Minister of Defense Yoav Gallant declared it in no uncertain terms on October 9th: “We are imposing a complete siege on Gaza. No electricity, no food, no water, no fuel. Everything is closed. We are fighting human animals, and we will act accordingly.”} Mahdi (2025) gathers a collection of “the more outrageous statements by Israeli lawmakers or influencers since 7 October 2023”. Again, marking a distinct shift in the rhetoric that, in Mahdi’s terms, is shameless with respect to the violence (either in the explicitness of its violence or the sadistic irony of blatant propaganda). In a similar vein, Israel’s discourse of aid no longer conceals its weaponisation of aid, it simply advances it.^[8]nrc  Writing for UN News, Travers (2024) writes that there was a drastic drop in the aid going into Gaza while Israel claimed that its humanitarian aid to Gaza was “unparalleled”. In August 2025, 108 aid groups signed a statement “calling for an end to Israel’s weaponisation of aid. [As] [d]espite claims by Israeli authorities that there is no limit on humanitarian aid entering Gaza, most major international NGOs have been unable to deliver a single truck of lifesaving supplies since 2 March”. (NRC, 2025). The statement notes Israels limiting of aid, through the obstruction of INGOs, while Israel’s Gaza Humanitarian Fund functions as a severely limited and militarized aid distribution mechanism where over 800 Palestinians have died in the proximity of these sites (NRC, 2025). The statement explicitly names Israel’s approach to aid as a component of a “broader strategy to entrench control and erase Palestinian presence” (NRC, 2025). The necropolitical war on aid and aid-workers is plainly displayed in the story of Hind Rajab.^{[9]See also: forensic-architecture.} Jones, O. (2024) gives the following account:

If you are ever in doubt about the nature of Israel’s onslaught against Gaza, remember this little girl. Hind Rajab was a five-year-old Palestinian with an adorable smile. On the morning of 29 January, she got in a Kia Picanto along with her aunt, uncle and several cousins. They were seeking to flee the Tel al-Hawa neighbourhood of Gaza City. The Israeli military fired on the car, killing everyone inside except for Hind and her 15-year-old cousin, Layan. A terrified Layan answered a call from the Palestine Red Crescent Society (PRCS), informing them that a tank was firing on the car: in the recording, you hear her tortured screams as she is shot dead. When the PRCS rang back, Hind answered, now the only survivor, surrounded by the bloodied corpses of her six relatives. She also referred to a tank and begged to be rescued. At one point she told the operator it was getting dark and that she was scared.  After hours waiting for permission, the ministry of health negotiated safe access with the Israeli authorities for an ambulance. The paramedics arrived at about 6pm and were shot upon arrival. Two weeks later, their remains were recovered – along with the decomposed bodies of Hind and her family.

It is reported that, in the last year 383 aid-workers have been killed, the highest number since records began in 1997 (Reuters, 2025). 173 of these deaths were in occupied Palestinian territories, with another 55 wounded. In 2024, In occupied Palestinian territories, 186 aid-workers were murdered and another 76 were wounded.^{[10]aidworkersecurity} The following graph demonstrates the extent of Israel’s war on aid-workers with little evidence of a strategic regard for pretence.

This is what this article wants to sit with. The devastating and blatant advance of genocidal activity aligns with a shift. This ‘take off’ of practices that seem to have abandoned pretence, or seem to wield an open-pretence, indicates a new phase in the rationality of the regime. The extent of this change can be argued and needs to be further analysed but in order to combat this regime, in order to counter its strategies, we should be attentive to the shift in strategy as more than a simple disregard for it.

Israel appears to act with impunity and reckless disregard for consequences that seem untenable in the long-term. But they chose to act. Why? What is the ‘calculus’, strategy, the rationale, by which this shift occurs? It seems, as more and more states and larger proportions of the population denounce Israel’s actions (if not its existence), that Israel has been consistently undercutting its own sovereign claim. Are we to believe that Israel is just acting short-sightedly or carelessly? Should we expect strategies for the rehabilitation of its claims to sovereignty in the near future? Is Israel just calling the bluff on the modern limits of sovereignty given its geopolitical standing? What does this mean for the general claim of states to sovereignty? Of course, this overlaps with changing material conditions and geopolitical context, but what is the modification of the rationale that accompanies this change and what are its consequences moving forward? Just as the current form of genocide has been facilitated by the regime of practices which preceded it, it is worth asking what the current regime of practices facilitates. The demand for a ceasefire is necessary and urgent. Almost 2 years after October 7 2023, it must be fought for as Israel advances its genocide.^{[11]aljazeera: Israel has given final approval for a controversial settlement project in the occupied West Bank that experts say would damage plans for any future territorially contiguous Palestinian state in the territory. Israeli Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich, who announced the plan on August 14, hailed the decision as “historic” and framed the approval as a rebuke to Western countries that announced their plans to recognise a Palestinian state in recent weeks. “The Palestinian state is being erased from the table not with slogans but with actions,” Smotrich, a settler himself, said on Wednesday (Al Jazeera, 2025).} But this is only part of the struggle. Let us highlight some components from our discussion. The first is that the current genocide in its unspeakable violence is built on the necropolitical infrastructure that Israel has built over decades. The necropolitics of Israel preceded their current instantiation and practices. We should be wary of the calculus by which they entered into a seemingly reckless position. The second is that necropolitics and Israel’s deployment of necropolitics have been, in the past, calculated with a futural dimension. The shift in activity indicates a potential shift in rationality and this raises questions about Israel’s current futural practices. What has been the change in building necropolitical power that has accompanied this advance in the deployment of necropower? What surreptitious techniques is Israel using to prepare for what follows. Thirdly, closely related to the previous points, is that the target of resistance should include the necropolitical infrastructure of Israel. Israel’s claim to sovereignty, blurring modern state sovereignty with a divine claim and ‘right to exist’, must be dismantled so that its ‘sovereign right’ to wield necropolitical power is eviscerated. And a final point of emphasis, here, is that sovereignty should not escape analysis. We must end the Zionist regime but also widen our aperture, to find Israel situated within a world of continuing violence. We must keep asking ourselves about the way this world operates.