Israels Genocidal Imagination: Fantasies of Erasing Palestinians

How have calls for mass murder of Palestinians become mainstream in Israeli society?

In the aftermath of the Hamas massacre of 7 October 2023, genocidal language—once marginal and taboo—burst into Israel’s public mainstream. Politicians, rabbis, military officers, journalists, and cultural figures openly articulated fantasies of annihilation, drawing on a politics of fear, discourse of security, and biblical imagery.This book offers the most comprehensive analysis to date of how such rhetoric became thinkable, speakable, and, for many, legitimate. It traces the longer history of the genocidal imagination in Zionist culture: the ideas, metaphors, and moral frameworks that render mass elimination imaginable.

Drawing on newspapers, poetry, literature, sermons, religious rulings, and popular culture—alongside original analysis of dozens of public-opinion surveys from the 1970s to 2025—the author maps the evolution of eliminatory thought from early fantasies about the disappearance of Palestinians to explicit calls for mass killing.The book advances a multidimensional explanation that integrates settler-colonial structures, collective existential anxiety, and cultural-theological reinterpretations of biblical texts. Challenging accounts that reduce genocide to either trauma or ideology alone, it shows how moments of crisis activate deep-seated eliminatory repertoires embedded across both secular and religious Zionism.

At once empirically grounded and theoretically ambitious, this book is an essential contribution to debates on settler colonialism, political violence, and the conditions under which genocidal rhetoric becomes normalized in modern societies.