From permanent exception to genocide: Contextualizing the Israeli regime in Gaza

Abstract

This article interrogates the Israeli regime’s approach to Palestinians –particularly in Gaza– through the lens of permanent exception, arguing that a triadic system of governance comprising normative, discursive, and performative dimensions of exception has created the structural preconditions for genocidal violence. Far from representing temporary responses to crisis, exceptional measures have become embedded within ordinary governance, enabling the systematic erosion of legal protections, the securitized construction of Palestinians as existential threats, and the routinized deployment of surveillance, bureaucratic arbitrariness and demographic engineering.

Situating this analysis within critical legal theory, the paper proposes a shift from intent-based approaches to genocide toward a context-based and socio-legal understanding that emphasizes cumulative state practices aimed at dismantling the conditions necessary for group life. Gaza, under prolonged siege and recurrent military assault, exemplifies how exceptionality transforms into an infrastructure of elimination –where legal norms are weaponized, rights systematically denied, and Palestinian existence rendered disposable.

Through detailed examination of Israeli legal history, political discourse, and daily practices of control, the article argues that genocide emerges not as an isolated rupture but as the culmination of normalized and prolongued state violence. In doing so, it reclaims genocide as a processual, socio-political and historicaly embedded phenomenon –one that demands urgent reconsideration within both international legal doctrine and global political consciousness.