Academic Paper: The Long Sixteenth Century and the War of Extermination on the Gaza Strip (Arabic)

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By: Mostefa Bousboua.
(Exclusively for al-Zaytouna Centre).

Al-Zaytouna Centre for Studies and Consultations has published an academic paper entitled “The Long Sixteenth Century and the War of Extermination on the Gaza Strip,” by Mostefa Bousboua.* The study analyzes the underlying drivers of Western support for, and complicity in, the genocide in GS since 7/10/2023, notwithstanding its evident contradiction with professed Western values.

The study contends that the Western epistemic framework underpinning modernity, emerging from the “long sixteenth century,” is inherently structured by a form of genocidal violence rooted in the exclusion and dehumanization of the Other. Accordingly, genocide is rendered not as an anomaly but as a constitutive feature of modernity, whereby non-European populations are constructed as surplus human material to be managed either through extermination or forced displacement.

The paper further asserted that the Jewish Question arose from the economic and social transformations in Europe during the long sixteenth century, which reduced Jews to functionally marginalized groups and gave rise to non-Jewish Zionism, advocating the displacement of Jewish communities on religious grounds. Over time, Jewish Zionism aligned with Western colonial projects and became part of them. Consequently, Zionism, as a Western formation, has functioned as a form of atonement for the genocide against Jews by enabling the displacement and killing of Palestinians, in order to establish a Jewish national homeland conceived as an extension of the West.

The study demonstrates that Western support is rooted in a “fundamental comprehensive Zionist formula,” resulting in an implicit accord between the West and Israel. Consequently, Israel’s acts of genocide do not conflict with Western values but constitute an integral component of Western modernity.

The study draws on Latin American research on the emergence of modernity, colonialism and genocide, and employs ‘Abdel Wahab El-Messiri’s concept of the comprehensive secular system to examine the link between Zionism and modernity, as well as Western unconditional support for Israel.