“Welcome to the Rubble-based Order,” by Shivangi Mariam Raj, is a Communis original feature.

“The rubble-based order carries no clear horizon or measure of victory. Its sole purpose is to inflict as much harm as possible through protracted attacks, varying in intensity and frequency. It seeks to weaken the assaulted population and render it debilitated by diminishing its capacities for rebuilding and rehabilitation, thus creating a network of dependence. After profiting off the production of large swathes of rubble in Gaza, the Empire’s brokers created the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation and the Board of Peace to extract even more profit in the name of relief and reconstruction. The flattened landscape of Gaza was furnished within the myth of terra nullius to prepare the ground for further invasion and extraction. Rubble emerged as a spatial currency to clear the ground for yet another mechanism of colonial control. Today, in Lebanon and Iran, the Zionist-American forces are utilising the same method, framing their annihilatory violence as civilisatory benevolence, publicising it as a prescribed virtue to achieve a shiny ‘new Middle East.’”

— Shivangi Mariam Raj

[extinguished footsteps]

[the night settles as soot on clothespins, wing mirrors, and pensive rooftops]

[ash and history inside lungs]     /drones/     [breathing broken homes]

[…] [a father holding his son in his arms] [in a plastic bag]

 <Shahin Shahr> <Saida>

 <Gaza>

[each home is a heart, and all chambers are in smoke]

/dust, so much dust/

/footsteps on broken glass/

[what the skin cannot contain rises as stench] […]

<Sir el-Gharbiyeh> <Nabi Chit>  <Kashan>

[residue]                       [windows, iron beams, stone slabs, concrete, taps, finger]

 [family photo albums that outlived the families]

/golden, dark, everything falls/

/skies belch fire/

/smoke gasps for more smoke/

[blood congeals into the absent sun] [breathsbreathsbreaths] [speech is suspended]

[breathing broken                                                                                             homes]

[a man searches for his leg in the powder of his neighbourhood]

/toys trembling with blue porcelain/

[on the highways, people have turned into sea]

/plumes of hours, all time is in rot/

[dust] [dust] [dust]

There is nothing random about this overwhelming succession of disorder and chaos: this is the deliberate design of the international order, which uses rubble to crystallise in space its settler-imperialist domination. Rubble has long been understood as the unfortunate aftermath of an episode of mass violence. And yet our dependence on stale legal and moral vocabularies does not allow us to understand that spatial destruction is itself the point. The so-called rules-based order, upon which the West has crafted its civilisational fables of peace and stability, has been sustained by the systematic ruination of colonised and disobedient lifeworlds.

For the Zionist-American machinery in West Asia, rubble is the ultimate tactic of seizing territorial control, stealing all forms of sovereignty, and restructuring capital flows to extract more profit, all the while concealing its objectives in dust-smeared limbs of ordinary buildings. This total war has been unleashed to assuage the crisis of a disrupted project of regional expansion and creation of subordinate States disciplined by and dependent on the wider imperialist structure. This is not a collapse of the rules-based order, this is not a failure to adhere to international law, this is not mere violation of human rights: what we are witnessing across Palestine, Iran, and Lebanon is the architecture of ruin.

Instead of being caught up in these legal and moral imperatives, we need to pay attention to what Dirk Moses conceptualises as “permanent security,” the logic and practice that presides over the modern nation-State order in need of such violence. With its unattainable goal of absolute safety, such security animus has birthed a State sentimentality that is constantly suspicious of what it identifies as immediate or future threats.

[dust-dust-dust]

The paranoia inside which the modern nation-State order has constituted itself shapes the logics of securitisation, where “preventive war” and “preemptive strikes” offer an alibi to its annihilatory violence. Such a vocabulary allows this violence to appear justified and enlightened, while the aggressors can claim innocence by stating that their intent is not to destroy their adversaries, only to protect themselves. Where permanence of the State is the integral goal, all political imagination is saturated with security, producing a perpetual need for an enemy who can be wilfully sacrificed and eliminated in the name of upholding the sanctity of the State. It is within this sentimentality of victimhood that imperialism operates.

For over four decades, Iran has been presented by the US and “Israel” as an impending nuclear threat whose accelerating pursuit of atomic energy makes it the “world’s leading State sponsor of terrorism.” But this is a cover for not allowing Iran to challenge the goals of regional domination and destabilisation long harboured by the Zionist-American machinery’s expansionist ambitions in retaining the military power to attack everyone and not being attacked by anyone. In claiming to be surrounded by hostile States, “Israel” has consistently relied on the strategy of permanent victimhood to wage permanent warfare against those who refuse to abide by its settler-colonial decree. This chronic need for protection has drawn both juridical and popular imagination in its favour. In June 2025, the “Israeli” forces attacked the Natanz uranium enrichment facility and killed six nuclear scientists as part of “Operation Rising Lion,” which Benjamin Netanyahu claimed would “roll back the Iranian threat to Israel’s very survival.” Such a threat, however, does not exist yet, it is a threat that the Zionist-American machinery claims could or even will exist. The paranoid order, though, demands that the burden of proof be always on Iran, but no proof is ever enough. Even the evidentiary domain of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) serves the imperialist interests and weaponises its reports as a diplomatic cover to justify aggression.

The same non-proliferation regime that has enabled unbridled development of nuclear weapons by “Israel” and the US has long punished Iran with multiple and endless sanctions for its transgression of this order that maintains itself by prescribing limits and permissions. The punishment continues today, with more than 1,500 Iranian civilians killed since February 28, as part of what “Israel” calls “Operation Roaring Lion” and what the US terms “Operation Epic Fury” — names that suggest the righteous indignation of someone who’s had enough, only to conceal the cold and calculated design of this violence. Donald Trump has promised a “safer world” after the elimination of these “evil terrorists” and “lunatics.” Iran is both an “imminent threat” and a “backward, savage” nation. The simultaneity of securitisation and racialisation is what the imperative of permanent security demands.

Behind the fig leaf of the restoration of human rights, freedom, and democracy, this settler-imperial war aims to target the political and economic sovereignty of Iran and weaken the regional resistance, led by Hamas, Hezbollah, and Ansarallah. Despite its stated goals, the war is neither against the State, military, and resistance leadership nor against nuclear and missile programmes and sites: it is against a people coded as a threat to humanity, as an evil beyond redemption, as a perpetual suspicion that can be soothed only through its eradication.

When the entire population is produced as an existential threat to the governing Westphalian order — hated and criminalised, banished out of the fold of humanity — there is no “precise target,” all combatants and noncombatants alike become “legitimate” ones. In Lebanon, particularly across Dahye and Jnoub, more than 1,300 civilians have been killed since March 2 by Zionist strikes aimed chiefly at densely populated neighbourhoods. These killings do not produce shock or outrage among the public in the West. They do not qualify as transgression of the moral limit set by the imperialist order. This is not a violence against “innocent victims,” but against people who “deserve” it because they refuse to surrender their political agency to the Zionist-American imperial enterprise. A violence that is permitted and even considered necessary because the resistance in Lebanon committed a transgression by rejecting the disarmament plan that would continue to sustain the colonisers’ monopoly over violence. That children are heartbreakingly, exceedingly bombed, maimed, and killed inside their homes and schools in Gaza, Tehran, and Jnoub is not some arbitrary monstrosity on the part of the aggressor, it is a meticulous tactic of the preventative warfare that views the elimination of “future threats” as essential to the safety of the imperialist order.

More than spectacular episodes of mass violence, this permanent warfare sustains itself through protracted routines of destruction that unfold gradually with the aim of extinguishing the opponents’ lifeworlds and impeding their capacity for social reproduction. Across Lebanon, the “Israeli” occupation forces have destroyed several clean water sources, torn down the sanitation infrastructure, bombed roads and bridges, attacked ambulances and medical centres, killed journalists and paramedics. With the successive bombings of the Shahran oil depot, the Shahid Dolati facility, the Tehran oil refinery, and the Aqdasieh oil depot, among others, fire and smoke hung for weeks in the skies of Iran, releasing particles of carbon monoxide, sulphur and nitrogen oxides, and toxic hydrocarbons into the air. In addition to these carcinogenic compounds, the winds also carried silica and asbestos from the entrails of broken buildings for everything to seep into waterways, to be absorbed by seeds and saplings in soil, and to contaminate drainage systems. Long after, and far away from the blast sites, exposure to poisonous pollutants continues to target lives now at the risk of developing cardiovascular complications, respiratory disorders, impaired cognitive function, inherited defects, and DNA mutations — crimes that have already been committed against the unborn. With more than three million displaced peoples across Iran, Kurdistan, and Balochistan, these attacks have targeted densely populated areas so that the impact of the violence multiplies. No matter how many civilian casualties are counted in Iran today, we will never know the number of lives that, with each passing day, are being subjected to a slow decimation.

This rubble-based order sediments by incrementally eroding all claims to the term “human” so that even the limited premise of human rights can be denied to the besieged populations — permanent security is far more important than human rights because it corresponds to the preservation of the Statist and imperialist machinery. It calculates the hierarchy of humanity and rearranges populations upon the twin logics of racialisation and securitisation. It relies on rubble to carefully eliminate the marked populations by subjecting them to displacement, dispossession, and disease. Heap upon heap, debris reconfigures space in order to accelerate their social death, thereby emerging as an instrument for population management and subsequent ethnic cleansing. The necroeconomy of debris, as evidenced in Gaza, operates on land theft, territorial expansion, and reinscription of borders. This is how “Israel” crafts its life.

This total, limitless war carries destruction not as a means, but as the end. Unlike traditional warfare, its purpose is not merely to incapacitate the military infrastructure of its adversaries, but to annihilate all conditions and networks that produce life. As such, it has become increasingly difficult to categorise and contain this naked carnage within legal and moral terms such as genocide or mass violence because it is this very ruination upon which the neoliberal nation-State order stands, upon which settler “innocence” continues to sanitise its fictions, upon which millions of killings are normalised as “incidental harm.” This is not rare violence. This violence is regular and regulated. The heuristic of rubble is instructive in allowing us to understand that ruination is not aberrational, but rather a constitutive element of the imperialist formation. The production and consumption of rubble are necessary activities for the creation of value and accumulation of capital and colony. Instead of dismissing what is readily termed “collateral damage,” thinking with rubble allows us to place it at the heart of our examination of a violence that is never over: it remains inside bodies across species and generations, it poisons the veins of the skies, it sinks deep into river beds and ocean floors, it lingers in soil and seeds, it contaminates time. Slow violence, slow decay. As a structure, rubble is both consequence and evidence of this calibrated design of annihilation.

Thus, calling these attacks “barbaric” to highlight their cruelty is misguided because this is the precise metanarrative of civilisation within which the governing settler-colonial order established and advanced itself. To justify its bombing of Iranian cities the Empire alleges that the Iranian regime oppresses women and that these attacks are necessary to usher them into the cloister of civilisation. Recently, the Chairman of the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) defended the US strike on Shajareh Tayyebeh elementary school in Minab that killed at least 168 schoolgirls by saying, “they’d be alive in a burqa.”

Likewise, dependence on the language of accuracy in questioning the Empire’s “precision strikes” targeting civilians instead of the military infrastructure, is futile: it misses the fact that the whole population is indeed the target. This terminology allows the Empire to carry out the exact and exacting violence it wouldn’t have been able to through the explicit term of “indiscriminate strikes.” These words come from the same civilisational index that has continued itself in the shape of the Empire, the modern nation-State, the colony. They harden civilisational mythologies and function as a justification for continuing their wars. Trump called Iran “barbaric,” accusing the Iranian military forces of conducting out imprecise strikes and killing civilians.

[dust / dust / dust]

The current warfare infrastructure operates through the paradox of highly sophisticated precision weapons and a significantly higher number of civilians killed and injured. This contradiction is smoothened by the logic of permanent security, whereby the killing of civilians is not only permissible, but also made necessary. The apparent abstraction of rubble turns abstract everything else, including people, reduced to a “recommended target” and a “predicted threat” in a steady data stream controlled by algorithm and artificial intelligence across advanced UAV platforms. Technologies that promise strategic advantage and “qualitative military edge” to the aggressors also stand in need of more “targets” and “threats” to justify the costs and investments in their machines. How can the lofty principle of distinction be maintained? There is no longer a specified battlefield; with drones, each node of the neighbourhood and each corner of the house is now a frontier.

In order to boost profits, predictive warfare further precipitates wars by generating more real-time targets. Time-efficient and cost-effective, it makes its own decisions and charts its own battle plans, not only saving the life and labour of the aggressor’s human resources, but also saving them from any legal repercussions. The aggressors can deny all responsibility for the actions undertaken by a semi- or fully automated and autonomous machine.

Between networks of data and debris, rubble emerges as a modality of hybrid warfare that simultaneously dispenses punishment and deterrence, soothing the anxieties of a waning imperialist order. This tactic of elimination via “collateral damage” gets increased legal immunity with the vocabulary of “forbidden weapons.” “Israeli” occupation forces recently used white phosphorus — a “forbidden weapon” — in Jnoub, after having used it more than 200 times between October 2023 and November 2024, across Kfar Kila, Meis el-Jabal, Hula, Alma ash-Shaab, and Labbouneh, among other towns and villages. It was used primarily in residential areas, with the most recent attacks concentrated in Yohmor, Haret Hreik, and Ghobeiry. These artillery-delivered munitions contain chemicals that, upon exposure to oxygen, can burn down homes and agricultural fields, and cause injuries lasting a lifetime. Even as the occupation forces defend their use by stating that these are utilised for the large quantities of smoke to conceal the movement of their soldiers as well as to increase the visibility of the movement of Hezbollah fighters, these strikes were intensified amidst mass displacement and forced evacuations of the local population with the intention to cause maximum damage. A military necessity inseparable from civilian harm. In the so-called non-residential areas, these toxic fumes damaged agricultural fields, oak and gum trees, and forests that the community depends upon for sustenance. Long after the airburst, white phosphorus can penetrate the soil and explode when the soil is tilled. The occupation forces claim that their use of this “forbidden weapon” minimises civilian harm because before an attack they issue evacuation orders, but such notices become a tactic for them to render more populations vulnerable to this chemical, with the eventual aim of ethnic cleansing. The “forbidden” is sublimated into the “precautionary” and the “necessary.” Such exceptional focus on the “forbidden” method of annihilation permits the “ordinary” method of annihilation. Why, for example, is a bulldozer not a forbidden weapon? Even further, such differentiation between permissible and non-permissible grades of violence allow these legal and humane forms of violence to circumvent all limits.

This rubble-based order carries no clear horizon or measure of victory. Its sole purpose is to inflict as much harm as possible through protracted attacks, varying in intensity and frequency. It seeks to weaken the attacked population and render it debilitated by diminishing its capacities for rebuilding and rehabilitation, thus creating a network of dependence. After profiting off the production of large swathes of rubble in Gaza, the Empire’s brokers created the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation and the Board of Peace to extract even more profit in the name of relief and reconstruction. The flattened landscape of Gaza was furnished within the myth of terra nullius to prepare the ground for further invasion and extraction. Rubble emerged as a spatial currency to clear the ground for yet another mechanism of colonial control. Today, in Lebanon and Iran, the Zionist-American forces are utilising the same method, framing their annihilatory violence as civilizatory benevolence, publicising it as a prescribed virtue to achieve a shiny “new Middle East.”

The political instrumentalisation of its permanent victimhood has allowed “Israel” to use disproportionate force in the name of anticipatory self-defence, whether catalogued as the Begin Doctrine or the Dahye Doctrine. It has routinely deployed brief, scattered attacks on Palestine, Lebanon, and Syria to reinforce its settler-colonial project in the region. However, with its ongoing genocide in Gaza, it has now come to rely on long, drawn-out attrition warfare. This is what Amal Saad has termed the Gaza Doctrine, outright extermination and civilian destruction that we are forced to witness in Isfahan, Al Khiam, Burj el-Shmali, Karaj, the Bekaa Valley, and elsewhere. Leveraging the rubble-based order, “Israel” no longer needs to “mow the lawn”: it can now “level” it.

In Lebanon, knowing that it cannot defeat Hezbollah, “Israel” is trying to weaponise the local political and social divisions and punishing all networks where the resistance draws its popular support. The racialisation of the Shi’a and the Palestinian refugee populations as “outsiders” is combined with producing them as a security threat, thereby turning entire populations into a legitimate target. If in Dahye the attacks are aimed at destroying the material infrastructures of resistance, in Jnoub, these attacks aim to steal and flatten as much land as possible for “Greater Israel.” Dismissed in legal registers as “incidental harm,” bombing densely populated neighbourhoods is a deliberate strategy to push more than a million people subjected to enforced displacement into even more pronounced precarity. Similarly, in Iran, despite the US assertion of regime change, the end goal is total collapse of the sovereign State order and the creation of a dependent public fastened to a failed State, a dismantled State, a State eventually impossible even in the future. By weaponising the just struggle of Kurdish peoples, “Israel” seeks to compound destabilisation in the region and redraw its borders over mound after mound of rubble.

As the settler-imperialist forces declare their violence to be ethical and humane — a most humanitarian destruction indeed — they fortify their narrative of permanent victimhood by moving beyond protecting themselves to protecting the oppressed of choice against the common enemy. They code “Israel’s” ontological dependence on annihilation into the nomenclature of just war by claiming that they have been merely compelled to act. The principle of proportionality provides that any attack that may cause incidental loss of civilian life and property exceeding the expected military advantage is prohibited. Once again, when warfare is oriented towards the accumulation of rubble to cohere foundational mythologies and to consolidate the settler identity, can there be a legal or moral limit to such violence? A certain hint can be observed in the vocabulary Netanyahu uses in English, speaking to an international audience hemmed in by the so-called rules-based order compared to the vocabulary Smotrich and Ben-Gvir use in Hebrew, speaking to a settler audience dancing, touring, and celebrating the rubble-based order.

Rubble, before being an architectural object and a political force, is the residue of homes, memories, and lifetimes torn apart. Its primary violence is turning the sacred, the intimate, the whole into splinters of profanity; and it is this profanity that the settler-imperial order turns to as voyeurs seeking a reassurance of their safety and supremacy. In the landscape of permanent warfare, rubble emerges as a perfect weapon because not only does it cause immediate loss of life and property, it also creates multiple grades of violence that mature over long stretches of time, deferring more devastation to the future, whilst slipping past all international legislations that designate these as mere collateral damage. It turns to the doctrine of double effect that grants legal and moral permission for the destruction to continue as a mere unavoidable, inevitable outcome. Instead of killing people in one go, the rubble-based order administers incremental violence to kill even a higher number, but at a steadier, unremitting pace. Constant exposure to toxic waste guarantees premature death of the masses who previously survived the bombs. Because the aggressor forces cannot win by direct confrontation with their adversary on land, their asymmetric warfare turns the entire atmosphere into a weapon. “Scorched-Earth Policy” across Palestine and Lebanon and “Tornado Plan” across Iran are atmospheric registers of this violence that last longer than generations. Rubble is a technology to industrialise death: it is streamlined, it follows the supply chain, it carries law itself as part of its technique.

[dustdustdust]

International law prides itself in centering the term “civilian,” but logics of racialisation and securitisation require for this definition to not extend to certain populations. People who are marked as the permanent enemy — not just of a particular settler or imperial force, but of humanity as a whole — are inevitably placed outside the protection of law. Where political-theological weight is on designating Palestinians as Amalek and on terming the attack on Iran as Armageddon, annihilatory violence is sacralised and the modern instrument of law operates as the modern instrument of enforcing European Christian virtue. What are defined and circulated in law as “humanity” and “civilisation” are, in fact, memory cultures hingeing upon the erasure of certain communities from these terms and the discursive protection they offer.

With its principles of distinction, proportionality, and precaution, international law has aided the ruling Westphalian order by allowing it to claim that they are “civilised,” that their violence is refined and restrained. In such a scenario, violation of law no longer remains a problem because the application of law itself becomes a method to facilitate their crimes.

Take, for example, Article 15 of the Fourth Geneva Convention, which stipulates providing shelter to civilians who take no part in hostilities, and who perform no work of a military character. As per the customary International Humanitarian Law, the first rule emphasises the principle of distinction between civilians and combatants, while the sixth rule posits that civilians are no longer protected from attacks if “they take a direct part in hostilities.” However, when the entire population is designated as “evil terrorists,” then the already vague definition of “direct part,” “work of a military character,” and “hostilities” is made even blurrier. Under the logic of limitless war, such presumed participation has no beginning and no end; it is ascribed to the population as a racial marker, thereby justifying permanent warfare.

The notion of just war rests on the conceptualisation of civilian immunity. And yet for such an immunity to be awarded, the population  must be considered “innocent.” In Lebanon and Iran, entire family lines have been wiped out, and parents have been forced to bury their children or unbury their limbs from debris because they were viewed as subsidiary military forces and host sites of resistance. For at least two decades, “Israel” has routinely used the deceptive argument of human shields to justify its attacks on Palestinians in Gaza.

Even as Article 23 of the 1907 Hague Regulations prohibits destroying or seizing the enemy’s property, it immediately states that this is permitted for the “necessities of war.” And it is this necessity that is embedded in the kernel of permanent security. Rubble skillfully occupies a middle zone between destroying and seizing: it produces a spatial order that is neither completely damaged nor fully captured by the settler-imperial forces, yet which continues to exert domination by reordering populations, cities, and psyches.

Articles 48 and 52 of the Geneva Convention posit the protection of civilian infrastructure, permitting attacks, reprisals, and operations only against military objectives. Military objectives are defined as those which by “their nature, location, purpose or use make an effective contribution to military action and whose total or partial destruction, capture or neutralisation, in the circumstances ruling at the time, offers a definite military advantage.” But the “Israeli” propaganda of mentioning a tunnel network underneath Al-Shifa hospital in Gaza and rocket launcher rooms inside Shi’a homes in Lebanon worked to weaponise this legal loophole and gain public support for their genocidal violence by folding this distinction between civilian and military infrastructures, thereby establishing total annihilation as “a definite military advantage.”

Further, while Article 27 of the Hague Regulations elaborates in detail that “in sieges and bombardments all necessary steps must be taken to spare, as far as possible, buildings dedicated to religion, art, science, or charitable purposes, historic monuments, hospitals, and places where the sick and wounded are collected, provided they are not being used at the time for military purposes,” once again “military purposes” are purposefully left undefined for this conditionality to be weaponised by the settler-imperial forces. Such semantic opacity is not accidental, it provides an expansive cover to the aggressors to strategically orchestrate, both by elaborate maps and architectural drawings as well as hasty hasbara, a perfectly legal destruction of civilian spaces. Moreover, the conditions for the protection of objects indispensable to the survival of the civilian population remain vague as well. For example, “Israel” has been spraying concentrated doses of glyphosate across villages in Jnoub, poisoning the soil and water beyond repair, destroying thousands of livelihoods dependent on olive groves and tobacco farms, creating long-term health risks with carcinogenic toxins. When these fields are recast as military sites sheltering the movement of resistance fighters, such chemical warfare gains legitimacy.

In progressively turning all civilian infrastructure to rubble, Zionists claim to have devised a strategy to pressurise the resistance to disarm and to blame them for embedding their military presence in these quotidian spaces, thereby drawing the legal and moral imperative of the world against them. By placing the responsibility of the destruction of civilian lifeworlds on the resistance, the Zionist aim is to further cast them as “savages” who hide behind civilians, whereas “Israel” remains the “most moral army in the world,” following the principle of distinction.

Article 26 of the Hague Regulations provides that before commencing a bombardment, the officer in command of an attacking force must do all in his power to warn the authorities. Furthermore, Article 57(2)(c) of the 1977 Additional Protocol I states that “effective advance warning shall be given of attacks which may affect the civilian population, unless circumstances do not permit.” In Gaza, heavy bombardment, sniper attacks, and shelling punctuated the technologies of civilian safety professed in the lexical incongruity of “humanitarian pauses,” “humanitarian corridors,” and “humanitarian zones.” Evacuation notices with detailed maps offered the Zionist forces the veneer of adhering to the principle of precaution as well as being precise and accurate in their targets, while trapping the displaced populations into another routine of extermination. Once again, the same tactic is being applied across Lebanon now, where these leaflets are being used to depopulate neighbourhoods and villages in Dahye and Jnoub, deliberately exposing over one million displaced people to other threats to their safety.

These “precautionary measures” serve as tactics to administer even more violence across psychological, sonic, and other permissible registers. Leaflet after leaflet, more land is reduced to territory marked with more lines — red, blue, yellow, green, drawn, redrawn — coding announcements of population transfer, enforced displacement, and land grab as “safety warnings.” These warnings have been instrumental as legal fortification and strategic PR exercise for the Zionist entity, satiating all moral and juridical imaginations regarding its “conduct in war.” The “Israeli” occupation forces have been lauded for their advance warning technologies, which include phone calls with live operators or pre-recorded messages, leaflets with dehumanising cartoons, threats, or directives to collaborate, and SMS or social media messages with malicious links, among others. The range only grows with the effective warning technologies of “double tap” and “roof knocking” presented as alerts to save civilian lives. Only in settler logic can bombing people mean saving them.

In international law, even if warnings as a precautionary measure may offer some protection to civilian life, there is no provision for the safety of civilian infrastructure, nor are the aggressors obligated to find safe and alternative spaces to protect the displaced civilians. Even this supposed protection of civilian life is contingent upon the feasibility of issuing these warnings not exceeding the aggressors’ military necessity.

What becomes of those who choose to stay in their homes and on their land, rejecting the charade of these warnings, refusing to accept this interruption in their العودة Return? Does their disobedience forfeit their civilian status? What else does this legal order stand to protect except the myth of humane violence of the Empire?

Often, these evacuation notices generate a sustained moral panic around civilians not being given sufficient warning or the lawlessness of noncombatants being attacked. What use is such expectation of morality when it is this very righteousness that Zionist propaganda relies upon? Within this framework of precautions, the more “effective” their warning, the more legal their military operations become: an extremely lawful method to cause more harm and slaughter more civilians. Inversely, the more “legal” their actions are, the greater their accusation against the “illegal” and “barbaric” actions of Hamas and Hezbollah becomes by arguing that the resistance failed to honour the precautions and warning obligations towards their civilian populations. Law thus becomes a tool to fragment people from their resistance.

[… dust… dust… dust…]

How much destruction is too much? When does civilian infrastructure turn into military objectives and what marks the transformation of a civilian into a human shield? How many legitimate ways of killing are enough for how many legitimate targets? Rubble continues to stretch and reorder all thresholds by compressing the unspeakable, the unmeasurable into the acceptable scale of everydayness.

In this rubble-based order, noncombatant fatalities far exceed combatant deaths — and even more civilian lives are stolen by griefs, debts, and toxins sedimenting deep inside weary bodies, lives tossed against loss of home and lack of food, lives subtracted from their generations, lives never allowed to recover from injuries, lives consumed by waste so much and for so long that no statistical record retains their trace. No matter what the official figures say, we will never know the exact weight of loss, the definite number of people killed in these cumulative attacks by the Zionist-American forces. With its tactic of “lawful collateral damage,” the violence of rubble overturns the will and logic of measurement, further obscuring all civilian destruction.

The law states that civilian destruction should not be excessive in relation to the concrete and direct military advantage anticipated. But in practice these legal principles, otherwise constituted to offer protection to civilians, permit both hyperspectacular and imperceptible forms of violence against them, for the anticipated military advantage itself has expanded to absolute annihilation. Aside from calculating the hierarchy of humanity, these legislations further calculate the hierarchy of crimes. By accepting the terminology of collateral damage, they have brought forth the rubble-based order, where the conditions of war continue even after the war has ended. Whether by design or through its conceptual pitfalls, international law has relinquished civilian immunity in favour of civilisation immunity, and therefore is indispensable to modern statecrafting with its promise and permission to conduct crimes within the ambit of law. What “Israel” and the US are committing in Iran and Lebanon today is not some blatant disregard of law, not even an instance of lawlessness — these are the actions of forces that have thoroughly studied international law and exercised due diligence to bypass and weaponise the gaps in these legal vocabularies and the moral weight they subsequently invoke.

As rubble continues to manufacture a political subjectivity that cannot be assimilated into any rank of rights-based humanity, where some people will always remain killable, expendable, rubbleable, where do these templated legal and moral imaginations lead us? When law is part of the Empire’s military strategy, where absolute extermination is a contrario permissible, why must we bear the moral burden of the belief that we will get justice from the same institutions designed to violate us, in life and in death? These settler-imperialist forces are not an episodic dispenser of violence, they are the aggregator of the global market where rubble is a soaring, cherished commodity. They chase the temporal order of permanence, an endlessness that they seek to forge over charred histories and futures of the ones denied their time. The liberal wet dream of reconciliation and resolution within the limits set by international law wilfully overlooks the political economy that demands our deaths.

This specious emphasis on civilian life, on the distinction between combatants and noncombatants, also prepares the ground to criminalise resistance. These legal and moral nomenclatures get in the way of the knowledge of the land that declares a people and their resistance as one, especially in Jnoub and Gaza. Against the logic of fragmentation carried by rubble that tears lands, bodies, and communities apart, the resistance swells beyond all rules of this order, materialising the will of popular sovereignty, which is not on land, but with land. Across the tunnels and in the mountains, the resistance is creating another time beyond the paranoia of settler-imperial pursuit of permanence.

[dust…]

Featured image: Tell es-Sultan Palestinian refugees Camp,  20 February 2025. From the series “Images from the Gaza War (2023-2025)” by Jaber Jehad Badwan. Source: Wikipedia Commons.

Shivangi Mariam Raj