Intro to Disability Theory
Disability studies, a newly emerging field in western academia, is theory and justice focused on rights and inclusion for all types of bodies. Disability studies grew out of social struggle and protest for equality. In Western society, the social understanding of disability has created a standard for what bodies look like and what they are capable of. Only fully productive bodies have value in western society, hence creating the minority of Disability. Like other notable western social movements in the late 20th century, flourishing communities arose out of disability justice, along with an understanding that one's productive abilities does not equal one's worth. For instance, various laws passed in the United States in 1990, such as the Americans with Disabilities Act, created legal rights for all bodies. Nowadays in the west, disability is included in Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) seminars, most public buildings are required to have ramps and elevators, and employers legally cannot discriminate for any form of disability.
This is not the extent of disability theory, as it is wide ranging and can be applicable in every other form of justice. However, following the neoliberalization of the global economy in the 90s, the movement for disability rights became focused on inclusion and access to the workplace and public institutions. While this is a progressive step historically, it made the focus of the movement about assimilating into able society instead of dealing with the contradictions of the economic order on a systemic level that deemed certain bodies as lacking value. An example of a contradiction that manifests in the economic order is imperialism. Fifteen percent of the global population are disabled, however 80 percent of that number live in the global south.1 Centuries of colonialism and imperialism have stripped large parts of the world of their natural resources, leaving the generations to come with nothing, except to struggle for capital and opportunity. Disability then becomes more than a social identity, but the physical repercussions of western imperialism on individual bodies.
“The Right to Maim”
With this in mind, extra attention should be given to one of the youngest settler-colonial projects, the occupation of Palestine. The only book published within disability studies about Palestine, The Right to Maim: Debility, Capacity, and Disability, by Jasbir K. Puar, published in 2017, explores connections between the colonial occupation of Palestine, disability justice, and systemic racism of the United States. Puar is a professor and director of the women and gender studies department at Rutgers University. Puar examines Ferguson and Gaza in the summer of 2014; when Israel’s Operation Protective Edge, a 51 day siege on Gaza happened concurrently with the murder of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri. In both circumstances, the state mobilized military forces to occupy a population expressing popular unrest. The difference lies in the strategies of control. U.S. police do not hesitate to fill black and brown bodies with bullets to uphold the status quo. Israel, as an active settler colonial force, must use a different strategy against those they colonize.
The main concept that Puar outlines in this book is debilitation. Debilitation is the persistent creation of permanent injury and disability in a population to limit movement and resistance. Debilitation shares traits with the concept of ‘de-development,' an economic strategy practiced by the imperialist powers that aims to limit the fiscal growth of an economy. In order for the state of Israel to exist, Palestine cannot exist. For the past 75 years, Israel has engaged in a systematic debilitation of Palestinian bodies and limited access to resources in order to maintain control over the population by limiting capacity for resistance, with the goal of eventually wiping out all Palestinians and expanding throughout the Middle East. De-development has been used against many nations and regimes that resist imperialism, such as Cuba, the USSR, or Iran. Puar argues that the Israeli state claims the ‘right to maim’ Palestinian bodies and resources to maintain authority as a state authorized by the international community.
Walid Daqqa
There is the most striking debilitation of the human body, the destruction of public resources and infrastructure, and finally the debilitation of the psyche. An excellent example of both mental and physical debilitation is Wallid Daqqa, an imprisoned Palestinian activist who wrote on the Palestinian question. Arrested and convicted in 1986 for killing an Israeli soldier, he spent the next 37 years in prison until his death on April 7th, 2024. Throughout his imprisonment, he wrote extensively on the mental debilitation faced by Palestinian prisoners. There is a long history of protestors and activists in Palestine being arrested by Israel and the Palestinian Authority. From 1967 to 2023, 1 million Palestinians have spent time in Israeli jails, about one in five Palestinians.2 Confining Palestinians in prison provides the occupiers direct access and control over the minds and bodies of political prisoners. There are extended reports and documentation on the sexual violence and abuse Palestinians face in Israeli jails.3 They are tortured physically and emotionally, put in semi-permanent solitary confinement, receive extended sentences for minor infractions, and face extremely limited visitor access. Daqqa died from myelofibrosis, a form of bone marrow cancer, that he was denied regular treatment for. Israel is known to delay medical care for prisoners, and refuses to provide specialized doctors with any regularity.4 This form of debilitation, withholding much needed medical attention, is another way of avoiding directly killing prisoners by simply letting them die.
Throughout Daqqa’s imprisoned life, he contributed to the resistance movement with essays, letters, and childrens books. His most famous works include Conciousness Molded, about the torture Palestinian prisoners face, The Oil’s Secret Tale, a YA novel about a young boy using magical olive oil to visit his father in prison, and short stories such as “Uncle, Give me a Cigarette.” He wrote on the importance of understanding the source of the violence and struggle that Palestinians face. He speaks on how easy it is to fall into despair and wish to give up due to the obstacles of the occupation. Understanding the various tactics of the occupiers violence and psychological warfare is necessary to fight back against these forces. His words echo those of the revolutionary Marxist writer Frantz Fanon in The Wretched of the Earth. Fanon was a psychologist who treated both the colonizers and the colonized in Algeria during the revolutionary struggle for independence from the French. The book outlines the detrimental mental effects decolonial struggle has on the minds of the colonized masses, and the debilitation via torture that was doled out by the settler population. “Because it is a systematized negation of the other, a frenzied determination to deny the other any attribute of humanity, colonialism forces the colonized to constantly ask the question: "Who am I in reality?"”5 The torture and imprisonment inflicted on Palestinians by Israel is meant to dehumanize, discourage, and ultimately destroy any revolutionary spirit present in the colonized. Daqqa’s writings echo Fanon and exemplify the psychological warfare that Palestinians must endure and their debilitating effects. He says that imprisonment is aimed at the destruction of the whole self, a recurrent theme in colonial occupations and counter revolutionary wars, such as what Fanon witnessed in Algeria. In Consciousness Molded, Daqqa states that “The Israeli prison does not only aim to incarcerate the body but to erode the soul, fragment the ties between the prisoner and their nation, and reconstruct their consciousness to undermine resistance and authority.” This tactic is somewhat successful, given the large number of Palestinian collaborators over the past decades.6 Israeli prisons are set up to disrupt revolutionary actions and make the colonized lose hope for liberation.
Let Live or Let Die?
In the past decades, the IDF has been known to hold a ‘let live’ strategy for Gazan civilians. By maiming and not killing, the IDF can reap the benefits of presenting as a humane state while illegally occupying stolen land. Maiming lowers the production rates of a population, makes the landscape less accessible, and overall stalls the growth of the society. Israel has not felt the need to wipe out everyone to maintain control over the region when they practice debilitation. There are a myriad of ways the IDF debilitates Palestinians. During the first Intifada, the Israeli defense minister at the time, Yitzhak Rabin, told his commanders to “break their bones.”7 This policy was first caught on video in 1988, when two Palestinians were beaten for over half an hour by IDF soldiers with stones, fists, and even their helmets. They were taken to a detention center, where they surely would have been left to die, if not for the video circulation putting pressure on Israel to release the pair, who were not being charged with any crime. Palestinians are shot or beaten, then detained, then receive severely delayed medical care, causing high rates of amputation. Israel will then regularly deny Gazans travel permits for medical care in the West Bank, where there are more specialized doctors. Palestinians cannot leave without Israeli permission. When bombing homes, the IDF claims to be humane by ‘knocking first.’ They will release a small missile nearby to give civilians a chance to evacuate before the main assault. The warning attack is often given less than a minute before the final attack. In multigenerational homes with debilitated civilians, seniors, and children; a minute warning is insufficient. Denying medical care creates more people who cannot leave or fight back.
IDF soldiers do not need to kill all the Palestinians, they can just shoot half in the knees, cut off resources, and let them all die trying to survive or leave. Maiming is a sanctioned tactic of settler colonial rule. While reporting on the violence the IDF is engaged in, Israeli media knows that collateral damage counts deaths, not injuries. It only needs to report the 3 dead in a bombing, not the 100 serious injuries. An Israeli sharpshooter, Sergeant Raz of the Nashon Battalion, said in an interview, “I shot two people . . . in their knees. It’s supposed to break their bones and neutralize them but not kill them.”131. Maiming Palestinians paired with systematically destroying infrastructure, withholding resources, and blocking medical care for decades, the colonizers maintain Palestine in a state of de-development. The occupying force debilitates not only bodies capable of resistance, but the physical landscape itself to stunt the growth of the economy as a form of de-development. Overall, the strategy of debilitation was working well for Israel. As of 2019, 93,000 Palestinians are disabled, a fifth of which are under 18. Half, about 47,000 people, have a mobile disability. 90 percent of disabled people in Palestine are unemployed.8
On the economic side of debilitation is de-development. The term de-development has been mentioned throughout this paper, as it is a very common economic tactic utilized by western imperialist powers that overlaps with debilitation of the colonized body. An article from 1999 highlights the de-development strategy employed by Israel since the Oslo Accord in 1993. Israel uses dispossession, externalization, deinstitutionalization, and closures. Dispossession involves Israel gradually taking possession of resources such as farming land, water, roads, borders, and other infrastructure necessary for economic growth. Israel then practiced externalization by integrating Palestines’ economy into its own by giving employment opportunities and redirecting trade to within Israel. This was done so that Palestinian economic growth would be entirely dependent on the Israeli economy. Israeli policy also undermines institutional growth such as credit and financial institutions, education, health, and government structures so there can be no room for reform without Israeli consent. Closure was first permanently imposed in 1993. Closure includes the restriction of Palestinian movement between the West Bank and Gaza and the limitation of goods and labor imported and exported. Due to Israeli security and travel restrictions, exported goods, mainly agricultural products, are very costly and are hardly delivered on time if at all. Since Palestine’s economy is reliant on Israel, closure effectively stops income and trade from entering the West Bank and Gaza. Closure led to high rates of unemployment, as about 70 percent of Gaza’s labor force was employed in Israel prior to 1993.9 “It is highly unlikely that employment levels will ever return to their historical (pre-intifada) levels, a reality underlined by Israel’s absorption of more than 200,000 legal and illegal foreign workers from Eastern Europe and South Asia.”10 Overall, Israel has complete control over Palestine’s economy in order to strangle any attempts of resistance. Palestinians cannot fight back against their colonizer if they are struggling to feed and house themselves.
Switch from Maim to Kill
Since the war on Gaza started on October 7th, 2023, Israeli debilitation tactics have shifted. With the excuse of wiping out the threat of Hamas, the IDF released mass destruction upon Gaza with consent and active financial and military assistance from the west. This justification has led to one of the worst humanitarian disasters in recent history. As of February 3rd, 2025, at least 61,709 people have been killed by the occupier’s army, 17,492 of which are children. 111,588 people have been seriously injured and over 14,222 people are missing and presumed dead. As of January 15 2025, according to the WHO and Palestinian government, almost all Gazan homes have been damaged or destroyed. 80 percent of commercial facilities, 88 percent of school buildings, 68 percent of road networks, and 68 percent of crop lands have been damaged or destroyed. Only half of the hospitals remain even partially functional. Between October and December 2023, 1,000 children lost one or both legs. Gaza currently has the largest pediatric amputee population in the world. Almost every single person in the Gaza strip was displaced, many displaced multiple times as the IDF dropped missiles on newly formed refugee camps. Famine and disease were widespread, dysentery and polio emerged in the camps that had little access to clean water and proper bathrooms. Multiple government agencies have evidence of Israel blocking and withholding aid from the strip, which was ignored by the Biden administration.
“Lavender” AI and “Daddy’s Home” Software
Some of the most telling features of the escalated violence in Israeli tactics towards Gaza is the emergence of AI software to pinpoint Hamas operatives. Operatives include everyone aiding to the goals of Hamas in the eyes of the Israeli state; civil administrators, engineers, academics, paramedics, and journalists. These civil workers are targeted because they are needed to run society effectively. A 972 Magazine article broke the AI software story in early April, 2024. Lavender AI is a software that marks Palestinians as Hamas operatives, alongside the Daddy’s Home AI, which tracks when the mark returns home. As the listed address for a citizen is the easiest place to make a drone strike, this also means entire families are wiped out when the target comes home. A significant majority of collateral damage for these attacks are women, children, and elderly family members. After October 6th, over 37,000 Palestinians were marked by the program, with a human IDF soldier only spending about 20 seconds per person before approving for a hit. The program's margin of error is over 10 percent. “In an unprecedented move, according to two of the sources, the army also decided during the first weeks of the war that, for every junior Hamas operative that Lavender marked, it was permissible to kill up to 15 or 20 civilians; in the past, the military did not authorize any “collateral damage” during assassinations of low-ranking militants. The sources added that, in the event that the target was a senior Hamas official with the rank of battalion or brigade commander, the army on several occasions authorized the killing of more than 100 civilians in the assassination of a single commander.”
On October 7th, the IDF began Operation Swords of Iron, a ground invasion and assault of Gaza Strip with the stated goal of eliminating Hamas and freeing the hostages. Under this operation, all operatives of Hamas are eligible for targeting, with the AI programs automating the entire process. The system targets people by rating everyone 1-100 based on certain features; such as changing addresses or phone numbers often or being in the same group chat as another target. Many facets of Israel's surveillance regime, that has existed for decades, have been reappropriated for the targeting of Hamas. The military stopped manually checking if operatives were home before striking, destroying many homes and killing families while missing the targeted official entirely. This was common practice in the first few months of the war, but with displacement it became much harder to track operatives using cell phones and home addresses alone, since many homes were destroyed or evacuated.
Conclusion
The lens of disability theory provides insight to the occupier’s tactics of colonization. As Walid Daqqa said, understanding the colonizer is essential for defeating the colonizer. During the war, the occupation was no longer shooting to maim but shooting to kill with the same overarching goal to ensure that Palestinians cannot govern themselves. In the past decade, Israel had been operating as though Hamas was no longer a factor. The October 7th attacks fundamentally changed the dynamics of the occupation. Hamas forced Israel into direct combat with Hamas fighters instead of periodically maiming civilians. To achieve liberation, revolutionary guerrilla movements aim to sharpen contradictions in order to push the population to revolutionary action. The resistance became a legitimate enemy of the occupiers, forcing them to engage in combat instead of the slow debilitation that modern settlers prefer. Maiming is preferable for the occupier because it preserves the status quo while allowing for incremental expansion of the colonizer. By changing the occupation equation, Hamas opened a path for liberation and halted Israeli expansion. The resistance was well aware of the risks and inevitable retaliation, but they also knew that armed resistance is the only way to reach liberation.
Bibliography
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Endnotes
1. “Factsheet on Persons with Disabilities,” United Nations, accessed February 6, 2025, https://www.un.org/development/desa/disabilities/resources/factsheet-on-persons-with-disabilities.html.
2. Al Jazeera, “Why Are So Many Palestinian Prisoners in Israeli Jails?,” Al Jazeera, October 8, 2023, https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2023/10/8/why-are-so-many-palestinian-prisoners-in-israeli-jails.
3. “Israel/Opt: Horrifying Cases of Torture and Degrading Treatment of Palestinian Detainees amid Spike in Arbitrary Arrests ,” Amnesty International, November 10, 2023, https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/news/2023/11/israel-opt-horrifying-cases-of-torture-and-degrading-treatment-of-palestinian-detainees-amid-spike-in-arbitrary-arrests/?utm_source=chatgpt.com.
4. Kaloti, Rasha. “Palestinian Prisoners and Detainees Lack Basic Access to Health Care in Israeli Prisons.” ImpACT International, September 3, 2020. https://impactpolicies.org/news/165/palestinian-prisoners-and-detainees-lack-basic-access-to-health-care-in-israeli-prisons.
5. Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth (New York, NY: Grove Press, 2004), pg 182.
6. Mohammed Omer, “Who Are Israel’s Palestinian Informants?,” Al Jazeera, September 6, 2014, https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2014/9/6/who-are-israels-palestinian-informants.
7.Shatha Hammad, “Stories from the First Intifada: ‘They Broke My Bones,’” Al Jazeera, December 10, 2017, https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2017/12/10/stories-from-the-first-intifada-they-broke-my-bones.
8. Palestine Central Bureau of Statistics, 2019, https://www.pcbs.gov.ps/portals/_pcbs/PressRelease/Press_En_3-12-2019-dis-en.pdf.
9. Sara Roy, “De-Development Revisited: Palestinian Economy and Society Since Oslo,” Journal of Palestine Studies 28, no. 3 (1999): 64–82, https://doi.org/10.2307/2538308, pg 69.
10. Sara Roy, “De-Development Revisited: Palestinian Economy and Society Since Oslo,” Journal of Palestine Studies 28, no. 3 (1999): 64–82, https://doi.org/10.2307/2538308, pg 70.
