The Crime Is Nationcide

The first mention I was able to find in that search came from 1794, when Gracchus Babeuf, a French revolutionary, used the term in his The War of the Vendée and the System of Depopulation. In August 2024, American Political Science Review published an article about how, after the defeat in 1867 of their French occupiers foisted on them by Napoleon III, Mexican republican liberals accused the European powers of attempted nationcide (nacioncidio) of their country. In 2019, Julien Philippe, a French IT technician—self-described as “into geopolitics, ex-Yu Balkan & linguistics” on the question-and-answer website Quora—took credit for inventing the term (spelling it “nationicide”), and posed this question: “If we coin the term ‘Nationicide’ on a parallel with Genocide in order to address the attempted or realized elimination of a Nation instead of a People, how would we properly define a nationicide & what could be of it...?” And in 2022, Christopher DeMuth, writing for The Wall Street Journal, suggested the word “nationcide” could describe “the extermination of the national civilization a people have built—customs, traditions, civil associations and practices of self-government.”

The United Nations, in its Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide, defined the crime as: “Acts committed with the intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnic, racial, or religious group, as such.” In his Quora discourse, Julien Philippe suggested the following phraseology for a similar, hypothetical Convention on the Crime of Nationicide: “acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national entity as such.”

Here, it might be objected that the Palestinian people do not constitute, and have never constituted, an actual national entity, and therefore a charge of nationcide against Israel would be moot. I have a twofold rejoinder to this claim. First, the Palestinians have long experience in governing themselves at the local level, for centuries under the Ottoman Empire and then under the British from the end of World War I to the creation of Israel in 1948. That the Palestinians developed a strong sense of nationalism after the large influx of Jewish people into what had been their lands for centuries was amply demonstrated by their ferocious uprising against British rule in 1936 (Britain had committed to supporting a Jewish state in Palestine in the Balfour Declaration of 1917).