The Nameless Soldiers that Kill Us & the Palestinian Call for Abolition

Cover art by Faris Treish

A year ago, I was speaking to a friend about the Palestinian journalist Shireen Abu Akleh, who was assassinated during her coverage of an Israeli raid in the Jenin refugee camp in May 2022. My friend asked me whether I knew the name of the soldier who pulled the trigger. I paused, realizing that I didn’t. In fact, I couldn’t recall any such names.

I couldn’t think of the name of the soldier who killed Ibrahim Abu Thuraya, a double amputee, during the Great March of Return in 2018, or Ahmed Erekat, who was killed at an Israeli checkpoint on his way to pick up his sister for her wedding. Nor could I think of the spineless soldier who lethally shot 21-year-old paramedic Razan Najjar from across the fence that blockades the Gaza Strip, or who murdered Ghada Ibrahim Sabatien, a widowed mother of six, in the West Bank. I couldn’t recall those names, not because my memory was exceptionally bad, but because I never learned them in the first place.

At face value, the question my friend asked was innocent enough. It contained hope for some form of due process for state violence, even as Palestinians are convicted at a rate of 99.9 percent in military courts and Israeli soldiers are routinely acquitted of their brutal crimes. Regardless, I worried that trying to excavate the name of the soldier that killed Shireen, or any Palestinian for that matter, would obfuscate the conditions that allow for them to be killed in the first place, misframing structural violence as the responsibility of individuals. At the end of the day, the murder of Shireen was not an aberration of the occupation but very much integral to its operation, which continues to protect Israeli soldiers from facing meaningful accountability while creating distance to allow them to further murder and terrorize Palestinians with impunity.

Think of the aftermath of Shireen’s murder, for example, when Israel rushed to spread misinformation by announcing that it was a Palestinian gunman who killed her (a claim Israeli human rights organization B’Tselem swiftly disproved). Israel then absurdly offered to investigate its own role in the killing—a gesture that would undoubtedly offer zero accountability—only to backpedal with claims that an investigation into their murder of a journalist would “lead to opposition within Israeli society.” Now, almost two years after Shireen’s murder, there has still been no investigation, nor has Israel been sanctioned for committing a war crime.

Significantly, Israel did not exceptionalize Shireen’s murder or treat it as a deviation of its “military ethics.” There was no investigation, no PR campaign to rehabilitate an image of Israel as an “equitable democracy,” not even a statement of apology or remorse. While these are not things we Palestinians demand or even care for, Israel’s utter lack of a response to the rest of the world indicates that they don’t care nor feel the need to respond. Why fire or punish a soldier who was doing exactly what the government expected of him? As Steven Salaita explains, “[t]he settler doesn’t need a ‘reason’ to kill the native. The settler kills because deracinating the native is a precondition of his social identity. It is a function of his legal status and class position.”

Indeed, as Noura Erakat wrote, “A sniper shot to kill one of our stars [and] is probably cracking lewd jokes [and] taking a drag of a cigarette, worried about weekend plans [because] they have ZERO worries of prosecution for a war crime.”

Photography by Faris Treish

But even if it were possible, does arresting one soldier of an occupying army constitute justice? The occupation isn’t sustained by just one soldier. It isn’t even sustained by an army, but rather by an entire settler-colonial state apparatus that must be completely dismantled if we take Palestinian freedom seriously. This structural violence is embedded in the occupation's design—architecturally, socially, and politically. This is why Palestinians rarely obsess over the names of individual soldiers.

In response to Shireen’s murder, Irish MP Richard Boyd Barrett angrily questioned what Israeli forces were doing in Palestinian territory in the first place. Indeed, why did Ahmed Erekat have to cross a checkpoint to reach his sister in the first place? Why was Razan Najjar living under siege and held captive in Gaza? And why was Israel targeting clearly identified medical professionals? What threat did Ghada Ibrahim Sabatien, a widowed mother of six, pose to the state of Israel? How can Israel, an occupying force that allegedly pulled out of Gaza in 2005, shut off all access to food and water, with the flip of a switch? 

Even if Israel named and fired the soldier who murdered Shireen, the structure of death imposed by the occupation would remain intact. The conditions of occupation are carceral. Gaza is often described as the “largest open-air prison” due to its architecture of confinement, discipline, and control. Not only are Palestinians in Gaza unable to leave the besieged strip, Israel controls their airspace, the electromagnetic sphere, their access to the sea, and what is imported into Gaza. This is precisely why journalist Mariam Barghouti described the al-Aqsa Flood, when resistance smashed through the fence that blockaded them and attached propellers to paragliders to soar over the walls that had held them captive for seventeen years, as a “prison break.”

The impunity of both the state of Israel and its anonymous individual soldiers has become even clearer in the genocidal aftermath of al-Aqsa Flood. As of January 2024, Israel has dropped over 60,000 tons of bombs on the besieged Gaza Strip, killing over 36,000, injuring 63,000 more, and internally displacing over 2 million already-displaced Palestinians. The Israeli army has shot and killed over 360 Palestinians in the West Bank alone. 

Photography by Faris Treish

Israeli state officials have promised to flatten Gaza, have dehumanized Palestinians as “human animals,” and have called for a second Nakba. The soldiers indiscriminately bombing people in Gaza are hidden out of sight in command centers, invisibilized, and thus emboldened in their genocidal practice. In this case not only are the names of those that strike Palestine from the heavens not even available to us, they are only a singular mechanism in a much larger structure that orchestrates daily settler-colonial violence. We are not engaging in protest against a few rotten apples but with a tree that is rotten to the core. 

Israel’s campaign of ethnic cleansing has been relentless and vicious. Justice for the killing of an unquantifiable number of Palestinians is therefore unattainable. No dollar amount could satisfy victims’ families and no prison sentence could bring our martyrs back to life. No legal settlement or incarcerated soldier will reverse over 75 years of settler colonial apartheid (although it might be a welcomed punishment for some).

This is why the Palestinian call for freedom has always been structural. We are not interested in reforming a brutal occupation, we are committed to abolishing it. That abolitionist response requires dismantling all its physical infrastructures, including checkpoints and the apartheid wall, and securing freedom of movement for Palestinians. It would require lifting the decades-long siege on Gaza. It would require disbanding the Israeli military and returning annexed territory to indigenous Palestinians. It would require all of us forced from our homeland by Zionism the right to return to our ancestral lands. Palestinians, who face the brunt of occupying violence every day, know this. It is precisely for this reason that they don’t demand the firing of killer soldiers. The demand has always been freedom.

Abolition therefore opens up new strategic alternatives for Palestinian liberation, offering an alternative framework for delivering justice by concerning itself with the prevention of violence rather than punishment after the fact. 

Abolition aims to identify and dismantle the structures and institutions of violence, removing the conditions that create martyrs in the first place. As abolitionist scholars Fred Moten and Stefano Harney explain, the goal is “[n]ot so much the abolition of prisons but the abolition of a society that could have prisons, that could have slavery, that could have the wage, and therefore not abolition as the elimination of anything but abolition as the founding of a new society.”

This approach shares much with those Black revolutionaries that counter the limited liberal call to “arrest killer cops.” They recognize that charging Derek Chauvin did not save Tyre Nichols, or Walter Wallace Jr., or Tony McDade, or Ma’Khia Bryant, or George Floyd. As writer Derecka Purnell poignantly writes, “[e]very now and then, a conviction will slip through the cracks and people will celebrate, similar to how slave patrols were punished and sometimes sent to prison for their mistreatment of slaves. But, the underlying power to be violent will remain virtually unchanged and many more people will die because of it.”

The abolitionist struggle connects to Palestinian solidarity not only because it resists military and police violence, but also through the partnerships between those that oppress us. Beyond American military aid to Israel (akin to bloated domestic police budgets) the two settler states also engage in exchanges of repression tactics. This “Deadly Exchange” facilitates transnational delegations in which US police go to Israel to train with the Israeli military and vice versa. Beyond the sheer depravity of such a program—designed to trade knowledge on how to surveil, discipline, punish, maim, and kill people—this underscores that the institution of policing is not determined by the temperaments of individual foot soldiers but that it is driven by an ideology that it is entrenched in.

Photography by Faris Treish

There is power in names nonetheless. The names of our martyrs are the Palestinian lifeblood. There is a reason that we uplift and immortalize them in murals, in song, and in writing. Their names represent the ultimate sacrifice for freedom, an undying faith in struggle, and cut through a dominating narrative that refuses to humanize us. This is why, when President Biden looked into the camera and told the world that he didn’t believe the Palestinian death count was accurate, Gaza’s Ministry of Health released a 212-page report that included every martyr’s name, age, and ID number; a document that is by now devastatingly out of date many times over. 

These names aren’t just casualties, they are brothers, sisters, mothers, and fathers; people who have been robbed of life. The number of names stolen during this genocide, not only in the last four months, but in 75 years, is incomprehensible. Embracing abolition as a political horizon and demanding nothing short of total freedom is the only way that we can ensure that we don’t have to remember more martyrs’ names. We must do so for Shireen, for Ghada, for Ahmed, for Ibrahim, for Khader, for Amir, for Mohammed, for…