Genocide,Peripheral Fascisms,and Late Neocolonialism in Palestine/Israel and Brazil

Introduction

The current phase of the US–Israeli genocide in Gaza, initiated after the Al Aqsa Flood military operation on October 7, 2023, by the Palestinian resistance, has resulted in the estimated loss of over 186,000 Palestinian lives and the forced displacement of millions (Khatib et al., 2024). The justification given for the destruction of Gaza’s infrastructure, which includes universities and hospitals, has been the defeat of Hamas and the Palestinian Islamic Jihad (PIJ). Israel has repeatedly violated international law, obstructed ceasefire negotiations, and denied humanitarian aid. Far-right members of the Benjamin Netanyahu government (2022–present), including Bezalel Smotrich and Itamar Ben-Gvir, aim to expel as many Palestinians as possible and reestablish Jewish settlements in Gaza. The International Court of Justice acknowledged the possibility of genocide in Gaza and directed Israel to cease its operations. However, the United States has played a critical role in the provision of diplomatic protection, as well as weapons and bombs, to continue with the elimination of the Palestinians (Ajl, 2024a, 2024b).

Brazil is another settler colony currently committing a genocide. The expansion of large landowners’ estates, extractive activities, and the dismantlement of indigenous health and protection agencies has resulted in the expulsion and death of numerous indigenous, Quilombola, ¹ and peasants. From 2022 to 2023, a total of 706 Yanomami individuals lost their lives due to the repercussions of illicit mining activities in the Amazon (FSP, 2024), which were permitted by the Jair Bolsonaro government (2019–2022) and have not been effectively controlled by the Lula da Silva administration (2023–present). An investigation is underway in Brazil by the Attorney General’s Office into the crime of genocide during the Bolsonaro government. Moreover, the War on Drugs has rationalized the state’s violence against Black people residing in urban favelas, leading to their deaths and mass incarceration. In the first months of 2024, the police force in the Baixada Santista ² has been responsible for the deaths of 56 individuals, predominantly of African descent (Bocchini, 2024). These deaths are recent occurrences within a prolonged process of genocide targeting Indigenous and Black peoples in the country (Huberman & Nasser, 2019; Kopenawa et al., 2019; Nascimento, 2016).

Both genocides are directed at racially subaltern populations, whose resistance poses a threat to the settler’s regime of accumulation, property relations, and political sovereignty. However, there is an important difference in scale. Although Brazil has a long history of genocide against its Indigenous population, the Brazilian state currently lacks the same capacity to exercise sovereign power as the Israeli state. Over 50% of the country’s fatalities are the consequence of disputes between criminal organizations regarding drug markets. In 2023, 6,393 murders caused by direct police action amounted to 13.8% of the 46,328 intentional violent deaths in total (FBSP, 2024). On the other hand, the State of Israel is directly responsible for almost all Palestinian violent deaths in the Occupied Palestinian Territories (OPT)—including more than 40,000 official deaths in the ninth month of war in Gaza (AJLabs, 2023). We do not absolve the Brazilian state of its responsibility for the highest rate of total homicides in the world. Rather, we are recognizing the difference in the way violence is ordered in these territories. To understand the circumstances that enabled these genocides, it is imperative to analyze the Israeli and Brazilian regimes and their associations with US-led collective imperialism. ³ The framework for this analysis will be the concepts of late neocolonialism (Yeros & Jha, 2020) and settler colonialism (Englert, 2022; Wolfe, 2006). We argue that it is essential to understand the transition to neocolonialism to comprehend how settler-colonial power is exercised. This establishes the capacity for sovereign violence to be employed against the colonized.

Brazil and Israel served as US sub-empires in the Middle East and South America during the Cold War (Marini, 2012). The genocidal capacity of both countries was comparable during this period. Brazil underwent a partial process of settler decolonization at the conclusion of the Cold War, which resulted in a transition to late neocolonialism. Brazil is now a consolidated settler colony in which colonizers and colonized share power, but claims for land and wealth distribution by the subaltern still threaten colonial property relations (Poets, 2024; Yeros et al., 2019). Popular resistance does not push the United States toward direct military interventions in Latin America. Nevertheless, the United States maintains hegemony in Latin America through comprador bourgeoisies and the War on Drugs (Avilés, 2017), which makes it the most violent region in the world (UNODC, 2024). On the other hand, Israel is an unconsolidated settler colony that is confronted with a robust anticolonial resistance from the Palestinians that threatens the settler’s political sovereignty. To impose hegemony against resistance movements that seek self-determination, the US–Israel alliance submits the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) to various imperialist wars, regime change operations, and sanctions (Ajl 2024a, 2024b).

We argue that settler states hold a “power of elimination” that they apply to the colonized within the contradictions of capitalism. Late neocolonialism increasingly expropriates workers and natural resources, constituting a surplus and semi-proletarianized population (Yeros & Jha, 2020). In addition, the logic of accumulation by waste of contemporary imperialism has made wars of extermination against surplus populations a central element for the global reproduction of capitalism (Kadri, 2023). As a result, we assert that settler forces employ genocide as a counterinsurgency strategy against colonized surplus populations to advance primitive accumulation.

In addition, we claim that the escalation of structural genocides in these settler colonies was facilitated by the rise of far-right governments in Israel and Brazil. Beyond religious fundamentalism, scientific skepticism, and conservative family values, it is essential to interpret Bolsonaro and Netanyahu as “peripheral fascists” (Yeros & Jha, 2020), resulting in a settler alliance to mutually reinforce state violence and genocide. However, the structural differences of settler colonialism in both countries also constitute the difference in the scale of the genocides and the capacity of the colonized to resist. The relationship with US imperialism is another factor considered to comprehend the ability of these authoritarian regimes to increase the use of the power of elimination to promote primitive accumulation and social control.

In the initial section of this article, we examine the limits and contributions of settler-colonial theory to the comprehension of genocides. Subsequently, we discuss how contemporary imperialism promotes genocide then, we examine the role of Brazil and Israel in the US-led collective imperialism during and following the Cold War. We are interested in comprehending how the reproduction of settler colonialism contributes to the capacity of these states to exercise their power of elimination. Lastly, we examine the extent to which the emergence of the far-right has facilitated the escalation of genocide in both nations and the methods by which the colonized have been able to resist.

Settler Colonialism and the Power of Elimination

Since the 1960s Palestinian authors had already analyzed Israel as the product of a settler-colonial process (Jabbour, 1970; Sayegh, 2012). However, following the work of Patrick Wolfe (2006), there has been a growth in the literature interpreting Israel as a settler-colonial state (Salamanca et al., 2012). According to Wolfe’s theory, settler colonialism is defined by a structural “logic of elimination.” It involves the eradication of the natives through means such as death, expulsion, assimilation, and confinement. The objective is to replace the Indigenous people with settlers to establish colonial sovereignty over the confiscated territory. The Palestinian Nakba of 1948, which involved the expulsion of over 750,000 Palestinians and the destruction of 500 villages, along with the historical massacres of Palestinians such as in Sabra and Shatila in 1982, and the subsequent confinement of the remaining Palestinians in highly securitized enclaves in the Gaza Strip and the West Bank, serve as evidence of an underlying settler-colonial rationale behind these events (Salamanca et al., 2012). The settler-colonial process persists as long as there is Indigenous territory to be expropriated. Thus, the Israeli war on the Palestinians in Gaza is a new phase of this long-lasting confiscation process.

Wolfe developed settler-colonial theory based on the “logic of elimination” to centralize genocide and the expropriation of territory. He sought to differentiate settler colonialism, which naturalizes settler sovereignty and property relation in nations such as the United States, Australia, and Israel, from the prevailing perception in postcolonial studies according to which colonialism was restricted to the past and to the exploitation of native labor. Nevertheless, I agree with the criticisms directed toward Wolfe’s perspective on settler colonialism (Ajl, 2023; Englert, 2020). Englert (2020) argues that, as a phenomenon embedded within capitalism, settler colonialism does not have its own logic. It operates within the contradictions of the processes of accumulation by dispossession. Moreover, Wolfe’s perspective also conflates Palestinian normalizers and guerrillas by disregarding the issues of labor and class within native society. As a result, it does not enable us to comprehend the class contradictions essential for national liberation (Ajl, 2023). Wolfe also disregards the Indigenous capacity to resist elimination processes (Englert, 2022). Natives refuse to be eliminated. The end of genocide does not mean the demise of settler colonialism (Ajl, 2023). In the liberal settler state, Indigenous peoples continue to demand territorial sovereignty and resist the expropriation of their territory (Coulthard, 2014). Nonetheless, the Israeli genocide against the Palestinians in Gaza and the Brazilian genocide against Black and Indigenous peoples highlight the need to examine the process of elimination in settler-colonial contexts.

Raphael Lemkin created the concept of genocide, which he derived from a colonial interpretation of Nazism. He endeavored to comprehend the way Germany replicated Europe’s practices of elimination that had previously been reserved for Indigenous peoples outside the continent (Flauzina, 2014). Before the emergence of Nazism in Europe, Cesaire (2020) noted, there were numerous Hitlers in the colonies. The settler colonization of the United States was an important source of inspiration for Nazi practices (Losurdo, 2006). Colonial history is replete with holocausts, including war, famine, disease, mass murder, and enslavement (Davis, 2022; Stannard, 1993). Entire Indigenous populations were eradicated in certain Caribbean islands, such as Haiti. It is estimated that only 3.5 million Indigenous people survived in Latin America five decades after Columbus arrived in the fifteenth century, when the region was home to approximately 70 million people (Englert, 2022).

Coulthard (2014) observes that the dispossession of the Indigenous people in Canada did not result in their proletarianization. The incorporation of natives into the workforce was not always necessary because the colonial metropolises allocated the already proletarianized population in Europe (Englert, 2022). Genocide was a critical instrument for the separation of Indigenous populations from their land, thereby facilitating the settlement of European colonists and the establishment of capitalist relations. Conversely, the Spanish and Portuguese empires utilized Indigenous labor extensively in the Americas due to the challenges associated with recruiting settlers. Enslaved Africans were subsequently employed as laborers for European settler colonialism. Thus, genocidal practices were constant companions to the exploitation of Indigenous labor in settler-colonial contexts. “Enslavement, genocide and settlement became the holy trinity that made the accumulation of wealth possible on a global scale, into the coffers of European states, merchants and emerging capitalists” (Englert, 2022, p. 114).

The case of Brazil is still not much studied by the settler-colonial theory (Poets, 2024). However, it presents an opportunity to facilitate a combined understanding of the oppression of Indigenous and Black people. Even though Black people are not Indigenous from the territory where Brazil was established, we contend that they have been subject to the settler colonial process in a similar way to the natives (Huberman & Nasser, 2019). Since the end of slavery in Brazil in 1888, free Blacks settled in urban and rural territories, such as favelas and quilombos. As a result, Black people are no longer reproduced solely as a workforce. They have also been subjected to practices of elimination and land confiscation for capital reproduction. However, racism has impeded the classification of the systemic elimination of Black peoples in the diaspora as genocide (Flauzina, 2014). “There is an evident naturalization of state terror targeting Black bodies, despite the celebration of the imperative value of international human rights law, which has the proscription of genocide as one of its most celebrated bastions” (Flauzina, 2014, p. 20).

While genocide is a consistent component of settler-colonial history, this does not imply that elimination is the defining structural aspect of settler colonialism, as asserted by Wolfe. Brazil and Palestine are exemplary cases of settler colonialism where the exploitation of the native population’s labor is combined with their elimination (Englert, 2020; Poets, 2024). Therefore, elimination and exploitation are interchangeable forms of settler colonial power within capitalist relations that the settlers employ, following the material relations in which they find themselves. The power of exploitation is directly correlated with Marx (2013) and the centrality of labor in the production of surplus value and profit. The Marxian concept of primitive accumulation is also associated with the power of elimination, which emphasizes the utilization of extra-economic violence to accumulate capital. But it is more closely related to Mbembe’s (2003) centralization of death through the concept of necropolitics. Using the forms of power defined by Foucault (2010), the power of exploitation mainly involves disciplinary power, while the power of elimination entails sovereign power and biopower. Thus, we aim to analyze the Brazilian and Israeli states’ employment of the power of elimination without reducing settler colonialism to genocide.

Imperialism and Late Neocolonialism

The debate on genocide in settler colonial contexts is even more pressing in the face of US imperialism that has employed destruction and warfare against racially subaltern groups during the neoliberal period to address the permanent crises posed by monopoly capital (Kadri, 2023; Mbembe, 2003). Kadri’s (2023) comprehension of contemporary imperialism helps understand the centrality of war in US action in the Global South. The author contends that the wars fought by US-led collective imperialism are a form of production, accumulation, and profit. War is a mode of accumulation by waste that results in the destruction of human life and nature by Western bombs. The commodities produced are the bodies of the surplus populations who resist the undisputed hegemony of the United States.

This argument is in line with Harvey’s (2003) claim that different forms of accumulation by dispossession, such as expropriation of indigenous lands, privatization of public companies, and financial fraud, characterize the new imperialism. However, Harvey’s portrayal of imperialism is more decentralized and excessively economic, which hinders the understanding of the rationale behind imperialism’s systemic deaths, such as the 5 million individuals killed in the War on Terror (Watson Institute, 2024). Kadri’s centralization of US military power enables us to comprehend the normalization of genocide in the Global South. Elimination became a central method of managing spare populations from the peripheries in neoliberalism along with the militarization of borders, the deepening of surveillance, and mass incarceration (Gilmore, 2007; Kundnani, 2015; Walia, 2021). The outcome is the imposition of de-development on the societies of the Global South, which are confined in permanent wars and susceptible to the expropriation of their natural resources and the violation of their sovereignty by Western capital (Kadri, 2023).

The foreign policy and accumulation strategy of the Joe Biden administration (2020–2024) revolve around war to benefit the US military–industrial complex. This approach is exemplified by the persistent stance of confronting Russia, despite the setbacks experienced in the Ukraine War (2022–present), as well as the unwavering commitment to aiding Israel in the war in Gaza and the attacks on Lebanon, Yemen, Syria, and Iran. The Palestinian guerrillas, along with the remaining members of the Axis of Resistance—Iran, Syria, Hezbollah (Lebanon), Ansar Allah (Yemen), and the Popular Mobilization Forces (Iraq)—are the main challenge to US–Israeli hegemony in MENA. War and sanctions are the primary methods by which imperialism confronts these actors’ struggle for political sovereignty and autonomy (Ajl, 2024a). In Latin America, popular resistance against neocolonialism and imperialism does not resort to violence anymore. Non-state actors are engaging in armed conflicts to compete for markets and routes of illegal goods. US-sponsored state repression of drug trafficking is a critical factor in the management of these surplus populations and imperial hegemony (Avilés, 2017).

Nonetheless, the way imperialism and genocide manifest within settler states is contingent upon the internal class struggle. This underscores the significance of integrating the debate on neocolonialism. Kwame Nkrumah (1967) developed the category of neocolonialism to highlight the systemic transition that brought colonialism to an end. At this stage, imperialism retreated from direct political domination of the periphery, but at the same time, it has developed a wide array of mechanisms designed to deny the people their recently acquired sovereignty. In this way, monopoly capital, in association with the imperialist powers, continued to direct, from the outside, the newly independent countries’ economies and policies.

Yeros and Jha (2020) distinguish between early and late neocolonialism. In early neocolonialism, there was a “nationalist momentum,” a “commitment to social and democratic development,” and even an anti-imperialist posture in the spirit of Bandung. Late neocolonialism is characterized by neoliberalism and the super-exploitation of labor, land grabbing, expansion of the agricultural frontier, and predatory use of cheap natural resources in the peripheries to maintain the pattern of consumption and well-being in the center, thus entailing a pattern of primitive accumulation.

Cold War, Subimperialism, and Settler International

For a comprehensive understanding of the transition to neocolonialism, Yeros and Jha (2020) highlight the distinctive characteristics of the settler colonies in Latin America and Southern Africa. In the years following World War II, coups d’état and dictatorships halted their transitions to neocolonialism and guaranteed the upholding of white supremacy in countries such as Brazil and South Africa. The same can be said for Israel, where military occupation of Palestinian territories has assured Jewish supremacy following the Nakba in 1948 and the Naksa in 1967. ⁴ Ruy Mauro Marini (2012), the Brazilian theorist who introduced the term “subimperialism,” identified Brazil and Israel as examples of subimperialist nations during the Cold War. ⁵ He argues that subimperialism allows dependent capital to circumvent the domestic market’s atrophy by exporting goods and capital to weaker countries. Nevertheless, the definition of subimperialism should go beyond economics. The subimperialist nation has regional leadership, autonomy from the imperialist core, and acts as a regional gendarme against communist and nationalist forces.

The potential for national liberation in Brazil in the early 1960s, marked by the emergence of a nationalist movement and the implementation of social reforms by the João Goulart government (1961–1964), prompted the settler elite to choose authoritarianism as a means of preserving control over the domestic political landscape and aligning with US imperialism (Gissoni et al., 2024). This decision included the establishment of a civil–military dictatorship (1964–1985). Following the US-backed military coup in 1964, the “spheres of influence” policy designated Brazil as the imperialist representative in South America. Externally, Brazil assisted coups in Uruguay, Argentina, Paraguay, Chile, and Bolivia as part of Operation Condor (1975–1983).

Internally, the Brazilian elites had their own “national-settler project” to balance mild opposition to imperialism with industrial development based on settler monopoly of land and primitive accumulation at the expense of the colonized (Gissoni et al., 2024). Brazil established, for example, the second-largest arms industry in the Third World, trailing only Israel (Luce, 2015). Also, the dictatorship pushed for widespread elimination of Indigenous peoples to expand the agricultural and urban frontiers into the Amazon. The result was the genocide of 8,300 Indigenous people, as well as the expropriation of thousands of square meters of land (Comissão Nacional da Verdade Brasil, 2014, p. 205). The Brazilian nuclear project, developed in 1975 to compete with Argentina for continental dominance, however, initiated a crisis with the United States. Following an agenda of atomic containment and human rights during the Jimmy Carter administration (1977–1981), the countries experienced a gradual separation in the final decade of the Cold War.

In 1948, the Nakba effectively thwarted the potential for Palestinian national liberation and the subsequent shift toward neocolonialism, akin to the military coup in Brazil in 1964. The establishment of a military regime over the Palestinians who remained in Israel excluded them from the state, like the Brazilian dictatorship. The first two decades of the Labor administrations, until 1967, were also marked by governments that sought to achieve a certain level of foreign policy independence in their interactions with Western and Soviet blocs. The Labor governments had a “national-settler project” with the development of productive forces for the benefit of Jewish settlers at the cost of dispossessing Palestinians’ land, labor, and lives. In addition to confiscating the territories of Palestinian refugees, Israelis killed 69 Palestinians in the West Bank village of Qibya in October 1953 and massacred 48 Palestinian citizens of Israel in Kafr Qasim in October 1956 (Masalha, 2012).

The 1967 war was the culmination of Israel’s rapprochement with the United States, as Israel emerged victorious over Egypt, Jordan, and Syria. This was considered a humiliation for Arab nationalism, which began to perish. The Yom Kippur War of 1973 was the final gasp of pan-Arabism. The Camp David Accords between Israel and Egypt, signed in 1979 by US mediation, buried Arab nationalism. Israeli militarism was rewarded with huge investments from US capital in security companies and the opening of new markets (Loewenstein, 2023). A significant market was Latin America, particularly the dictatorships of Chile, Argentina, and Brazil (Bahbah, 1986), consolidating a settler international solidarity. In 1982, Israelis continued their genocide against the Palestinians, providing protection for the Lebanese militia Kataib to murder 3,500 Palestinians in the Sabra and Shatila refugee camps during the Lebanese Civil War (1975–1990).

Late Neocolonialism in Brazil

Brazil underwent a transition toward late neocolonialism upon the demise of the civil-military dictatorship. The primary contradiction arises from the growth of monopoly financial capital after the debt crisis in the late 1970s, juxtaposed with the emergence of the democratization movement of the 1980s. This movement, as enshrined in the 1988 Constitution, introduced universal suffrage, the criminalization of racism, the universalization of health care, agrarian reform, and the protection of the rights of Indigenous and Quilombola peoples. The outcome manifests as a societal conflict between a white-settler bourgeoisie that seeks to uphold its privileges through the super-exploitation of labor and the expropriation of natural resources versus a popular movement fighting for complete decolonization. The contradiction between the perpetration of genocidal violence against racially subaltern populations and the implementation of policies aimed at fostering social and racial justice is the central manifestation of late neocolonialism in Brazil (Yeros et al., 2019).

The expansion of civil liberties and economic stabilization in the 1990s primarily benefited the middle classes. The economic crisis provoked a rural exodus in the 1980s, forcing the expanding urban population to relocate to slums. This period also witnessed the emergence of the Landless Workers’ Movement (MST) to promote agrarian reform. Despite the advancements of the 1988 Constitution and the social policies of the Worker’s Party (PT) governments from 2003 to 2016, the constraints of monopoly capital on establishing a universal welfare state and the persistence of primitive accumulation have compelled many urban surplus people to pursue illegal survival methods. As a result, there was a dramatic increase in conflict between criminal groups and an upsurge in homicides (Feltran et al., 2022). The 2016 parliamentary coup against PT resulted in the establishment of an ultra-liberal government, which intensified the expropriation of the working class and facilitated the emergence of the far right. In 2017, Brazil reached its all-time high for violent deaths: 64,079 (FBSP, 2024). In 2018, Jair Bolsonaro was elected with a pledge to intensify repression against criminal organizations.

The concept of late neocolonialism also provides insight into Brazilian foreign policy. The country seeks increased autonomy and closer relations with the South, as manifested by the establishment of BRICS and the strong condemnation of Israeli genocide in Gaza. However, Brazil fails to deviate substantially from the influence of US imperialism and monopoly capital. For this reason, some authors have characterized Brazil’s rise since the 1990s as subimperialist (Luce, 2015). Nevertheless, I agree with Katz (2020) and Berringer (2013) that Brazil’s project for South America is not subimperialist. The Brazilian state is essential to the expansion of the monopoly bourgeoisie and US interests in the region; however, its military action is not aligned with the interests of capital. Moreover, the country has developed a greater respect for the sovereignty of its neighbors. Brazil confronted coup attempts in Venezuela in 2002, Bolivia in 2003 and 2008, Ecuador and Honduras in 2008, and Paraguay in 2012 (Berringer, 2013). The decline in South America’s importance to the United States ceased the need for the political rivalries that US imperialism fostered during the Cold War.

A rapprochement with Israel was also the consequence of the contradictions of the late neocolonial period in Brazil. During the first Lula da Silva administration (2003–2010), Brazil sought to broaden its political influence and engage in international security matters. As a means of establishing a political relationship that could potentially position Brazil as a mediator in the Palestine/Israel conflict, Lula granted Israeli companies access to its security market. Billions of dollars have been allocated to the procurement of Israeli drones, vehicles, and machine guns, which are employed to suppress the subaltern populations. Even though Brazil was unable to secure a seat in any negotiations, it established a direct connection between the genocides of Palestinians and Brazilians. Also, it provided the foundation for the close relationship between Bolsonaro and Netanyahu.

Maintaining Direct Settler Colonialism in Palestine

Transition to neocolonialism also emerged as a possibility for the Palestinians at the end of the Cold War. The Oslo Accords (1993–1995) were supposed to result in the establishment of the State of Palestine after decades of anticolonial resistance since the 1950s.

However, this was not the outcome of the peace process. Following the Arab States’ defeat in the 1967 war, the Palestinian armed struggle experienced both victories, exemplified by the Battle of Karameh in 1968, and losses, as witnessed in the Lebanese Civil War. In 1987, there was an emergence of the popular movement in the OPT, known as the first Intifada. The utilization of civil disobedience strategies, exemplified by the refusal to comply with Israeli tax obligations, presented Israel with novel obstacles that extended beyond the confrontation of armed guerrillas or the management of Palestinian labor.

In the 1990s, The United States resumed its role as a peace broker to transform the resolution of the Palestine Question into a means of normalizing Israel’s diplomatic relations with Arab nations and establish of a free-trade zone in the MENA (Hanieh, 2013). The emergence of political Islam and the Axis of Resistance further solidified the rapprochement between Israel and the United States. This resulted in the country’s transformation into a US co-empire, thereby seizing its autonomy as the MENA grew in importance for US imperialism (Katz, 2020). In this context, the United States assisted Israel in deceiving the Palestinians through diplomatic negotiations (Khalidi, 2013).

The Palestinian leaders of the Intifada participated in the beginning of the peace process at the Madrid Conference in 1991. Nevertheless, the setting up of a secret channel between the Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO) and Israel led to the Oslo Accords in 1993. The agreement served as a mechanism for the PLO leadership to consolidate its authority, alienating the Intifada leaders. However, it did not mean the end of legal segregation and settler’s direct domination over Palestine. The result was a reorganization of settler-colonial control over the OPT, enabling the Israelis to outsource the administration of the colonized populations to the Palestinian Authority (PA) while still retaining unrestricted sovereignty over the entire territory (Gordon, 2008). The Paris Protocols (1994) facilitated the development of neoliberal paradigms for the establishment of the Palestinian State. A considerable number of Palestinians opted for the building of a neoliberal state as the most rational approach to achieving national liberation (Khalidi & Samour, 2011). The result has been the growth of precarious labor, the seizure of Palestinian territory, and an increase in security measures coordinated by Israelis and the PA. The entire territory remained under the sole sovereignty of Israeli apartheid regime. Therefore, Oslo meant another abortion of the neocolonial transition, just like the Nakba in 1948.

Following the Second Intifada (2000–2006), which was the outcome of Palestinian frustration with the Oslo Accords, Israel started the disengagement of Gaza in 2005. Gaza became a repository for surplus Palestinians. The profound de-development of Gaza and the precariousness of Palestinian life were the result of the interruption of the flow of trade, foreign aid, and Palestinian workers. However, the Palestinian resistance remained under the leadership of Hamas. Israel conducted its initial airstrike on Gaza in December 2008, by the administration of liberal Ehud Olmert to restrict the Palestinians’ capacity to resist. This attack laid the groundwork for the Israeli strategy of “mowing the loan” (Loewenstein, 2023). Under the protection of the United States, the instrumentalization of international law, and the racist classification of Gaza as a terrorist territory, Israel has been able to conduct numerous massacres in Gaza with impunity throughout the years. It is estimated that Israeli bombs and gunfire in Gaza resulted in the deaths of over 4,000 Palestinians before 2023, ⁶ in addition to the thousands who were killed in the “slow death” process, or incapacitated propitiously (Puar, 2015, 2021). Nevertheless, it was the rise of the far right that enabled this structural phenomenon to attain unprecedented proportions.

Peripheral Fascism, Power of Elimination, and Genocide

The advance of what Yeros and Jha (2020) refer to as “peripheral fascism” has accompanied the late neocolonial situation. Its characteristics are (a) its limitation to national or regional disputes, (b) its alignment with monopoly capital, and (c) its link to generalized semi-proletarianization. The second characteristic gives peripheral fascism its role in the imperialist drive for world dominance, despite the first characteristic. According to the authors, in fascism at the center, in Europe, racism serves mainly the purpose of legitimizing internal authority and the external colonial drive, while in peripheral fascism, especially in the settler colonies, racism legitimizes the internal colonial drive, apartheid, and “the escalation of primitive accumulation under the neoliberal assault.” We analyze the genocides perpetrated by Bolsonaro and Netanyahu through the lens of peripheral fascism to elucidate the distinctions and connections in the application of the power of elimination within the settler colonial contexts of Brazil and Palestine.

Netanyahu was the first representative of the Israeli state to attend the inauguration of a Brazilian president in 2019, when Bolsonaro took office. Netanyahu said that Israel and Brazil had begun “a new era” and that he saw Bolsonaro as a “friend.” Bolsonaro returned the visit in March 2019, when he visited the Wailing Wall in East Jerusalem, in a tacit recognition of Israeli sovereignty over Palestinian territory. The countries signed six bilateral agreements to facilitate security-related trade and military cooperation to fight organized crime in Brazil. In return, Bolsonaro promised to open the country’s mineral wealth to Israeli exploitation. During the 2018 presidential campaign, Bolsonaro gave a speech at a Jewish social club in Rio de Janeiro when he said the following about Brazil’s minerals and Indigenous lands: “[w]here there is Indigenous land, there is wealth underneath it. We have to change that” (Veja, 2017). Therefore, there was a direct connection between the expropriation of Indigenous lands and the rapprochement with Israel.

Elected with the support of monopoly financial capital and the agricultural, evangelical, and security sectors, Bolsonaro promoted a series of deregulations under the neoliberal banner of austerity and the rationalization of the state that allowed primitive accumulation to advance. Deregulation was portrayed as a means of tackling corruption, enabling semi-proletarianized workers to engage in free individual enterprise and fostering national development that was supposedly impeded by organized crime, the MST, and PT. The backing given by the Armed Forces to the 2016 coup and the Bolsonaro government was partially derived from their opposition to the demarcation of Indigenous lands in detriment to agribusiness during the PT governments. They perceived Indigenous lands as a violation of national sovereignty and an obstruction to economic development (De Castro, 2021).

The limits imposed on environmental inspections, for example, permitted mining prospectors to expand their illegal extractive activities onto Indigenous lands, such as the Yanomami reserve. Financial deregulation has made it easier for illegally extracted gold to enter the global financial market. Bolsonaro was also negligent in caring for Indigenous people during the COVID pandemic (2020–2022). The outcome has been a significant deterioration in the living conditions of Indigenous peoples in Brazil, resulting in accusations of genocide by Brazilian jurists at the International Criminal Court. There have been 800 violent deaths of Indigenous people during the Bolsonaro administration, most of them in disputes over territory (Conselho Indigenista Missionário, 2023). The period concentrated 62% of the land invasions registered between 2013 and 2022: a total of 1,185 raids of public lands and 411 assaults of Indigenous lands. Between 2021 and 2022, conflicts in the countryside grew by 10% and murders increased by 30%. The most common victims were Indigenous (29%), Quilombolas (16%), and landless workers (12%) (Centro de Documentação Dom Tomás Balduino, 2023). Police violence against Black people also increased in Brazil during the Bolsonaro administration by 6%, even though state repression against whites fell by 31%. While the total number of homicides in the country decreased by 9.4% from 2011 to 2021, the number of Black people murdered increased by 3.7%. As a result, 87.4% of people killed by the police in 2022 were Black in a country where 56% of the population is Black (FBSP, 2024). Therefore, genocide against racially subaltern populations escalated during the Bolsonaro administration as a means of promoting primitive accumulation and social control.

Externally, Bolsonaro assumed a geopolitical role aligned with subimperialism. Brazil supported the 2019 coup against Bolivian President Evo Morales and the 2019 coup attempt against Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro in addition, Bolsonaro made efforts to strengthen the far right on the continent. However, he reduced Brazilian autonomy by weakening the National Bank of Economic and Social Development (Banco Nacional de Desenvolvimento Econômico e Social) and the Union of South American Nations and transferring the Alcantara spatial base to the United States. Bolsonaro’s submission to US imperialism, nonetheless, did not secure a free pass to a new coup.

The growth in authoritarian measures and the several coup attempts show that Bolsonaro was seeking to reverse Brazil’s transition to late neocolonialism and restore direct settler colonialism by reestablishing a dictatorship that enables unimpeded killing, imprisonment, and expropriation of land and labor. Nevertheless, Brazilians have successfully averted the expansion of Bolsonaro’s authoritarianism and genocidal violence by utilizing institutional instruments that have been in place since the 1980s because of Brazil’s neocolonial transition. Brazilians prevented a new Bolsonaro mandate in the 2022 election, and democratic state institutions managed to contain several coup attempts. The Biden administration also played a critical role in limiting Bolsonaro’s coup aspirations in 2022. In addition, the United States condemned the coup attempt during the far-right invasion of the Federal Supreme Court and the National Congress on January 8, 2023 (Chade, 2024). Biden’s actions were mainly interested in containing the US far right, but they were also reflective of the relationship between the United States and Brazil during the late neocolonial era. Therefore, the United States, a portion of the Brazilian bourgeoisie, including the financial capital, and the subaltern population worked together to limit the expansion of authoritarianism and genocide in Brazil.

In Israel, Netanyahu’s first government took place between 1996 and 1998, after the signing of the Oslo Accords. He worked to undermine the agreements because he adhered to a neo-conservative ideology that rejected peace with the Arabs in the Middle East and was under pressure from the settler movement not to exchange land for peace with the Palestinians. Netanyahu returned to power in 2009 and was responsible, during Barack Obama’s administration (2009–2017), for imploding diplomatic negotiations with the Palestinians. Simultaneously, the global economic crisis of 2008–2009 exacerbated the precariousness of life for a significant number of Israelis and heightened the demand for the confiscation of Palestinian land to mitigate the increasing cost of living (Englert, 2017). The conflict between Jewish political groups has become the primary concern for Israelis during the Netanyahu government due to the combination of neoliberal austerity and the silencing of the Palestinian question. Israelis have begun to regard the Palestinian question as secondary. Netanyahu intensified settler colonization and pursued the formal annexation of portions of the West Bank in the “Deal of the Century” during the administration of Donald Trump (2016–2020). The Abraham Accords in 2020 normalized Israel’s relations with the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain, Sudan, and Morocco and expanded free trade in MENA under US hegemony without resolving the Palestinian question. Thus, Netanyahu was instrumental in obstructing the liberation of Palestine and the transition to late neocolonialism, which was still a possibility at the time of his election in 2009. He also partially succeeded in addressing the aspirations of the surplus Jewish population by expanding the settler colonization of the Palestinian territories. However, the mobilization of liberal settlers removed him from power in 2021.

On his return to power in 2022, with a coalition made up of extremist settlers, Netanyahu confronted juridical limits on executive power to further radicalize colonization. Smotrich and Ben-Gvir promoted military and settler violence in the West Bank to increase the expulsion of Palestinians. As a result, there was a significant increase in the number of forced evictions and lynchings of Palestinians by Jewish settlers. For instance, the Huwarah pogrom in February 2023 resulted in the destruction of the village and the injuries of hundreds of Palestinians (B’Tselem, 2023). Before October 7, the year 2023 was already the deadliest for Palestinians since the Second Intifada. The genocide in Gaza and the expulsion of millions of Palestinians were the escalation of a process that did not begin with Operation Al-Aqsa Flood. It also expresses the deepest objectives of extremist settlers after the withdrawal of the Jewish settlements in 2005 as part of Ariel Sharon’s strategy of seeking international legitimacy after the Second Intifada.

However, the Palestinians lack alternatives to resist Israeli settler colonization in comparison to Brazilians. This situation is illustrated by the global inability to halt the genocide despite favorable decisions in internation institutions, the popular solidarity from Western and Southern peoples, the growing diplomatic and economic isolation of Israel, and the military actions from member of the Axis of Resistance (Ajl, 2024a, 2024b). The United States continue to provide Israel with a variety of support to further the horror in Gaza and obstruct external pressure. Also, the democratic sector of Israeli society failed to remove the far-right government after months of genocide and sabotage of negotiations for the release of Israeli hostages. The result has been the unimpeded genocide of Palestinians in Gaza, where the Hamas and PIJ guerrilla fighters, as well as the people’s steadfastness, are the main sole obstacles to Israeli power of elimination.

Conclusion

The alliance between the supremacist administrations of Bolsonaro and Netanyahu exemplified the robustness of settler solidarity in promoting the expropriation of the colonized population, consequently leading to the intensification of the genocide in both nations. Peripheral fascism increases the scale of violence used in primitive accumulation at the expense of subaltern’s land, labor, and lives. This also involves confronting liberal settlers to expand the limits of settler colonization. The far right represents the needs of monopoly financial capital and the reaffirmation of white supremacism under the veil of nationalism. In the case of Brazil, this means the restoration of an authoritarian state after the transition to neocolonialism. In Israel, it means fighting any form of negotiation with the Palestinians that could result in native self-determination.

The genocide in Gaza shows that the power of elimination operates unimpeded under a direct settler-colonial domination that hinders the native’s resistance capabilities. The transition to late neocolonialism in Brazil, on the other hand, constitutes a distinct condition for the settler state to use sovereign power against the racially subaltern population. Neocolonialism imposes constraints on the legal sovereignty of a postcolonial state, but it also means a material context that determines the ability of the colonized to resist. The abolition of direct settler colonialism in Brazil enabled the colonized to access institutional political resources, including the vote, to remove Bolsonaro from power. The Palestinians possess a scarcity of resources to impede the settler-colonial expansion. Thus, the Palestinians are more susceptible to the settlers’ ambitions and anxieties. The result is the largest genocide in recent history.