Mass graves as instruments of Israel’s settler colonial violence: Indigenous removal from 1948 to 2023 by Muna Haddad

This article examines Israel’s use of mass graves as instruments of settler colonial violence against Palestinians, situating the practice within a continuum from the 1948 Nakba to the ongoing genocide in Gaza. Mass graves are commonly associated with mass violence, such as massacres, ethnic cleansing, and genocide and are generally understood to serve two primary functions: concealing criminal evidence and terrorising populations. However, this understanding is insufficient in settler colonial contexts. As this article argues, dominant legal and forensic frameworks, with their focus on criminal, evidentiary, and affective dimensions, overlook how mass graves operate as tools of colonial power. Examining Israel’s continued use of mass graves, it identifies three additional spatial and temporal functions targeting indigenous presence: erasure from the geography; severing ancestral, historical and cultural ties to the land; and inducing mass displacement. Mass graves, the article contends, are not merely discrete forensic sites of past atrocities, as typically understood in dominant legal and forensic discourse, but active mechanisms that sustain settler colonial rule.