Islamophobia: The discursive apparatus of Israel’s genocide in Gaza, Palestine

This paper analyzes the ideological function of Islamophobia in contemporary structures of genocidal violence, focusing on Israel’s attack on Gaza that began in October 2023. Drawing on scholarship framing Islamophobia as a structural feature of Western imperial formations, the article argues that Islamophobic discourse serves as the discursive apparatus through which Israel’s genocide is rendered legible. Analyzing political speeches and official statements by Israeli and U.S. political leaders, as well as major media narratives, the paper demonstrates how three central Islamophobic tropes—depicting Muslims as licentious, inherently barbaric, and pathologically anti-Semitic—are mobilized to rationalize Palestinian dispossession and mass killing. Overall, the paper argues that Islamophobia operates as part of a broader ideological strategy that not only enables genocide but also forecloses political legibility of Palestinian violence as an anti-colonial struggle by reframing it as a pathological expression of fanatical religious anti-Jewish hatred. In this way, scrutiny of Israeli actions is cast as morally suspect, narrowing the scope of legitimate critique, while also enabling the territorial objectives of Israel’s settler-colonial project.