My most recent column was headlined “Genocide in Gaza? Why it is increasingly difficult to deny.” I was planning to explore the topic in greater depth this time, as the horrors of starvation in the Gaza Strip continued to mount and intensify, but a part of my brain kept telling me that, even if that dire accusation were merited, it was not the whole story. For now, we have a ceasefire, and welcome as that is, it doesn’t erase how Israel has waged this war. Genocide describes the destruction of a group, but there was, I thought, another also unsavory dimension to the conflict, a purely political one, involving the determination of the Israeli right wing to forestall the creation of a Palestinian state, something the United States and much of the rest of the international community had long supported.

Maybe, I thought, there could be an alternate term for this aspect of the matter. Would nationcide be too awkward, or silly? I typed it into Google Search, expecting no results, but to my surprise the term was shown to be already in existence and could be used to describe the destruction—political, economic, cultural—of a nation-state. This made it different from genocide or ethnocide (destruction of a culture). Still, Google noted, it’s not in any dictionaries, and Google tried mightily to autocorrect it to “nationwide.”

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........

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