Israel’s “Mowing the Grass” strategy (2013) and its later rupture toward “Uprooting” (2023) should not be understood as an isolated evolution of military doctrine, but rather as surface symptoms of a deeper ideological grammar. This grammar systematically constructs Palestinians as a plant-like existence that can be “managed,” “trimmed,” and even “eradicated,” thereby laying the moral and political conditions for mass violence at the linguistic and cognitive levels. This essay argues that this grammar is not an invention of the “Mowing the Grass” text, but rather a continuation and mutation of a deeper narrative within Zionist colonial logic concerning the “conquest of nature” and the “domestication of the indigenous” in contemporary military discourse. Moreover, this grammar performs a decisive and lethal operation: it collapses the distinction between combatant and civilian, between adult and child, by encoding all Palestinians—including infants—as either actual or future “Hamas,” thereby transforming what presents itself as “management” or “eradication” into the systematic murder of a population classified as collectively guilty.
1. From “Mowing” to Genocide
The Hamas attack of October 7, 2023, was described by the Israeli strategic establishment as a complete refutation of the “Mowing the Grass” strategy. Eitan Shamir promptly published “The End of Mowing the Grass: If Israel Wants to Continue to Exist, It Must Uproot Hamas from Gaza,” declaring that Israel must shift from cyclical “management” to total “eradication.” On the surface, this appears to be a paradigm shift in strategic doctrine: from limited attrition warfare to regime destruction warfare.
Yet it is precisely this “rupture” that exposes a deeper continuity. Why could the metaphor of “mowing” transition so naturally to the metaphor of “uprooting”? Why do these two seemingly opposed strategic choices share the same basic grammar concerning the enemy and violence? The core task of this essay is to argue that Shamir’s 2023 “uprooting” declaration is not a negation of the “mowing” logic, but rather the extremized unfolding of its internal logic—both are expressions of the same ideological grammar under different conditions. This grammar encodes Palestinian political existence as a natural object requiring “gardening” treatment, thereby preemptively dissolving its status as a political interlocutor at the cognitive level.
The analytical path here is not “tracing causal relationships” but “diagnosing symptoms.” As Francesca Albanese points out in the “Anatomy of a Genocide” report, the violence in Gaza is an escalation of a long-standing settler-colonial erasure process. What this essay seeks to do is precisely to dissect the grammatical structure of this “erasure process” at the level of strategic discourse, and to demonstrate how this grammar enables the systematic murder of Palestinians by encoding them all as “Hamas.”
2. The Grammar of “Mowing”: Violence as Gardening
In 2013, Efraim Inbar and Eitan Shamir published “‘Mowing the Grass’: Israel’s Strategy for Protracted Intractable Conflict” in the Journal of Strategic Studies. The article acknowledged that Israel was engaged in a “protracted intractable conflict” with Hamas and Hezbollah, and that the goal of military operations was not political resolution but to “degrade the enemy’s capacity to harm Israel” and “achieve temporary deterrence.” Ben Reiff, in a commentary for the London School of Economics, accurately summarized the logic of this strategy: “to ‘mow’ through occasional large-scale operations, patiently causing attrition, hoping to exhaust the enemy’s motivation over time.”
The key to this strategy lies in its temporal grammar. “Mowing” presupposes a cyclical view of time: conflict is not a historical event to be resolved, but a natural condition to be periodically managed. As Reiff notes, Israel “does not seek to overthrow Hamas” but is “content with a status quo.” In this grammar, the enemy is not a political adversary but a type of vegetation within an ecosystem that requires periodic trimming.
The Zionist Colonial Genealogy of the “Mowing” Metaphor. Comparing military violence to “gardening maintenance” is not an innovation of the Israeli strategic establishment. Areej Sabbagh-Khoury, in Colonizing Palestine, documents in detail how early Zionist settlers framed the dispossession and expulsion of Palestinian peasants (fallahin) as the “cultivation” and “civilization” of “wasteland.” In this colonial grammar, the indigenous population is encoded as part of “nature”—their existence is either ignored or seen as disorderly vegetation requiring “tending.” Sabbagh-Khoury emphasizes that even the left-wing Hashomer Hatzair movement practiced systematic expulsion of Palestinians under the rhetoric of “socialism” and “national brotherhood.”
The Cognitive Downgrade from “Management” to “Trimming.” The core cognitive operation of the “mowing” metaphor is to transfer Palestinian life and political existence from the “domain of persons” to the “domain of things.” Grass does not negotiate, does not compromise, does not possess rights. Grass merely requires “management.” In this grammar, violence is no longer political action but maintenance work—akin to a gardener trimming a hedge or a farmer clearing weeds. The political consequences of this cognitive downgrade are profound: it preemptively forecloses the possibility of viewing Palestinians as political interlocutors, thereby rendering “two-state solution” or any form of political resolution unthinkable at the discursive level.
It is worth noting that the proponents of the “Mowing the Grass” strategy were not marginal figures in Israeli politics. Inbar was the former director of the Begin-Sadat Center for Strategic Studies at Bar-Ilan University, and Shamir is a senior researcher at the same center. Their strategic article was published in a peer-reviewed mainstream military journal and was widely cited and discussed. This indicates that the “mowing” grammar is not extremist discourse but mainstream strategic discourse within the Israeli security establishment. It is precisely this mainstream character that makes it an ideal symptom for diagnosing a deeper ideological structure.
3. The Language of “Uprooting”
After October 7, 2023, Shamir published “The End of Mowing the Grass.” In it, he declared that deterrence had completely failed and that Israel must “dismantle the Hamas regime in Gaza and destroy its military capabilities.” The wording of this declaration deserves careful reading.
The Semantics of “Uproot.” The verb Shamir chose—”uproot”—shares the same botanical semantic field as “mow,” but its intensity of violence is entirely different. “Mowing” is cyclical, reversible, limited; “uprooting” is final, irreversible, total. Yet both operate within the same cognitive framework: Palestinian existence is encoded as a plant-like existence, its political life reduced to the natural structure of “roots” and “leaves.” Whether trimming or uprooting, the actor is the “gardener,” not a political subject. The acted-upon is “vegetation,” not a human community.
The Logical Slippage from “Management” to “Eradication.” Why does the failure of “mowing” lead to the necessity of “uprooting”? From a strategic logic perspective, the answer lies in the internal contradiction of the “mowing” strategy itself: it promises to “manage” the conflict but cannot “resolve” it. When this management fails (as revealed on October 7), the strategic grammar faces a choice: either acknowledge the limitations of “management” itself and turn toward political resolution, or blame the failure of “management” on insufficient “management,” thereby moving toward “eradication.” Shamir chose the latter. This choice is not accidental but the necessary unfolding of the extremizing tendency inherent in the “mowing” grammar: if the enemy is “grass,” then the failure of “mowing” can only mean that “uprooting” is needed, not that we need to rethink whether “grass” is really “grass.”
“The End of Mowing” as Symptom, Not Cause. It must be emphasized that Shamir’s article did not “cause” the genocide in Gaza. The policies and practices of genocide were constituted by a series of decisions made by Israel’s political and military leadership under specific historical conditions. The significance of Shamir’s article lies in the fact that it reveals an ideological grammar that made these decisions “thinkable” and “natural.” When Yoav Gallant declared on October 9, 2023, that “we are fighting human animals,” he was using precisely this grammar. When Israeli President Isaac Herzog stated that “it is an entire nation out there that is responsible,” he was collapsing the distinction between combatant and civilian that international humanitarian law is built upon. These statements are not aberrations; they are the natural vocabulary of a grammar that has long encoded Palestinians as a homogeneous, threatening entity requiring elimination.
4. The Collapse of the Civilian: “All Palestinians Are Hamas”
The most consequential operation of this ideological grammar is not merely the naturalization of Palestinians as vegetation. It is the systematic collapse of the distinction between combatant and civilian, between adult and child, through the assertion that all Palestinians are Hamas—or will become Hamas. This operation is what transforms “management” and “eradication” from strategic euphemisms into descriptions of systematic murder.
“There Are No Innocent Civilians.” In June 2024, an official Israeli government account on X posted a video declaring that “there are no innocent civilians” in Gaza. The video used a quote from a freed Israeli hostage, Mia Schem, who stated: “There are no innocent civilians there.” The video’s caption accused “many Gazan civilians” of participating in the October 7 attacks and of holding Israeli hostages captive in their homes. This is not the rhetoric of a fringe account. As NBC News reported, the video appeared on the Israeli government’s main account, @Israel, and was also posted by Israeli embassies in Lithuania and South Korea and its consulate in Los Angeles.
Mark Kersten, a war crimes researcher with the Wayamo Foundation, described the video as “disgusting” and stated: “It is exactly what atrocity perpetrators say.” He explained the legal significance: “International humanitarian law is largely based on making a distinction between civilians and combatants… To blur the lines is to suggest that this whole apparatus is incorrect or faulty and therefore, in this instance at least, anyone can be targeted.”
The “Future Terrorist” Doctrine. The collapse of the civilian category is most explicitly articulated in statements about Palestinian children. The search results contain a harrowing catalogue of Israeli officials, rabbis, and soldiers expressing the view that Palestinian children are either already “terrorists” or will inevitably become them.
Nissim Vaturi, Deputy Speaker of the Knesset, stated on October 9, 2023: “Erase Gaza. Nothing else will satisfy us… Do not leave a child there, expel all the remaining ones at the end, so that they will not have a resurrection.” He later declared: “Gaza is full of terrorists and every child born there is already a terrorist, from the moment of his birth.”
Amit Halevi, a Knesset member, stated in July 2024: “300 Palestinian babies in the maternity ward of the besieged Al Shifa Hospital are all born terrorists.”
Moshe Feiglin, former Knesset member, stated in May 2025: “Every child, every baby in Gaza is an enemy… not leave a single Gazan child there. There is no other victory.”
Merav Ben-Ari, a Knesset member, stated on October 16, 2023: “There is no equality with Gazan children. Children in Gaza brought their own killing on themselves.”
A Zionist rabbi, Eliyahu Mali, who heads a religious school in Jaffa where students serve in the army, stated: “Today he is a child, today he is a youth, and tomorrow a fighter.” He argued that Gazan children must be killed because “if you don’t kill them, they will attempt to kill you.”
This is the “future terrorist” doctrine in its most explicit form. The Palestinian child is not a child. The Palestinian child is a future Hamas fighter—a threat that must be preemptively eliminated. The temporal logic here is crucial: the child is not punished for what they have done, but for what they will become. And what they will become is determined not by their individual choices but by their national identity. To be born Palestinian is to be born Hamas.
The Logic of Preemptive Murder. This doctrine has a direct operational consequence. If every Palestinian child is a future terrorist, then killing a Palestinian child is not murder—it is preemption. It is the elimination of a threat before it materializes. The Israeli soldier who told a boy’s father “I am the one who shot your son. God willing, he will die” was not acting outside the grammar; he was enacting its most fundamental logic. The sniper in the Nahal Brigade who described firing “50–60 rounds a day, killing many including children,” and who was “pressured by his commander regardless of the target’s age,” was operating within a framework where age is irrelevant because all Palestinians are classified as threats.
A soldier’s social media post from March 2024 stated: “The starvation campaign?…our fault that they are hungry; they deserve to die! All of Gaza should be burned with its inhabitants, from the greatest to the smallest.” The phrase “from the greatest to the smallest” is theologically resonant—it echoes the biblical command regarding Amalek—but it is also grammatically precise: in this framework, “the smallest” is no less an enemy than “the greatest.”
The Statistics of This Grammar. The consequence of this grammar is measurable. In Gaza, since 2023, more than 186,000 Palestinians have been killed by Israel, and more than 176,000 have been severely injured. More than 44% of the deaths are children, ranging in age from a few months to seventeen. Gaza has the highest number of child amputees in recorded history, and the highest number per capita of child amputees in the world. These are only educated guesses. the true scale of the genocide carried by Israel (and which continues still) is as yet unknown.
The Gaza Ministry of Health reported that by late 2025, 55 percent of the martyrs of the “Zionist genocide” were children, women, and the elderly. As of April 2026, the Palestinian Central Bureau of Statistics reported that over 21,000 children had been killed in Gaza. More than 58,000 children had lost one or both parents. Over 44,000 children had been injured, with more than 1,000 suffering limb amputations.
These are not “collateral damage” in any conventional military sense. They are the statistical signature of a grammar that has pre-classified every Palestinian child as an enemy.
5. The Deep Grammar: “Conquest of Nature” and “Depoliticization” in Zionism
The grammar of “mowing” and “uprooting” did not emerge from nothing. It is rooted in a deeper ideological structure within the Zionist project: the “naturalization” and “depoliticization” of the Palestinian question.
From “Swamp Drainage” to “Mowing the Grass.” One of the core rhetorics of early Zionist settlers was to describe Palestinian land as “barren,” “uninhabited,” or “awaiting cultivation.” Ilan Pappé, in The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine, cites Orde Wingate’s influence on Zionist leaders: Wingate made them realize that “the idea of a Jewish state must be inextricably linked to militarism and an army,” and that “acts of armed aggression are an effective deterrent to possible Palestinian resistance.” In this logic, Palestinian existence is systematically transferred from the “political” domain to the “natural” domain: their land requires “cultivation,” their resistance requires “deterrence,” their communities require “management.”
The Epistemology of “No Palestinians.” The core of this “naturalization” operation is to render Palestinians invisible as political subjects. In the early kibbutz settlers’ statements recorded by Sabbagh-Khoury, Palestinian peasants are described as “irrational,” “manipulated by elites,” and “not representing the true interests of the people.” The function of this description is to delegitimize the existence of an independent Palestinian political will. The same epistemological structure reappears in “mowing” discourse: Hamas is described as an “idea” to be “managed” rather than a political movement to be negotiated with.
Rashid Khalidi’s Framework. In The Hundred Years’ War on Palestine, Khalidi proposes a key analytical framework: Palestinian history should be understood as the history of “settler colonialism,” not as a “conflict between two nationalisms.” The core distinction in this framework is: in a conflict between two nationalisms, both sides are political subjects, and resolution requires mutual recognition and negotiation; in settler colonialism, the political subjectivity of the indigenous population is systematically denied, and the “resolution” of the conflict is defined as the colonizer’s “management” or “erasure” of land and population. Khalidi’s framework helps us understand that the “mowing” grammar is not a “strategic choice” but a necessary expression of settler-colonial epistemology in military discourse.
Omer Bartov and Khalidi’s Divergence. It is worth noting that Israeli-born historian Bartov and Khalidi hold fundamentally divergent views on the question of causality: Bartov tends to view the Palestinian tragedy as the “corruption” of an “originally legitimate national project,” while Khalidi views it as the “logical culmination” of convictions intrinsic to Zionism. This divergence directly bears on the core question of this essay: if Bartov is correct, then “mowing” and “uprooting” are deviations under specific conditions; if Khalidi is correct, then they are the natural unfolding of a deep grammar. The argument of this essay leans toward Khalidi’s framework: the grammar that made “mowing” and “uprooting” “thinkable” existed prior to and independently of any specific strategic decision.
6. Language and Extermination: The Grammatical Function of Dehumanization
In Gregory Stanton’s “Ten Stages of Genocide” model, “dehumanization” is the fourth stage—at which “those perceived as ‘different’ are stripped of all human rights and personal dignity,” equated with “cockroaches,” “pests,” or “disease.” Stanton explicitly states that dehumanization “is spread through propaganda,” and its function is to “overcome normal human inhibitions” for subsequent stages of violence.
Plantization as a Specific Form of Dehumanization. Encoding Palestinians as “grass” or “vegetation” is a specific form of dehumanization. Compared to animalization (“human animals”), plantization appears more “gentle”—after all, no one “hates” grass. However, it is precisely this apparent “gentleness” that gives plantization grammar its unique political efficacy. It does not require hatred; it requires only management. It does not require genocidal intent; it requires only the necessity of “maintenance.” As Stanton notes, the function of dehumanization is not to incite hatred but to eliminate inhibition. When the enemy is encoded as vegetation requiring periodic trimming, violence inflicted upon it is no longer “violence” but “gardening.”
The Slide from Plant-ization to Animalization. It is worth noting that in the statements of Israeli officials after October 2023, plantization grammar rapidly gave way to more naked animalization grammar. Gallant used the term “human animals,” while the botanical metaphors of earlier “mowing” discourse receded into the background. This slide reveals the deep function of plantization grammar: it is a bridge to more extreme dehumanization. When “management” fails, the language of “management” can seamlessly transform into the language of “eradication,” without passing through any intermediate stage of political reflection.
The Grammatical Structure of “We Are Fighting Human Animals.” The grammatical structure of Gallant’s statement deserves careful analysis. He did not say “we are fighting Hamas,” but “we are fighting human animals.” The paradox of the category “human animals” is that it simultaneously appeals to the semantic fields of both “human” and “animal,” but its function is to cancel the semantics of “human” and retain the semantics of “animal.” Under this category, the entire population of Gaza—not just Hamas fighters—is encoded as “animals.” One of the core findings of the Albanese report is precisely this totalizing effect of the “terrorist label”: it “treats the entire protected group and the infrastructure sustaining life as ‘terrorists’ or ‘terrorist supporters,’ thereby making everything and everyone a target or collateral damage.”
Conclusion
Returning to our core methodological claim: Shamir’s “The End of Mowing the Grass” is not the “cause” of the Gaza genocide but its symptom. Treating this article as a “symptom” means that what we must ask is not “what did it cause” but “what does it reveal.”
It reveals that: in the mainstream grammar of Israeli strategic discourse, Palestinian political existence is systematically encoded as a natural phenomenon—vegetation requiring “management,” grass requiring “trimming,” roots requiring “uprooting.” This grammar was not invented by Shamir, nor by Inbar, but is deeply embedded in the epistemological structure of the Zionist settler-colonial project. The expulsion of Palestinian peasants by early settlers documented by Sabbagh-Khoury, the “hundred years’ war” described by Khalidi, the 1948 ethnic cleansing analyzed by Pappé, and the “long-standing settler-colonial erasure process” diagnosed by Albanese—all operate within the same grammar.
But this grammar performs an even more lethal operation than naturalization. It collapses the distinction between combatant and civilian by declaring that there are no innocent civilians—that all Palestinians are Hamas, or will become Hamas. The Palestinian child is not a child but a “future terrorist.” The Palestinian mother is not a mother but the producer of terrorists. The Palestinian population is not a population but a “future army.” Under this grammar, “mowing” and “uprooting” are not metaphors for political violence. They are euphemisms for the systematic murder of a people who have been pre-classified as collectively guilty.
The political efficacy of this grammar lies in the fact that it renders political resolution unthinkable. If Palestinians are not political subjects but natural objects—or future terrorists to be preemptively eliminated—then there is no “negotiation,” only “management”; no “peace,” only “maintenance”; no “justice,” only “order.” In this grammar, violence is not the result of political failure but the restoration of natural order.
Therefore, critical analysis of “mowing” and “uprooting” discourse cannot remain at the strategic level—asking “which strategy is more effective.” It must penetrate to the grammatical level—asking “what kind of ideological structure makes ‘management’ and ‘eradication’ the natural language for describing Palestinian existence, and what kind of structure makes the murder of children appear as preemption rather than atrocity.” Only at this level can we understand: why the transition from “mowing” to “uprooting” is not a rupture but a return—a return to the oldest and most deeply rooted operation in settler-colonial grammar: the naturalization of the indigenous population, rendering their political life invisible, their physical existence manageable, and their children killable.
