The first mention I could find during this search was in 1794, when Gracchus Babeuf, a French revolutionary, used the term in his The Vendée War and the depopulation system. In August 2024, the American Political Science Review published an article explaining how, after the 1867 defeat of their French occupiers by Napoleon III, Mexican liberal republicans accused European powers of attempted nationalcide (a national decision) of their country. In 2019, Julien Philippe, a French IT technician, self-proclaimed “enthusiast of geopolitics, ex-Yu Balkan and linguistics” on the question-and-answer site Quora, took credit for coining the term (spelling it “nationalicide”) and asked this question: “If we invent the term “Nationicide” in parallel with genocide in order to deal with attempted or accomplished elimination of a nation instead of a People, how would we correctly define nationalicide and what could be [examples] about that…? And in 2022, Christopher DeMuth, writing for The Wall Street Journal, suggested that the word “nationcide” could describe “the extermination of the national civilization that a people has built – its customs, traditions, civil associations, and practices of self-government.”
The United Nations, in its Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide, defined the crime as follows: “Acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnic, racial or religious group, as such.” In his speech on Quora, Julien Philippe suggested the following phraseology for a hypothetical similar Convention on the crime of nationalicide: “acts committed with the intention of destroying, in whole or in part, a national entity as such”.
Here, one could object that the Palestinian people do not constitute, and never have constituted, a true national entity and that, therefore, an accusation of national crime against Israel would be moot. I have a twofold response to this statement. First, Palestinians have a long history of governance at the local level, for centuries under the Ottoman Empire and then under the British from the end of World War I until the creation of Israel in 1948. That Palestinians developed a strong sense of nationalism after the mass influx of Jews into what had been their lands for centuries was amply demonstrated by their fierce uprising against domination. British in 1936 (Britain had committed to supporting a Jewish state in Palestine in the Balfour Declaration of 1917).
