By Eric Vandenbroeck and co-workers

Consequences Of The Israel/Hamas War Part Two

The United Nations Human Rights Council appointed a commission of inquiry into Operation Cast Lead. It was headed by the eminent South African Judge Richard Goldstone. The Goldstone team noted that both sides were guilty of war crimes.

The report concluded that the attacks in 2008–2009 were directed, at least in part, at the people of Gaza as a whole. It was “a deliberately disproportionate attack designed to punish, humiliate, and terrorize a civilian population.” During the second Lebanon war of 2006 the IDF chief of general staff Gadi Eizenkot enunciated a policy of deliberately harming enemy civilians which became known as the “Dahiya Doctrine.” The doctrine was named after the Dahiya neighborhood of Beirut, where Hezbollah was headquartered during the war. It encompassed the destruction of civilian infrastructure in order to deny its use to the enemy and it endorsed the use of “disproportionate force” to achieve that end. Israel has repeatedly applied this criminal doctrine in Gaza to devastating humanitarian effect. Operation Cast Lead was followed by further Israeli attacks on the Gaza Strip in 2012, 2014, 2018, 2021, 2022, and mid-2023. Operation Swords of Iron is the eighth Israeli military offensive in Gaza in fifteen years, and it is by far the most lethal and destructive. After two months of fighting, the Palestinian death toll had risen to at least 17,700, including 7,729 children and 5,153 women, with over 48,700 injured—more than the total of the previous military offensives combined. A further 265 Palestinians were killed on the West Bank by the Israeli military and armed settlers. Nearly 1.9 million people in Gaza, equivalent to 85 percent of a population of 2.3 million, were internally displaced. Heavy IDF bombardment reduced entire neighborhoods to rubble and inflicted catastrophic damage on the civilian infrastructure and economy of Gaza. UN staff who assist the Palestinians were another casualty of this savage Israeli offensive. More than 130 UNRWA teachers, health workers, and aid workers were killed—the highest number in any conflict in the UN’s history.

Israel’s War on Gaza Avi Shlaim When Israel withdrew from Gaza in 2005, it turned the tiny enclave into an open-air prison. Israel’s response to the Hamas attack of October 7, 2023—the incessant bombardment of Gaza by land, sea, and air—turned this open-air prison into an open graveyard, a pile of rubble, a desolate wasteland. António Guterres, the secretary-general of the United Nations (UN), said in his address to the Security Council that the Hamas attack, in which 1,200 Israelis were killed and 250 taken hostage, did not happen in a vacuum. “The Palestinian people have been subjected to fifty-six years of suffocating occupation,” he noted. He immediately added that “the grievances of the Palestinian people cannot justify the appalling attacks by Hamas. And those appalling attacks cannot justify the collective punishment of the Palestinian people.”

Operation Cast Lead was also the first major Israeli assault on the people of Gaza, and I use the words “people of Gaza” deliberately. Israel claims that Hamas uses civilians as human shields and that this makes them legitimate military targets. In a crowded enclave, however, it is inevitable that some Hamas command centers, tunnels, and weapons stores are located near civilian buildings. That is not the same as using civilians as human shields. Many of the Israeli claims that Hamas uses schools, hospitals, mosques, and UNRWA buildings as cover for its operations have turned out to be untrue. On the other hand, the claim that the IDF goes to great lengths to avoid hurting innocent civilians is flatly contradicted by the evidence. Its offensive inflicted very heavy casualties and massive damage to the civilian infrastructure. It established a pattern of regular incursions to hit Hamas, incursions that invariably rain down death and destruction on the civilian population.

The United Nations Human Rights Council appointed a commission of inquiry into Operation Cast Lead. It was headed by the eminent South African Judge Richard Goldstone. The Goldstone team noted that both sides were guilty of war crimes but reserved its severest criticisms for Israel because of the scale and seriousness of its war crimes. To give just one example, Goldstone and his colleagues found seven incidents in which Israeli soldiers shot civilians leaving their homes, holding a white flag.

The United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) estimated that Israeli attacks destroyed more than 52,000 housing units and damaged more than 253,000. At least 60 percent of Gaza’s homes were damaged or destroyed. By November 12, OCHA reported, 279 educational facilities had been damaged, more than 51 percent of the total, with none of Gaza’s 625,000 students able to access education. More than half of Gaza’s hospitals and nearly two-thirds of primary healthcare centers were out of service and 53 ambulances damaged. All thirteen hospitals in Gaza City and northern Gaza had received evacuation orders from the Israeli military. Water consumption had fallen by 90 percent since the war started. People were queuing for an average of four to six hours to receive half the normal bread ration. Around 390,000 jobs had been lost since the start of the war. Before the war the jobless rate already stood at 46 percent, rising to 70 percent among youth. The socio-economic impact of the war has been nothing short of catastrophic. It is difficult to avoid the conclusion that, as in Operation Cast Lead, Operation Swords of Iron is “a deliberately disproportionate attack designed to punish, humiliate, and terrorize a civilian population.”

Israeli generals frequently use the same phrase to describe their recurrent operations in Gaza: “mowing the lawn.” What this means is that they have no political solution to the problem of Gaza. So every few years they move in with foot soldiers, tanks, artillery, navy, and aircraft, smash up the place, degrade the military capabilities of Hamas, pulverize the civilian infrastructure, and then go home and leave the political problem completely unresolved.

“Mowing the lawn” is a chilling metaphor because it describes a mechanical action that you do periodically every few years and with no end in sight. Under this template, there is no end to the bloodshed, and the next war is always around the corner. This is not a policy for dealing with Gaza; it is a non-policy. To put it differently, it is an inappropriate military response to what essentially is a political problem.

There is a popular Israeli saying: if force does not work, use more force. This is an asinine idea: if force does not work, it is because it is an unsuitable instrument for dealing with the problem at hand. It can also be counterproductive. Israel’s disproportionate, excessive use of military force in the past ended up encouraging the rise of Hezbollah in Lebanon and of Hamas in the Gaza Strip. Israel’s policy of assassinating Hamas leaders with the aim of decapitating the organization has never worked. The dead leaders are quickly replaced by younger leaders who are usually more militant.

The government formed by Benjamin Netanyahu at the end of 2022 was the most radical, right-wing, xenophobic, expansionist, overtly racist, and the most incompetent government in Israel’s history. It was also the most explicitly pro-settler, Jewish supremacist government. The policy guidelines of this government assert that “the Jewish people have an exclusive and inalienable right to all parts of the Land of Israel.” In other words, only Jews have a right to the whole Land of Israel which includes the West Bank. Palestinians have no national rights. This extreme and uncompromising position makes bloodshed inevitable because it leaves the Palestinians no peaceful avenue for realizing their right to national self-determination.

After October 7, Israel announced a new war aim, namely, to eliminate Hamas altogether as a political and military force. Israeli leaders began to speak of “dismantling Hamas once and for all” or “eradicating” Hamas. To anyone familiar with the history of Israel-Gaza relations, this aim comes as a surprise. It definitely represents an abrupt reversal of Netanyahu’s previous policy. Whereas some Israeli leaders prefer having a unified collaborator PA administration in Gaza and the West Bank, Netanyahu was content with the status quo of different regimes in Gaza and the West Bank. Here is what he reportedly said to his Likud colleagues in March 2019: “Anyone who wants to thwart the establishment of a Palestinian state has to support bolstering Hamas and transferring money to Hamas … This is part of our strategy—to isolate the Palestinians in Gaza from the Palestinians in the West Bank.”

On October 7, the cynical policy of Netanyahu, of preserving the status quo in the occupied territories by a tactic of divide and rule, collapsed spectacularly. His policy was to keep the Palestinian Authority weak, to allow Israel a free hand to do whatever it liked on the West Bank, and to keep the Palestinians in Gaza cooped up in the open-air prison. It was a policy of containment that ultimately failed to contain.

On October 7, the inmates broke out of the prison. In the words of Norman Finkelstein, the breakout was akin to a slave rebellion. Fighters of Hamas and Islamic Jihad broke down the fence and went on a killing spree in southern Israel. First, they attacked a military base, then kibbutzim and settlements around the borders of Gaza. They killed about 350 soldiers, more than 800 civilians, and the carnage was accompanied by terrible atrocities. They also took 250 hostages, both soldiers and civilians. This was a game-changer: the first time Hamas conducted a large-scale attack by land inside Israel. It was a horrific and totally unexpected attack that traumatized the whole of Israeli society.

On the Israeli side, this was more than an intelligence failure; it was a policy failure of the highest magnitude. For years Netanyahu had been saying to the Israeli public that the Palestinians are finished, that they are defeated, that Israelis can do whatever they like on the West Bank, that they can forget Gaza, and achieve peace with the Arab states without making any concessions to the Palestinians.

The 2020–2021 Abraham Accords between Israel and Bahrain, the United Arab Emirates (UAE), Morocco, and Sudan seemed to vindicate Netanyahu. They yielded what he wanted: peace for peace without Israel having to make any concessions on the Palestinian issue. The Accords were a betrayal of the collective Arab position on the Palestinian issue. This position was adopted by the Arab League summit in Beirut in March 2002, and it became known as the Arab Peace Initiative. It offered Israel peace and normalization with all twenty-two members of the Arab League in return for agreeing to an independent Palestinian state along the 1967 lines with a capital city in East Jerusalem. Israel ignored the offer. The Abraham Accords amounted to a very different kind of deal for Israel and a stab in the back to the Palestinian national movement. They were sponsored by the United States as part of a misguided policy of promoting stability in the Middle East by cooperating with authoritarian Arab regimes and Israel while bypassing the Palestinians.

The Hamas attack announced loud and clear that the Palestinian issue is not dead and that Palestinian resistance to the Israeli occupation is far from over. One of its aims was to deter Saudi Arabia from concluding a peace treaty with Israel. Under strong American pressure, Saudi Arabia came very close to signing an Abraham Accord with Israel. In the Arab world, as in the West, there is a disconnect between the governments and the people on Israel-Palestine. The governments value their relationship with America and Israel; the Arab street remains strongly pro-Palestinian regardless of the shifting geopolitics of the region. The Hamas attack, by rekindling popular support for the Palestinian cause throughout the Arab and Islamic worlds, forced the Saudis to think again.

The October 7 attack also highlighted the contrast between the craven subservience of the PA to Israel and America and the Islamic resistance to the occupation spearheaded by Hamas. The PA had been totally ineffective in protecting the people of the West Bank against Israeli land grabs, ethnic cleansing, escalating settler violence, and ever-increasing provocations in and around the al-Aqsa mosque in the Old City of Jerusalem, one of the three holiest sites of Islam alongside Mecca and Medina. Al-Aqsa is of the greatest importance to Muslims as a religious symbol and this is precisely why the encroachment by the Netanyahu government and its Jewish fundamentalist followers is so incendiary. By its attack on October 7, Hamas signaled to Israel that these provocations will no longer be tolerated. It was for this reason too that the operation was named the Al-Aqsa Deluge. All in all, it was a powerful assertion of Palestinian agency and leadership in the ongoing struggle against the Israeli occupation.

The Hamas attack left Netanyahu’s entire policy in tatters, and he will probably pay the political price for the intelligence and security failures. Before October 7 there was massive protest in Israel against his plan for judicial overhaul. The protest did not cease altogether following the Hamas attack but the situation in Gaza became the dominant issue. It did not take long for families of the hostages to start a vigil outside the prime minister’s residence in Jerusalem. After the dust settles, all the anger will be redirected at Netanyahu. In the face of mounting international calls for an immediate ceasefire, he remains defiant. He knows that once the war against Hamas comes to an end, his days in office will be numbered. Politically speaking, Netanyahu looks like a dead man walking.

What is clear is that Netanyahu’s new policy of eradicating Hamas has no chance of succeeding. Hamas has a military wing, the Izz ad-Din al-Qassam Brigades, which commits terrorist acts when it targets Israeli civilians. Even if all its commanders were killed, they would be quickly replaced by new recruits and more militant ones. But Hamas is also a political party with institutions and a social movement with many branches such as a women’s association and a students’ association. It is part of the fabric of Palestinian society. What is more: Hamas is a set of ideas, including the idea of freedom and self-determination for the Palestinian people. Military force can decimate an organization, but it cannot kill an idea.

With characteristic hubris, Netanyahu announced that he was determined to destroy Hamas not only to ensure his own country’s security but also to free the people of Gaza from Hamas’s tyranny. Israel’s indiscriminate use of force, however, does not weaken Hamas; it strengthens it. By relying on brute military force alone, Israel weakens those Palestinian leaders who advocate for negotiations and believe that Palestinians need only behave nicely for the world to sit up and listen. Nor is Hamas identical to ISIS, as Netanyahu and an ever-increasing number of his ministers keep claiming. ISIS is a jihadist organization with a nihilist global agenda. Hamas, by contrast, is a regional organization with a limited and legitimate political agenda.

On June 2, 1948, Sir John Troutbeck, a senior official in the Foreign Office, wrote a memo to Foreign Secretary Ernest Bevin. He complained that by their support for the creation of Israel, the Americans helped to create a “gangster state with a thoroughly unscrupulous set of leaders.” Whether Israel behaves like a gangster state is open to debate, but Netanyahu is without doubt a thoroughly unscrupulous leader. As he directed Israel’s 2023 assault on Gaza, Netanyahu was also on trial for three serious corruption charges, and he knew that if convicted, he might end up in prison. The imperative of personal political survival helped to shape his conduct of the war.

Yet Netanyahu’s motives for prolonging the war in Gaza went deeper than self-preservation. His life’s mission has been to defeat the Palestinian national movement and to prevent the emergence of an independent Palestinian State alongside Israel. He grew up in a fiercely nationalistic Jewish home. His father, Benzion Netanyahu, was the political secretary of Ze’ev Jabotinsky, the spiritual father of the Israeli Right and the chief architect of the strategy of the “iron wall.” In 1923, Jabotinsky published an article under the title “On the Iron Wall (We and the Arabs).” In it he argued that the Zionist goal of an independent Jewish state in Palestine could only be achieved unilaterally and by military force. A Jewish state could only be established not by negotiations with the Arabs of Palestine but behind an iron wall of Jewish military power. The essence of the strategy was negotiations from strength. Once the Arabs gave up hope of defeating the Jews on the battlefield, then would come the time for stage two, for negotiating with them about their status and rights in Palestine. Israeli prime minister Yitzhak Rabin moved from stage one to stage two of the strategy by signing the Oslo Accord with the PLO in 1993 though he never conceded any Palestinian national rights.

Netanyahu came to power in 1996, following the assassination of Rabin, with the explicit mission of subverting the Oslo Accords and preventing the establishment of a Palestinian state. He was fixated on the first part of the iron wall strategy, on accumulating more and more military power, and avoiding stage two, negotiations of any kind. Until October 7, his strategy was to drive a firm wedge between Gaza and the West Bank and to allow a weak Hamas to govern Gaza. After October 7, he was determined to destroy Hamas but without allowing the PA to extend its writ to Gaza because that would strengthen the case for a two-state solution. This amounted to a crude version of Jabotinsky’s strategy, using Jewish military power not to resolve the conflict but to keep the Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza in a permanent state of subordination to a Jewish supremacist state. Netanyahu’s declared aim is to ensure security for Israel for the long-term. His undeclared aim is to end forever the prospect of Palestinian independence.

One disturbing aspect of the Israeli response to the horrific Hamas attack is the dehumanizing of the Palestinian people. This is nothing new. On one occasion, Netanyahu famously suggested that it was Haj Amin al-Husseini, the leader of the Palestinian National Movement, who suggested to Hitler that instead of expelling the Jews from Germany, he should exterminate them. One of Netanyahu’s most often repeated, and most morally repugnant, claims is that Palestinian nationalism is a direct continuation of Nazi antisemitism.

Today, many Israeli ministers depict the Palestinians as Nazis. Yoav Galant, the defense minister, referred to the enemy as “human animals,” and used this view to justify the inhuman siege that he imposed, the cutting off of electricity, food, water, and fuel to 2.3 million people. Particularly chilling in its cruelty, given the huge number of children killed, was the statement by Israeli president Isaac Herzog that the “entire nation” of Gaza “is responsible.” Dehumanizing an entire people can have serious political consequences even if they are unintended. The Nazi dehumanization of the Jews was a major factor in paving the way for the death camps. Israeli demonization of the Palestinians is a similarly dangerous dynamic that can be used to justify the ethnic cleansing of Gaza.

The Western response to the crisis in Gaza has comprised the usual hypocrisy and brazen double standards, but this time taken to a new level. The Western love of Israel has always been accompanied by the denial of Palestinian history and humanity. Deep concern for Israel’s security is reiterated all the time by all Western leaders, but no thought is spared for Palestinian security, let alone Palestinian rights. Evidently, the Palestinians are the children of a lesser God.

In the immediate aftermath of the Hamas attack, Western leaders undertook a pilgrimage to Jerusalem to demonstrate that they are standing by Israel. Palestinian resistance to the occupation, the most prolonged and brutal military occupation of modern times, has been decontextualized and de-historicized. The Palestinians are engaged in an anti-colonial struggle, possibly the last anti-colonial struggle in today’s world. But their struggle is widely attributed by Western commentators to religious fanaticism and irrational hatred of Jews rather than to the normal, universal desire of all people to live in freedom and dignity on their land.

The Western stand with Israel carries an echo of the habitual colonial tendency to treat struggles for national liberation as proof of the savagery, barbarism, and terrorism of the indigenous population. This is how the “civilized world” responded to the liberation struggles of South Africans, Algerians, Kenyans, and Vietnamese. And this is how some Western leaders look upon Palestinian resistance today.

The US and UK have given Israel not only moral but material and military support as well as diplomatic protection. President Joe Biden said that the attack of October 7 was the worst attack on the Jewish people since the Holocaust. This is to trivialize the Holocaust. America sent two aircraft carriers to the Eastern Mediterranean and beefed up its forces in Saudi Arabia, Iraq, and Jordan. By shielding Israel from Hezbollah and Iran, the US enabled Israel to carry on with the mass slaughter in Gaza. In effect, America and Britain gave Israel warrant to pursue its war on Gaza despite the humanitarian catastrophe it caused. They called for “humanitarian pauses” when what was desperately needed was a complete ceasefire. The seven-day pause in the fighting made it possible to send some humanitarian aid into Gaza and for the freeing by Hamas of some of the hostages in return for the release of three times the number of Palestinians from Israeli prisons. But as soon as the pause expired, on December 1, the IDF intensified the bombardment, killing 700 people in one day and exacerbating the utterly horrendous humanitarian crisis.

A UAE draft resolution to the Security Council for an immediate humanitarian ceasefire was defeated by an American veto on December 8, although it had the support of thirteen members with only the UK abstaining. Since 1948, the US has used its veto thirty-four times to defeat resolutions critical of Israel. The majority of these resolutions were drafted to provide a framework for resolving the Israel-Palestine conflict. The veto of the UAE draft resolution was widely denounced, especially in the global south, as tantamount to a free pass for Israel to continue the butchery and destruction of Gaza.

In his October 28 address to the nation, Netanyahu said that Israelis were fighting their second war of independence. This is preposterous: no one is threatening Israel’s independence or existence today. It is Israel which is denying freedom and independence to the Palestinians. The statement may also have carried a veiled threat. In 1948 what Israelis call their “War of Independence” was accompanied by the Nakba, the catastrophe, the ethnic cleansing of Palestine. There have been ample signs that the Netanyahu government is in fact actively planning a second Nakba.

A leaked report of Israel’s intelligence ministry, dated October 13, outlined three alternatives “to bring about a significant change in the civilian reality in the Gaza Strip in light of the Hamas crimes that led to the ‘Iron Swords’ war.” The alternative deemed by the document’s authors to best serve Israeli security involves moving Gaza’s civilian population to tent cities in northern Sinai, then building permanent cities and an undefined humanitarian corridor. A security zone would be established inside Israel, on the border with Egypt, to block the displaced Palestinians from entering. The report did not say what would become of Gaza once its population is cleared out. History tells us that once Israel drives Palestinians from their homes, it does not allow them to return. This is what happened in the 1948 war and in the 1967 war and, despite strong Egyptian opposition, it could happen again.

These are not isolated actions but part of a pattern. They all serve the ultimate goal that the Zionist movement had set itself from the start: to build a Jewish state on as large a part of Palestine as possible with as few Arabs within its borders as possible. Operation Swords of Iron marks a new and utterly ruthless step in this direction. As Ahdaf Soueif, the Egyptian-British novelist, observed in the Guardian on December 4, 2023, “[w]hat the global south has known for 100 years, the people of the global north are understanding now: that the Zionists want all the land, with no Palestinian people, and will stop at nothing to get it.”

In 1876, Liberal opposition leader William Gladstone published a pamphlet denouncing atrocities committed by soldiers of the Ottoman Empire against civilians in Bulgaria. Gladstone’s indictment seared itself in my memory since I was an eighteen-year-old schoolboy in London doing A-level British History. The key passage went as follows: “Let the Turks now carry away their abuses in the only possible manner, namely by carrying off themselves. Their Zaphtiehs and their Mudirs, their Bimbashis and their Yuzbachis, their Kaimakams and their Pashas, one and all, bag and baggage, shall, I hope, clear out from the province they have desolated and profaned.” This is rather how I feel about the atrocities perpetrated by the IDF in the Gaza province today.

 

 

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