October
20, 2024
The
picture of an 11-year-old girl with napalm burns running naked down a road in
Vietnam was deemed so shocking in 1972 that it won a Pulitzer Prize. 
“The
Terror of War” became the iconic image of the Vietnam War.
Today
in Gaza and Lebanon, there are so many pictures of burning people, burning
tents, bodies piled up on the streets of the Jabalia refugee camp, and
dust-encrusted survivors staggering out of the rubble with the lifeless bodies
of their tiny children in their hands, but no one even bothers to publish them.
Images
of “The Terror of War” being committed by Israel in Gaza or Lebanon are not
entered for Pulitzer Prizes. Nor do they elicit statements of condemnation or
disgust from US presidents or British prime ministers.
Editors
are too frightened.
To
suggest that Israel is deliberately killing children in Gaza is a “blood libel”
that reminds British novelist Howard Jacobson of the pogroms of Jews in 13th
century England, sparked by rumours that they were eating the remains of
Christian children in Matzah bread.
But
Israeli forces are deliberately killing women and children in Gaza and Lebanon
and domestic opinion in Israel is urging their soldiers on.
There
are no taboos in the debate in Israel about the final solution for north Gaza
or south Lebanon. No hang-ups about using words like “extermination”.
This
is what Uzi Raby, one of Israel’s most sought-after experts on the Middle East,
does. The senior lecturer at the department of Middle Eastern and African
studies at Tel Aviv University said in a TV interview last month: “Anyone who
stays there (north Gaza) will be judged by law as a terrorist and will go
through either a process of starvation or a process of extermination.”
The
‘Generals’ Plan’
Historians
in Israel are not a brake on genocidal talk. They are an inciter of it.
Raby
said that Israel should not try to solve problems in the region with western
kid gloves, adding that Israel’s actions would be flavoured with a “Middle
Eastern spice”.
Benny
Morris, who in times long gone was one of the “new historians” who uncovered
the massacres Israel committed in 1948, now wants to nuke Iran.
The
plan these historians are debating has been hatched by former army general,
Giora Eiland. Eiland acknowledges that Israel’s tactics in Gaza have failed. He
notes that every time they clear an area of Hamas fighters and retreat, Hamas
re-appears.
Eiland,
however, is no dove.
His
solution is not to negotiate. It is to force 400,000 inhabitants in northern
Gaza out by giving them the option of starving or dying. This, Eiland says, is
the only way to achieve Israel’s war goals.
This
plan has received widespread support in the army, the Knesset and the media.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said he is studying it.
The
Eiland plan is far from blue-sky thinking. Netanyahu tasked his chief aid Ron
Dermer last December to consider ways of “thinning out Gaza”.
Many
today believe the army is already implementing parts of it. The army has issued
expulsion orders named in the plan as the first stage.
The
key to Eiland’s siege tactics, the Netzarim corridor which bisects the strip
south of Gaza City, has already been built and armed with its own garrison.
At
the time of its construction last February, Shimon Orkabi, the lieutenant
colonel responsible for paving the road, said one of the goals of the road was
to “prevent passage from south to north and to control it very precisely”.
Three
soldiers serving in Gaza told Haaretz this week that the plan is being
implemented.
“The
goal is to give the residents who live north of the Netzarim area a deadline to
move to the south of the strip. After this date, whoever will remain in the
north will be considered an enemy and will be killed,” a soldier stationed in
the Netzarim corridor was quoted as saying.
The
killing machine
Indiscriminate
killing is also already happening. Into the deadly cocktail of non-stop
shelling, quadcopters and dropping 2000-pound bombs on tents, the Israelis have
introduced the latest killing machine: exploding robots capable of demolishing
six houses in a row.
The
residents of north Gaza have already experienced “explosive demolitions” of an
intensity that is foreign even to them, after surviving a year of all-out war.
A
journalist who lives in this hell hole told MEE: “The bombing has been
different than what we previously experienced. The sound of explosive
demolition is very loud, like we’ve never experienced before.
“Despite
this, the people, particularly in Jabalia, are not budging from their homes.
People are saying we would sooner die in the streets than leave to the south
because even people in the south have been saying, ‘better to die in Gaza City
than die in the south’, because while death is the same, life in the south is
unbearable and much harder than in the north. People are living in tents and
humiliation.”
The
carnage going on daily is enthusiastically encouraged. The more Palestinians
refuse to move, the more voices in Israel, like popular commentator Eliahu
Yusian, proclaim there are “no innocent” civilians in Gaza.
Professor
Avi Bareli, a lecturer on Israel and the history of Zionism at Ben-Gurion
University, wrote last October that the Palestinians are “a society that
worships death and raises the banner of murder”.
Raby,
Bareli, Morris, and all generals and soldiers committing war crimes against
civilians are quite safe.
They
do not, and should not, fear arrest the next time they pop over to London’s
Oxford Street for their Christmas shopping or check out the latest West End
musical, because there is a complete absence of condemnation or pressure from
the dwindling number of countries that still support Israel.
Silent
or complicit
The
media are silent or complicit. Sky News initially described the soldiers killed
in a Hezbollah rocket strike on an army base as “teenage victims” in the same
headline that referenced the 23 dead in a school struck by Israel in numbers
only.
The
BBC routinely refers to the civilian death toll as claimed by Hamas, not even
by a “Hamas-run” health authority. In similar fashion, the BBC’s Middle East
editor Jeremy Bowen interviewed Eiland, with studied neutrality, as if his plan
was a legitimate view.
Bowen
did not suggest, reference or report the fact that there are two major court
cases going on about war crimes and genocide at two of the highest courts of
international justice, for which the Eiland plan is evidence in chief.
Perhaps
Bowen thinks these cases are irrelevant or that the Geneva and Genocide
Conventions are dead letters.
Eiland
himself devotes energy and time to claiming everything he suggests is legal,
but Bowen as a reporter did not challenge him or seek to verify his claims.
Would
they have reported the Sabra and Shatila massacre in this way? Exactly the same
thing is happening now in Jabalia refugee camp.
Perhaps
our public service broadcaster does not think their public service duty obliges
them to reference in their reports the enormous, some might say overwhelming,
body of international legal opinion which now exists on this subject.
Both
the BBC and Sky News routinely blur the distinction between armed combatants
and unarmed civilians, which is Israel’s purpose.
Silence
buys time. Time buys death.
Biden’s
latest attempt to constrain the siege and starvation of northern Gaza follows
in the footsteps of his patently failed attempt to stop Netanyahu from
occupying Rafah. He threatened then to stop the delivery of heavy bombs.
His
threat did not halt arms supplied nor prevent the complete occupation of the
border with daily massacres.
The
World Food Programme has said that all aid has stopped going into northern Gaza
for 16 days, but US Secretary of State Antony Blinken and the defence secretary
have given them 30 more days before they will begin a “reassessment” of
military aid.
“From
a humanitarian perspective, a 30-day deadline is basically a death sentence,
especially for those in northern Gaza that are facing famine,” Natasha Hall, a
senior fellow at the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS),
told Middle East Eye.
Little
Israel, greater Israel
If
Israel’s plan for north Gaza succeeds, south Lebanon will be next. Meir Ben
Shabbat, a former national security advisor and chief of staff for national
security, said Israel had three options in its current operation in Lebanon: to
create a security zone under Israeli military control, to offer a political
settlement that would allow Israel to enforce a new regime at the border, or to
empty the land along the entire border.
Shabbat
favours the last alternative: “Enforcement in the buffer zone will be carried
out by Israel through a combination of intelligence and fire. The advantage of
this alternative is the relatively low costs of enforcement and the fact that
it can be made possible on a routine basis without serious dilemmas. Another
advantage of it is in the message it conveys: the terrorism against Israel
caused a loss of territory.”
Attack
little Israel and you get Greater Israel.
Just
as the early leaders of Israel, Ben Gurion, Levi Eshkol and Yitzhak Rabin used
conquest of territory as a means of punishing those who attacked Israel, and
defeat and loss of land led to peace deals with Egypt and Jordan, so Israel
should now use the same tactic in Lebanon and Syria, it is being urged.
After
all, the religious Zionists claim Jerusalem extends all the way to Damascus.
The
only response that these plans will elicit is a permanent war on all fronts by
every people in the Arab world. Those who stay on the sidelines today, will not
do so tomorrow. They will be shamed into action.
It
is only a matter of time before this war and these tactics involve every
country threatened by Israel’s punishment raids and its ever-expanding borders.
Jordan
will in time tear up its peace treaty with Israel. Iran and Hezbollah will
fight for their lives.
It
took a matter of weeks for the Americans to topple the Taliban in 2001 and 20
more years for the Taliban to force them to leave.
It
took three weeks to bring down Saddam Hussein’s statue in Baghdad in April 2003
and eight more years for the US combat role in Iraq to end in ignominy and
defeat.
These
are not happy precedents for a war, which will involve much more than the
toppling of unpopular and repressive regimes in Afghanistan and Iraq. This war
will involve the very identity of the Sunni and Shia of Syria, Jordan, Iraq,
and Iran.
This
war will be existential for everyone involved.
This
will be a war to the end. Will it finish in conquest or retreat? I am not sure
Israel has the capacity any more to recalculate, to stop and rethink, as it
marches blindly towards its own demise.
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