Post No. 998 - Gaza, Again

 “The disaster that befell Israel on the holiday of Simchat Torah is the clear responsibility of one person: Benjamin Netanyahu.” Editorial, Haaretz, October 8, 2023

I think it’s fair to say that the world doesn’t care about Gaza or the plight of the Palestinians. Since I began this blog in 2004, Israel has pulverized Gaza with disproportionate military force at least five times (2006, 2008, 2012, 2014, and 2021), causing massive destruction of critical infrastructure and thousands of civilian casualties. Israel targeted hospitals and schools, yet I don’t recall a single American official calling Israel’s actions “evil” or “merciless” or, heaven forbid, a “war crime.” What I remember are assertions from the State Department and the White House that Israel’s right to defend itself was sacrosanct.  

To be clear, I’m not defending Hamas for targeting civilians, shooting women and children, and taking more than 100 people hostage. But nor do I accept the idea that the attack by Hamas was unprovoked. The actions of the Netanyahu government in Gaza and the West Bank over the past decade is the provocation. Gaza is one of the most -- if not the most -- densely populated places in the world, often described as an open-air prison due to Israel’s complete control of access points, water, electricity, and the flow of foodstuffs, medicine, and other goods. Israel controls Gaza’s airspace as well as its coastal waters. 

In the West Bank, Israeli settlers with the active collusion of the Netanyahu governing coalition, police, the Israeli military and the courts, have waged a merciless campaign to drive Palestinians from their traditional lands, to appropriate Palestinian olive groves and water sources; entire villages have been reduced to rubble by Israeli army bulldozers, schools destroyed, homes invaded. Writing in the October 19, 2023 edition of the New York Review, David Shulman notes that in the South Hebron Hills, thirteen villages are in imminent danger of expulsion, with the backing of Israel’s High Court of Justice. 

Shulman also writes the following: “The moral foundation of the State of Israel has been severely compromised, perhaps beyond repair, and exchanged for the horrific reality of the occupation, which is further entrenched with each passing hour.”

Once again we see a disparity in the value of human life. The lives of Palestinians are simply not valued as highly as those of Israelis. Palestinians die at the hands of Israeli soldiers or settlers with no outpouring of shock or sympathy or calls for justice, and the United States certainly doesn’t rush aid to the survivors. Moral outrage is reserved for Israeli victims. Palestinians are dehumanized in the same way that Native Americans and African Americans were during America’s first century and a half. Palestinians are deprived of civil rights, legal redress, and can be killed with impunity, driven off their ancestral lands to make way for Jewish settlers. 

Benjamin Netanyahu is a narcissist in the same way that Donald Trump is a narcissist, and like Trump, is under indictment. For fifteen years he has preached division and hatred of Palestinians and surrounded himself with rabid ultra-nationalists. Netanyahu is responsible for the attack by Hamas as surely as Donald Trump is for the January 6 assault on Congress. 

I can’t bear to watch or read mainstream American media coverage of this war; it will be presented as a fair fight between equals, which isn’t even close to the reality. While Hamas is clearly being supported from without, presumably by Iran, the support comes nowhere close to what the US provides Israel on an annual basis. Israel has an overwhelming military advantage, the latest advanced missiles and bombs, fighter jets and ordnance. 

American media will also remind us that Israel is the Middle East’s only democracy, and therefore entitled to our undying support. This assertion is laughable. Netanyahu and his coalition of rabid ultra-nationalists care about democracy about as much as the American Republican Party does, which is to say, very little. 

Israel and the United States share an astonishing hubris. Both countries believe themselves entitled to oppress, invade, attack, disenfranchise and expropriate what belongs to others, and both react with shock and rage when those others rise up and strike back. 

Gaza Scorecard

“Editors around the world are requesting their journalists to be ever softer, ever more mealy-mouthed in their reporting of any incident which might upset Israel.” Robert Fisk, The Independent, August 2001

The New York Times keeps a running scorecard of the latest Israeli-Palestinian madness in Gaza. According to the Times, Israel has struck 3,209 targets in Gaza, and Hamas has fired 2,233 rockets into Israel. It’s interesting that these numbers are reported side-by-side, as if to show there is some equality between the Israeli Defense Forces and Hamas. But it’s one thing to attack a target in a densely populated territory with sophisticated weaponry, and another to launch a rocket indiscriminately in the hope it will find a target.

The death count is the true indicator of the one-sided nature of this latest round of conflict: 856 Palestinians, many of them children, 40 Israelis, most of them soldiers. It’s also telling that the Times chose not to report the number of wounded on either side, or the number of people displaced from their homes – those numbers fall overwhelmingly, and almost exclusively, in the Palestinian column of a grim ledger.

I look at photographs of destruction on Aljazeera and wonder how the people of Gaza will ever rebuild their homes, businesses, schools, and neighborhoods, not to mention the water and sewage system and electrical grid. For the third time in six years, the infrastructure of Gaza has been smashed. How are Palestinians supposed to rebuild in the face of Israel’s blockade? Where will the enormous quantities of steel, cement and other building materials come from? Not from the sea – the Israeli navy won’t allow it; not from the air -- Israel controls the airspace; not by land from Egypt because the Egyptian dictatorship despises Hamas almost as much as Israel’s political leaders do.

Israel has a right to exist. Israel has a right to defend its territory and population. But Israel doesn’t have the right to occupy land taken from the Palestinians by armed force, or to evict Palestinians so Israel can build more settlements, or to indefinitely imprison Palestinians, and on and on. 

What most irks me about the constant turmoil in the Middle East is the role played by the United States. For decades we’ve blindly backed Israel, allowed Israel to call our diplomatic tune, and provided buckets of military aid and diplomatic support so that Israel can maintain a stranglehold on Gaza and the West Bank. Along with unconditional support of Israel, the US supports the junta in Egypt and the despotic rulers of Saudi Arabia. We sure know how to pick our friends. And lest it be forgotten, we once considered Saddam Hussein a stand-up guy.

Bombs Away

Israel is at it again in Gaza, and the American news media plays right along, perpetrating the fiction that Hamas is a military power. The fact is that whatever offensive capability Hamas can muster, Israel has ten or twenty times more. If Hamas kills five Israelis, Israel will kill 500 Palestinians in retaliation.

Diplomats from western countries turn their heads and avert their eyes. On ABC’s Good Morning America, the time spent on Gaza is dwarfed by reports about holiday travel and Black Friday shopping tips. Our priorities are crystal clear: get home to kith and kin, gorge on turkey and beer, and then rush to the mall to sink deeper into debt.

Right now, every day in Gaza is black. Artillery shells whistle across the sky and turn houses and buildings into rubble; children die; hospital wards overflow with the wounded and maimed; too many casualties, too few doctors and nurses, plasma, blood or bandages. There is no electricity or running water. Humanitarian aid can’t get in fast enough or in enough volume to alleviate suffering.

Except for North Korea and Iran, the United States would not let this happen to any other nation, nor we would allow any other nation to flaunt international law the way Israel has done for decades. A nation that occupies another by force, practices targeted assassination, kidnapping and sabotage, decade after decade, while UN resolutions turn yellow with age would be treated like a pariah. Israel appropriates Palestinian land and water, erects barrier walls, and builds settlements on territory taken by military force, and the United States applauds and bows. 

Hamas is not innocent in all of this, but the Israeli response never fails to be disproportionate. If your neighbor punches you on the arm, hit him over the head with a sledgehammer.

While bombs rain on Gaza, some Americans pitch tents outside their local Wal-Mart, Best Buy, or Target, waiting for Black Friday and the deal of the century. 

A Disproportionate Response, Gaza, December 2008

You slice our finger,
We cut off your hand;

You pluck out our eyes,
We chop off your head;

You shell our homes,
We level your cities;

You throw rocks,
We fire missiles from F-16’s;

You kill our soldiers,
We kill your children;

Whatever you do,
We will do X 10;

Because,

Your terror,
Is no match for our terror