“In a few days,” writes Amira Hass, the veteran Israeli correspondent who has reported for decades from the Occupied Territories, “Israelis went through what Palestinians have experienced as a matter of routine for decades, and are still experiencing,” including “military incursions, death, cruelty, slain children, bodies piled up in the road, siege, fear, anxiety over loved ones, captivity… and searing humiliation.”
The Hamas-led attack on Israeli military bases and civilian neighborhoods reportedly killed more than 1,300 Israelis, along with at least 120 taken hostage. While enduring that type of violence may be routine for Palestinians, Gaza is now facing the most calamitous Israeli military assault to date.
In less than one week, as of this writing, Israel has killed more than 2,300 people, including 724 children. Israeli strikes have hit residential buildings, mosques, schools, hospitals, universities, and fleeing civilians. Israel has intensified its already crippling blockade by cutting off all food, water, and electricity. It has ordered the expulsion of 1.1 million residents of northern Gaza, “a death sentence for the sick and injured,” the World Health Organization warns. If Israel does not restore Gaza’s water supply, the United Nations Palestinian refugee agency says, “people will start dying of severe dehydration.”
With a ground invasion looming, Israel is threatening atrocities on an even larger scale, all while espousing rhetoric that calls for ethnic cleansing or even genocide.
Justifying what he called the “complete siege” of Gaza, Israeli defense minister Yoav Gallant declared that his government is “fighting against human animals.” According to former Israeli Deputy Foreign minister Danny Ayalon, the Israeli plan is to force Palestinians into the “almost endless space in the Sinai desert, just on the other side of Gaza,” where they can live in “tent cities.” Israeli president Isaac Herzog effectively declared that there are no innocent civilians in Gaza, home to “an entire nation… that is responsible.” Invoking the ethnic cleansing of hundreds of thousands of Palestinians before and after Israel’s founding in May 1948, known as the Nakba (“catastrophe”), Ariel Kallner, an Israeli parliamentarian, said that Israel has “one goal”: a “Nakba that will overshadow the Nakba of ‘48.”
Even as the threat of regional escalation grows, the Biden administration fully endorses Israel’s blood lust. Calls for a ceasefire, the White House press secretary declared, are “repugnant.” State Department employees have even been instructed to avoid mentioning the terms “de-escalation/ceasefire,” “end to violence/bloodshed” and “restoring calm.”
Biden’s stance is shared across both political parties, with only a handful of lawmakers demanding a ceasefire. As the US backs Israel’s assault, “we may be about to see massive ethnic cleansing” in Gaza, one European Union official has warned.
As in previous cases, the Western media and political establishment justifies the prevailing support for attacking Gaza by asserting that Israel has “the right to defend itself”, and has no other option against Palestinian militants who refuse to accept its existence.
As a legal matter, the former assertion is false: while Israel has an internationally recognized right to defend itself from an attack, it does not have the right to commit war crimes against a besieged civilian population. Moreover, Israel is not “defending itself” against an external aggressor, but an imprisoned internal population that also has a recognized right to resist military occupation (but not, as is evident, to kill and kidnap Israeli civilians). To adopt the Israeli-US narrative, therefore, requires “ignoring Israel’s structural violence and cruelty,” Amira Hass writes, “and the context of the Palestinian people’s ongoing dispossession from their land.”
That Israel is “defending itself” from a people that it has colonized has long been acknowledged at the highest levels. At a 1956 funeral for an Israeli soldier killed by Palestinians in Gaza, Gen. Moshe Dayan, one of Israel’s most famed military leaders, advised the following:
Let us not cast the blame on the murderers today. Why should we deplore their burning hatred for us? For eight years they have been sitting in the refugee camps in Gaza, and before their eyes we have been transforming the lands and villages, where they and their fathers dwelt, into our estate.
Dayan, having led Israeli forces in the military campaign during Israel’s founding in 1948, recognized that his country originated with the dispossession of Palestinians and theft of their homes. Yet his acknowledgment was not an act of remorse. Rather than attempt to reverse or redress the forced expulsion of Palestinians, Dayan went on to decree that Israel should maintain the colonization with even more aggression:
We are a generation that settles the land and without the steel helmet and the cannon’s maw, we will not be able to plant a tree and build a home… Let us not fear to look squarely at the hatred that consumes and fills the lives of hundreds of Arabs who live around us. Let us not drop our gaze, lest our arms weaken. That is the fate of our generation. That is our choice – to be ready and armed, tough and hard – or else the sword shall fall from our hands and our lives will be cut short.
In the nearly 70 years since Dayan spoke those words, Israel has heeded them by expanding its theft of Palestinian land and creating new generations of refugees. As B’Tselem, the leading Israeli human rights group, acknowledged in 2021, this has turned Israel into “an apartheid regime” that “promotes and perpetuates Jewish supremacy between the Mediterranean Sea and the Jordan River.”
A foundational moment for Israel’s apartheid regime was its 1967 conquest of the West Bank and Gaza Strip, which brought millions of Palestinians under Israeli military occupation. As he did in 1956, Dayan candidly articulated what became the guiding policy: “You Palestinians, as a nation, don’t want us today, but we’ll change your attitude by forcing our presence on you.” Under Israeli rule, the Israeli general said, occupied Palestinians will “live like dogs, and whoever will leave, will leave.”
For Gaza, one of the world’s most densely populated areas, this forced Israeli occupation has confined a population of 2.3 million, more than half of them children, to what former UK Prime Minister David Cameron has described as “an open-air prison,” or what Hebrew University Professor Baruch Kimmerling called “the largest concentration camp ever to exist.”
