Israel’s forever wars in the Middle East will pave the way for its demise

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.

(Article by David Hearst republished from MiddleEastEye.net)

“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.

The views expressed in this article belong to the author and do not necessarily reflect the editorial policy of Middle East Eye.

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