By any measure, Israel's destruction and slaughter in Gaza, makes amply clear that this was not a mere operation to take out Hamas rockets from firing on Israel. Israel's goals were far reaching and calculated to destroy the infrastructure of a society and ultimately of a state.
The level of destruction even shocked jaded diplomats who have witnessed the worst war zones and humanitarian crises. "Sir John Holmes, [of the United Nations] who visited Gaza on Thursday, said he was shocked by "the systematic nature of the destruction" (emphasis added). The Red Cross representative, Jacob Kellenberger, was equally flumoxed by the level of destruction. "The International Committee of the Red Cross's (ICRC) president Jakob Kellenberger said conditions in Gazan hospitals were the worst he had seen..." (emphasis added). "In an interview with the BBC's Today Programme, [Sir John Holmes of the UN] described an industrial area where every building within a square kilometre had been levelled, by bulldozers and shells. " National Public Radio also reported on the apparent wantoness of the destruction.
The Gaza village of Juhor al-Deek is one of the Palestinian communities closest to the Israeli border. It's clear, strategically, why the Israeli army would want to control the land around this farming village during an attack: It holds the high ground overlooking the southern entrance to Gaza City near Salahadin, a main north-south road. What's less clear, though, is why the army demolished almost every house in the village.
The toll was indeed grim, per the BBC, for the cramped population of 1.5 million Palestinians living in the Gaza Strip:
- More than 1,300 Palistinians killed
- Thirteen Israelis killed]
- More than 4000 buildings destroyed in Gaza
- More than 20,000 buildings severely damaged
- 50,000 Gazans Homeless
- 400,000 without running water
The "systematic nature of the destruction" is the key to understanding Israel's motives. Israel's acted to destroy the infrastructure that is the root of society in Gaza and every civilized place in the world. Is this some genocidal act akin to the ethnic cleansing in Bosnia Herzegovina, Rwanda or Darfur? On some level, perhaps this could be considered an act of genocide but Israel's motives are far more shrewd. Israel wants to deny any element of sovereignty to Palestinians under its control. In so doing, Israel is making certain that there will never be a two state solution, one state solution or really any solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict that involves an element of sovereignty for the Palesitinians. Nor is Israel interested in a moderate Palestinian secular state. For Israel, the only option is to colonize and disenfranchise Palestinians. This policy applies to the West Bank just as certainly as it does to the Gaza strip and one could even argue to the population of refugee Palestinians in Lebanon and Jordan.
The two Palestinian territories under Israeli control are nothing more than apartheid Bantu-Lands, bereft of any natural resources, including water. These apartheir Bantu-Lands are used to marginalize the millions of Palestinians that Israelis divested of their land. Neither Gaza nor the West Bank enjoy a single element of a sovereign state. Every aspect of these territories from the borders to the very water that they consume is controlled by Israel. At a moment, Israel can turn these territories into uninhabitable areas starved of water, electricity, food, medicine even basic communication with the outside world. In order to interact with those outside the territories, Gazans must burrow in tunnels like mole rats. Never mind the higher elements of sovereignty such as control of the borders, a duly constituted state, control of the nation's resources, a national currency, communication, trade, the rule of law by a sovereign entity and independent political relations with other sovereign entities, known as nation-states.
This state of affairs was well articulated by Avi Shlaim, the Israeli war veteran and professor of international relations at the University of Oxford in the UK. In an article entitled, "How Israel brought Gaza to the brink of humanitarian catastrophe," for the Guardian, Professor Shalom, forcefully articulates the Israeli policy of destroying every element of Palestinian sovereignty.
Gaza, however, is not simply a case of economic under-development but a uniquely cruel case of deliberate de-development... The development of local industry was actively impeded so as to make it impossible for the Palestinians to end their subordination to Israel and to establish the economic underpinnings essential for real political independence.
Gaza is a classic case of colonial exploitation in the post-colonial era. Jewish settlements in occupied territories are immoral, illegal and an insurmountable obstacle to peace. They are at once the instrument of exploitation and the symbol of the hated occupation. In Gaza, the Jewish settlers numbered only 8,000 in 2005 compared with 1.4 million local residents. Yet the settlers controlled 25% of the territory, 40% of the arable land and the lion's share of the scarce water resources. Cheek by jowl with these foreign intruders, the majority of the local population lived in abject poverty and unimaginable misery. Eighty per cent of them still subsist on less than $2 a day. The living conditions in the strip remain an affront to civilised values, a powerful precipitant to resistance and a fertile breeding ground for political extremism.
And what is at the root of this policy?
Anchored in a fundamental rejection of the Palestinian national identity, the withdrawal from Gaza was part of a long-term effort to deny the Palestinian people any independent political existence on their land. (emphasis added)
"The declared aim of the war is to weaken Hamas and to intensify the pressure until its leaders agree to a new ceasefire on Israel's terms. The undeclared aim is to ensure that the Palestinians in Gaza are seen by the world simply as a humanitarian problem and thus to derail their struggle for independence and statehood."
The fact that Israel's actions radicalize a new generation of Palestinians also serves its interests. After all Hamas was founded by Israel, in large measure to drive a wedge against the secular Fatah movement. By radicalizing the Palestinian liberation movement, Israel is able to brand them as "terrorists" and delegitimize them in the eyes of the international community, giving Israel carte blanche for its repressive actions.
[Israel] continued to play the old game of divide and rule between rival Palestinian factions. In the late 1980s, Israel had supported the nascent Hamas in order to weaken Fatah, the secular nationalist movement led by Yasser Arafat. Now Israel began to encourage the corrupt and pliant Fatah leaders to overthrow their religious political rivals and recapture power. Aggressive American neoconservatives participated in the sinister plot to instigate a Palestinian civil war. Their meddling was a major factor in the collapse of the national unity government and in driving Hamas to seize power in Gaza in June 2007 to pre-empt a Fatah coup.
And the pretext for the latest atrocity visited on the Palestinians? "The figures speak for themselves. In the three years after the withdrawal from Gaza, 11 Israelis were killed by rocket fire. On the other hand, in 2005-7 alone, the IDF killed 1,290 Palestinians in Gaza, including 222 children." And this toll does not include the hundreds, mostly civilians, killed in the current Gaza operation. In the hapless Bush administration, Israel was given a complete free hand to do as it wished. As progressives, we cannot stand idlly by while the worst of human rights offenses are committed under our name.