Global leaders must finally stand up to Israel before it’s too late for Gaza
Original article by Paul Rogers republished from Open Democracy under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International licence.
| Mahmoud Abu Hamda/Anadolu via Getty Images
It’s clear that Netanyahu’s ‘messianic fantasy’ is full control of the territory. Staying silent is complicity
As its appalling onslaught in Gaza and treatment of Palestinians in the West Bank are broadcast around the world, Israel is increasingly encountering international opprobrium. Yet Binyamin Netanyahu’s position is still not under threat from the country’s domestic opposition, whose criticism of his government scarcely stretches to the war.
While that may be starting to change, the Israeli prime minister’s rule will likely persist as long as he can rely on the support of Donald Trump, which shows no sign of abating. In any case, he could probably rectify any significant shift in domestic attitudes by engineering another crisis with Iran.
Why support for the war persists in Israel needs to be understood, and it is worth recalling that before the Hamas attack nearly two years ago, Israeli Jews thought that they were at last achieving a measure of lasting security.
At the time, the occupied West Bank has seen a steady increase in the number and size of Jewish settlements, along with all the strategic roads, checkpoints and patrols that went with them. That helped to ensure Israel could more effectively control the whole area, which was already enclosed by the heavily guarded border with Jordan and the separation barrier with Israel.
More widely, Israel had overwhelming air superiority in the region, which enabled it to project power in Lebanon, Syria, Iraq and elsewhere. It was far from complete, given the presence of Hezbollah in Lebanon and the theocratic regime in Iran, but Israel’s ever-present connection with the United States offered further protection.
Perhaps the most reassuring element was how Gaza had been subdued after the shock of the 2006 Hamas election victory over Fatah, a secular nationalist party that had previously had a majority on the Palestinian Legislative Council.
That election had been held across all the Palestinian territories and was followed by violent Israeli and international opposition to the onset of Hamas rule, as well as conflict between Fatah and Hamas. Within months, Fatah had regained control of the West Bank, while Hamas ran Gaza, which almost immediately became subject to a near siege by Israel.
Four wars and several lesser periods of intense violence followed between 2008 and 2022.
The first of the four, in 2008, was a 22-day Israeli military offensive that killed around 1,400 Palestinians and 13 Israelis. This was followed by the Israeli Defence Forces (IDF) assassinating Hamas’s military chief of staff, Ahmed Jabari, and conducting eight days of air raids in 2012.
Then, mid-2014 saw a seven-week IDF offensive after Hamas kidnapped and killed three Israeli teenagers. That bitter air and ground offensive led to the deaths of more than 2,100 Palestinians and 73 Israelis. Israeli losses were mostly IDF ground troops, which is one reason why many senior Israeli soldiers are now reluctant to put troops into Gaza City.
More recently, in May 2021, the IDF killed 260 Palestinians in Gaza, and 13 Israelis died in rocket fire from Gaza. Thirty more Palestinians were killed in further attacks in 2022.
Amid these short but intense wars, many Israelis became used to brief bursts of warfare, which were often seen as a necessary means to control Palestinians. Israeli military personnel even referred to such violence as “mowing the grass”, according to foreign correspondent and author Phoebe Greenwood, whose vivid insights into reporting on the years of war do much to explain the lack of balance in the mainstream media when it comes to Israel and Palestine.
In total, in the 15 years leading up to 2023, in the wake of the first and second Intifadas (Palestinian uprisings) and the control of Gaza, Israeli military operations killed close to 5,000 Palestinians and wounded thousands more. That this was well over three times the Israeli death toll on 7 October counted for little among the great majority of Israeli Jews, enabling the Netanyahu coalition to go to war with those Palestinian “human animals” to destroy Hamas once and for all.
Within weeks, it became clear that Hamas would not easily be defeated. From very early on in the war, the IDF was pursuing the Dahiya Doctrine of punishing the civilian population to undermine support for Hamas. That is failing to the extent that while Hamas has lost thousands of its paramilitaries, there are many thousands more ready to take their place.
As a result, Israel is using increasingly extreme measures, including killing medics and paramedics, destroying hospitals and medical centres, and starving people by cutting off food supplies.
At the same time, the Netanyahu government is conducting an international propaganda exercise, especially in the UK and Germany – two of the states where support is most urgently needed.
In the UK, the support of leading politicians and pundits is essential, and the propaganda process has been aided by providing financial support to Labour cabinet ministers in particular. The extent of the campaign has this week come more fully into the public eye after Declassified UK published the itinerary and lobbying efforts of the Israeli ambassador in London, Tzipi Hotovely.
In an interview with LBC journalist Iain Dale last year, Hotovely suggested that “every school, every mosque, every second house” in Gaza had access to underground tunnels and that this justified Israel’s bombardment.
“But that’s an argument for destroying the whole of Gaza, every single building there,” said LBC presenter Iain Dale. “Do you have another solution?” she responded.
That response starkly supports Nimer Sultany’s assessment of the situation in an article in The Guardian this week. Sultany, a Palestinian citizen of Israel who is a reader in public law at SOAS University of London, wrote: “Israel is pursuing the messianic fantasy and the criminal enterprise of a ‘Greater Israel’, with the goal of ‘maximum land, and minimum Arabs.’”
Ambassador Hotovely’s views certainly support Sultany’s argument, as does the announcement this week that Israel’s security cabinet has approved a plan to take full control of Gaza City. From there, it seems likely that the rest of the Gaza Strip would be next, followed by the West Bank.
Sultany is right to call this aim a “messianic fantasy”. Western political leaders must recognise it as such and radically change their policies on selling arms and sharing intelligence with the IDF, as well as introducing sanctions on trade with Israel. Given the UK’s long-term relationship with Israel, and its close military and security links with the IDF (which exceed those of any other nation bar the US), Keir Starmer should take the lead in this.
Original article by Paul Rogers republished from Open Democracy under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International licence.
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