Not long ago, I claimed that Israel is employing genocidal
policies in the Gaza Strip. I hesitated before using this very
charged term and yet decided to adopt it. The responses I
received indicated unease in using such a term. I rethought
the term for a while, but concluded with even stronger
conviction: it is the only appropriate way to describe
what the Israeli army is doing in the Gaza Strip.
On Dec. 28, 2006, the Israeli human rights organization
Betzelem published its annual report on Israeli atrocities
in the occupied territories. In 2006, Israeli forces killed
660 citizens, triple the number of the previous year
(around 200). Most of the dead are from the Gaza
Strip, where Israeli forces demolished almost 300
houses and have slain entire families. Since 2000,
almost 4,000 Palestinians have been killed by Israeli
forces, half of them children, and more than 20,000 wounded.
The point is not just about escalating intentional
killings but the strategy.
Annexation
Israeli policy makers are facing two very different realities
in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip. In the former, they
are finishing construction of their eastern border. Their
internal ideological debate is over, and their master plan
for annexing half of the West Bank is gaining speed.
The last phase was delayed due to the promises made by
Israel, under the Road Map, not to build new settlements.
Israel found two ways of circumventing this. First, it
defined a third of the West Bank as Greater Jerusalem,
which allowed it to build towns and community centers
within this new annexed area. Second, it expanded old
settlements to such proportions that there was no need
to build new ones.
Creeping Transfer
The settlements, army bases, roads and the wall will allow
Israel to annex almost half of the West Bank by 2010. Within
these territories, Israeli authorities will continue to implement
creeping transfer policies against the considerable number of
Palestinians who remain.
There is no rush. As far as the Israeli are concerned they
have the upper hand there; the daily abusive and
dehumanizing combination of army and bureaucracy
effectively adds to the dispossession process.
All governing parties from Labor to Kadima accept Ariel
Sharon’s strategic thinking that this policy is far better
than the one offered by the blunt “transferists” or ethnic
cleansers, such as Avigdor Liberman. In the Gaza Strip
there is no clear Israeli strategy, but there is a daily
experiment with one. The Israelis see the Strip as a distinct
geo-political entity from the West Bank. Hamas controls Gaza,
while Mahmoud Abbas seems to run the fragmented West
Bank with Israeli and American blessing.
There is no land in the Strip that Israel covets and there is
no hinterland, like Jordan, to which the Palestinians can
be expelled.
Ethnic cleansing is ineffective here. The earlier strategy in
the Strip was ghettoizing the Palestinians there, but this is
not working. The Jews know it best from their history. In the
past, the next stage against such communities was even more
barbaric. It is difficult to tell what does the future hold for the
Gaza community: ghettoized, quarantined, unwanted and demonized.
Throwing Away the Key
Creating the prison and throwing the key to the sea, as South
African law professor John Dugard has put it, was an option
the Palestinians in the Strip reacted against with force in
September 2005. Determined to show that they were still
part of the West Bank and Palestine, they launched the first
significant number of missiles into the Western Negev. The
shelling was a response to an Israeli campaign of massive
arrests of Hamas and Jihad people in the Tul Karim area.
Israel responded with operation “First Rain.” Supersonic
flights were flown over Gaza to terrorize the entire
population, succeeded by heavy bombardment of vast
areas from the sea, sky and land. The logic, the Israeli
army explained, was to weaken the community’s support
for the rocket launchers. As was expected, by the Israelis
as well, the operation only increased the support for the
rocket launchers.
The real purpose was experimental. The Israeli generals
wished to know how such operations would be received at
home, in the region and in the world. And it seems the
answer was “very well;” no one took interest in the scores
of dead and hundreds of wounded Palestinians.
Following operations were modeled on First Rain. The
difference was more firepower, more casualties and more
collateral damage and, as expected, more Qassam missiles
in response. Accompanying measures ensured full imprisonment
of Gazans through boycott and blockade, with which the
European Union is shamefully collaborating.
The capture of Israeli soldier Gilad Shalit in June 2006
was irrelevant in the general scheme, but it provided an
opportunity for the Israelis to escalate even more. After all,
there was no strategy that followed the decision of Sharon to
remove 8,000 settlers from Gaza whose presence
complicated “punitive” missions. Since then, the “punitive”
actions continue and have become a strategy.
First Rain was replaced by “Summer Rains.” In a country
where there is no rain in the summer, one can expect only
showers of F-16 bombs and artillery shells hitting the
people of the Strip.
Summer Rains brought a novel component: the land invasion
into parts of the Gaza Strip. This enabled the army to kill
citizens and present it as an inevitable result of heavy fighting
within densely populated areas and not of Israeli policies.
Summer Rains, Autumn Clouds
When the summer was over came the even more efficient
“Autumn Clouds:” beginning on Nov. 1, 2006, the Israelis
killed 70 civilians in less than 48 hours. By the end of that
month, almost 200 were killed, half of them children and women.
Some of the activity was parallelled the Israeli attacks on Lebanon,
making it easier to complete the operations without much external
attention, let alone criticism. From First Rain to Autumn Clouds
there is escalation in every parameter. The first is erasing the
distinction between “civilian” and “non-civilian” targets: the
population is the main target for the army’s operation. Second
is the escalation in the means: employment of every possible
killing machine the Israeli army possesses. Third is escalation
in the number of casualties: with each future operation, a much
larger number of people are likely to be killed and wounded.
Finally, and most importantly, the operations have become a
strategy — the way Israel intends to solve the problem of the
Gaza Strip.
A creeping transfer in the West Bank and a measured
genocidal policy in the Gaza strip are the two strategies
Israel employs today. From an electoral point of view the
policy in Gaza is problematic, as it does not reap any tangible
results; the West Bank under Mahmoud Abbas is yielding to
Israeli pressure and there is no significant force that arrests
the Israeli strategy of annexation and dispossession.
Gaza Fights Back
But the Strip continues to fire back. This would enable the
Israeli army to initiate larger genocidal operations in the
future, but there is also the great danger that, as in 1948,
the army would demand a more drastic and systematic
“punitive” action against the besieged people of the Gaza
Strip. Ironically, the Israeli killing machine has rested lately.
Its generals are content that the internal killing in the Strip
does the job for them.
They watch satisfied the emerging civil war in the Strip that
Israel foments and encourages. The responsibility of ending
the fighting lies of course with the Palestinian groups
themselves, but U.S. and Israeli interference, the continued
imprisonment, the starvation and strangulation of the Strip
all make such an internal peace process very difficult.
Cutting Israel’s Oxygen
What unfolds in Gaza is a battleground between America’s
and Israel’s local proxies most unintentional but who dance
to Israel’s tune nonetheless — and those who oppose their
plans. The opposition that took over Gaza did it in a way
that one finds very hard to condone or cheer.
Once fighting there subsides, the Israeli Summer Rains
will fall down again on the people in the Strip, wreaking
havoc and death. There is no other way of stopping Israel
than that of boycott, divestments and sanctions. The only
soft point of this killing machine is its oxygen lines to
“western” civilization and public opinion. It is still possible
to puncture them and make it at least more difficult for the
Israelis to implement their future strategy of eliminating the
Palestinian people either by cleansing them in the West Bank
or genocide in the Gaza Strip.
Dr. Ilan Pappé is an Israeli historian and author of numerous
books, including The Modern Middle East and
The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine.
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