11 February 2024
The Israeli bombing and sniping in Gaza Strip is unprecedented act of war against an entire population. Of course, before the current Post Cold War Epoch, the global experience has been the use of state violence against ‘non state actors’, which did involve bombing from the air too. In this list of countries that bombed their own people, India is also included, though the effort was brief and used to bring to bear a peace. The British had used mustard gas to quell insurgency in Iraqi territories between the World Wars, the Americans used Agent Orange in Vietnam, and use of air power undertook an entirely new connotation when drones emerged, and Americans could attack wedding processions, take out a top Iranian general on a scheduled visit to Baghdad, and perhaps their most justified use of such military prowess was to raid a compound in Abbottabad that captured and slew Osama Bin Laden.
Today the world is far different from even what it was before the pandemic, the initial advantage the West had in handling social media platforms has now levelled out. So we see Gaza’s own intrepid journalists host videos, file reports on Facebook, X, offer a Quds News Network, and contribute online to various news agencies and platforms which has painstakingly documented the events in Gaza Strip in the last 127 days and to be fair, The Haaretz is an Israeli broadsheet that tries to bring news from Gaza through opinions like this. Largely due to this effort, at huge personal costs to the Palestinians documenting their own devastation and destruction, the world gets to know of the fate of a child called ‘Hind’, which is the Arabic name for India.
So we know that Israel is meticulously working on a solution. After accusing Hamas of doing very little for the Gazans in their reign, Israel made a list of dozens of hospitals, universities, polytechnic schools, high schools and other infrastructure to raze to the ground. Remember when the first hospital was targeted, fearing Western repulsion, Israel actually suggested that Hamas or some Palestinian militia had misfired rockets that led to this hit? After getting assurance from the West, Israel turned more brazen as it used BBC and other Western news agencies to cover their raids of hospitals as the campaign progressed. While questions about morality or Conventions Geneve are not under discussion in this blog, the military aim of Israel is now getting clear. For a Palestinian people who are a young population, destroying their dwelling units, hospitals, schools, universities in a systematic way is the modern equivalent of an older war strategy used against Napoleon Bonaparte’s invincible French forces- scorched earth policy.
“In defensive just as in offensive warfare, it is necessary to pursue a great aim: the destruction of the enemy army, either by battle or by rendering its subsistence extremely difficult. Thus we shall disorganize it and force it into a retreat, during which it will necessarily suffer great losses.“
Clausewitz in his Principles of War
Israeli use of snipers has been effective in targeting the intelligent community leaders which include nurses, journalists and technicians identified through years of information gathering and the huge data base it has on Palestinians. This campaign includes not just Gaza but even the other Palestinian Territories of West Bank. And snipers have been used for decades now to deplete the ranks of civilian leadership of Palestinian peoples as recounted in this piece by Haaretz. That Israel had normalised the use of snipers was evident when it sniped a Palestinian American journalist Shireen Abu Akleh on 11 May 2022 who was reporting an IDF operation underway in Jenin as an accredited journalist. So from Intifada use of bulldozers to snipers, Israel has a clear strategy of reigning in the Palestinian dissent and voice. Like how now the West acquiesced with allegations about UNRWA staffers and halted aid, over the years, Israel has built enormous clout in Western intelligence agencies to accept their versions as gospel.
So unfazed by the ICJ ruling of 26 January 2024, Israel will possibly now attack the Palestinian refugee camps the remain as clusters around the Egyptian crossing point of Rafah. Israel has hinted that it will seek Cairo’s approval but that is more likely to be after the fact, because the IDF will justify that the remaining 122 hostages, the Hamas High Command are now holed up in Rafah, after bombings and raids of North and South Gaza Strip have not exposed them. If for Hamas and Palestinians the 7 October 2023 event was a trigger to bring the global concern on Palestinian fate, for Netanyahu and Israel this is equally an opportunity to destroy Gaza Strip which because of its geography is impossible for Israel to hold through a settlement policy. Israel had to vacate Gaza previously in 2005 legislated by the Knesset under PM Sharon. Its previous offensives after Hamas took over in 2007 have been militarily not satisfactory, and perhaps now Israel is planning an ‘all of Gaza’ approach, more feasible now that Northern Israeli settlements along the Syrian-Lebanese border have become vulnerable due to Hezbollah and Syrian militia. Like Jordan, Egypt is more reliable and can be banked upon to control the borders. That is why the Israeli settlement strategy along the West Bank is the most successful despite there being even its closest Western allies’ displeasure through resolutions that have deemed these to be illegal. The American Intelligence community recognised this and hence in 2019 the US deemed these ‘illegal settlements’ to be ‘not inconsistent with international law’.
With the champions of Israel, UK and USA now talking about a 2 State solution in connection to recognising Palestine as a state, the Israeli strategy would be to confine such a Palestinian State to within the territories held by the Palestinian Authority largely in and around the West Bank. Already the US has acceded to Tel Aviv’s plans for its future capital at Jerusalem and there fore the new two State Solution if it were to ever come about would be a Israel that ran continuously from the ‘River to the Sea’ with a few pockets of PA territory that would continue to be under overall Israeli security control with its attendant implications for the Palestinians.
The Biden Administration in tandem with Netanyahu War Cabinet is likely to clinch this deal before June 2024, the background for which is being already staged in Paris, with Oman, Saudi Arabia and Jordan being involved euphemistically to aid with the Hamas hostage crises. Like how once Arafat and Rabin held hands at Oslo, Abbas and Netanyahu may in Paris. In all probability, the reality that Palestinians will undergo a Nakba of never before seen proportions, out of Gaza, across the Sinai will be blanketed out. Likewise will news about Palestinians evicted elsewhere under pressure voluntarily to emigrate from their homes through settler intimidation and violence.
Like a Biblical exodus, the eviction of Palestinians from much of their lands is what Israel has been planning for sometime now. Conspiracists will argue that even the possibility that 7 October was staged by Israeli agencies is real, because of this outcome that delivers a long strategised Israeli goal of a Jewish State in the entire of the Promised Land with the capital at Jerusalem. This is the final solution.
After all, how many hold colonialists responsible for Australia, or America today? It is more acceptable as providence now. Even those peoples have reconciled who were indigenous and who were dispossessed. Time tunes to the history of the victor, doesn’t it?
indiarubberman.com 