Netanyahu and Taking Over Gaza
Occupation and Slaughter
To say that Israel’s Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, had lost the plot is to assume he ever had one. With a dearth of ideas as to how to come up with a “final solution” to the Palestinian problem, he has received a majority approval from his cabinet colleagues to take over Gaza City. It took a late-night meeting with the security cabinet lasting some ten hours.
A statement released on the morning of August 8 from his office mentioned a five-point plan intended to defeat Hamas and conclude the war. None of this is an improved version of what has come before: the intended disarming of Hamas, the return of all hostages, demilitarising the Gaza Strip, assuming security control of the territory and creating “an alternative civil administration that is neither Hamas nor the Palestinian Authority”.
There is also not much difference here from recent proposals made by the French President Emmanuel Macron, UK Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer, and Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney, with one fundamental difference: the Israelis want no current Palestinian representative authority to govern the people they so loathe. What all the proposals share is a core belief that the Palestinians be reduced to subordinate status, forever policed and monitored by watchful authorities. Their representatives are to be vetted by the Israelis and any number of international partners. Genuine sovereignty can sod off.
The Israeli military has announced that it “will prepare to take control of Gaza City while providing humanitarian aid to the civilian population outside the combat zones”. Little change then given the current model of aid distribution that features daily massacres of the desperate and the starving overseen by trigger itchy personnel from both the IDF and the obscenely named Gaza Humanitarian Foundation. OHCHR, the United Nations human rights office, claims that at least 1,373 Palestinians seeking food have been killed since May 27, 859 in proximity of the GHF’s distribution points. Another 514 have perished along the routes traversed by food convoys.
The UN Human Rights chief Volker Türk has done his best to reiterate a certain ghastly obviousness in the plan. The military takeover “runs contrary to the ruling of the International Court of Justice that Israel bring its occupation to an end as soon as possible, to the realisation of the agreed two-State solution and to the right of Palestinians to self-determination.” The takeover would entail further escalation, resulting in “more massive forced displacement, more killing, more unbearable suffering, senseless destruction and atrocity crimes.”
The IDF’s chief of staff, Lt. General Eyal Zamier, is not a fan of the plan, concerned that it would do more to imperil the surviving Israeli hostages held in the Strip. The New York Times reports that the country’s military leadership would prefer a fresh ceasefire, with the IDF suffering from the effects of attrition from the conflict. The head of Israel’s National Security Council, Tzachi Hanegbi, is in furious agreement: such an operation would further endanger the surviving Israeli hostages. Mossad’s director, David Barnea, also adds his name to the list of sceptics.
Israeli opposition leader Yair Lapid did not shy away from excoriating the cabinet decision, something he called “a disaster” that would breed further disasters. The far-right figures of Itamar Ben-Gvir and Bezalel Smotrich had “dragged” the Prime Minister into a strategy that would lead to the death of the hostages and Israeli troops while costing billions to the Israeli taxpayer.
An announcement from Hamas proved suitably contemptuous of the latest Netanyahu gambit. “We warn the criminal occupation that this criminal adventure will cost it dearly. It will not be a walk in the park. Our people and their resistance are resilient to defeat or surrender, and Netanyahu’s plans, ambitions, and delusions will fail miserably.” The group also thought it fitting to name the United States as “fully responsible for the occupation’s crimes, due to its political cover and direct military support for its aggression.”
In a turn up for the books for those opposing Netanyahu’s blood-soaked adventurism, some of Israel’s closest allies are going beyond muttering criticism. Modest as it is, Germany has announced that weapons exports to Israel for use in the Strip had been suspended “until further notice”. (Between 2020 and 2024, the country accounted for a third of Israel’s arms imports.) A statement from German Chancellor Friedrich Merz, while acknowledging the usual proviso that Israel had “the right to defend itself against Hamas terrorism,” expressed concern that “even tougher military action by the Israeli army in the Gaza Strip” undermined prospects for releasing the hostages and pursuing negotiations for a ceasefire. Merz further warned that Israel “not take any further steps toward annexing the West Bank.”
For his part, Starmer called Israel’s “decision to further escalate its offensive in Gaza […] wrong, and we urge it to reconsider immediately. This action will do nothing to bring an end to this conflict or to help secure the release of the hostages. It will only bring more bloodshed.”
Türk, if somewhat hollowly, demands an end to the war in Gaza with a rosy vision: an arrangement where Israelis and Palestinians are “allowed to live side by side in peace.” Admirable as this aspiration is, optimistic in its transcendence, it misunderstands the currency of hate and vengeance currently traded in Netanyahu’s cabinet and swathes of the Israeli populace. This is not a matter of side by side, but above and below, living in a state of permanent conflict, suppression and suspicion.
Heavy Machinery and Patriotic Demolition in the Service of Genocide
Rabbi Avraham Zarbiv is a well-respected holy man in Israel with some devoted followers. He is a dayan, a judge in the rabbinical courts of Tel Aviv, dispensing wisdom in matters of religion and Jewish law. He’s also a reservist in the Seyeret Givati brigade of the IDF and is currently serving in Gaza. There, he has earned a degree of fame for his skills as an operator of the Caterpillar D9 armored bulldozer, the IDF’s tool of choice for the erasure of Palestinian homes. He claims to average more than 50 demolitions a week. According to Zarbiv, his unit has learned to ‘play the D9’ like a musical instrument.
Rabbi Zarbiv is part of the wider effort to lay waste to Gaza and render it uninhabitable for Palestinians. His stated motives are religious; war, for him, is a harbinger of the coming of the messiah. But he is one of many directly or indirectly employed to demolish buildings in Gaza. The motivation for others is more straightforward: money, revenge or, in a context where the demolition of Palestinians’ homes is seen as a service to one’s country, patriotic duty.
Domicide is a key aspect of the genocide in Gaza. According to recent reports, around 92% of homes and 70% of all buildings in the Gaza Strip have been severely damaged or destroyed. Gaza has a population of over 2 million and from the scale of the destruction, it appears that all houses are considered bases of resistance. If we put morality aside, as the IDF seems to have done, the scale of the flattening of Gaza is an impressive achievement, considered as an initial stage of population transfer. There is no access given to foreign journalists for a reason – Gaza is unrecognizable, the destruction wholesale. So, how do you transform such a vast area into a moonscape of concrete and ashes in under two years? Overwhelming air power certainly helps, but on the ground, two things have been particularly important: willing personnel, such as the good rabbi, and the right equipment.
It takes certain modifications for a Caterpillar D9 bulldozer manufactured in the US to become an armored D9. Israel Aerospace Industries [IAI], which offers an ‘extensive range of innovative solutions’ in ground combat situations, is responsible for these. The Israeli armored version of the Cat D9 has a mounted machine gun, grenade launcher and smoke projector. It is armoured to protect the operator and has, of course, been battle-tested over years of occupation. So familiar an asset is it, that the D9 has its own affectionate nickname in IDF slang: the ‘Doobie’, or Teddy Bear in English. Rachel Corrie died underneath one. Together with excavators, wheel loaders and other heavy machinery, it has been used for years in West Bank house demolitions. The D9 can not only demolish buildings but create the new ‘corridors’ of Gaza and clear border security zones. It has hardly been reported in the West but, with the aid of such equipment, whole villages in southern Lebanon along the international border have recently been erased, Gaza style.
In wartime, the Israeli economy has been strikingly robust. The assault on Gaza has been a boost to certain sectors, and it has been especially profitable for those with initiative who can hire or invest in large machinery. As well as utilizing its own personnel for demolitions, the IDF has been shown to be outsourcing the destruction in Gaza. Lucrative work has been available for equipment operators. Owners of excavators can earn 5,000 shekels a day. Those who work as contractors with the Ministry of Defence are paid per number of houses demolished. This is war as a continuation of business by other means, as Brecht might have observed. Rabbi Zarbiv is merely the celebrity face of patriotic demolition. So many are working on the razing of Gaza that infrastructure projects in Israel are facing significant delays due to shortages of operators and equipment.
But Zarbiv’s days could be numbered as a D9 specialist. Quite apart from the complaint lodged against him with the ICC for alleged war crimes, he could soon be redundant as a result of the recent introduction of the ‘Robdozer’, developed by IAI. This is a destroyer of homes that is unmanned and can be remotely operated, like a drone, from the air-conditioned comfort of an office. Future versions are envisioned to be fully autonomous. Genocide and destruction will be even easier than they are now. If pilots who drop bombs indiscriminately can be considered heroes in Israel’s militarized culture, so too can those who operate drones or bulldozers remotely, or those who program an autonomous D9 – no doubt according to the values of the ‘most moral army in the world.’ These advancements in remote-controlled technology represent another contribution to the ongoing disconnection of Israelis from the consequences of their wartime actions.
The IDF has recently received another shipment of D9s after delivery was held up by the Biden administration. Israelis take pride in their myth of the start-up nation. But besides having a thriving software and high-tech sector, Israel has invested significantly in heavy machinery, appropriately enough for an apartheid state which wants to control and shape the land it occupies. But it needs external help. In UN Special Rapporteur Francesca Albanese’s recent report on Israel’s ‘economy of genocide’, Caterpillar Inc is allocated its own paragraph. This year, the company signed a further multi-million dollar contract with Israel.
Punitive demolition has long been a part of the history of this conflict. As the Palestinian poet Mohammed El-Kurd put it, bulldozers have been ‘undoing God’ for some time. What is new is the prominence of their role in this unprecedented destruction. New too, is the amount of money being made in the process, not just by Israelis, but by international firms producing heavy machinery like Caterpillar and JCB. We are witnesses to the razing of entire cities, towns and villages, to lives being shovelled aside like rubble, all to clear the way for the next phase of Zionism. Western companies and governments are providing the wherewithal.
Anthony Fulton is a blogger and activist based in Israel/Palestine. He is a member of a kibbutz in the Upper Galilee.
In Israel’s Genocide of Gaza, We See the
Face of Five Centuries of Western
Colonialism
The leveling of Gaza by the equivalent of 6 Hiroshima bombs is said to be the greatest destruction of an urban area in modern history.
There are times when it is difficult to bring myself to my writer’s desk, when I know there is something that desperately needs to be acknowledged, but I barely have the words for it. And if I could find them, I ask myself what effect could one small voice possibly have. Is this even a meaningful process? Daily seeing pictures of children with bones sticking out of their emaciated flesh, let alone children missing limbs, while most of the western world continues support for Israel, pierces me with a sense of despair at our seeming helplessness to stop this horror.
But finally, I have to make that effort. There could be no more fitting day than this one, August 6, the 80th anniversary of the day the United States seared the Japanese city of Hiroshima with the first atomic weapon used in war, three days before the second was dropped at Nagasaki. Historians generally agree this was entirely unnecessary, that the entry of the Soviet Union into the war tipped the balance to Japanese surrender. After all, the one-day death toll in the firebombing of Tokyo had been even greater.
Now we witness events that, though it staggers belief, are even more destructive. The cumulative power of the bombs Israel has dropped on Gaza amount to six or more times that of the Hiroshima bomb, something like 90,000-100,000 tons of high explosive. The destruction is said to be the greatest of any urban area in modern history, including the Japanese cities. Now an even more pervasive weapon of starvation has been unleashed on the remaining civilian population. Famine has reached the “worst-case,” a U.N. affiliated group says. Overall deaths are often quoted in the range of 60,000, but could well run into the hundreds of thousands. Most of those who survive will experience ill effects through life, physical and psychological.
It is clearly a genocide, and though they are late in the game, Israeli human rights group B’tsalem on July 28 issued a report under the all-caps bold heading, “OUR GENOCIDE.” It concluded, “An examination of Israel’s policy in the Gaza Strip and its horrific outcomes, together with statements by senior Israeli politicians and military commanders about the goals of the attack, leads to the unequivocal conclusion that Israel is taking coordinated, deliberate action to destroy Palestinian society in the Gaza Strip. In other words: Israel is committing genocide against the Palestinians in the Gaza Strip.”
The same day, Physicians for Human Rights – Israel issued its own statement. It is worth quoting at length.
“Today, PHRI is releasing a position paper that documents this assault for what it is: a deliberate, cumulative dismantling of Gaza’s health system, and with it, its people’s ability to survive. This amounts to genocide. Israel’s bombing of hospitals, destruction of medical equipment, and depletion of medications have made medical care – both immediate and long-term – virtually impossible. The system has collapsed under the weight of relentless attacks and blockade.
“Each day, dozens die of malnutrition. Ninety-two percent of infants aged six months to two years don’t get enough to eat. At least 85 children have already starved to death. Israel has displaced 9 in 10 Gazans, destroyed or damaged 92% of homes, and left over half a million children without schools or stability. It has wiped out essential health services – including dialysis, maternal care, cancer treatment, and diabetes management.
“This is not a temporary crisis. It is a strategy to eliminate the conditions needed for life. Even if Israel stops the offensive today, the destruction it has inflicted guarantees that preventable deaths – from starvation, infection, and chronic illness – will continue for years. This is not collateral damage. This is not a side effect of war. It is the systematic creation of unlivable conditions. It is the denial of survivability. It is a genocide.”
In charging Israel with destroying Gazan society by making conditions unliveable, both groups are using definitions set by the 1948 U.N. Genocide Convention, one of which is, “Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part.”
This is accompanied by a general sense the worm is turning on Israel. France, Britain and Canada have announced plans to recognize a Palestinian state, though the latter two with conditions. Major figures are making statements calling for an end to the starvation campaign, including Barack Obama, Donald Trump and Keir Starmer, though the continuing shipment of arms to Israel which Trump could accomplish is not forthcoming. So his words seem to be just empty virtue-signaling.
Why did it take so long?
The general view toward these these statements is – What took you so long? Those with eyes to see have been calling it a genocide since the early days of the war in 2023 when Israel closed the Gaza borders and began mass bombing. That was obvious to Craig Mokhiber, New York office director of the U.N. Office of the High Commissioner of Human Rights, who on October 28, 2023 announced his resignation. In his letter he wrote, “ . . . the current wholesale slaughter of the Palestinian people, rooted in an ethno-nationalist settler colonial ideology, in continuation of decades of their systematic persecution and purging, based entirely upon their status as Arabs, and coupled with explicit statements of intent by leaders in the Israeli government and military, leaves no room for doubt or debate . . . This is a text-book case of genocide. The European, ethno-nationalist, settler colonial project in Palestine has entered its final phase, toward the expedited destruction of the last remnants of indigenous Palestinian life in Palestine.”
Israel finally made its genocide too blatant, though words of Israeli leaders at the beginning of the war made clear their intent, a reason why the International Court of Justice in January 2024 ruled in response to a South African charging genocide that it was plausible. Finally, it is no longer possible to plausibly deny it.
Why has it taken so long? Why does it go on? I have to conclude it is because in what Israel is doing in Gaza, and under less scrutiny in the West Bank, the West is seeing the reflection of its own brutal colonial past. The mass slaughter in Gaza is no different than exterminations European conquerors inflicted in the Americas, Africa and Asia. Do we find it unbelievable that Israelis actually say kill children because they will grow up to be terrorists? Do we remember that U.S. Army Col. John Chivingtonordered all to be killed in an assault on a peaceful native camp at Sand Hill, Colorado, including children. ““Damn any man who sympathizes with Indians!…Kill and scalp all, big and little; nits make lice.” Many were such massacres, from 1600s New England to 1800s California. Coast-to-coast genocide.
And if we view using starvation as a weapon with horror, let us remember how killing the buffalo herds was central to U.S. Army strategy to defeat the Sioux and Comanche who ruled over much of the west, when it was having trouble defeating them militarily. Gen. Philip Sheridan said it was necessary “to settle the Indian question.” The same Sheridan who reputedly said, “The only good Indian is a dead Indian.” Whether or not he really did say it, it was a widespread sentiment in the 19th century U.S. So we should not be surprised to hear similar statements from the later settler colony of Israel.
What we see today is only a high-tech version of our own history. Instead of Gatling guns mowing down natives at Wounded Knee, it is F-16s dropping 2000-pound bombs on Rafah. We are shocked to see it, because Israel is acting out in the 21st century what western nations did from the 1400s on. Israel is in many ways a throwback. The Zionist idea of a Jewish state emerged in the late 1800s at the height of western colonialism. The idea that European whites were a superior race with a right to rule over others provided an intellectual legitimacy to seizing other people’s lands and committing genocide. We hear that echoed in claims of Jewish supremacy and right to the land of Palestine. It is often based, as were western claims to hegemony, on some kind of religious claim. In the end, it is theft.
If what Israel is doing in Gaza is increasingly compared to what Hitler and the Nazis did, it is partly because Hitler was a kind of throwback himself. It is said that his great crime was to treat white Europeans the same way they treated non-white populations in the Global South. Hitler had a dream Germans would settle the steppes of Eastern Europe that way the U.S. settled the west. He was an avid fan of Karl May, a German writer of western frontier adventures, and named his train The America. Trouble was, in Hitler’s case, the indigenous had tanks and were not so easily genocided.
Colonialism is woven into our lives
If colonialism was simply a historic fact and not present in the modern world, perhaps the tide would have turned against Israel sooner. But it is a fundamental reality, so woven into our lives we are barely aware of it. I started out asking if writing about the genocide is a meaningful act in the face of monumental horror. Of course, I answer that we must all lift our voices, that our many small droplets turn into a tsunami that makes any further support for Israel unacceptable. But to add to that, I think it is this issue of the colonialism that runs through our lives that connects to what I write about here, building the future in the places where we live.
For while political colonialism largely ended in the decades after World War II, it has been replaced by a more insidious economic and cultural colonialism that continues to hold the Global South in thrall. In debt peonage that continues to hinder nations from developing their own economies, which as John Perkins wrote in Confessions of an Economic Hit Man is quite purposive. In covert political manipulation that arranges coups and overthrows whenever a national leadership goes out of line. And perhaps most profoundly, in who does the work.
Jason Hickel, one of the world’s leading proponents of degrowth, the idea of reducing material and energy throughput to address the ecological crisis, is not by coincidence one of the world’s leading authorities on economic inequality. In 2024 Hickel published an article in Nature, “Unequal Exchange in the Global Economy.” The results are staggering:
“We find that, in 2021, the final year of data, 9.6 trillion hours of labour went into producing for the global economy. Of that, 90% was contributed by the global South The South contributed the majority of labour across all skill levels: 76% of all high-skilled labour, 91% of medium-skilled labour and 96% of low-skilled labour. In the same year, 2.1 trillion hours of labour went into the production of internationally traded goods (our use of ‘traded goods’ in this paper refers to both goods and services). The relative North–South contribution to the production of traded goods is similar to that of total production, with the South contributing 91% of all labour (73% of all high-skilled labour, 93% of medium-skilled labour, and 96% of low-skilled labour).”
In a 2022 article in which Hickel was the lead author, researchers found a huge portion of the economy of northern countries is extracted from the south, even in the so-called post-colonial era. The system is rigged by keeping resource prices low and finished goods prices high.
“This research confirms that the ‘advanced economies’ of the global North rely on a large net appropriation of resources and labour from the global South, extracted through induced price differentials in international trade. By combining insights from the classical literature on unequal exchange with contemporary insights about global commodity chains and new methods for quantifying the physical scale of embodied resource transfers, we are able to develop a novel approach to estimating the scale and value of resource drain from the global South. Our results show that, when measured in Northern prices, the drain amounted to $10.8 trillion in 2015, and $242 trillion over the period from 1990 to 2015 – a significant windfall for the North, equivalent to a quarter of Northern GDP. Meanwhile, the South’s losses through unequal exchange outstrip their total aid receipts over the period by a factor of 30.”
Israel’s genocide of Gaza is the immediate atrocity in our face. In the background are other proxy wars tied to western resource extraction in Sudan and Congo. Of course, we can look at the run of wars in West Asia and North Africa – Iraq, Libya, Syria, and perhaps one pending with Iran – as struggles over the control of energy and the western drive to preserve its colonial hegemony. It is all of a piece.
So what can we most meaningfully do in the face of all this, as people living in western countries, particularly the final guarantor of western colonialism, the U.S.? As I said, we can and must raise our voices against the current genocide, however small or powerless we feel we are. It is a necessity simply to be whole human beings. Then, at a broader level, we must examine deeply the role of continuing colonialism in our lives, dependent as we are on a flow of labor, resources and income from the Global South. Since much of this is tied to fossil energy, from which most global climate disruption flows, this is also vital to deal with the climate crisis. We need to get an honest living, because ours is not. It is built on centuries of colonial extraction.
The paradigm about which I write here, building the future in place, is all about building community-based economies grounded in the realities of nature, beginning in the communities and bioregions where we live. It is about local control of finance to invest in networks of community-based institutions – worker coops, local food providers, energy coops, circular economies, social housing, community broadband, etc. – that set us free from the global system of exploitation and extraction. That move us from these five centuries of colonialism to a just world for all.
With everything in us, let us push for the agony of the people of Gaza to end and for the colonial experiment of Zionism to be declared the manifest failure it is. It has not only brutalized the Palestinians; It has morally and psychologically twisted a large segment of the Jewish people, a tragic irony considering Jewish history. And at the same time, let us look at why the western world has largely gone along and supported what is clearly a genocide, understanding it as a late expression of what the western world has been pulling for a half-millennium. Then dig into the economic roots of this and our multiple, onrushing global crisis, and undertake the work of change in our own communities. It is hard to see the value in events that has caused so much suffering, but if Gaza spurs us to reflect on our own colonial past and move beyond it, and present, the many who have died will not have died in vain.
This first appeared on Patrick Mazza’s Substack page, The Raven.
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