Escalation and Miscalculation: How a Bigger War Might Happen in the Middle East

by Mel Gurtov

August 8, 2024
Facebook

TwitterReddit

Image by Alex Shuper.

Fateful Choices

Just a few weeks ago, the media were reporting that Israel and Hezbollah were edging closer to an agreement that would bring their deadly exchanges along the border with Lebanon to a halt. At the same time, however, the rising number of firefights and casualties, and the mutual buildup of forces, threatened to do the opposite: create a major war which, as in 2002, caused huge losses for all sides.

Now, two weeks later, the stakes for all sides are much higher. A Hezbollah rocket attack killed 12 children in a village in the Golan Heights, and Israel’s response—an air assault on Beirut that killed Fuad Shukr, a senior Hezbollah commander—raised the stakes. At virtually the same time, Israel also carried out the assassination in Tehran of Ismail Haniyeh, a key figure in the Hamas leadership.

Once again, the threat of a wider war looms, and the leaders in Israel, Hamas, Hezbollah, and Iran must reconsider whether these escalations should continue. In short, for each of them the strategic question is: Should we continue with tit-for-tat actions, accept our losses and continue negotiating a cease-fire, or escalate to repay blood debts?

Embedded in these choices are certain military and political realities, described in detail by Dexter Filkins in the July 29 issue of The New Yorker. If Israel attacks Hezbollah’s huge missile and rocket force, estimated at around 150,000, it would probably not be able to destroy it completely.

That would probably require Israel to follow up with a ground invasion. Hezbollah, meantime, could fire thousands of missiles a day into Israel, causing huge losses of life and property. But Israeli strikes would also cause enormous losses for Hezbollah, and an invasion might well destroy much of Lebanon itself. Iran would have to weigh how to support Hezbollah, at the great risk of a showdown with the US, which just now is bolstering its Middle East air and naval presence just to head off that possibility.

Vengeance: A Common Motive

All the parties thus have reason to fear a wider war, and have said as much. Yet the desire for vengeance runs deep. Israel’s government conveyed a wish to avoid a larger war, but also said the assassinations were necessary to repay for the killing of children.

Hezbollah and Iran also lean toward retribution. Hassan Nasrallah, Hezbollah’s leader, declared at the funeral of Fuad Shukr: “The enemy, and those who are behind the enemy, must await our inevitable response … You do not know what red lines you crossed.”

Iran’s supreme leader, Ali Khameini, is said to have ordered an attack on Israel, which most likely would come from Hezbollah but could be directly from Tehran. Observers recall that the last time Iran responded to an Israeli attack, in April, which killed several senior Revolutionary Guards at the Iranian consulate in Damascus, Syria, Iran made its first-ever direct attack on Israel.

The trouble with all these options for using greater force is that, when you step back and analyze them, their necessity and motives are questionable. Did Israel carry out the assassinations at that particular moment in order to squelch progress in the cease-fire talks and sustain the far right’s social and political agenda?

Steven Erlanger raised that issue in the New York Times of August 2. So did an Israeli writer for Ha’aretz, who wondered if Netanyahu was “deliberately provoking escalation in the hope that a conflagration with Iran will drag the United States into the conflict, further distancing [him] from the debacle of October 7 . . .”

The same question can also be asked of Hezbollah and Iran: Is a major retaliation against Israel necessary at this time, with the high risk of sparking a war that might bring in the US? Is the Hezbollah strategy, dictated by Iran and supported by Hamas, to keep the pot boiling in order to provoke further US and international distancing from Israel?

Escalation and Miscalculation

What kind of retaliation any of these parties will make against Israel, and how Israel might respond, may not be known for a while. But one thing all the parties should consider but may ignore: They cannot fully control an escalation.

It’s a phenomenon familiar to students of war: actions taken defensively by one side, with the aim of deterring the other side from further attacks, are interpreted by the other side to be more threatening, leading to further escalation in response. A former US ambassador to Israel, Thomas R. Nides, put it well:

“Neither side really wants a bigger war because they understand the huge damage that it would cause their countries. The problem is that wars are caused by miscalculations. And by trying to deter each other from escalating, they risk making a miscalculation that does the opposite of what they intended.”

At bottom, none of the contending parties seems to want either war or peace. Retribution seems to fit with each of their strategies. That is the latest Middle East tragedy, portending no imminent release of hostages or prisoners, no letup in the humanitarian disaster in Gaza, and no movement toward a permanent cease-fire and Palestinian statehood.

Mel Gurtov is Professor Emeritus of Political Science at Portland State University, Editor-in-Chief of Asian Perspective, an international affairs quarterly and blogs at In the Human Interest.

Gaza’s Children Face an Unseen Crisis

The psychological toll taken by nine months of war is in a category not seen before, experts warn.

By Hoda Serif

August 8, 2024

Source: New Lines Magazine



Until this year, the Alashi siblings — Said, 16, Jihan, 15, and Hanan, 12 — were at school and knew only the routine of life in Gaza. The two sisters aspired to be artists.

Now they dream of mastering English, driving a car like their mother and becoming physicians so they can save the lives of people in Gaza.

The children’s parents were divorced. They lived with their father in Gaza while their mother, Dina Massoud, lived in Staten Island, in a cramped, sublet one-bedroom apartment that she shares with her new husband and their newborn baby. Crucially, she is a U.S. citizen. In November her ex-husband, who requested anonymity, called Dina, urgently requesting that she obtain the necessary paperwork from the U.S. Embassy in Egypt to evacuate him and their children from Gaza. She worried about organizing their departure, knowing that the journey to Rafah crossing was extremely dangerous. With the help of Najla Khass, 43, a Palestinian refugee coordinator in New York City, Dina decided to risk getting her family out; it was a decision, she understood, that would put her young children in direct contact with the Israeli army and what she described as their “draconian commands.”

Said, Jihan, Hanan, their father and his family evacuated their home in northern Gaza in December, along with another 1 million Palestinians, following the Israeli army’s orders to move south. For several weeks they sheltered at the Abdullah Bin Rawahah primary school near Deir el-Balah, waiting for Dina to arrive in Egypt. Each family at the school-turned-shelter was allocated one classroom containing six small twin-size beds.

Bodies were packed tightly, and men sleeping in opposite directions stretched their legs out toward the faces of the others, Hanan recalled. Some slept on desks or on the floor, covered only with light blankets. Hanan rose early each morning to join the long line for the limited bathrooms, a daily struggle that usually took two to three hours. Running water was limited, and the children lived in constant fear of being bombed. With United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA) aid and food trucks turned away from Rafah crossing in the south and at the Beit Hanoun border in the north, Hanan stored a single packet of vanilla Oreos she had found on the floor under her pillow, taking small bites each night. A few weeks later the Alashi family set out on the journey to Rafah, where the few Palestinians who have managed to obtain a permit can cross into Egypt.

“And just two days after we left the empty school, Israel bombed it,” Jihan said. “We made it out.” Later, she said, “I don’t know if that makes us lucky.”

The sisters described with expressions of horror the sight of large Israeli tanks on Salah al-Din Road, the north-south artery that leads to the Rafah crossing. It was the first time they had encountered Israeli soldiers and Jihan remembers the racing beat of her heart. “Here, feel,” she said as she took my hand. The girls recounted seeing many dead bodies strewn across the main road, as they inched closer to the crossing. Jihan said her heart rate surged each time her gaze met her sister’s. “The thought of anything happening to Hanan or Said or Baba [Dad] — I wouldn’t be able to bear it.”

Jihan frequently reenacts the maternal, protective role over her younger sister, a natural instinct she attributes to a childhood spent without their mother. That day in the car, her thumping heart rate was accompanied by sweaty palms and frantic recitations of verses from the Quran as they sat huddled in the car.

“We held our hands up in the air, waved the white cloth, and didn’t look [Israeli soldiers] in the eyes. We had to stare straight ahead,” Jihan said, adding, “If we wanted to survive, this is what we had to do.” Almost in unison, the girls said, “Some survive, others don’t.”

At Rafah crossing, an Egyptian officer informed them that their father would not be permitted to enter Egypt. Because he was divorced from Dina, he was not considered a member of her immediate family and so was not eligible for a crossing permit. He embraced his children and they said goodbye, not knowing when they would see one another again.

In Egypt, the Alashi children and Dina spent a month hotel-hopping in El-Warraq, a municipal district of Giza near Cairo. Once all the necessary paperwork for entry into the U.S. was prepared, the family was set to fly to New York on Jan. 8. During the long flight, all the girls thought about was Gaza: when they would next touch the granular sand of their cherished beach, where they had flown their white kites with friends and watched as the sunset painted hues of deep reds and pinks, or when they could next visit the bakery that served their favorite mango ice cream. Said wondered most about when they would next see their father and who would take care of him now that they were gone.

As Israel continues its relentless bombing campaign in Gaza, trauma experts from around the world have expressed deep concern about the devastating impact this war is having on “successive generations of Palestinian families,” Dr. Vivian Abouallol, the head of the steering committee at the USA-Palestine Mental Health Network said. The group of mental health professionals at the network identify the Israeli occupation as the sole cause of turmoil to the mental well-being of both “the Palestinian and the Israeli public.” As of this writing, the number of Palestinians who have been able to leave Gaza remains unclear, while the process is becoming increasingly onerous and costly. As of this writing, UNRWA estimates that up to 1.9 million people in Gaza have been internally displaced, or about 90% of the population.

Juliette Touma, director of communications at UNRWA, said that the current war in Gaza has, in addition to taking a death toll far exceeding that of previous wars, caused trauma on a scale worse than the intergenerational trauma that is the legacy of the Nakba in 1948, when the newly established Israeli army forced an estimated 850,000 Palestinians into what became permanent exile. When Touma visited Gaza with other UNRWA members in late October, she saw pain on a scale “unfathomable to the human mind.” She said the shock of it all keeps mourning Palestinians from crying. “It’s a reopening of an unhealed wound because many of them have either experienced the Nakba in 1948 or their grandparents have told them stories about it. For them to be forced to watch as their communities are bombed to rubble, forced to flee their homes and villages, or worse to evacuate their kids from Gaza entirely, is all part of revisiting that agonizing journey of exodus, of pain and no longer belonging.” What has transpired in Gaza over the past eight months, she adds, has created “the most destructive mental injury to the human brain, experienced by 2.4 million people, and these are just the numbers inside of Gaza.”

Najla El-Temawi Khass was born in 1980 in Shujaiyya, Gaza City’s largest neighborhood. This is where she lived when the First Intifada began in December 1987. By September 1988, riots and deadly military incursions had made the neighborhood unlivable; Najla’s parents left and settled in New Jersey, where they raised Najla and her five siblings.

Najla recalled that during the First Intifada, the Israeli army would raid the house of anyone suspected of violating the strict curfew. As an act of resistance, Palestinians would leave footprints in the sandy, unpaved streets; the Israeli soldiers would follow the footprints, raid the homes they led to and force their residents to show them their shoes. If children were caught, they were detained and tried in Israel’s military court system, which has a conviction rate above 99%, according to the Israeli army’s own records. Or they were kept in indefinite administrative detention.

“It was always little boys they wanted,” Najla said. “The goal has always been to dehumanize them. I understand now all their tactics to intimate and stoke fear.”

“One day, my eyes will speak. They will say they saw true horror. Worse than anything you can imagine,” she continued. “My ears heard it. My chest felt it. What’s happening in Gaza now is all very real to me.” She spoke softly as we sat down to drink our coffee. Her eyes wandered to a distant corner of her home in a penetrating stare, which occurred frequently when our conversations triggered memories of the Israeli military. Najla’s family is currently sheltering in displaced persons camps across Gaza. Her childhood home, which her parents had built, was demolished by an Israeli airstrike back in November.

Since settling in New York as a child, Najla has dedicated her days to serving as a full-time refugee coordinator with the Islamic Circle of North America’s ICNA Relief, a Muslim aid organization that provides services to victims of war and survivors of disaster, mostly from Palestine, Libya, Sudan and Iraq. Khalto (Auntie) Najla, as the kids call her, slowly became everyone’s aunt in her close-knit, predominantly Arab neighborhood in the New York City borough of Staten Island. The children she helped became something of a second family to her. “It’s the Palestinian way,” she said – a phrase she repeated often during our interview. “Keeping myself distracted is the only way I know how to survive,” Najla added.

The mental health crisis for Palestinians living in Gaza was already acute before Oct. 7, according to reports from UNICEF. Since 2006, Israel had imposed a military closure on Gaza, controlling everything from who and what entered or left the territory to the population registry and the daily allotment of electricity. The closure shaped entire generations that have grown up amid repeated cycles of violence, with military incursions, airstrikes and severely restricted freedom of movement. The Israeli military incursions as well as the constant surveillance and monitoring took an enormous toll; even before the current war, UNICEF estimated that at least 500,000 children in Gaza were in need of psychosocial support.

Caesar Hakim is a clinical psychologist who specializes in child and adult trauma. In addition to his private practice in Haifa he also lectures at the University of Glasgow. He was previously clinical director at the Guidance and Training Center for the Child and Family in Bethlehem. He treats patients with continuous traumatic stress disorder (CTSD) — a condition, he said, that is “radically unique” among classifications of trauma and is inherently rooted in every Palestinian’s experience.

Hakim treats patients in Haifa, Galilee, Jerusalem and the West Bank. Because Israel’s restrictions on movement make it impossible for him to see patients in Gaza, he offers remote assistance to psychologists there.

“Palestinians have long faced repeated danger,” Hakim said. “With no external protection systems to process any of their experiences, it throws them into a cycle of revictimization. It is far from what we can clinically describe as PTSD, where one’s fears are stuck in a traumatic loop, suggesting little to no likelihood of recurrence. In Palestine, that loop is reality. The threat is still there. It has always been there. This chronic, generational pain is the only breath most children have ever taken in Gaza.”

The term CTSD was first coined by South African writer Frank Chikane in the 1980s to describe the effects of apartheid on generations of children in South Africa. Children, he discovered, were particularly susceptible to developing CTSD from prolonged exposure to various forms of political repression, violence or systemic racism against their people.

The younger generation of children, Hakim says, is experiencing a resurgence of past traumas that they never had a chance to process. “What they need is stability — caretakers. Just imagine a child living in a world like this, when he was born, that there is no responsible adult to help them. Everyone is just focused on sheer survival.”

Hakim said that a significant number of his patients are increasingly reflecting on their past, with many expressing a strong desire to go back in time. “Patients come in with all the questions. They ask me: How can we live in a place like this? How can we take care of our families? Why am I here? How can I survive here?” He added: “Each one of them has his own story in his own personal life of how they lived this trauma over and over. And now it is all coming out. And they can’t avoid it, nor can they face it. There is nowhere to turn.”

The cornerstone of therapy, he says, is being able to provide a safe haven for those in need of security. For many of Hakim’s patients, his office serves as their sole sanctuary. The high rates of attempted suicide, according to Hakim, remain a daunting reminder that the Palestinian sense of alienation is everywhere amid the violent social, cultural and historical atmosphere of Israel today.

Ifirst met Said, Jihan and Hanan at Najla’s Staten Island home a week after they arrived in New York. The school day had ended and Najla, who had made a habit of picking them up each day, had just brought them home. Their mother, Dina, and I were sitting on the black leather couch in the living room as the children ascended the stairs, 16-year-old Said trudging up slowly behind his sisters and greeting me with uncertainty. He was a reserved, quiet young man with a towering posture and wavy dark-brown hair that framed his face. He did not raise his eyes to acknowledge my presence or engage in conversation. Instead, he walked silently, his feet tapping the light-orange wooden-paneled floor with the slow, uncertain steps of a man twice his age. His gaunt shoulders sagged underneath his gray hoodie as he moved, slowly but carefully, always pausing for balance before taking the next step.

Slumped in a beige armchair, legs extended, the 16-year-old became engrossed in his iPad, which Najla had gifted upon their arrival. “His head is always in that thing,” Dina said.

Before the children fled Gaza, their father had buried 12 of Said’s friends, all in the same month — a tragedy I discovered not until weeks later. I did not learn much about Said; he was withdrawn, averting his gaze when spoken to. I watched as Najla offered him a glass of water and he remarked: “Who’s getting Baba water now?”

Said remembers the last time he retrieved water for the family; he carried it alone from the well back to his home using carts laden with plastic containers. He was in Haraat al-Daraj, northwest of Gaza City, where he’d managed to acquire just two six-liter containers of briny water for four shekels ($1.10). This ration had to last his extended family of 50 for an entire week.

“Right now, you are in America, not Gaza. You can eat and get full, and you can even eat again after that,” Najla reassured Said, pushing a bowl of spicy macaroni and cheese toward him. The sisters refused meals that did not involve their ritual of sharing with one another, a reminder of their ceaseless struggle to procure food in Gaza’s ruins, where the act of eating alone was a luxury they could never afford.

They had become unaccustomed to tasty, wholesome food after subsisting for weeks on end on paltry meals — cans of tuna that had passed their expiration date, fava beans or ramen. “That’s all that we could find. The bread, if any, was moldy.” The girls were sometimes afraid to open the tuna cans because they had heard that some were booby-trapped with explosives.

Said was resolute in minimizing electricity usage as much as possible. That day, he walked around Najla’s home, vehemently switching off lights and unplugging unused appliances — from hair straighteners to iPhone chargers — a habit that was a legacy of Israel’s control over the electricity supply in Gaza, which was limited to four hours per day even before the war and then cut off completely on Oct. 8.

Jihan appeared slightly happier about the move than her two siblings did. Her hope, I learned, was in the power of academia. If they had stayed in Gaza and if there had been no war, she would have completed high school in al-Daraj, at the same school her mother, aunts and uncles had attended. “But I barely had the chance to start,” Jihan said. Her school was bombed just one month into the start of the academic year. She was most looking forward to her advanced art class, where she would learn how to create abstract canvases with oil paint. With her brother, Jihan is now enrolled at Wagner High School on Staten Island, where she has yet to forge any friendships that feel authentic. Stabraq, her best friend from Gaza, will never be replaced, Jihan tells me. “I hope she is still alive and that I can meet her again soon. We did everything together.”

“It is as if the war is not happening or people don’t seem to care as much here,” Hanan told me, referring to the school’s bleak social climate. Jihan added: “I still have nightmares. Of course I do. I can hear the sound of the bombs. But I keep it to myself. I am so lucky to be safe. To have escaped. Of course I don’t feel lucky, but I can’t complain. All I can do is work hard to achieve the grades I need to help my people.”

Dr. Samah Jabr, 47, grew up in East Jerusalem, which is occupied by Israel. For eight years she has been chair of the mental health unit at the Palestinian Ministry of Health in Ramallah, overseeing all mental health provision in the West Bank, Gaza and East Jerusalem. She said that all the traumatized patients she sees in her office show a strong lack of trust, belonging and hope in human relationships: “My patients tell me they are supposed to contain their pain inside their heart, no matter how distressed, to avoid the shame of sharing it,” she said. “Such reactions are not just limited to individuals. Attitudes like these have become generalized over generations in Palestine, forming a body of maxims and proverbs that communicate a loss of faith, pervasive fear of danger and an avoidance of disclosure for both men and women. These reactions are all barriers to their healing,” she said.

Jabr has conducted training sessions for hundreds of medical professionals in Palestine, Afghanistan, Libya and Jordan. Each day, she sees up to 30 people experiencing personality changes and emotional torment, often manifesting as physical ailments. Political trauma in Palestine is both “transgenerational and collective,” she said, adding that her unit has nearly reached its capacity.

“Even if we had the funding and professional resources to address this, how do we begin to solve a trauma that is man-made, deliberate and ongoing? It is a mistake to believe it is any easier, mentally, for the child when living abroad. We, as marginalized Palestinians, do not fit the current framework by which the West defines trauma.” There is no safe place to help them anywhere in the world, Jabr adds, so long as the root of the problem endures: the Israeli occupation. “Giving people who lost their humanity, who have been reduced to nothing, their dignity back is all part of the solution. Psychologists can’t do that alone. We need responses at state and international level. We need the rest of the world to stand with us.”

Samar Harfi is a licensed clinical psychologist in Illinois. She works with the Khalil Center, a Zakat Foundation project where her clinical approach focuses on traditional Islamically integrated psychotherapy. Harfi received the President’s Volunteer Service Award for her work with refugees and treating war-related trauma in 2012. She spoke to me about the Alashi children, who are “rare cases” she says, of civilians who have been able to flee since the onset of the war. She says that what they have been exposed to in Gaza will live inside them for a long time; they have lost the sense of belonging that children desperately need for healthy development and recovery.

“This is the epitome of CTSD: shame, survivor’s guilt. Why them, not me?” Harfi added: “It is the mind that is still colonized, even if the body is physically removed from the violence.”

Back in the car, Najla was driving us to the American Veterans Memorial Pier in Brooklyn, where she had organized a kite-flying session for the children and other community members. Said opted out, as he did most days, preferring to spend the day playing basketball with Najla’s sons.

“That’s how he deals,” Najla told me. “He won’t even stay in the room if we turn on the TV, afraid he will hear the bombs off Al Jazeera.”

I watched Hanan, who was particularly thrilled by the roads, record videos of the scenery with her new iPad. On her face was an expression of wonderment at a world preserved beyond the flames of perpetual war and bombardment. Hanan looked forward to sending the videos to her father and other family members still in Gaza. “So they can see that the whole world doesn’t also look so dull. I swear, we forgot what the sun and a clear sky looks like. Listen to the birds!” she cried out. The girls ate chips while Najla tended to at least 30 unread chats about refugee relief on WhatsApp. “Welcome to a day in my crazy circus life.”

As we pulled up to the 25-foot-high memorial on the Brooklyn waterfront overlooking lower Manhattan, a group of people — some 30 children and their parents — awaited Najla, the organizer, who hurriedly removed the box of white kites and posters from her trunk. The kids sprinted to her, all waiting to choose their favorite ones. Without hesitation, Hanan pointed to the white kite coiled with green, black and red strings, then clapped her hands and launched it into the air almost immediately. Jihan stayed behind to keep a close eye on her sister.

She was only four years older than Hanan, but Jihan worried incessantly about her younger sister’s safety, afraid she might lose track of her amid the overwhelming crowd of kite flyers. “Please make sure we can always see her,” Jihan said. Najla reassured Jihan, so that she would release the protector’s burden and see that within it, joy too could be found. After all, Najla would later argue, that was her job now — and one she fully embraced.

For over two hours, Hanan immersed herself in the joyful pursuit, every movement radiating pure happiness. She darted through the crowded space, lost in the bustle of New Yorkers, the kite trailing behind her like a ribbon in the wind.

The weariness set in as soon as Hanan paused to catch her breath. She reminisced about lying in Gaza’s moist sand; those were special moments when she would gaze up at the sky where white kites flown by children seemed to dance like ghosts in the wind with the sun shining down on them and their feet anchored in the glistening sand. “It was so beautiful,” she said. On days when safety concerns kept them from the beach, the girls improvised by flying kites out of their window, a gesture to let those on the beach know they were with them in spirit.

I marveled at the sheer happiness that the simple act of flying a kite could generate for a child ravaged by war.

“This was our freedom,” she told me.

Hanan wishes she had some way of letting the kids in Gaza know that she is thinking of them. She is sure that one day they will return to play with kites on their beloved shores of Gaza.

“I have to believe,” she said. Najla silently nodded, her pencil-thin eyebrows descending toward her black, beetle-leg eyelashes: “Our beach was our only escape. Sometimes, our only hope.”

The sun had started to set, and Najla’s vision blurred with the onset of floaters, a recurrence she attributes to her many long days. Together, the sisters and Najla strolled back to the car, arms linked, ready to return to Najla’s house. The sky was sprinkled with black, red and green kites. Najla smiled.

“I was once them,” she said. “They don’t understand where they’re allowed to take up space in this world, to just exist. I do this work to remind them, and myself in the process, that hope comes with the fight and to find meaningful ways to live through this grief,” she said, speaking softly. “These are our wounds.”

We Must Oppose Israel’s Dangerous Gamble Before It’s Too Late

Failure to stop Israel’s genocide of Palestinians gambles with the fate of humanity as a whole

by Kathy Kelly / August 8th, 2024

Following World War II, Albert Camus posed a “formidable gamble” to those who had survived a tragedy of immense proportions. “We’re in history up to our necks,” he observed, yet we must wager that “words are more powerful than munitions.”

“Leave or die” are the horrid words threatening largely unprotected Palestinian civilians in Gaza as dismayed populations around the world demand moral decency, or at least some indication of sanity, from their non-responsive governments.

The stakes couldn’t be higher. For decades, Israel has flouted international norms by refusing to acknowledge its nuclear weapons arsenal. Nor has it signed relevant treaties governing the biological weapons it possesses. For years, Israel has flagrantly violated the Geneva Conventions and basic principles of customary international law through its forcible acquisition of territories in the West Bank and East Jerusalem and through its transfer of Israeli settlers into the Occupied Palestinian Territories.

Now, Israel’s genocidal attacks against Palestinians living in Gaza have cost the lives of at least 39,677 people. Tens of thousands more are believed to be buried beneath the rubble, with at least 90,000 wounded and the overwhelming majority of its displaced 1.9 million population facing starvation.

Israel’s failure to comply with international treaties and humanitarian law signal an acute need for other countries to organize weapons embargoes, cease trade deals, and provide support for civilian peacekeepers to bring about a permanent ceasefire.

Instead of unwavering adherence to international law, the United States continues to arm and protect Israel’s genocidal campaign against Palestinians, which now includes using starvation as a weapon of war.

We must try to absorb what it means to live as a refugee in an open-air concentration camp—already one of the most densely populated areas on Earth, even before 70 percent of its housing was destroyed. More than 341 mosques and three churches have been destroyed. 2,000-pound bombs have been dropped on tents in places deemed safe areas.

Innocent civilians are being killed by snipers. Thirty-one out of thirty-six hospitals have been damaged or destroyed. Escape routes are cut off. Persistent restrictions on the flow of humanitarian aid into and around Gaza are driving a desperate shortage of food, fuel, and medicine. As access to humanitarian relief is deliberately choked off, children are being collectively punished while Israeli leaders denounce them as animals. The world watches in horror as surgeons are forced to amputate the limbs of wounded children with no available anesthetics.

A new polio epidemic emerges while Israel vaccinates its soldiers but leaves the Palestinian civilian population vulnerable. Newly released prisoners have said they were subjected to torture, including being waterboarded and raped.

Rather than bring suspects before international courts, Israel has resorted to assassinations of the very negotiators with which it purports to be seeking peace, and in a manner clearly intended to expand the conflict into a global war involving multiple nuclear-armed nations.

In its July 19, 2024, authoritative Advisory Opinion on Israel’s Settlement Policy and Practices, the World Court clearly declared the Israeli settlement project in the Occupied Territories to be illegal. The Court outlined the obligation of all parties to the Geneva Convention and the Genocide Convention to discontinue any economic or trade dealings with Israel which might help perpetuate Israel’s occupation and unlawful presence in the territory. Countries that signed or ratified these agreements are obligated to immediately stop arms exports to Israel and to use political, military, and economic influence to stop Israel’s flagrant, escalating violations of international humanitarian law.

The World Court has provided strong, clear words denouncing Israel’s genocide against Palestinians. As during the Vietnam War, ordinary citizens can no longer abide with the lawless barbarism of continuing assaults against Palestinians.

“Rolling the bones” is a slang expression for gambling. With a regional war perhaps now unavoidable in the Middle East, the genocidal derangement of the United States and Europe over Israel’s actions may well lead to a nuclear war that ends the human species. Failing to use our words at this most crucial juncture for humanity would be, as Camus said, a formidable gamble indeed.

This article first appeared in The Progressive.
TwitterRedditEmail

Kathy Kelly (kathy.vcnv@gmail.com) is the board president of World BEYOND War (worldbeyondwar.org) and a co-coordinator of the Merchants of Death War Crimes Tribunal. (merchantsofdeath.org) Read other articles by Kathy.

Nothing’s changed since 1948 except now Israel’s excuses don’t work

We have been lied to for decades about the creation of Israel. It was born in sin, and it continues to live in sin

by Jonathan Cook / August 8th, 2024

The headline above, about yet another Israeli operation to ethnically cleanse the Palestinians in the tiny, besieged and utterly destroyed enclave of Gaza, was published in yesterday’s Middle East Eye.

When I began studying Israeli history more than a quarter of a century ago, people claiming to be experts proffered plenty of excuses to explain why Israelis should not be held responsible for the 1948 ethnic cleansing of some 750,000 Palestinians from their homes – what Palestinians call their Nakba, or Catastrophe.

1. I was told most Israelis were not involved and knew nothing of the war crimes carried out against the Palestinians during Israel’s establishment.

2. I was told that those Israelis who did take part in war crimes, like Operation Broom to expel Palestinians from their homeland, did so only because they were traumatised by their experiences in Europe. In the immediate aftermath of the Holocaust, these Israelis assumed that, were the Jewish people to survive, they had no alternative but to drive out the Palestinians en masse.

3. From others, I was told that no ethnic cleansing had taken place. The Palestinians had simply fled at the first sign of conflict because they had no real historical attachment to the land.

4. Or I was told that the Palestinians’ displacement was an unfortunate consequence of a violent war in which Israeli leaders had the best interests of Palestinians at heart. The Palestinians hadn’t left because of Israeli violence but because they has been ordered to do so by Arab leaders in the region. In fact, the story went, Israel had pleaded with many of the 750,000 refugees to come home afterwards, but those same Arab leaders stubbornly blocked their return.

Every one of these claims was nonsense, directly contradicted by all the documentary evidence.

That should be even clearer today, as Israel continues the ethnic cleansing and slaughter of the Palestinian people more than 75 years on.

1. Every Israeli knows exactly what is going on in Gaza – after all, their children-soldiers keep posting videos online showing the latest crimes they have committed, from blowing up mosques and hospitals to shooting randomly into homes. Polls show all but a small minority of Israelis approve of the savagery that has killed many tens of thousands of Palestinians, including children. A third of them think Israel needs to go further in its barbarity.

Today, Israeli TV shows host debates about how much pain soldiers should be allowed to inflict by raping their Palestinian captives. Don’t believe me? Watch this from Israel’s Channel 12:

2. If the existential fears of Israelis and Jews still require the murder, rape and ethnic cleansing of Palestinians three-quarters of a century on from the Holocaust, then we need to treat that trauma as the problem – and refuse to indulge it any longer.

3. The people of Gaza are fleeing their homes – or at least the small number who still have homes not bombed to ruins – not because they lack an attachment to Palestine. They are fleeing from one part of the cage Israel has created for them to another part of it for one reason alone: because all of them – men, women and children – are terrified of being slaughtered by an Israeli military, at best, indifferent to their suffering and their fate.

4. No serious case can be made today that Israel is carrying out any of its crimes in Gaza – from bombing civilians to starving them – with regret, or that its leaders seek the best for the Palestinian population. Israel is on trial for genocide at the world’s highest court precisely because the judges there suspect it has the very worst intentions possible towards the Palestinian people.

We have been lied to for decades about the creation of Israel. It was always a settler colonial project. And like other settler colonial projects – from the US and Australia to South Africa and Algeria – it always viewed the native people as inferior, as non-human, as animals, and was bent on their elimination.

What is so obviously true today was true then too, at Israel’s birth. Israel was born in sin, and it continues to live in sin.

We in the West abetted its crimes in 1948, and we’re still abetting them today. Nothing has changed, except the excuses no longer work.
il

Jonathan Cook, based in Nazareth, Israel is a winner of the Martha Gellhorn Special Prize for Journalism. His latest books are Israel and the Clash of Civilisations: Iraq, Iran and the Plan to Remake the Middle East (Pluto Press) and Disappearing Palestine: Israel's Experiments in Human Despair (Zed Books). Read other articles by Jonathan, or visit Jonathan's website.

Finding the Moral Courage to Recognize a Genocide

by Ana Malinow

AUGUST 8, 2024

Silence in the face of a polio epidemic

Last week, Gaza’s Ministry of Health announced the detection of poliovirus in sewage water samples, placing residents at significant risk of contracting this highly infectious virus. Despite a 99% decline in global polio cases since 1988 due to extensive vaccination campaigns, the eradication of polio is now under threat. The ongoing conflict in Gaza, characterized by Israeli military actions that have damaged or destroyed water infrastructure, has exacerbated conditions conducive to the spread of diseases. Limited access to clean drinking water, poor hygiene, overcrowding, and disruptions to childhood immunizations, including boosters, all contribute to this public health crisis.

In response to this alarming development, U.S. medical professional organizations have remained conspicuously silent. On November 3, the American Public Health Association (APHA) issued a statement recognizing Israel’s right to self-defense but failed to address the 16-year blockade of Gaza and its devastating humanitarian impact. The APHA referred to the situation as a “growing humanitarian crisis arising from limited access to basic human necessities” without mentioning the ongoing bombing campaign targeting civilians in Gaza. Less than two weeks later, the same organization issued a one-sentence call for an immediate ceasefire in the “Hamas-Israel war.”

On November 11, the American Medical Association’s (AMA) House of Delegates declined to consider a resolution co-sponsored by the Minority Affairs Section supporting a ceasefire in Israel and Palestine. Former AMA president, Andrew Gurman, MD, stated, “This resolution deals with a geopolitical issue, which is in no way the purview of this house,” emphasizing that their role is to address issues facing doctors and patients in the U.S. This stance contrasts sharply with the AMA’s previous condemnation of attacks on healthcare workers and facilities in Ukraine, where it called for an “immediate ceasefire and an end to all attacks on health care workers and facilities.”

Why are medical professional organizations staying silent?

As reported in MedPage, nine months into the genocide, the AMA passed a resolution calling for peace in Israel and Palestine but still refrained from demanding a ceasefire. In April, the World Medical Association (WMA), alarmed by the escalating healthcare and humanitarian crisis in Gaza, including starvation and lack of medical care, unanimously passed a resolution calling for a “bilateral, negotiated, and sustainable ceasefire,” with support from the Israeli Medical Society.

A compelling article published by Mondoweiss, an online journal providing analysis on Palestine, Israel, and the U.S., questioned the silence of U.S. public health institutions amidst a genocide financially and ideologically supported by their own government. The author suggested several reasons: a failure to recognize the root causes of health disparities driven by colonialism, imperialism, and racial capitalism; a history of harm inflicted by U.S. medical institutions on marginalized communities; and the substantial investments of U.S. universities in the weapons industry.

I propose an additional explanation. For too long, U.S. physicians have been blind to the paradox within our training and healthcare system. As Eric Reinhart argues in a JAMA Commentary published last year, medical education has been political, but in a manner that is “overwhelmingly conservative, profoundly uncritical, and reflexively protective of an ethically bankrupt field that has spent a century building up a capitalist healthcare industry.” This has led doctors and medical students to accept and uphold a for-profit, market-driven healthcare system that often disregards how politics shapes our profession.

Medical professionals must speak out

Given this context, it is perhaps unsurprising that many health professionals lack the moral courage to acknowledge a genocide. However, we must demand more from our professional associations. They should call for an immediate ceasefire, safe and unrestricted humanitarian access to Gaza, the evacuation of urgent medical cases including children with family members, the protection of civilian infrastructure, and an end to the transfer of weapons and ammunition to Israel. These actions are essential to uphold our ethical obligations and avoid complicity in what UN experts describe as potential serious violations of human rights and international humanitarian laws.

The medical community must rise to the occasion, recognizing and addressing the genocide in Gaza, which today includes a potential polio epidemic, with the urgency and moral clarity it demands. We cannot afford to remain silent in the face of such profound suffering and injustice.

Dr. Ana Malinow is a retired pediatrician, who has dedicated her career to serving immigrant, refugee, and marginalized children. She has written extensively on U.S. health care policy. She co-leads National Single Payer.

Photograph by Nathaniel St. Clair