Israel-Gaza: some vital context

 

Mike Phipps review Deluge: Gaza and Israel from crisis to cataclysm, edited by Jamie Stern-Weiner, published by OR Books.

July 29, 2024 Labour Hub Editors

For most of this century, Israel’s approach to the Palestinians has been to keep the West Bank and Gaza Strip divided. It relied on the Palestinian Authority to maintain Israel’s security in the West Bank, while periodically launching military offensives against Gaza in 2008, 2012, 2014, 2021, 2022 and 2023.

Israeli leaders called this ‘mowing the lawn’. “It was a strategy of managing the conflict, of avoiding peace talks,” writes Avi Shlaim in the Foreword to this book. But the strategy lay in tatters following the Hamas attack on October 7th 2023.

From then on, the Israeli government adopted a major change in policy – destroying Hamas and preventing Gaza from ever again being a threat. “What has not changed is the Israeli addiction to occupation, its hugely exaggerated trust in the utility of military force.”

The chapters in this collection aim to place the war in its proper historical context. Israel’s siege of Gaza is not new. After Hamas won democratic elections in the territory in 2006, Israeli sanctions reduced its inhabitants to penury. Western governments followed Israel in refusing to recognise the election results and joined its economic warfare against Gaza.

In 2008, the UN agency for Palestinian refugees, UNRWA, noted: “Gaza is on the threshold of becoming the first territory to be intentionally reduced to a state of abject destitution, with the knowledge, acquiescence and – some would say – the encouragement of the international community.” Later, as Sara Roy points out, a Wikileaks cable would confirm this was the Israeli intention: “to keep the Gazan economy on the brink of collapse without quite pushing it over the edge.”

Military offensives added to the agony. 1,600 civilians were killed in the 2014 assault alone.

But Israel’s response to October 7th was unprecedented for the scale of killing and destruction. Israel evidently wants to render the territory uninhabitable. This may be more achievable than eradicating Hamas, whose slaughtered members are likely to be quickly replaced by new, more militant, recruits.

To those in the international community who insist that Hamas is the principal obstacle to peace, Colter Louverse shows how Israeli military action has repeatedly been used to sabotage genuine peace efforts and marginalise moderate Palestinian voices, thus helping to foment rather than combat Palestinian terrorism. Insofar as that has resulted in making a lasting peace process more unlikely than ever, the strategy could be considered successful.

If provocation is a driver of Israeli strategy, then the high number of civilian casualties is a logical consequence rather than an unfortunate by-product, argues Yaniv Cogan. An Israeli general admitted this as far back as 2008 when he said of any Palestinian village from which Israel is shot at: “We will subject it to disproportionate force and cause enormous damage and destruction. We don’t consider them to be civilian villages but military bases.”

Dehumanisation is an essential ingredient of this approach. “We are fighting human animals,” announced Israel’s Defence Minister in October 2023, as native Gazan Ahmed Almaouq points out in a powerful personal memoir. His entire family – father, three sisters and two brothers – were wiped out by an Israeli bomb two weeks into the onslaught.

Others have argued that wreaking deliberate devastation acts as a deterrent to neighbouring countries getting involved. This seems to have had some effect; not only have other states in the region been feeble in offering support to the people of Gaza, but the Palestinian Authority in the West Bank has also been slow to react, in the eyes of Musa Abuhashhash. He argues that its “unwarranted complacency” has not protected it from increasingly murderous attacks by Israeli settlers, supported by the IDF.

The international response

“Just eight days before Hamas launched its attack, US national security advisor Jake Sullivan declared that ‘[t]he Middle east region is quieter today than it has been in two decades’,” notes Mitchell Plitnick. “Sullivan’s boast reflected the Biden administration’s indifference to both the worsening humanitarian situation in Gaza and the escalating attacks by Israeli settlers and soldiers in the West Bank.” In the seven months before the October 7th attack, 237 Palestinians had been killed.

The US response since then has been utterly supportive of Israel, while affecting to maintain an indifferent detachment regarding the future. There hasn’t been the smallest sign of how the administration might even begin to use its considerable leverage over Israel.

Secretary of State Antony Blinken’s talk of an “effective and revitalised Palestinian Authority” governing Gaza in future ignores the Authority’s long-term ineffectiveness and Israel’s opposition to it, suggests Nathan J. Brown. Planning for the “day after” assumes Hamas will soon be gone – it won’t – or that international agencies will be willing to provide a form of governance. But why would they, when UNRWA alone has seen more than 130 of its workers killed? The most likely form of future government could be self-appointed gangs.

It’s been left to ordinary people across the world, taking part in solidarity protests in their millions, to lay down some basic principles in relation to the conflict – an immediate ceasefire, respect for civilian life and an end to arming what has become a genocidal regime.

These simple demands are beginning to influence the political elites – impacting for example on the UK’s general election, with the election of several Independent MPs who highlighted the plight of Gaza, and on President Biden’s base of support in the US.

Initially, Biden’s staff dismissed concerns about alienating  Muslim and Arab-American voters on the smug rationale that they would be unlikely to vote for Trump. But as the scale of Israel’s murderous bombardment increased, wider sections of the Democratic vote have begun to peel away. Some 70% of younger voters said they disapproved of Biden’s policy on Gaza.

Any book about such a volatile political situation is likely to feel out of date as soon as it leaves the printers and this is reflected particularly in the chapters on international solidarity, the scale of which continues to grow and impress. But this collection remains  an excellent introduction to the underlying issues and provide vital context to this much-misreported war.

Mike Phipps’ book Don’t Stop Thinking About Tomorrow: The Labour Party after Jeremy Corbyn (OR Books, 2022) can be ordered here.