An ever expanding Israel will pave the way for its demise
An explosion is seen following a missile alert amid cross-border hostilities between Hezbollah and Israel, as seen from Nahariya, northern Israel, on 16 October 2024
David Hearst writes in Middle East Eye on 16 October 2024:
The picture of an 11-year-old girl with napalm burns running naked down a road in Vietnam was deemed so shocking in 1972 that it won a Pulitzer Prize. “The Terror of War” became the iconic image of the Vietnam War.
Today in Gaza and Lebanon, there are so many pictures of burning people, burning tents, bodies piled up on the streets of the Jabalia refugee camp, and dust-encrusted survivors staggering out of the rubble with the lifeless bodies of their tiny children in their hands, but no one even bothers to publish them.
Images of “The Terror of War” being committed by Israel in Gaza or Lebanon are not entered for Pulitzer Prizes. Nor do they elicit statements of condemnation or disgust from US presidents or British prime ministers. Editors are too frightened.
To suggest that Israel is deliberately killing children in Gaza is a “blood libel” that reminds British novelist Howard Jacobson of the pogroms of Jews in 13th century England, sparked by rumours that they were eating the remains of Christian children in Matzah bread.
But Israeli forces are deliberately killing women and children in Gaza and Lebanon and domestic opinion in Israel is urging their soldiers on. There are no taboos in the debate in Israel about the final solution for north Gaza or south Lebanon. No hang-ups about using words like “extermination”.
This is what Uzi Raby, one of Israel’s most sought-after experts on the Middle East, does. The senior lecturer at the department of Middle Eastern and African studies at Tel Aviv University said in a TV interview last month: “Anyone who stays there (north Gaza) will be judged by law as a terrorist and will go through either a process of starvation or a process of extermination.”
The ‘Generals’ Plan’
Historians in Israel are not a brake on genocidal talk. They are an inciter of it. Raby said that Israel should not try to solve problems in the region with western kid gloves, adding that Israel’s actions would be flavoured with a “Middle Eastern spice”.
Benny Morris, who in times long gone was one of the “new historians” who uncovered the massacres Israel committed in 1948, now wants to nuke Iran. The plan these historians are debating has been hatched by former army general, Giora Eiland. Eiland acknowledges that Israel’s tactics in Gaza have failed. He notes that every time they clear an area of Hamas fighters and retreat, Hamas re-appears.
Eiland, however, is no dove. His solution is not to negotiate. It is to force 400,000 inhabitants in northern Gaza out by giving them the option of starving or dying. This, Eiland says, is the only way to achieve Israel’s war goals.
This plan has received widespread support in the army, the Knesset and the media. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said he is studying it. The Eiland plan is far from blue-sky thinking. Netanyahu tasked his chief aid Ron Dermer last December to consider ways of “thinning out Gaza”.
Many today believe the army is already implementing parts of it. The army has issued expulsion orders named in the plan as the first stage.
The key to Eiland’s siege tactics, the Netzarim corridor which bisects the strip south of Gaza City, has already been built and armed with its own garrison.
At the time of its construction last February, Shimon Orkabi, the lieutenant colonel responsible for paving the road, said one of the goals of the road was to “prevent passage from south to north and to control it very precisely”.
Three soldiers serving in Gaza told Haaretz this week that the plan is being implemented.
“The goal is to give the residents who live north of the Netzarim area a deadline to move to the south of the strip. After this date, whoever will remain in the north will be considered an enemy and will be killed,” a soldier stationed in the Netzarim corridor was quoted as saying.
The killing machine
Indiscriminate killing is also already happening. Into the deadly cocktail of non-stop shelling, quadcopters and dropping 2000-pound bombs on tents, the Israelis have introduced the latest killing machine: exploding robots capable of demolishing six houses in a row.