The Gaza assault cannot be understood separately from Israel’s divide-and-conquer strategy against Palestinians in Jenin, Jerusalem, and Nazareth.
Israeli security forces demolish a building that was built without a permit in the East Jerusalem neighborhood of Beit Hanina, February 20, 2024. (Jamal Awad/Flash90)
This article was first published in “The Landline,” +972’s weekly newsletter.
In an interview about Israel’s economy with business newspaper “The Marker” in 2012, Benjamin Netanyahu boasted, in what has since become a kind of idiomatic phrase, that “if you leave out the Arabs and the ultra-Orthodox, [Israel is] in great shape.” Today, the prime minister seems to be refining that tagline even further: if you leave out all the people entirely, we’re in golden shape.
It’s not just Netanyahu who believes this. Since the October 7 attack and the ensuing war of annihilation waged on Gaza, the Israeli right has been euphoric. The Iranian missile attack two weeks ago further succeeded in diverting our gaze from Gaza, restraining international criticism of Israel’s crimes, and even earning the state renewed sympathy.
For a moment, Israelis could once again look into the mirror and pretend to see the reflection of a beloved victim, instead of an unruly, vengeful, and deadly bully. Yet the catastrophe Israel is inflicting on Gaza has not disappeared, and an invasion of the city of Rafah, if carried out, would likely bring the scenes of Gaza’s apocalypse back to the front pages.
And when global attention does return, it is crucial not to fall for the false belief, like that espoused by the prime minister a decade ago, that Gaza exists in some parallel universe, with its destruction taking place in a vacuum. Rather, the assault on the Strip is an integral part of the organizational logic of Israel’s apartheid regime between the river and the sea — a regime that many Israelis hope will continue to be in “great shape” after the war is over.
The categorization of Palestinians into separate classes — citizens inside Israel, permanent residents of East Jerusalem, occupied subjects in the West Bank, prisoners in the Gaza ghetto, and refugees in exile — is at the heart of Israel’s policy of divide and conquer. It effectively negates the existence of the Palestinians as a single and organic people, while keeping them all under the rule of Jewish supremacy.
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