Unholy Land

Is Israel Perpetrating Genocide in Gaza?

I tend to be wary of invoking the concept of genocide in relation to armed conflicts involving civilians, regardless of how horrific such conflicts may be. Because genocide is seen as the crime of crimes, the term is sometimes used for political purposes, and can end up trivialising or devaluing real historical episodes of genocide in order to make horrific atrocities seem even worse than they are by imagining them as the worst thing they can be. But the killing of civilians in wartime has many different aims that aren’t necessarily genocidal, and it isn’t necessary to describe them as genocidal in order to condemn them.

The 1948 United Nations Convention on Genocide, following the Polish jurist Raphael Lemkin’s hard-won introduction of the term at the Nuremberg Trials, defined genocide as the intent ‘to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such.’ This aim can be pursued by all or some of the following actions: killing members of a particular group; causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group; deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part; imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group, and forcibly transferring children of the group to another group.

From a legal perspective, genocide differs from the category of crimes against humanity, which was also introduced by the prosecutors at the Nuremberg Trials as a legal novelty. Crimes against humanity can include all of the acts listed above, but such acts need not constitute an attempt to annihilate an entire group because the victims of such crimes are members of that group.

And the reason I raise the subject now, is because it is difficult to avoid the conclusion that the ongoing annihilation of Gaza constitutes a deliberate attempt ‘to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group’ by ‘deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part.’ According to the Euro-Med Human Rights Monitor, Israel has killed 25,000 Palestinians, including 10,000 children and 3,109 women. It has wounded 50,112 Palestinians, hundreds of them critically. There are now 1.850 million displaced people in Gaza, out of a population of just over two million. Some 62, 990 housing units have been destroyed and 172,055 partially damaged - representing some sixty percent of the total housing stock.

Israel has attacked 286 schools, 1, 356 industrial facilities, 124 health facilities, including 22 hospitals, 141 mosques, 3 churches, 210 health personnel, and 83 journalists. According to a study by the Open University of Israel, the ratio of civilian deaths amongst those killed in Israeli airstrikes is 61 % - a figure higher than the average of all wars during the 20th century.

Even if you accept Israel’s explanation that is targeting ‘terror targets’ who ‘hide behind civilians’ etc, this devastation goes way beyond the doctrine of proportionality in international humanitarian law, which prohibits attacks ‘expected to cause incidental loss of civilian life, injury to civilians, damage to civilian objects, or a combination thereof, which would be excessive in relation to the concrete and direct military advantage anticipated.’

In a single attack on Jabalia camp in October, Israeli airstrikes killed at least 50 Palestinians and wounded 150 more, supposedly in order to kill one Hamas leader who may not even have been there. Fifty civilians for one leader may seem ‘proportional’ to Israel and its supporters, when dealing with a Gazan population habitually written off as less than fully human, but there is no code of international law or morality in which such ratios are acceptable.

This is staggering, incomprehensible destruction that defies any notion of Israel ‘defending itself’. Nor can it be understood in terms of collective punishment. Israel is not just punishing Gaza. It is not just attacking Hamas. It is not just taking ‘excessive’ revenge for 7 October. It has used the most advanced military hardware at its disposal to dismantle the sinews that make it possible for Gazan society to exist. It has driven nearly two million people into an area not much bigger than Heathrow, who it continues to attack even as it continues to make much of the north of Gaza uninhabitable.

In short, this is destruction on an entirely different scale to the previous Gaza wars. As the Palestinian lawyer Diana Buttu observed yesterday:

Let’s assume the bombing stops tomorrow. Most homes are uninhabitable – where do you send all these people? How do you provide for them? Where are the shops, the schools, the universities, the hospitals?

These questions raise other questions. If it’s true, as Clausewitz famously argued, that ‘War is a mere continuation of policy by other means’, then what is the policy? Clausewitz also stated that ‘No one starts a war - or rather no one in his senses ought to do so, without first being clear in his mind what he intends to achieve by that war and how he intended to conduct it.’ So what is Israel trying to achieve through such devastation?

Netanyahu has said that his war aims are to eliminate Hamas and obtain the release of the hostages, but neither he nor anyone else has explained how Israel can achieve either of these objectives through military force, let alone this kind of military force. And these aims are not as straightforward as they seem. How will it be known that Hamas has been eliminated? Does ‘Hamas’ refer only to its armed wing or to government employees, teachers, and local officials? Who or what will replace Hamas if it is destroyed?

There are no clear answers to any of these questions. So far US diplomacy has focused on helping Israel achieve its nebulous military aims and providing Israel with the weapons to achieve them, while making occasional mild criticisms regarding the ‘tolerable’ number of casualties - a high benchmark as far as Palestinians are concerned. Biden and Blinken’s team, and now the hapless Sunak, have also tried to breathe life into the punctured balloon known as the ‘two-state solution.’ But the Israeli ambassador to the UK has explicitly said there can be no two-state solution, and so has Netanyahu.

There has also been discussion about bringing the discredited Palestinian Authority back into Gaza, though no one seems to have considered whether Gazans would accept that outcome. Some politicians and think tanks have floated the possibility of an interim international force to run Gaza, along the lines of the UN in Kosovo or the Multinational Force and Observers (MFO) in the Sinai. But Israel has said that will not allow any of this, and the Gazans - well who has ever asked them anything?

But if Israel has said what it doesn’t want, it hasn’t said what it does want. Is it trying to create a ‘buffer zone’ in the north of Gaza? Or a permanent military presence in the strip? How much control is it seeking? No one knows. Even the army doesn’t seem to know what is expected of it, beyond the continuation of military operations in which 117 Israeli soldiers have been killed - significant losses for a country that doesn’t like to lose any soldiers.

In other words, we are in that most dangerous of places - a war without any clear goals or endpoint, waged by a state that believes it has an unlimited licence to inflict whatever destruction it sees fit, supported by allies who lack the courage or the wisdom to bring it to its senses.

As unhinged as it seems however, this devastation may not be entirely irrational or purposeless. In October the Israeli Misgav Institute for National Security & Zionist Strategy published a paper arguing that the current conflict offered ‘a unique and rare opportunity to evacuate the entire Gaza Strip’, and suggested that the population of Gaza could be housed in empty apartments in Cairo.

The ‘Decisive Plan’

This is a novel variation on an old tradition. There has always been a radical sector of the Israeli right that favours the removal of the Palestinian population from the Occupied Territories as a preferable alternative to Netanyahu’s ‘state minus’ - a permanently subjugated and disaggregated entity under the supervision of a supine Palestinian Authority. In 2017 Bezazel Smotrich, an extremist settler leader from the West Bank spelt out a ‘Decisive Plan’ to end the Israeli-Palestinian conflict that he claimed would ‘win the conflict, rather than merely managing it,’ and achieve ‘a victory founded on the understanding that there is no room in the Land of Israel for two conflicting national movements.’

Smotrich argued that the Palestinians of the West Bank would be given two choices: they could continue to live under Israeli rule but without any national political rights; or they could ‘emigrate’ to the Arab world and receive Israeli and international help to do this - no one can say the Smotriches of the world lack compassion. Given the events of the last seventy-five years, it was logical to assume that not all Palestinians would accept these options, Smotrich took this possibility into consideration:

It is of course safe to assume that not everyone will adopt one of these two choices. There will be those who will continue to choose another "option"—continuing to fight the IDF, the State of Israel, and the Jewish population. Such terrorists will be dealt with by the security forces with a strong hand and under more manageable conditions for doing so.

This terrifyingly eloquent document is the plan that Smotrich considers ‘the most just and moral by any measure—historical, Zionist, and Jewish—and it is the only option that can lead to quiet, peace, and real coexistence.’ There is no chance it can lead to any of these things, but it is well-worth reading in its entirety, because it really does spell out what the Israeli right is actually like, to those who may not be aware of it, and it is a testament to the truly dangerous forces that have been nurtured in the Occupied Territories and beyond throughout the ‘peace process.’

Smotrich doesn’t talk much about the Gaza Strip, but his objections to a Palestinian state in the West Bank (Judea and Samaria in settler-speak) are partly based on what he thinks about Gaza:

Under the present reality, the establishment of an Arab terror state in Judea and Samaria, a state whose territory is twenty times larger than the Hamas terror state in the Gaza Strip, would be nothing less than suicidal (from the security perspective)

Of course, Smotrich’s mad suggestion that Palestinians who accept Israeli supremacy can remain in Israeli territory is not intended to be taken seriously. He is as aware as anyone else of the ‘demographic challenge’ to Israel’s identity as an exclusively Jewish state, if the Palestinian struggle ever ceased to be a national struggle and became a struggle for civil rights within an enlarged Israel that includes the population of the Occupied Territories.

No way does Smotrich want that. Nor does he want the Palestinian Authority back in Gaza. In 2015, he declared that ‘The Palestinian Authority is a liability, Hamas is an asset.’ Why? Because Hamas is ‘ a terrorist organization, no one will recognize it. ‘ As the Times of Israel reported two months ago, this was Netanyahu’s position too, until the strategy blew up in his face on 7 October.

Now, Smotrich has told an Israeli media outlet that ‘Israel needs to ensure as quickly as possible that there is nobody to talk to on the other side. That's the goal: to destroy Hamas, so that there won't be anyone to talk to on the other side.’

That ‘nobody’ means what it says. In November, Smotrich supported a proposal for the ‘voluntary emigration’ of Gazans to any country that would accept them, and declared that ‘The State of Israel will no longer be able to accept the existence of an independent entity in Gaza’.

Given that Smotrich is Finance Minister in Netanyahu’s government - a government which even the United States admits is the most extreme in Israel’s history, it is worth asking whether Israel is now using the events of 7 October as the pretext to implement these proposals.

In an article in the excellent +972 magazine, Orly Noy, the chair of B’Tselem argues that the Israeli public has undergone a process of Smotrichization as a result of 7 October, to the point when it is prepared to accept the kind of radical solutions that were once the preserve of the Kahanists and settler-extremists. It is not clear whether any such consensus exists - yet. But the shock of 7 October and its vengeful aftermath mean that nothing can be ruled out. You know a threshold has been crossed, when proposals like this are floating through the public domain:

Ideas like this are not limited to the settler fringe, even if few would invoke the Holocaust to propose them. In 2004 the historian Benny Morris - a self-proclaimed leftist - criticised Ben Gurion for having failed to ‘finish the job’ by removing all Palestinians in 1948. Asked whether he supported ‘the transfer and expulsion of the Arabs from the West Bank, Gaza and perhaps even from Galilee and the Triangle’ Morris replied ‘not at this moment’, adding

But I am ready to tell you that in other circumstances, apocalyptic ones, which are liable to be realized in five or ten years, I can see expulsions.

Are we now living in these ‘apocalyptic’ times? Israel is unlikely to admit publicly that it wants to annex Gaza and drive its population out. But, as in 1948, it can do everything possible to bring about this outcome without declaring explicitly that this what it’s doing.

If the war continues at the same level of intensity, it is difficult to see how nearly two million people can continue to survive the winter without water, shelter, fuel, electricity, medical treatment or food, or without outbreaks of disease that will accelerate the calamity. The point may be reached, when Gazans flee into Egypt, and Egypt may have no choice but to accept them, and Israel will be very unlikely to take them back.

In other words, we may be witnessing the intentional destruction of the Gazan Palestinians an ethnic/national group. Bear in mind that the Palestinians don’t have to be physically killed in order to be victims of a genocide. It’s enough for Israel to destroy everything that makes it possible for their society to exist. Even Sky News has considered the long-term hypothetical strategic possibilities behind these operations:

If Israel's aim was an expanded state, then the military objective might be to clear Gaza, level the infrastructure, create a humanitarian crisis, and force Palestinians to leave Gaza.

It is increasingly clear that despite Israel's previous diplomatic prevarications, their objective is not limited to "solving the Hamas problem".

All this is happening in real time, with the support and collusion of the same liberal democracies that (rightly) opposed the Russian invasion of Ukraine. And if it succeeds, and the Palestinians are driven into the Sinai or evacuated from Gaza, it will solve nothing and win nothing. It will be the end of any moral illusions that still hover around the Israeli ‘villa in the jungle’ and a giant step towards the transformation of Israel into an ethnofascist state.

It will, as even former defence secretary Ben Wallace wrote in the Telegraph yesterday, provide a catalyst for another fifty years of conflict. More than anything else, it will result in the deaths of thousands more Palestinians than have died already. All of which makes it a moral imperative for the governments that have supported and enabled this mayhem so far to use their power and influence to bring Israel to its senses.

And they will not do this without serious pressure from the millions of people who see what is happening and understand why it is happening, and who know, that if it looks and sounds like genocide, it may be because - this time - it actually is.