Another clue to Israel's thinking was provided in early 2008, at about the time defense officials were putting Gaza on a diet. Matan Vilnai, a former army general and at that point Israel's deputy defense minister, discussed on Israeli radio a vicious bout of bloodletting that had killed more than 100 Palestinians, on one side, and an Israeli student, on the other. For the first time Qassam rockets fired from Gaza had hit the center of the southern Israeli city of Ashkelon.
Vilnai told the interviewer: "The more Qassam fire intensifies and the rockets reach a longer range, they [the Palestinians of Gaza] will bring upon themselves a bigger shoah because we will use all our might to defend ourselves." The comment was picked up by the news agency Reuters because the Hebrew word "shoah" literally "disaster" was long ago reserved to describe the Holocaust, in which millions of European Jews were murdered by the Nazis. Its use in any other context had become virtually taboo. Appreciating the potential damage the remark could do, Israel's foreign ministry immediately launched a propaganda offensive to persuade the world's media that Vilnai was only referring to a general "disaster", not a holocaust.
Few Israelis were deceived. Haaretz's cultural commentator, Michael Handelzalts, noted that "whatever connotations the word [shoah] had before the Nazis embarked on their systematic extermination of the Jews, today it means with quotation marks or without them, with "the" preceding it or without it just that." Why would Vilnai select this extremely provocative and troubling word to frame his threat to the Palestinians?
At the time, few could have understood that Vilnai's "shoah" comment would take physical form a few months later in the first of a series of horrifying military rampages by Israel in Gaza. In late 2008-09, and again in 2012 and 2014, Israel wrecked Gaza, destroyed many thousands of homes and its key infrastructure, including its power plant, and left many thousands dead and many tens of thousands wounded and disabled. Tens of thousands more found themselves homeless.
The first of these attacks, in winter 2008, came under close scrutiny from the UN through a fact-finding mission led by a South African jurist, Richard Goldstone. The panel's report suggested that the Israeli army as well as Hamas had committed war crimes and crimes against humanity during Israel's three-week Operation Cast Lead. It noted Israel's use of unconventional weapons such as white phosphorus, the destruction of property on a massive scale, and the taking of civilians, including young children, as human shields. And significantly it concluded that Israel had targeted civilians "as a matter of policy".
After the report's publication, Goldstone, who is Jewish, faced an immense backlash from Jewish communities in the US and South Africa that painted him as a traitor. Jewish leaders in South Africa even prevented him from attending his grandson's bar mitzvah. Though his jurist colleagues did not, Goldstone eventually retracted his support for parts of the report, most importantly the reference to Israel targeting civilians as policy.
However, there were plenty of reasons to conclude that this was exactly what Israel had done as would be confirmed by Israel's subsequent attacks, including the even more savage Protective Edge of 2014. Breaking the Silence, an organization of whistle-blowing Israeli soldiers, collected many testimonies from soldiers indicating that they received orders to carry out operations with little or no regard for the safety of civilians. Some described the army as pursuing a policy of "zero-risk" to soldiers, even if that meant putting Palestinian civilians in danger.
Similarly, leaflets produced by the military rabbinate apparently with the knowledge of the army top brass urged Israeli ground troops, an increasing number of whom are religious and from the settlements, to show no mercy to Palestinians. It characterized the Palestinians as the Philistines, the Biblical enemy of the Jews, and told them Israel was waging "a war on murderers". In a sign of the extent to which the army is being taken over by such religious extremists, Ofer Winter, who extolled his troops in 2014 to attack Palestinians in Gaza as "blasphemers", was appointed commander of the 98th Division, Israel's most elite combat troops, in July 2019.
But even more significantly, in October 2008, a few months after Vilnai's "shoah" comment and two months before the launching of Cast Lead, the Israeli army formally divulged a new military policy known as the Dahiya Doctrine. In fact, it had first been field-tested during the 2006 summer offensive on Lebanon that had left much of that country in ruins after waves of missile strikes. Gadi Eisenkot, the general widely credited with developing the doctrine, clarified its goal:
We will apply disproportionate force on [any area resisting Israel] and cause great damage and destruction there. From our standpoint, these are not civilian villages, they are military bases. This is not a recommendation. This is a plan.
A short time later, the Israeli commander overseeing the Cast Lead attack on Gaza, Yoav Galant, echoed Eisenkot, saying the aim of the military operation was to "send Gaza decades into the past." Israel's intention was to lay waste to Gaza's infrastructure, forcing survivors to eke out a bare existence rather than resist Israel.
In early 2019, Benny Gantz, who had overseen the even more brutal Operation Protective Edge of 2014, fought a general election as head of a new party named Blue and White. He and the other generals who led the faction played up their military credentials with a series of campaign videos. One showed the wastelands of Gaza after the 2014 attack, a camera hovering over a sea of rubble as far as the eye could see. Alongside these images, the video boasted: 6,231 targets destroyed and 1,364 terrorists killed, and it concluded: "Parts of Gaza have been sent back to the Stone Age."
An economy in collapseFor more than a decade Israel has pursued a consistent and barely veiled double policy: destroying Gaza's infrastructure with massively violent military attacks laying waste to tens of thousands of homes, the enclave's only power station, farms, schools, universities, hospitals, factories while at the same time putting the population on a near-starvation diet through a punishing, long-term blockade. This has been rationalized by both rabbis and army commanders using language designed to degrade the humanity of Palestinians, characterizing them as "murderers" and their communities as "military bases".
And behind the scenes, Israel has also assisted in a third, wider strategic approach toward Palestinians under its rule that has impacted Gaza in ways that have intensified the effects of the two other policies.
Ariel Sharon pulled the settlers from Gaza in 2005 without an agreement with, or handover to, Mahmoud Abbas's Palestinian Authority, the Palestinians' supposed government-in-waiting. Denied the chance to take credit for Israel's disengagement, the PA was forced on to the back foot. Its Hamas rivals presented Israel's withdrawal as a victory for its strategy of violent resistance, in contrast to the ineffectiveness of the PA's diplomatic approach and security coordination with Israel. Hamas leaders argued that it was they who had chased Israel out of Gaza, the occupier's tail between its legs.
That, in part, set up Hamas for its win in the Palestinian legislative elections, as well as for its violent confrontation in Gaza with Abbas's Fatah faction and ultimately Hamas's takeover of the enclave in 2007. Over the next 12 years, the geographic and ideological split between the Fatah-ruled West Bank and Hamas-run Gaza has only deepened. By default, the division has turned the PA into Israel's ally in isolating and punishing Hamas and by extension Gaza. The PA has imposed its own form of blockade on Gaza, most significantly withholding transfers of revenues to the enclave, leaving public-sector workers, the largest employed group in the occupied territories, on severely reduced salaries. The harmful effects have been felt across the enclave, because typically the salary of each Palestinian in employment supports a much larger extended family.
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