It seems that no indignity is too great for the people of Gaza. After being subjected to perhaps the most horrific assault of the 21st century, after seeing their schools, hospitals. cities bombed into rubble, after seeing over 60,000 of their people slaughtered, they are now told they must give up their land to a real estate developer.
Israel’s supporters excused the horrors of Israel’s cataclysmic assault by referencing the preceding attack by Hamas and endlessly parroting the mantra “Israel has a right to defend itself.” Of course it does, but defending yourself against invasion by a foreign power and quelling an uprising by a captive population are rather different things.
The idea that Israel could only defeat Hamas by bombing Gaza’s cities into rubble and slaughtering its people by the tens of thousands never made sense. Israel is a high-tech country with a high-tech army supported by the most powerful military in the world. The idea that it had to engage in mass destruction and mass slaughter to fight lightly armed men hiding in tunnels is scarcely credible.
It seemed to me that the ferocity of the assault must be due to simple revenge combined with collective punishment, something Israel is infamous for. Many believe it was nothing less than genocide. Arrest warrants for war crimes have been issued by the International Criminal Court for Prime Minister Netanyahu and his Minister of Defense, Yoav Gallant. The International Court of Justice has ruled that there are “plausible” grounds for believing Israel was indeed carrying out a genocide. Given that Israel refuses to allow the United Nations Relief and Works Agency into the territory, the Gazans best hope for surviving their ordeal, that accusation looks increasingly valid.
Whether or not it was genocide, at the very least it is now beginning to look like Prime Minister Netanyahu and his colleagues seized on the Hamas attack to do some ethnic cleansing, to do another Nakba. Never let a good crisis go to waste.
And Israel now has Washington on board. As the ceasefire settles in, President Trump announces his support for displacing the Palestinians while Gaza is redeveloped as some kind of playground for the rich and famous. Given his family’s interests in real estate, to say nothing of potentially huge natural gas reserves in Gaza’s territorial waters (which Israel has never allowed the Gazans to exploit) have no doubt contributed to that co-operation.
The Gazans have no intention of going anywhere. Hamas alone will provide an obstacle to Trump’s real estate scheme. Despite Israel justifying its devastation of the territory as necessary to destroy the militants, they remain very much a force. According to Antony Blinken, President Biden’s secretary of state, “We assess that Hamas has recruited almost as many new militants as it has lost.”
Meanwhile the vaunted 2-state solution remains the same fantasy it’s always been faced with the colonial attitude of Israel and its supporters toward the Palestinians. Winston Churchill, an imperialist and early supporter of a Jewish state in Palestine, referred to the natural replacement of lesser races by greater races. Hs attitude remains very much alive today. As settlers in North America thought of the Indians, Jewish Israelis and their supporters think of the Palestinians, a nuisance in the way of their greater design.
With Netanyahu determined to impose Israel on all of Palestine, and Trump prepared to help, a solution to the Gaza dilemma seems remote. The rest of the world will have to step up.
In the meantime, it’s on to the next ethnic cleansing, the next Nakba. The West Bank awaits.