[Salon] Israel’s War of Pacification - ArabDigest.org Guest Post

Israel’s War of Pacification Summary: the Gaza war has shown with a brutal clarity the hypocrisy of the West and the contempt it has for the people of Palestine. We thank our regular contributor Maged Mandour for today’s newsletter. Maged is a political analyst who also contributes to Middle East Eye and Open Democracy. He is a writer for Sada, the Carnegie Endowment online journal and the author of the recently published Egypt under El-Sisi (I.B.Tauris) which examines social and political developments since the coup of 2013. You can find Maged’s most recent AD podcast here. Israel’s war on Gaza has been framed by major Western states and politicians as a war of self-defence, after the 7 October Hamas attack that saw 1,200 people killed (with a still unknown number by Israeli counter-fire) and 255 taken back to Gaza as hostages. The dead included 346 IDF soldiers and 66 Israeli security personnel. Almost two weeks after the Al-Aqsa Flood operation, 6 major Western powers, including the UK, Germany, US, Canada, and Italy issued a joint statement reaffirming their support for Israel’s “right to self-defence against terrorism.” It was language that fully endorsed the view that Israel's war was directed against Hamas, fitting neatly into the war on terror paradigm that has been a dominant narrative in international politics since the 9/11 attack. The Israeli war aims in Gaza conform to that narrative with the stated aim of destroying Hamas and achieving the return of the hostages. The brutality of the war, and its genocidal nature, however, have made it very different from the war on terror invasions and operations from Iraq to Afghanistan. Indeed, Israel's tactics did not focus on precision strikes to eliminate Hamas operatives, nor did it focus on winning the hearts and minds of the Palestinians in Gaza with the grander aim of instilling a new regime to replace Hamas. Rather it is aiming to inflict mass civilian casualties and to destroy the fabric of life in Gaza. In effect, it is a war of pacification against the Palestinians, not dissimilar from the wars waged by the French in Algeria in the 19th century or the wars which European settlers waged in North America against the native indigenous peoples. This is a war that aims to destroy the Palestinian National Movement, end the Palestinian will to resist, and pacify the native. The Palestinians are left with the stark choice of either being expelled, accepting Israeli apartheid and subjugation or being killed. It is a choice that many native people have faced, albeit mostly not in a century where adherence to the international rule based order has been touted for decades. Israel's war of pacification against the Palestinians is similar to wars waged by the French in Algeria in the 19th century or European settlers waged in North America against indigenous peoples There are numerous examples of IDF tactics that illustrate the logic of pacification. For example there is the Israeli policy of designating “kill zones” where anyone entering is killed indiscriminately and anyone killed is labelled a terrorist and added to the numbers of Hamas fighters liquidated by the IDF. This includes the killing of Palestinian civilians, mostly male, trying to return to their homes; it is a mass slaughter of the male population designed to break the will to resist. AI has been introduced to power the killing of a large number of Palestinians. The IDF started using an AI program named “Lavender” for the purpose of ‘target generation.’ Lavender has produced 37,000 Palestinian targets, supposedly all members of Hamas and the Islamic Jihad. The AI targeting is treated as a human decision, despite the IDF knowing that the programme produces an error rate of approximately 10%. Even more horrifyingly the bombing of targets takes place when the suspect is at home, usually at night, surrounded by family members. In essence, the suspected member of Hamas is killed together with his family, which helps to explain the figure that 70% of the Palestinian dead are women and children. It is a pacification strategy that wipes out entire families if one of the family decides to take up arms against Israel. The logic of pacification also extends to the use of starvation tactics by the IDF, with the continued blockade of food and aid to the besieged population of Gaza. The most recent example is the Israeli assault on Northern Gaza, with experts warning the UN Security Council that famine is imminent in the North, as Israel continues to block the flow of food and aid. This was accompanied by what Human Rights Watch has called “war crimes of forced transfer” in effect, ethnic cleansing of the population of the North another pacification tactic used to quell resistance. Added to all these acts of violence are a number of blatant massacres deliberately targeting civilians. In May there was the flour massacre, where Israeli soldier killed 187 civilians as they were trying to get flour for themselves and their families. A second massacre occurred in November, following the same tactic, leading to the death of 70 Palestinians. All of these tactics are combined with the targeting of civilian infrastructure with the aim to kill as many Palestinians as possible by making the Gaza Strip unliveable. For example, in October a UN commission of inquiry accused Israel of committing war crimes in its deliberate policy of targeting and effectively destroying the healthcare system in Gaza. This has served to increase the number of civilian casualties and is causing immense suffering amongst the wounded, with reports emerging of amputation on children having to be carried out without anaesthesia. All are deliberate policies aimed at killing as many Palestinians as possible, instilling fear in the rest and breaking their will to resist. The paradigm of a colonial war of pacification would help explain Israeli policy and is logically consistent with the Israeli apartheid ideology of Jewish supremacy and continued colonisation of Palestinian and Arab land. The latest example are the calls made by the far right Finance Minister and self-declared fascist and homophobe, Bezalel Smotrich, calling for the formal annexation of the West Bank. However, this colonial war aimed at breaking the will of the native is deeply problematic for Western powers and the so-called “rule based international order”, which now appears to be another victim of Israel’s war of pacification. Such concern, however, is not shared amongst many people in the Middle East who are deeply aware that this rules based order never really applied to them and the Western powers ignore it at will when convenient. One only needs to recall the American invasion of Iraq and the Russian involvement in the Syrian civil war just to name a few cases where the rules were ignored. The Israeli war, however, is qualitatively different from any of these wars in that it is aimed at the destruction of a people, their national movement, the will to resist, even the core of what makes them Palestinian. It is for all intents and purposes an existential war on the Palestinians backed by the West. How this war proceeds and how it will change the Middle East is hard to predict. What is certain is that Palestinian resilience and resistance will not be defeated. Members can leave comments about this newsletter on the Arab Digest website