How to explain the violence of Israel’s attack on Gaza

For the last four weeks the world has watched in horror as bloodletting has taken place, again, in Gaza.

How can we explain the sheer viciousness, the excessive murderousness, the brutality? Dozens of innocent people killed every day, shelled in hospitals or UN schools or blown up in their homes. It seems to defy logic. What can possibly warrant this?

Israel could surely only act in this way if it faces a threat to its existence. The violence against innocents goes far beyond a proportionate response, or rationally achieving military objectives.

When we’re existentially threatened, we lash out, and a surplus of violence is at least understandable if not justified.

However, the idea that the rockets militants fire from Gaza present an existential threat to Israel is laughable. Iron Dome intercepts them if they ever come close to civilian centres.

And Hamas, the stated adversary, hadn’t been firing rockets prior to the recent raid on the West Bank — its rocket fire was resumed after Israel raided, putatively to find three kidnapped youths, which Israel had no proof were kidnapped by Hamas (they weren’t), making 750 arrests and killing 11 people including 4 children, and then carrying out an air strike killing 7 militants.

This follows the familiar pattern: provocation (which is hardly reported), response (which gets reported as aggression), escalation (which is justified in light of the response).

What then is the existential threat which Israel must be facing in order to behave in this way?

The immediate context to the current hostilities is the recent signing of an agreement between Hamas and Fatah, and the formation of a unity government, supported by the US and EU, on 2 June. This is threatening not because these parties are bent on Israel’s destruction, but because by cohering, they threaten Israel’s strategy. Israel’s strategy is to contain and weaken, to strike at the possibility of Palestinian autonomy. That’s why they make a point of hitting civilian infrastructure in Gaza.

There are two prospects Israel cannot countenance and which it has become clear will go to any lengths to destroy. These are the ideas it defends, the red lines it won’t cross, for which it has sacrificed hundreds of children’s lives in the last few weeks.

The first is the two-state solution, on 1967 borders. Israel stalled and snuffed out the most recent manifestation of the peace process, the Road map for peace in the early 2000s, because a return to 1967 borders would constitute too much of a retreat*. Instead it unilaterally disengaged and adopted a policy of containment and neglect. Better to keep Gaza as an open air prison, breeding hostility to provide the pretext for maintaining the siege.

The second is a single state, as a secular democracy, where Jews and Arabs have equal rights (whereas today of course Israel is a Jewish state, with certain rights being denied to Israeli non-Jews). Here the demographic threat, of an Arab population growing faster than Jewish, comes into play. Again, better to maintain Gaza as an open air prison than the prospect that its 1.8 million people might enter a greater Israeli-Palestinian society.**

The protection against those eventualities, defending a particular idea of Israel at all costs, constitutes the edge cutting into innocent Palestinians’ bodies.

Could Israel find a way to surrender those ideas? Could it come to realise that the price it pays for them, in terms of bloodshed on its conscience, and in terms of the corruption of its own society, is too much?

Until its society changes its mind, we must enforce international law. While Israel’s violence has been condemned as irrational, the rational aspect is its leaders’ calculation that they can get away with it in terms of 1) domestic opinion, 2) their continuing geopolitical usefulness to the US, and 3) world public opinion.

While the first two, depressingly, seem to be true (90% of Israelis support the current bombardment, the US continues to arm Israel), we as constituents of the latter must make it clear that this isn’t a viable strategy, that Israel has gone too far; that we don’t allow it. That we hold Israel to international law.

2014 has to be the last time, not just the rerun of 2012 and 2008-09, of 2006 in Lebanon. It can’t be the latest in a recurring cycle. There’s hope surely that Israel has crossed a line in world public opinion and we can all help it to find a peaceful alternative.

Join the voices at peaceful family-friendly protests. Boycott-divest-sanction.

*From Jonathan Cook, Blood and Religion:

The outcome of the Road Map, Weisglass [advisor to Ariel Sharon] insisted, “would be a Palestinian state with terrorism. And all this within quite a short time. Not decades or even years, but a few months.”

The answer, argued Weisglass, was disengagement:
It is the bottle of formaldehyde within which you place the president’s formula so that it will be preserved for a very lengthy period … It supplies the amount of formaldehyde that’s necessary so that there will not be a political process with the Palestinians … The political process is the establishment of a Palestinian state with all the security risks that entails. The political process is the evacuation of settlements, it’s the return of refugees, it’s the partition of Jerusalem. And all that has now been frozen.

**Ariel Sharon in 2005:

The Jews have one small country, Israel, and must do everything so that this state remains a Jewish state in the future as well,” he told reporters aboard his plane en route to the United States.

“There is no intention of hurting anyone here; there’s merely a correct and important intention of Israel being a Jewish state with a massive Jewish majority,” said Sharon. “That’s what needs to be done, and that’s exactly what we’re doing. This is considered normal everywhere.”