In Gaza, Israel is seeking the political, as well as military, emasculation of Hamas through the widespread destruction of Gaza’s infrastructure and economy. This is known as the “Dahiya Doctrine,”
named after a suburb of Beirut that was almost leveled during Israel’s attack on Lebanon in summer 2006. The doctrine was encapsulated in a phrase used by Dan Halutz, Israel’s chief of staff, at the time. He said Lebanon’s bombardment would “turn back the clock 20 years”. The same strategy was also applied for instance during the 2008-2009 war which made 1100 casualties in Gaza, during the 2012 “Pillar of Defense” war, and it is again being applied now.
On the name of the elimination of Hamas, which is not actually to be blamed in the beginning of this conflict, Israel has undertaken to blitzkrieg Gaza, hoping that massive destruction will be enough to sever the link between Hamas and the inhabitants of Gaza. The result will be the opposite. Hatred will be perpetuated across generations of Palestinians, and no-one will ever be able to believe that a sustainable peace with Israel is possible. Israel is crushing Gaza, and has engaged in the systematic destruction of Palestinian infrastructure, as well as in the onslaught of its people.
What is actually the strategic motive in trying to kill a single militant near a United Nations school or a house because he has fired rockets ? In the most recent attacks on the Jabaliya Elementary Girls School, Israeli authorities were warned 17 times that it was full of refugees, but shells smashed in the building, killing 19 and injuring more than a hundred other Palestinians. The UN talks about a “possible war crime”, the last one in an extremely long list. Another attack in a Shijaiyah market has killed 15 and injured 150 on the same day.
Amnesty International, in a statement, said it “does not have evidence” that Hamas would be using human shields, one of the main accusations of the Israeli. And even if Hamas was actually doing so, “all of Israel’s obligations to protect these civilians would still apply”, according to the NGO. A UN OCHA spokesman said that “there is literally no safe place for civilians” in Gaza. Israel pretends that it is actively attempting to warn Gazans that it will undertake a strike, but Amnesty International says that their actions “do not constitute an effective warning under international humanitarian law”. The United Nations Fact Finding Mission for the 2008 war has found “roof knocking”, the Israeli strategy of using dummy bombs to warn that a missile is going to strike a house, to be unlawful.
What is the point of destroying Gaza’s sole power plant, for instance ? How to understand the attacks on forty-six of Gaza’s fishing boats ? Two-thirds of Gaza’s wheat mills have been rendered unoperative. Inhabitants of Gaza may suffer from mass starvation if the funding of the UNRWA is not quickly increased. The number of displaced people in UNRWA shelters approaches “10% of the entire population of Gaza”. 170 461 are housed in 82 schools “without adequate water sanitation and hygiene (“WASH”) infrastructure and without sufficient space”. The homes of 3 965 families have been severely damaged or destroyed. 1,2 million people have “no or very limited access to water or sanitation services due to the damage to the electricity system or lack of fuel to run generators”. Maternity care is restricted for an estimated 45 000 pregnant women in the Gaza Strip, of whom approximatively 5 000 have been displaced. 133 schools, 88 mosques, 22 health facilities have been destroyed. The sole Shifa hospital urgently needs neurosurgeons, anaesthesiologists, plastic and general surgeons, and orthopedic specialists, as well as 20 ICU beds, a digital C-ARM machine for orthopedic surgeries, three operation tables and a lighting system for the five operation rooms. Two paramedics were also killed, and two other wounded, when trying to retrieve injured persons from Ash Shuja’iyeh. Twenty four doctors and scientists have released an open letter in The Lancet to express their “appallment at the military onslaught on civilians in Gaza under the guise of punishing terrorists”, a “massacre [that] spares no one, and includes the disabled and sick in hospitals”. The homes of the poet Othman Hussein and of the artist RaedIssa have been destroyed. Cameraman Khaled Reyadh Hamad and driver for a Gaza news agency HamdiShihab have been killed. Arabic-speaking journalists of al-Jazeera and of the BBC have been attacked. The building of the Sawt al-Watan radio station has been destroyed.
Israel is applying counter-insurgency tactics of collective punishment which directly take their inspiration in the worst pages of contemporary history. They have been used first by colonial powers like France in Algeria : extraordinary renditions, torture and secret executions of suspected insurgents. Approximatively 3 000 persons were killed during the “Battle of Algiers”, a military victory for France but a political victory for the National Liberation Front (there is an excellent movie, “The Battle of Algiers”, on that). But while a number of former French resistants were part of the paratrooper forces, these techniques of “secret war” were actually developed on the model of the techniques used by the Gestapo. The purpose was to terrorize the colonized population, to convince it through “shock and awe” that they should never seek independence. That is exactly the method applied by Israel in Palestine now.
A “secret war” against “terrorism” has been waged by Western powers at least since the beginning of the new millennium. But while it is still unclear whether some of the enemies have not been “propped up” to feed the media with always-welcomed scapegoats (see our article : http://www.eiilir.eu/politics-strategies/topics/terrorism-security/121-u-s-counterintelligence-and-the-manufacturing-of-domestic-terrorism), it clearly emerges that “terrorism” is always solely a pretext for colonial occupation and state terrorism. Thus it allows for the continuation of Western domination in resource-rich regions (Oil in Iraq, water and colonial territories in the West Bank, etc).
Let’s not forget that the main cause of the war is actually the kidnapping and murder of three Israeli teenagers, which was not even committed by Hamas but by a « lone cell » of militants, as acknowledged by Israeli police spokesman Mickey Rosenfeld (according to BBC correspondent Jon Donnison). It is the subsequent crackdown on Hamas that sparked an increase in rocket strikes, inducing full-blown Israeli assault. It is now clear that Benyamin Netanyahu was vowing a tough response to the killings at a moment when he actually knew Hamas was not responsible for them.
Israelis too are rallying for peace. Not all of them believe that “shock and awe” is the way to achieve peace. Recently, 27 Israeli aircraft pilots have refused to fight. Thousands of Israelis have also rallied in Tel-Aviv against the war, behind the Hadash left-wing party.
Colonial policies have never succeeded. The Israeli strategy is both an attempt at dominating imperialistically the Palestinians through what may amount at state terrorism, whatever the human and material costs, and a mediatic stunt to convince the Israeli people that they have elected the right government. It will solely enlarge the abyss that already separates Israelis and Palestinians, while ensuring significant profits to the Israeli weapons industry.
Israel has therefore almost acknowledged that it is applying a « shock doctrine » against a population it wants to « punish and deter » for it would be supporting Hamas’ armed operations. Now about 1300 Palestinians, at least 75 percent of whom are civilians (and among them at least 229 children), have been killed in the latest conflict. Israel is truly attempting to obliterate Palestinians as a people living autonomously in their homeland. This strategy is a way to deter Palestinians from actively demanding an independent State and from exercising their legally protected and natural right of return in Israel, among other things. It is clear that in reality, one of the major driving forces in the conflict is Israel’s refusal of a Palestinian coalition government supported by Hamas. Israel do not want to acknowledge it is occupying illegally the Palestinian territories since 1967, and violently fears the emergence of a politically unified Palestinian state able to demand respect of its rights. This is key in the motives of Israel’s neocolonial policy.
What is Benyamin Netanyahu’s government doing now, except securing “as much land as possible, and as few Palestinians as possible” (Bashir Abu-Manneh) in the territories it seeks to use for its own purposes ? According to researcher Darryl Li, quoted by Jacobin Magazine, “since 2005, Israel “has developed an unusual, and perhaps unprecedented, experiment in colonial management in the Gaza Strip,” seeking to “isolate Palestinians there from the outside world, render them utterly dependent on external benevolence,” and at the same time “absolve Israel of responsibility toward them”. Li goes on to argue that this strategy is one way for Israel to try to maintain a Jewish majority in its territories (the Jews are a minority in Israel and the Occupied Territories since 2012), in order to deny equal rights for the rest of the population. In Palestine, Israel’s strategy is imperialist and neo-colonial.
