Benjamin Netanyahu
Rafah’s Dire Plight: Netanyahu’s Last Grasp for Victory
The Palestinian city of Rafah is not just older than Israel; it is as old as civilization itself.
It has existed for thousands of years. The Canaanites referred to it as Rafia, and Rafia has been almost always there, guarding the southern frontiers of Palestine, ancient and modern.
As the gateway between two continents and two worlds, Rafah has been at the forefront of many wars and foreign invasions, from ancient Egyptians to the Romans to Napoleon and his eventually vanquished army.
Now, it is Benjamin Netanyahu’s turn. The Israeli Prime Minister has made Rafah the jewel of his crown of shame, the battle that would determine the fate of his genocidal war in Gaza – in fact, the very future of his country. “Those who want to prevent us from operating in Rafah are essentially telling us: ‘Lose the war,'” he said at a press conference on February 17.
There are around 1.3 to 1.5 million people in Rafah, an area that, before the war started, had a population of merely 200 thousand people.
Even before the start of this genocidal war, Rafah was still considered crowded. We can only imagine what the situation is right now, where hundreds of thousands of people are scattered in muddy refugee camps, subsisting in makeshift tents that are unable to withstand the elements of a harsh winter.
The Mayor of Rafah says that only 10 percent of the needed food and water is reaching the population in the camps, where the people are suffering from extreme hunger, if not outright starvation.
These families are beyond traumatized as they have lost loved ones and homes and have no access to any medical care. They are trapped between high walls, the sea and a murderous military.
An Israeli invasion of Rafah will not alter the battlefield in favor of the Israeli army, but it will be horrific for the displaced Palestinians. The slaughter will go beyond everything we have seen so far anywhere in Gaza.
A child wounded in an Israeli bombing is brought to Al Najjar hospital in Rafah, Feb. 24, 2024. Fatima Shbair | AP
Where will up to 1.5 million people go when the Israeli tanks arrive? The closest so-called safe area is al-Mawasi, which is already overcrowded and too small to begin with. The displaced refugees there are also experiencing starvation due to Israel’s prevention of aid and constant bombing of convoys.
Then, there is northern Gaza, which is mostly in ruins; it has no food to the extent that, in some areas, even animal feed, which humans are now consuming, is no longer accessible.
Suppose the international community does not finally develop the will to stop Israel. In that case, this horrific crime will, by far, prove worse than all the crimes that have already been committed, resulting in the death and wounding of over 100,000 people.
Even with the invasion of Rafah, Israel would achieve no military or strategic victory. Netanyahu wants to satisfy the calls for blood emanating from throughout Israel. After all of this, they are still seeking revenge. “I am personally proud of the ruins of Gaza,” Israel’s Minister of Social Equality, May Golan, said at a Knesset session on February 21.
But, still, there will be no victory in Rafah, either.
At the start of the war, Israel said Hamas was primarily concentrated in the north. The north was duly destroyed, though the Resistance carried on unabated. Then they claimed that the Resistance headquarters was under Shifa Hospital, which was bombed, raided and destroyed. Then they claimed Bureij, Maghazi and central Gaza were the main prize of the war. Then, Khan Younis was declared the ‘capital of Hamas’. And on and on…
Aside from the mass destruction and the killing of hundreds of civilians daily, Israel has won nothing; the Resistance has not been defeated, and the alleged ‘Hamas capital’ has conveniently shifted from one city to another, even from one neighborhood to another.
Now, the same ridiculous claims and unsubstantiated allegations are being made and leveled against Rafah, where most of Gaza’s population ran to, in total despair, to survive the onslaught.
Children desperately clamor for food in Rafah, Feb. 23, 2024. Fatima Shbair | AP
Israel had initially hoped that Gazans would rush in their hundreds of thousands to the Sinai Desert. They did not. Then Israeli leaders, like far-right Israeli Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich, began speaking of “voluntary migration” as the “right humanitarian solution.” Still, the Palestinians stayed. Now, they have all agreed on the invasion of Rafah, a last-ditch effort to orchestrate another Palestinian Nakba.
But another Nakba will not happen. Palestinians will not allow it to happen.
Ultimately, Netanyahu’s and Israel’s political madness must come to an end.
The world cannot persist in this cowardly inaction.
The lives of millions of Palestinians are dependent on our collective push to bring this genocide to an immediate end.
Feature photo | A man stands on top of a mosque destroyed in an Israeli airstrike in Rafah, Gaza Strip, Feb. 22, 2024. Mohammed Dahman | AP
Dr. Ramzy Baroud is a journalist, author and the Editor of The Palestine Chronicle. He is the author of six books. His latest book, co-edited with Ilan Pappé, is ‘Our Vision for Liberation: Engaged Palestinian Leaders and Intellectuals Speak Out.’ His other books include ‘My Father Was a Freedom Fighter’ and ‘The Last Earth.’ Baroud is a Non-resident Senior Research Fellow at the Center for Islam and Global Affairs (CIGA). His website is www.ramzybaroud.net
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Meet the ‘Bronze Age Zionists’ — Far-Right Jews Embracing Fascism in the Wake of October 7
The US online hard-right isn’t exactly known as the friendliest place for Jews. It’s the...
Israeli army gassed my son ‘like Auschwitz,’ mother of slain Israeli soldier says
An outraged Israeli mom has sparked an uproar after accusing the Israeli army of deliberately gassing her son to death while he was being held in a Gaza tunnel. Now she says the Israeli military had her son’s gravestone removed after her critical message went viral. His killing follows a pattern of Israeli military attacks on Israeli captives in Gaza, raising questions about the existence of a friendly fire policy to prevent prisoner swaps. The mother of a now-dead Israeli […]
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Scandal-stained Israeli ‘rescue’ group fuels October 7 fabrications
Founded by a serial rapist known as the “Haredi Jeffrey Epstein,” Israeli ultra-Orthodox rescue group ZAKA is responsible for some of the most obscene post-October 7 atrocity fabrications, from beheaded babies to “mass rape” to a fetus cut from its mother. Secretary of State Tony Blinken and President Joseph Biden have each echoed demonstrably false ZAKA testimonies about Hamas atrocities. Marred by allegations of financial fraud, ZAKA is leveraging October 7 publicity to raise unprecedented sums of cash. Its rival, […]
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Israeli tank gunner reveals orders to fire indiscriminately into kibbutz — report
New disclosures add to the growing body of evidence indicating many Israelis who died on October 7 were killed by the Israeli military. Meanwhile, the Israeli government has muzzled captives freed from Gaza to prevent further damage to the official narrative. Firsthand testimony by admittedly inexperienced Israeli tank operators reveals orders to open fire upon Israeli communities when Palestinian militants breached the fences encircling Gaza on October 7. A glowing profile of an all-female tank company by Israel’s N12 News […]
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No Endgame in Gaza
If war is supposed to be the continuation of politics by other means, Israel’s assault on Gaza seems to be the continuation by other means of the absence of politics. It does not seem that Israel understands what its endgame is. Without a clear sense of an ending, there can be no answer to the most crucial moral and strategic question: When is enough enough? Even in the crudely mathematical logic of vengeance, the blood price for Hamas’s appalling atrocities of October 7 has long since been paid. The body count—if that is to be the measure of retribution—has mounted far beyond the level required for an equality of suffering. Yet it appears to have no visible ceiling. What factor must Jewish deaths be multiplied by? When, as W.B. Yeats asked in a different conflict, may it suffice?
“Enough” is the word that Yitzhak Rabin, then Israel’s prime minister, stressed in his remarkable speech of September 1993 at the signing of the Oslo Accords:
We who have fought against you, the Palestinians, we say to you today in a loud and a clear voice: Enough of blood and tears. Enough…. We are today giving peace a chance and saying to you and saying again to you: Enough.
Enough is both a political goal and an ethical limit. Without the first, it is hard to set the second. To know how far you can go, you have to know where you want to get to. Benjamin Netanyahu’s government seems to know neither.
There has been much fine reporting on the dreadful intelligence failures that allowed the massacres of October 7 to happen. But they in turn arise from something much deeper: a cognitive failure. There has been a literal false sense of security. Rabin, in his Nobel Peace Prize acceptance speech in 1994, spelled out in the clearest terms the impossibility of security without peace: “There is only one radical means of sanctifying human lives. Not armored plating, or tanks, or planes, or concrete fortifications. The one radical solution is peace.”
Peacemaking is a political process. Wars may shape the circumstances in which it is done, but they do not make it happen. Rabin, one of Israel’s most accomplished warriors, understood that truth. With his assassination and Netanyahu’s rise, it was deliberately unlearned. Politics—the negotiation of a just settlement with the Palestinians—was abandoned and replaced by the illusion that security could indeed be created and maintained by planes, tanks, fortifications, and surveillance technology. That illusion has died a terrible death, but it retains a zombie existence. It persists because the first condition of a return to politics would be the admission that Netanyahu’s whole approach has been a disaster, not just for the Palestinians, but for Israel.
Israel has already tried two radically different strategies in Gaza. The first was a familiar military and political orthodoxy: conquest and colonization. Gaza, having belonged to the Ottoman empire and then to the British mandate in Palestine, was governed by Egypt after 1948, though neither its traditional residents nor the large refugee population were granted Egyptian citizenship. After its capture by Israel in 1956, Gaza was quickly returned to Egyptian control, but following its reconquest in the Six-Day War of 1967, the territory was ruled by an Israeli military governor for almost forty years. (Civil control of Gaza City was transferred to the Palestinian Authority in 1994.) In the late 1970s the right-wing government of Menachem Begin imagined that this rule could be made permanent and stable if enough Jews were settled in the territory. Eventually, 8,500 Jewish people did settle in Gaza—a number large enough to create a sense of existential threat for Palestinians but too small to be able to control the strip. Israel needed three thousand soldiers to protect these 8,500 Jews. In the second intifada it lost 230 of those soldiers.
Ariel Sharon’s decision in 2005 to end the military occupation and forcibly withdraw the settlements was not a wild caprice. It was a recognition of reality: the post-1967 attempt at colonization could not be sustained. By occupying Gaza, Israel had gained nothing and lost soldiers, money, and international goodwill. It’s worth recalling that Netanyahu supported the withdrawal for sound policy reasons before he opposed it for cynical political ones.
It was not for nothing that in 2014, when Hamas was firing rockets into Israel, Netanyahu did not support demands from his own foreign minister Avigdor Liberman for a military reconquest and reoccupation of Gaza. Netanyahu, when running for election, had made aggressive noises about Hamas, claiming in 2008 that “we will finish the job. We will topple the terror regime of Hamas.” But this was utterly deceitful. Netanyahu never wanted to topple the Hamas regime. He wanted to retain the threat that he might do it as a rhetorical trope, a furious sound that signified nothing. It is this empty vessel that Netanyahu is now seeking to fill with meaning and purpose—and with blood.
For Israel’s real alternative to military occupation and colonization was Hamas itself. The religious fundamentalists—committed to extreme antisemitism and the extinction of Israel—could be used to undermine the Palestine Liberation Organization and, after 2005, to keep the Palestinian movement divided between Gaza and the West Bank. The strangeness of this approach lay not only in the illusion that a jihadist movement could ever be, in practical effect, an ally of Israel, but in the weird form of war it created. Since Hamas would continue to attack Israel, Israel would continue to retaliate. The retaliatory attacks would be bloody and often horrific in their toll of civilian casualties. But they would be calibrated so as to ensure that Hamas stayed in power in Gaza.
A review of Israel’s Gaza wars between 2009 and 2014, commissioned by the US military from the RAND Corporation and published in 2017, points out that this was warfare specifically designed not to defeat the enemy:
Israel never strived for a decisive victory in Gaza. While it could militarily defeat Hamas, Israel could not overthrow Hamas without risking the possibility that a more radical organization would govern Gaza. Nor did Israel want to be responsible for governing Gaza in a postconflict power vacuum.
Implicit in this policy of repeatedly attacking a regime with overwhelming firepower while not wanting victory over it was the impossibility of an endgame. There would be no peace but also no decisive war. Even if thousands of Palestinians and hundreds of Israelis died in these intermittent eruptions of extreme violence, their purpose was to maintain this brutality at what RAND calls a “manageable” level.
The idea of controlled carnage ended in the unrestrained slaughter of October 7. Netanyahu was forced to abandon overnight the scheme that had been the touchstone of his whole approach to the Palestinian question: keeping Hamas strong enough to deny authority to the Palestinian Authority, but weak enough to pose no more than a sporadic and limited threat to Israeli citizens.
The failure of Israel’s Plan A, military occupation, was acknowledged with its unilateral withdrawal from Gaza in 2005. The even more catastrophic collapse of Plan B has been conceded, as it had to be, after Hamas’s attacks destroyed the illusion of literal and political containment. But the only response of which Netanyahu seems capable is a completely incoherent mix of Plan A and Plan B. There will be, for an unknown period, a military occupation. According to Netanyahu, Israel “will for an indefinite period…have the overall security responsibility” for the territory. But Israel will accept no liability for the welfare of those who live there. Israel will control Gaza but not govern it. This is not a plan. It is a fusion of two failures.
Military occupation did not work when Gaza had a smaller Palestinian population, when its cities were not reduced to wreckage, and when there was one fewer generation raised on hopelessness and hatred. No one really seems to think it can work now. Likewise, the belief that Gaza could be controlled from the outside by an Israeli government that had no accountability to its people, and that could insulate itself from the consequent suffering, has proved to be a calamity. The notion that the broken shards of these two collapsed strategies can be glued together to create what Israel’s defense minister, Yoav Gallant, calls “a new security regime” has no credibility.
Bombs and tanks do not answer questions. Who is to govern Gaza if not Hamas or Israel itself? Does Israel really think that, without the creation of a Palestinian state, somebody else—either an international consortium or a Palestinian puppet regime—will sail into a blood-soaked hellscape of rubble and dust, inhabited by traumatized survivors, and take responsibility for rebuilding, policing, and governing it? How is Israel going to make the kind of peace with its immediate neighbors without which the security of its citizens cannot be rebuilt?
While these political questions go unanswered, so do the moral ones. How many deaths are too many? How are obligations to international law and common decency going to be fulfilled in dense streets crowded with children, women, the elderly, and the sick? What is the “self” in Israel’s “self-defense”? Does it see its true image in this bloodletting? Can it imagine a life beyond revenge?
The post No Endgame in Gaza appeared first on The New York Review of Books.
The Many and the Few
One of the privileges of being civilized is that it gives you the right to do very uncivilized things to the barbarians. In his public address to Joe Biden in Tel Aviv on October 18, Benjamin Netanyahu remarked, “You’ve rightly drawn a clear line between the forces of civilization and the forces of barbarism.” History suggests that the clearer that line is said to be, the easier it is to justify large-scale violence. This is the secular equivalent of the absolute divide between believers and infidels that allowed Hamas to massacre Jews without restraint. In its mentality, there could be no such thing as Jewish civilians. Now, in Gaza, there are no civilians, only barbarians.
In 1859 the great English liberal John Stuart Mill suggested that “a civilized government” that has “barbarous neighbours” finds itself obliged either to conquer them outright or to “assert so much authority over them” as to “break their spirit”—an injunction that seems to have shaped Israel’s thinking about Gaza since the Hamas atrocities of October 7. In this process, Mill insisted, the enlightened government need not play by the moral or legal rules. “To suppose,” he wrote, “that the same international customs, and the same rules of international morality, can obtain between one civilized nation and another, and between civilized nations and barbarians, is a grave error, and one which no statesman can fall into.”
This was the most important doctrine of the polity from which Israel itself emerged, the British Empire. Civilized nations (of which Britain was the supreme example) did not have to grant their subject peoples the same rights and protections they claimed for themselves. Governments in London, writes Caroline Elkins in Legacy of Violence: A History of the British Empire (2022), “constructed an alternative moral universe for populations it perceived to be off civilization’s scale of humanity, in an otherworldly order distinctly their own.” If there are some respects in which the Israel-Palestine conflict can be seen as the most dangerously unfinished business of that empire, the question of whether the people of Gaza exist in an alternative moral universe is a living legacy of the British Empire’s governing mentality.
Israel’s own pre-statehood history should be a reminder of how treacherous these colonial categories really are. The problem the British had in the twenty-five years (1923–1948) they ruled Palestine was that they could never quite decide who the barbarians were. Arabs generally fit the bill, though there were times when they were to be flattered as friends and allies or swathed in Lawrence of Arabia romanticism. But what about the Jews? Were they civilized?
The commander of the British forces in Egypt and Palestine, General Sir Walter Norris Congreve, confessed after deadly intercommunal riots in Jerusalem in 1920 that “I dislike them all equally. Arabs and Jews and Christians, in Syria and Palestine, they are all alike, a beastly people.” When, in 1943 and 1944, Menachem Begin’s Irgun and Yitzhak Shamir’s Lehi (the two militant Zionist groups who hoped to gain all of Palestine as a Jewish state by violent means) began terror campaigns against the British, the Jews as a whole, not just in Palestine but in the diaspora, could, in some enraged British responses, be cast as barbarians, which is to say people who can be subjected to collective punishment without legal restraint. The official Jewish Agency, the proto-government headed by David Ben-Gurion (soon to become Israel’s first prime minister), was warned by Winston Churchill’s government in London that, as Elkins puts it, if it “did not actively cooperate with Britain to stamp out the terrorists, then Britain would bring the full force of its punitive measures to bear against the Jewish community in Palestine.” In the context of the ongoing Holocaust such a threat seems incredible, but it was long established as the imperial modus operandi.
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Once the Jewish community as a whole had been identified with terrorism, and thus with the forces of barbarism, it was fair game for armed raids on kibbutzim by British soldiers and police, in which civilians were terrorized, beaten, and in some cases killed. Elkins recalls, “One policeman claimed that he and others had been provoked into beating women and children who had formed human shields; these Jewish civilians had ‘behaved like demented wild beasts’ and engaged in ‘vicious attacks’ against the police and army, according to official reports.” Demented wild beasts, “human animals,” deserve what they get—including the children.
One senior British officer wrote that it was no longer possible to “differentiate between passive onlookers and active armed members of the Jewish population, and the word ‘terrorist’ is no longer being applied to differentiate one from the other.” In 1947, after the Irgun displayed the hanged bodies of two British sergeants it had kidnapped, this refusal to differentiate engulfed Jews in Britain itself. Antisemitic riots raged for five days in England and Scotland, and synagogues, shops, and gravestones were vandalized. Some were defiled with slogans such as “Hang all Jews,” “Hitler was right,” and “Destroy Judah.”
The Manchester Guardian commented, “The man who condemns the Zionists in Palestine on account of the crimes of the Irgun gangsters is only a degree better than the youth who expresses his hatred by mobbing the innocent men and women of Cheetham Hill or Wavertree. There is no political fault so common or so dangerous as this primitive confusion between many and few.” The Jewish Chronicle editorialized, “The anti-Jewish riots which have occurred in several towns, on the pretext of the Palestine murders, are shameful in the extreme, both for themselves and for the fact that they represent the newest extension of the evil principle of holding the innocent to blame for the guilty.”
Both newspapers were right, of course. But the primitive confusion between the many and the few, and the evil principle of holding the innocent to blame for the guilty, were not aberrations. They were, and are, functions of the colonial idea that the barbarian peoples are guilty of crimes precisely as peoples. Individual atrocities are to be understood as expressions of a collective lack of civilization and may therefore be punished collectively. The guilty race must, as Mill had it, either be conquered outright or be subjected to such a display of domination that its spirit is broken once and for all.
This long-established logic continues to play out in Israel now. Those who commit terrorist crimes are identified (as they wish to be) with the people they claim to represent. That people is then reduced to the atrocities committed in its name and must pay the price for these outrages. It is a logic that simultaneously inflates the standing of the terrorists and shrinks almost to invisibility the individuality of the civilians who belong to the criminalized group. It is a logic that has been used, time and again throughout history, against the Jewish people.
Can Israel—and by extension the US—transcend this colonial mindset? In his televised address to the American people on October 19, Biden explicitly disowned the idea of collective Palestinian guilt: “Hamas does not represent the Palestinian people.” He also said, “President Netanyahu and I discussed again, yesterday, the critical need for Israel to operate by the laws of war. That means protecting civilians in combat as best as they can. The people of Gaza urgently need food, water, and medicine.” He did not say, however, that Netanyahu had accepted this repudiation of collective guilt or the need to obey international law. Nor did he say what the US will do if Israel does not obey the laws of war or facilitate the provision of food, water, and medicine to civilians in Gaza. Are the principles Biden laid down exhortations or conditions, entreaties or imperatives?
The fate of the Middle East may turn on the answer. Biden began his address by saying, “We’re facing an inflection point in history. One of those moments where the decisions we make today are going to determine the future for decades to come.” In this at least he may well be right. There is either, in the crucible of this unfolding catastrophe, a definitive return to the colonial principle that humanity is fundamentally divided between those who deserve the protection of morality and law and those who do not, or there is a recognition that the line between civilization and barbarism runs not between different societies but within them.
The post The Many and the Few appeared first on The New York Review of Books.