Hamas
Israeli police admit rave-goers shot by IDF helicopter
Earlier reports confirmed by police finding
An official Israeli police investigation has confirmed that Israelis attending a rave on 7 October were shot by an Israeli Defence Force (IDF) helicopter – confirming reports from Israeli witnesses, media and security personnel.
According to Haaretz – which had previously condemned those reporting the testimonies of killings by Israeli forces as conspiracy theorists – investigators concluded that a helicopter ‘also hit some festival participants’, but without confirming the number:
According to a police source, the investigation also shows that an IDF combat helicopter that arrived to the scene and fired at terrorists there apparently also hit some festival participants.
Last week, Netanyahu adviser Mark Regev inadvertently admitted that Israeli forces were responsible for at least some of the 7 October deaths were caused by Israeli forces when he said that two hundred of the burned bodies that had been included among the Israeli dead were in fact Hamas fighters – Hamas clearly did not incinerate its own and does not have weapons capable of burning bodies to a crisp in moments.
Israeli survivors of the attack have also told Israeli media that the Hamas operatives were kind and polite but that Israeli forces fired indiscriminately and killed many hostages. A senior Israeli pilot also told Haaretz that the mass killing of Israelis was a ‘mass Hannibal’ – referring to the Israeli doctrine of killing everyone, including Israelis, to prevent a hostage situation. Col Nof Erez said that he and other military pilots had been training for Hannibal responses for the last twenty years – the doctrine was officially abandoned in 2008.
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Combined and Uneven Catastrophe
A conversation with Kareem Rabie about the occupied West Bank.
Chris Hedges: Israel’s War on Hospitals
Washington DC — (Scheerpost) — Israel is not attacking hospitals in Gaza because they are “Hamas command centers.” Israel is systematically and deliberately destroying Gaza’s medical infrastructure as part of a scorched earth campaign to make Gaza uninhabitable and escalate a humanitarian crisis. It intends to force 2.3 million Palestinians over the border into Egypt, where they will never return.
Israel has destroyed and nearly emptied the Al Shifa Hospital in Gaza City. The Indonesian Hospital in Beit Lahia is next. Israel is deploying tanks and armored personnel carriers around the hospital and has fired rounds into the building, killing twelve people.
The playbook is familiar. Flyers are dropped by Israel over a hospital, telling people to leave because the hospital is a base for “Hamas terrorist activities.” Tanks and artillery shells rip away parts of the hospital walls. Israeli missiles blow up ambulances. Power and water are cut. Medical supplies are blocked. There are no painkillers, antibiotics or oxygen. The most vulnerable, premature babies in incubators and the gravely ill die. Israeli soldiers raid the hospital and force everyone out at gunpoint.
This is what happened at Al Shifa Hospital. This is what happened at Al Rantisi Children’s Hospital. This is what happened at Gaza’s main psychiatric hospital. This is what happened at Nasser Hospital. This is what happened at the other hospitals that Israel has destroyed. And this is what will happen at the few hospitals that remain.
Israel has shut down 21 of Gaza’s 35 hospitals, including Gaza’s only cancer hospital. The hospitals still operating have severe shortages of basic medicine and supplies. One by one, the hospitals are being picked off. Soon, there will be no health facilities left. This is by design.
Tens of thousands of terrified Palestinians, forced to evacuate by Israel, their homes blasted into rubble, seek refuge from the relentless bombing by camping out in and around Gaza’s hospitals. They hope Israel will not target the medical centers. If Israel abided by the Geneva Conventions, they would be correct. But Israel is not carrying out a war. It is carrying out a genocide. And in a genocide, a population, and all that sustains a population, is obliterated.
Civilian casualties from an Israeli airstrike on the Indonesian Hospital in northern Gaza, November 21, 2023
In an ominous sign that Israel will turn on the Palestinians in the West Bank once it is done flattening Gaza, armored vehicles have surrounded at least four West Bank hospitals. Israeli soldiers have raided the Ibn Sina Hospital along with the East Jerusalem Hospital.
Israel’s settler colonial state was founded on lies. It is sustained by lies. And now, when it is grimly determined to carry out the worst slaughter and ethnic cleansing of Palestinians since the 1948 Nakba, or “catastrophe,” that saw 750,000 Palestinians ethnically cleansed and some 50 massacres by Jewish militias, it spits out one grotesque absurdity after another. It speaks of Palestinians as a dehumanized mass. There are no mothers, fathers, children, teachers, doctors, lawyers, cooks, poets, taxi drivers or shopkeepers. Palestinians, in the Israeli lexicon, are a single contagion that must be eradicated.
Watch this video of Israeli school children singing, “We Will Annihilate Everyone” in Gaza.
Hitler Youth used to sing songs like this about Jews.
Those who embark upon projects of mass killing lie to avoid demoralizing their own populations, lull the victims into believing they will not all be exterminated and stop outside forces from intervening. The Nazis claimed that Jews packed on trains and sent to extermination camps were on work details and had good medical care and adequate food. As for the infirm and elderly, they were cared for in rest centers. The Nazis even created a mock camp for the “resettlement” of Jews “to the East,” – Theresienstadt – where international bodies such as the Red Cross could see how humanely the Jews were treated, even as millions were being exterminated.
At least 664,000 and possibly as many as 1.2 million Armenians were massacred or died of exposure, disease and starvation during the genocide carried out by the Ottoman Empire from the spring of 1915 to the autumn of 1916. The Armenian genocide was as public as the genocide in Gaza. European and U.S. consular missions provided detailed accounts of the campaign to cleanse modern-day Türkiye of Armenians.
The Ottoman government, in an attempt to hide the genocide, banned foreigners from taking photographs of Armenian refugees or the corpses that lined the roads. Israel, too, has blocked the foreign press from Gaza, carrying out only a handful of brief and carefully staged visits arranged by the Israeli military. Israel periodically cuts off internet and phone services. Israel has killed at least 43 Palestinian journalists and media workers since the Hamas incursion into Israel on Oct. 7, many undoubtedly targeted by Israeli forces.
Armenians, like Palestinians, were forced from their homes, gunned down and denied food and water. Armenian deportees were sent on death marches to the Syrian Desert, where tens of thousands were shot or died from starvation, cholera, malaria, dysentery and influenza. Israel is forcing 1.1 million Palestinians into the southern tip of Gaza and bombing them as they flee. These refugees, like the Armenians, lack food, water, fuel and sanitation. They, too, will soon succumb to epidemics of infectious diseases.
Talat Pasha, the de facto leader of the Ottoman Empire, told the United States ambassador, Henry Morgenthau Sr., in words that replicate Israel’s stance, on Aug. 2, 1915, “that our Armenian policy is absolutely fixed and that nothing can change it. We will not have the Armenians anywhere in Anatolia. They can live in the desert but nowhere else.”
The longer the genocide continues, the more absurd the lies become.
There are big Israeli lies. The obliteration of Gaza and wanton killing of thousands of Palestinians, Israel insists, is a targeted effort to get rid of Hamas rather than a campaign to reduce Gaza to a pile of rubble, carry out mass murder and ethnically cleanse Palestinians.
There are small Israeli lies. Forty beheaded babies. Al Shifa Hospital is a “Hamas command center.” A calendar in Arabic on the wall of a hospital, according to IDF Spokesperson Rear Admiral Daniel Hagari, is “a guardian [guard] list, where every terrorist writes his name and every terrorist has his own shift guarding the people that were here.” An Israeli actor dressed up as a nurse and speaking heavily accented Arabic claims to be a Palestinian doctor and to have seen Hamas use civilians as human shields. She says members of Hamas “attacked Al Shifa Hospital” and stole “the fuel and medicine.” Palestinian militants, rather than Israeli tanks, Israel says, are responsible for shelling Al Shifa Hospital. Israel struck a car full of “terrorists” in southern Lebanon, “terrorists” who turned out to be three girls, their mother and grandmother. The explosion at the Al Ahli Hospital was the result of an errant rocket fired by the Palestinians, a claim questioned by The New York Times when it discredited the video based on analysis of its time stamp. Israel said it “responded to the request of the director of Shifa Hospital to allow Gazan citizens who were sheltering in the hospital and who wish to evacuate from Shifa Hospital towards the humanitarian crossing in the Gaza Strip via a secure axis,” a statement Mohammed Zaqout, director general of hospitals in Gaza, said was “false,” adding “we were forced to leave by gunpoint.” Israeli Lt. Col. Jonathan Conricus, in a video pilloried by the BBC, shows viewers a meager stash of automatic weapons in a promotional video that magically increases once foreign reporters arrive for a guided tour. The IDF later deleted it.
The lies will be written into the Israeli school books. The lies will be repeated by Israeli politicians, historians and journalists. The lies will be told on Israeli television, films, and books. Israelis are eternal victims. Palestinians are absolute evil. There was no genocide. Türkiye, a century later, still denies what happened to the Armenians.
A Palestinian doctor carries a child as he flees the Indonesian Hospital in northern Gaza, November 21, 2023. Photo | Quds News Network
In wartime, people believe what they want to believe. The lies fill a hunger within the Israeli public that sees the conflict as a binary struggle between “the children of light and the children of darkness.” The lies are a defense against accountability, for if Israel refuses to acknowledge reality, it is not forced to respond to reality. The lies create cognitive dissonance, where fact becomes fiction and fiction becomes truth. The lies make any discussion of genocide or reconciliation impossible.
Israel, with the backing of the Biden administration, will continue to snuff out all systems that sustain life in Gaza. Hospitals. Schools. Power plants. Water treatment facilities. Factories. Farms. Apartment blocks. Houses. Then Israel will pretend, like the killers in past genocides, that it never happened.
The lies used by Israel to absolve itself of responsibility will eat away at Israeli society. They will corrode its moral, religious, civic, intellectual and political life. The lies will elevate war criminals to heroic status and demonize those with a conscience. Israel’s genocide, as with the 1965 mass killings in Indonesia, will be mythologized, an epic battle against the forces of evil and barbarity, just as we mythologized the genocide of Native Americans and turned our settlers and murderous cavalry units into heroes. The killers in the Indonesian war against communism are cheered at rallies as saviors. They are interviewed about the “heroic” battles they fought nearly six decades ago. Israel will do the same. It will deform itself. It will celebrate its crimes. It will turn evil into good. It will exist within a self-constructed myth. The truth, as in all despotisms, will be banished. Israel, a monster to the Palestinians, will be a monster to itself.
Feature photo | Eve of Destruction – by Mr. Fish
Chris Hedges is a Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist who was a foreign correspondent for fifteen years for The New York Times, where he served as the Middle East Bureau Chief and Balkan Bureau Chief for the paper. He previously worked overseas for The Dallas Morning News, The Christian Science Monitor, and NPR. He is the host of show The Chris Hedges Report.
The post Chris Hedges: Israel’s War on Hospitals appeared first on MintPress News.
Condemnations, Moral Guidance, and Gaza (guest post)
“The absence of moral guidance by philosophical condemners conveys that they do not think of Israelis as friends whom they want to morally improve. Perhaps, worse, it reflects the sense that there is something morally improper about providing Israelis with guidance and advice…”
The following guest post is by Daniel Schwartz, associate professor of political science and international relations at Hebrew University of Jerusalem. He is the author of, among other works, Aquinas on Friendship.
It is part of the ongoing series, “Philosophers On the Israel-Hamas Conflict“.
Condemnations, Moral Guidance, and Gaza
by Daniel Schwartz
Among the many causes of frustration with recent reactions by moral philosophers and other experts to the war in Gaza there is this: they consist basically in condemnations (short introductory condemnations of Hamas, more textually extensive condemnations of Israel). These texts do not aim to provide us, Israelis, with advice or guidance as to what would be the best thing for us to do (other than to just stop fighting).
By “condemnations” I do not mean calls for Israel’s unilateral ceasefire, considered as such. There are many different possible grounds for unilateral ceasefire calls, and not all of them rely on the moral condemnation of Israel. For instance, compassionate concern for the suffering of Palestinian civilians does not commit one to think Israel is in general acting unjustly. In practice, however, calls for ceasefire tend to conflate compassionate concern for Palestinian civilians with moral condemnation of Israel’s actions, i.e. declaring them unjust.
Some philosophical responses (such as this one by Victor Tadros) do delineate (if vaguely) the limits of what Israel could be morally entitled to do. But the purpose of such delineation is really to show the magnitude of the Israeli excess in relation that moral baseline, not to show Israelis how to scale back their response to the moral baseline (which, in Tadros’s case, would leave many Israelis unprotected).
Perhaps the lack of guidance and advice has to do with the way moral philosophers conceive of their professional duties: their business is just to judge whether actions being taken are morally permissible or not, merely to provide a moral diagnosis.
What about some moral guidance, though? What about instead of just condemning Israel, suggesting courses of action capable of providing maximum defense for Israeli citizens consistent with morality? Yes, this requires knowledge in the field of tactics, strategy, political science and international relations, and perhaps other fields. But condemnations, such as those issued recently, are also based on such purported knowledge and conjectures about the future, insofar as they include assertions on the disproportionality of the Israeli response based on assumptions about the prospective number of Israelis that would be killed in a counterfactually future Hamas attack.
The empirics necessary for a justified condemnation are not so different from the empirics necessary for moral guidance. Condemners should, in principle, believe themselves capable of giving the moral guidance that they fail to give. Indeed, this is all the more so in the case of the Oxford Open Letter, the signatories of which appeal to their authority as ‘scholars of political science, political philosophy, ethics, history, geography, law and the Middle East’. Surely the signatories’ wide range of expertise qualifies them to provide sound empirically-informed moral guidance.
So it is not for lack of relevant empirical knowledge that condemners fail to provide advice, and this brings me to what I really find disturbing about the lack of provision of moral guidance.
When see someone as a friend or someone you care for, you are willing to provide them with moral guidance; you care for their soul and you want them to be good. The absence of moral guidance by philosophical condemners conveys that they do not think of Israelis as friends whom they want to morally improve. Perhaps, worse, it reflects the sense that there is something morally improper about providing Israelis with guidance and advice, as it would be perhaps morally obscene for a priest taking confession to give to moral guidance (even the right moral guidance) to an abominable active Nazi war criminal.
If you have a pre-existing friendship with someone, regardless of whether it is acceptable to have that friendship, and you think that the friend did something morally wrong, your first duty is not to publicly condemn, but rather to provide moral advice. Admittedly, this cuts both ways: perhaps Hamas would have a valid complaint against Qatar, if Qatar had publicly condemned its actions before privately criticizing them and offering moral advice (perhaps Qatar actually did so). And this may be so even though Qatar’s friendship with Hamas is perverse. It is also, of course, true that if a friend becomes a moral monster or a beast (or turns out to have been so all along, unbeknownst to the friend), then the friendship is over and so are most of the duties that come with it.
Clearly the fact that issuing mere condemnations violates friendly duties (as well as professional duties, as argued below) does not imply that everyone should be a friend of Israel. The argument applies only to those who up to now been or seen themselves as friends of Israel. These include at minimum those who wish well to Israelis, care about them, and empathize with their present predicament.
They may also include those who see themselves as friends of the Palestinian people, too, and so face conflicting friendship duties. There is no contradiction between offering moral advice to Israel and at the same time seeking help for Palestinian civilians (as well as providing moral advice to Palestinian non-Hamas collective agents). In fact, concern for Palestinian civilians goes hand in hand with trying to get the Israelis to abide by the relevant moral constraints, which is naturally part of what moral advice amounts to. Moreover, friendship towards Israel is a lever that can and is used at the diplomatic level (by the US and Germany, for example) to encourage Israel to exercise moderation in the pursuit of any just aims it has, and to do so in part for the sake of its friendship with these countries, in a way that alleviates the suffering of Palestinian civilians.
Just to make clear, these points do not aim directly to elucidate the nature of general friendly duties as concern this conflict, but to rescue the spirit in with which we as moral philosophers should behave when acting in this capacity (for example when, writing open letters qua moral philosophers). We should aim to improve those whom we address, just as a friend would. This was the original intent of one of our philosophical exemplars: Socrates. Why—asked Vlastos—did Socrates roam the streets of Athens “forcing himself on people who have neither taste nor talent for philosophy” rather than sticking to “congenial and accomplished fellow-seekers after moral truth?” The reason was that he took it as his duty to improve the souls of his fellow citizens, particularly those whose soul was in the worst health.
In short, it is for judges to condemn and it is for philosophers is to talk, even—or rather, particularly—to the morally flawed.
It could be objected that Israel has shown zero good will to become morally better, so it would be naïve to address it with moral advice. Doing so might also be thought reprehensible because it would make Israel respectable by misleadingly portraying it as in possession of moral capacities it lacks. The right thing, it may be thought, is to condemn it publicly. Note, however, that Israel is not an ideological movement with fixed pre-defined goals, in contrast to Hamas (which takes as a goal the destruction of Israel). Even though historically speaking Israel is the product of Zionism (just as say modern unified Italy is historically the product of Italian risorgimento ideology), Israel, being a state, does not suffer from the rigidity and obdurancy of an ideological movement. While Netanyahu’s ears may be morally deaf (both to advice and condemnations) there are many Israelis who are now trying to figure out what is the morally acceptable way of defending the country and ultimately themselves and their families. There are many Israeli soldiers who need to be reminded of what they may and may not do and must be guided as to how to deal with battlefield moral dilemmas. Moral advice to Israelis is far from being a naïve waste of time.
Condemnations are also morally problematic when considered from the point of view of professional ethics. A physician should not simply produce a diagnosis but also a prescribe a treatment—so long as she has reason to believe that the patient in interested in health. Moral philosophers and political scientists must surely appreciate how complex the situation that we Israelis are facing is. We are facing the sort of problems experts in many various fields have trained themselves over decades to be able to help with. But, again, guidance is withdrawn, perhaps to avoid any suspicion of complicity. You don’t want to be the doctor advising the torturer on when to pause the interrogation just to let the victim recover enough before the start of the next round of torture. But what if you can offer an alternative to torture to achieve the defensive purposes that were sought by using these means? This analogy is of course—intentionally—a gross misrepresentation of what is going on. But it captures the suspicion that perhaps the reason some of the experts issue condemnations but refrain from providing guidance is not, or not only, that they object to Israel’s ius in bello conduct in Gaza but also, and perhaps principally, because they do not morally identify with Israel’s chosen defensive goals (the destruction of Hamas), and think Israel does not have a just cause for going to war.
Even if many of the condemners do not feel this way, at bottom, condemnation in the absence of moral guidance comes off as callous because it conveys that, while the condemners acknowledge that finding a morally acceptable way of defending of Israeli civilians from Hamas is a problem, it is not, despite their expertise, their problem—and that’s bad for both the Israelis and the Palestinians.
The post Condemnations, Moral Guidance, and Gaza (guest post) first appeared on Daily Nous.
Video: Israeli reserve colonel says Oct 7 killings were ‘mass Hannibal’ directive by IDF, not Hamas
Israeli media interview supports eyewitness accounts and inadvertent admission by Netanyahu spokesman that Israeli military, not Hamas, responsible for most deaths at Kibbutz Be’eri
A candid interview with a senior Israeli Defence Force (IDF) reserve pilot corroborates reports from eyewitnesses that Israeli forces were responsible for most deaths in the 7 October kibbutz raid – and not Palestinian resistance group Hamas.
The ‘Hannibal directive’, an instruction to the military to kill both hostages and raiders to prevent hostages being taken into captivity, was officially repealed in 2008, but Colonel Nof Erez said that he and his fellow pilots have been practising it for the past twenty years – and that the carnage at Kibbutz Be’eri was a ‘mass Hannibal’, with helicopter gunships shooting indiscriminately at cars leaving the area, without knowing whether they contained hostages or not.
Erez, speaking to Israeli media outlet Haaretz and translated by Asian news magazine The Cradle, said that the absence of any Israeli forces on the ground at the time ruled out any chance of ground coordination of the air assault – meaning that the helicopters would have been shooting at any target that moved:
Speaking with Haaretz, Israeli reserve pilot Col. Nof Erez describes Israeli army's response to Oct. 7 as "MASS HANNIBAL."
The Hannibal Directive orders the army to kill their own to prevent them being taken captive. pic.twitter.com/5IrERAAtVl— The Cradle (@TheCradleMedia) November 20, 2023
Survivors of the slaughter have said that they were treated well by the Hamas raiders, but that Israeli forces fired indiscriminately – with one eyewitness reporting that her husband had been killed by Israeli bullets – and the kibbutz security head said that houses had been shelled to bring them down on their occupants and kill them and the Hamas fighters.
And last week former Israeli ambassador Mark Regev, now a key Netanyahu adviser, inadvertently admitted that the many charred bodies had been burned by Israeli weapons – as long suspected by military experts and commentators who knew that Hamas does not have weapons that will do it – when he said that two hundred bodies had been thought to be Israeli but were in fact Palestinians.
Western media and politicians remain stubbornly silent on these facts, allowing the Israeli regime to continue to deceive the UK and US public with lurid and entirely unevidenced tales – what has been put forward as supposed evidence has rapidly fallen apart – of rapes and beheadings to justify Israel’s war crimes and mass murder of Palestinian civilians in Gaza.
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Video: Israel’s latest ‘evidence’ of Al Shifa Hamas base is embarrassingly feeble
CCTV footage – in a hospital the Israelis claimed had taped up all its cameras – showing wounded men being taken into a hospital is supposed to be proof Al Shifa hospital is a Hamas base
IDF spokesman Daniel Hagari claiming a ‘hostage’ shows no signs of being hurt
The Israeli military’s attempts to justify its incessant bombing of Gaza’s hospitals and schools by claiming that Al Shifa – Gaza’s largest hospital – was a Hamas base started feebly and have become an international embarrassment.
‘Evidence’ so far put forward has been full of holes, including claiming an IDF laptop on a desk was a Hamas computer – and a claim so transparently false that even the BBC felt obliged to point out the obvious problems and changes in a supposed weapons stash between the IDF publishing a video of it and them allowing the BBC in to film.
And now, IDF propaganda-pusher Daniel Hagari is telling us to believe that Israel has ‘concrete evidence’ of Hamas’s use of the base, because of CCTV footage showing them bringing in two men – when at least one of them is clearly badly wounded and the other is staggering like he might well be and appears to have blood on his shirt.
It’s impossible to tell from the footage – if it’s genuine at all – whether the wounded men are Palestinian or Israeli – or, as Hagari claims, from the Far East – but we’re supposed to think that bringing two wounded men into a hospital is ‘conclusive proof’ of anything except that, well duh, you take wounded people to a hospital if you’re a humane human being.
Hagari also claims ‘Hamas’ bringing military trucks into a hospital is illegal, yet then goes on in his own presentation to show they are bringing wounded people into the hospital for treatment – the war crime would be to not bring them to the hospital:
And even if the men in Hagari’s video are hostages, Hamas is unlikely to have shot them and then try to save their lives – and evidence is now piling high that the deaths and woundings at the Beeri kibbutz were caused by Israeli troops ordered to destroy houses and vehicles even though they knew they might be killing Israelis – including an inadvertent admission by a senior Netanyahu spokesman – though this is unsurprisingly being ignored by the UK’s so-called ‘mainstream’ media.
When in a hole, you should stop digging – but Israel is so desperate to justify its war crimes that it is embarrassing itself more with each attempt. It would be funny if they weren’t trying to cover genocide, ethnic cleansing and war crimes.
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VIDEO: What really happened on October 7?
The Grayzone’s Max Blumenthal joins Chris Hedges to discuss his investigation into Israel’s indiscriminate use of heavy weapons against Israeli citizens on October 7, and the shock-and-awe campaign of misinformation it subsequently employed to create political space for its brutal assault on Gaza. This was originally published by The Real News Network. Editor’s note: Since the publication of this interview, an Israeli police investigation has confirmed that Israeli Apache helicopters killed numerous Israeli citizens at and around the Nova electronic […]
The post VIDEO: What really happened on October 7? first appeared on The Grayzone.
The post VIDEO: What really happened on October 7? appeared first on The Grayzone.
Video: Israeli govt spokesman lets slip that kibbutz victims killed by Israel, not Hamas
Former UK ambassador Regev gives away reality of burned bodies when he tries to cover for Israel’s over-estimate of Israeli death toll in 7 October incident
The former Israeli ambassador to the UK, Mark Regev – now an adviser to Israel’s extremist prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu – has inadvertently admitted that Israel was responsible for the deaths of those claimed by the apartheid regime as Israeli dead.
Challenged by MSNBC interviewer Mehdi Hasan about Israel’s revision of its claimed death toll from 1,400 to 1,200, Regev answered that two hundred bodies they had thought were ‘ours’ were in fact Hamas operatives:
But as French entrepreneur Arnaud Bertrand has pointed out in a tweet highlighting the video clip, this means that for six weeks the Israelis believed that burned bodies in cars and houses were their own people – and that they were burned by Israel, since Hamas would not have had the inclination – and indeed did not have the means – to incinerate their own operatives during the raid:
So 200 burned bodies previously identified as Israelis were in fact Hamas… Which tends to confirm they were burned by Israeli fire (doubtful they self-immolated) and would therefore mean that Israel thought during a month they’d burned 200 of theirs.
Israeli survivors of the carnage of the raid have told media in their own country that the Hamas raiders were kind and polite, while Israel’s forces opened fire indiscriminately on the kibbutz homes and killed hundreds of Israelis – one survivor attributed her own husband’s death directly to it. Helicopter gunship pilots also reported the ‘dilemma’ of firing on cars without knowing whether they contained Israelis or Palestinians. The kibbutz’s security manager told Israeli journalists that soldiers had been ordered to fire on Israeli homes to ‘bring them down’ on hostages and raiders alike, to ensure Hamas fighters were killed. According to Israeli newspaper Haaretz, Israeli troops even called in an airstrike on their own facility – with Israeli troops inside as well as Hamas fighters.
None of this, despite being widely circulated internationally and supported by extensive evidence, has been reported by UK and other western media determined to present the 7 October incident as wilful and barbaric slaughter of innocents by Hamas. Claims of rape have ‘slipped away’, according to the Israeli press – and supposed video evidence has been proven to be false – and reports of murdered babies have been disproven by Israel’s own casualty lists. Yet continue to be repeated as fact by politicians and complicit ‘journalists’ and commentators.
The supposed murderousness of Hamas during the raid has been used by Israel and its supporters to justify their ‘maximum damage’ bombing and ethnic cleansing of Gaza, which is killing thousands upon thousands of civilians – around half of them children and another quarter women – and their bombing of schools, hospitals and homes.
But Regev’s accidental admission, as he tried to cover Israel’s barbarity and deception even toward its own, appears to put beyond any reasonable doubt of the truth of eyewitness and investigative reports that Israel’s response to the Hamas raid was in fact responsible for most if not all of the deaths surrounding the kibbutz. So much so that for weeks Israel didn’t even know that some of the people it immolated were not their own citizens. That homicidal action is now directed at the innocent civilians of Gaza, killing thousands and maiming and traumatising many thousands more.
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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.
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