War on Gaza: Israel wants to finish the job Washington started after 9/11

As the conflict expands across the Middle East, western leaders refuse to implement any red lines for Tel Aviv

[First published by Middle East Eye]

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Nearly a decade ago, a leading Israeli human rights activist divulged to me a private conversation he’d had a short time earlier with one of Europe’s ambassadors to Israel. He was shaken by the exchange.

The ambassador’s country was then widely seen as one of the most sympathetic in the West to the Palestinian people. The Israeli activist had expressed concerns about Europe’s inaction in the face of relentless Israeli attacks on Palestinian rights and systematic violations of international law. 

At the time, Israel was enforcing a lengthy siege on Gaza that had deprived more than two million people there of the essentials of life, and it had repeatedly bombed urban areas, killing hundreds of civilians. 

In the occupied West Bank and East Jerusalem, Israel had intensified its expansion of illegal Jewish settlements, leading to a surge in violence from settler militias and the Israeli army. Palestinians were being killed and driven off their land.

The activist asked the ambassador a simple question: What would Israel need to do for his government to act against it? Where was the red line?

The ambassador paused as he thought hard. And then, with a shrug of the shoulders, he responded: there was nothing Israel could do. There was no red line.

A decade ago, that comment might have been interpreted as evasive. A year into Israel’s erasure of Gaza, it sounds utterly prophetic.

There is no red line. And more importantly, there never has been. That conversation took place many years before 7 October 2023, when Hamas broke out of Gaza and killed more than 1,000 Israelis. 

That date is not quite the turning point, the rupture, that it is universally presented as. 

Hamas’s brief jail-break from Gaza certainly triggered an explosive desire for revenge among Israelis, who had grown used to being able to subjugate and dispossess the Palestinian people cost-free.

But more importantly, it offered a pretext for Israel’s leaders to erase Gaza – to carry out a plan they had long harboured. And similarly, it offered western states the pretext they needed to stand with Israel and excuse its savagery as Israel’s “right to defend itself”.

Horror show

Call the events unfolding over the past 12 months in Gaza what you will: self-defence, mass slaughter, or a “plausible genocide”, as the world’s highest court has termed it. What can’t be debated is that it has been a horror show.

In the first two months alone, Israel destroyed more of Gaza proportionally than the Allies managed in Germany during the entire Second World War. It carried out more air strikes on Gaza than the US and UK did against the Islamic State group over a period of three years in Iraq. 

The official figures are that Israel has so far killed more than 42,000 Palestinians in Gaza – more than half of them women and children – through relentless and indiscriminate bombing of the tiny, overcrowded enclave. 

According to human rights groups, more children were killed by Israel in the first four months of its bombing campaign in Gaza than were killed in four years of all other global conflicts combined. 

Oxfam reported last week that in the past two decades, no conflict anywhere else in the world has come close to killing so many children over a 12-month period. 

But the true death toll is far higher. Gaza, bombed into 42 million tonnes of rubble, lost the ability to count its dead and wounded many months ago. 

Last week, a group of nearly 100 American doctors and nurses who have volunteered in Gaza’s healthcare system as Israel has systematically eviscerated it wrote an open letter to US President Joe Biden. They estimated that the death toll was nearly three times higher than the official figure. 

They added: “With only marginal exceptions, everyone in Gaza is sick, injured, or both. This includes every national aid worker, every international volunteer, and probably every Israeli hostage: every man, woman, and child.”

Medieval-style blockade

Back in July, a letter published in the Lancet medical journal put the figure still higher. Using standard modelling techniques, drawing on data from previous wars in which densely populated urban areas were destroyed, a team of experts concluded that Gaza’s death toll would reach much closer to 200,000, based on conservative parameters. 

That would amount to nearly 10 percent of Gaza’s population killed outright by Israeli bombs, disappeared under rubble, dead from medical conditions that could not be treated, or dying from mass malnutrition after a year of an Israeli medieval-style blockade of food, water and fuel.

Israel appears certain that there are no red lines, and as a result, things have only gotten worse since the Lancet letter.

In September, deliveries of food and aid into Gaza sank to their lowest level in seven months, according to figures from the United Nations and Israel. 

In other words, Israel’s stranglehold on aid to Gaza’s starving population has actually intensified since May, when Karim Khan, the British chief prosecutor of the International Criminal Court (ICC), requested arrest warrants for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Defence Minister Yoav Gallant for crimes against humanity. 

One of the main charges was that the pair were using starvation as a weapon of war. 

Israeli leaders are so confident that the US and Europe are watching their backs that, according to a Reuters report last week, Israel’s military authorities have in recent days been blocking UN-chartered aid convoys from entering Gaza. 

Netanyahu clearly isn’t worried about being dragged to the dock of a war crimes tribunal at The Hague any time soon.

One-sided anniversary

If western politicians have no red lines when it comes to Israel, much the same can be said of the West’s establishment media. 

They barely report on conditions in Gaza anymore, apart from the occasional headline figure of deaths from Israel’s latest bombardment of a school shelter, refugee camp or mosque. 

Media outlets marked the anniversary of 7 October this week but, predictably, most have done so from an exclusively Israeli perspective – as the day when 1,150 Israelis and foreigners were killed during Hamas’s attack, and a mix of some 250 captured soldiers and civilian hostages were taken into the enclave.

The BBC, for example, has been heavily promoting its documentary We Will Dance Again, recounting the experiences of Israelis who attended the Nova rave close to Gaza, which turned into a killing field. 

Similarly, Britain’s Channel 4 aired a documentary titled One Day in October, billed as “an intimate and shocking account of the Kibbutz Be’eri atrocity”. Some 100 kibbutz inhabitants were killed that day and 30 hostages seized. 

Notably, more than a dozen of those residents in Be’eri were killed not by Hamas, but by the Israeli army, after an Israeli tank was ordered to fire into one of the homes where Hamas was holed up with them. 

Israeli army commanders on 7 October invoked the highly controversial Hannibal directive, authorising soldiers to kill their comrades to stop them from being taken captive. On that day, Israel appears to have applied the directive to civilians too. One of the people killed by the Israeli tank fire in Be’eri was a 12-year-old girl, Liel Hetzroni. 

Western media outlets have so far almost completely avoided drawing attention to the role Israel’s Hannibal directive played that day.

This week, in a sign of how one-sided the media’s portrayal has become, the Guardian hurriedly removed from its website a review criticising the Ch4 film for failing to provide any context for the Hamas attack on October 7 – decades of military oppression and siege conditions on Gaza. The review provoked a predictable storm of protest from leading Zionist journalists.

No consequences

7 October was not only the day Hamas launched its surprise attack on Israel; it was also the day Israel began its slaughter of Palestinians in revenge. 

The day marks the start of what the International Court of Justice (ICJ) has concluded amounts to a “plausible genocide” – one that Israel has barred foreign correspondents from covering in person. Instead, the slaughter has been live-streamed for 12 months variously by the population under attack, and by the Israeli soldiers committing war crimes in plain view.

In a sign of how odiously anti-Palestinian western media coverage has become over the past year, the supposedly liberal Observer newspaper – the Sunday sister paper of the Guardian – chose to give space last weekend to British Jewish writer Howard Jacobson to equate the reporting of the thousands of young children killed and buried alive in Gaza with a medieval, antisemitic “blood libel”. 

The paper even chose to illustrate the column with a photo of a blood-smeared doll – presumably suggesting that the massive death toll reported by every human rights organisation was false. 

The only major broadcaster to try to honour the civilian victims in Gaza and the experiences of those who have survived – just barely – since last October was not a western outlet. It was the Qatari channel Al Jazeera. 

Its documentary, Investigating War Crimes in Gaza, uses footage shot by Israeli soldiers and posted to social media as they carried out horrifying atrocities against the civilian population.

The soldiers’ delight in broadcasting their war crimes – and the licence they received from Israel’s military authorities to do so – underscores the confidence in Israel that there will never be any consequences.

Unlike the western media, Al Jazeera humanises the Palestinian victims of Israeli atrocities, giving them a voice and a backstory that the western media has largely reserved for the Israeli victims of 7 October.

Courts dragging their feet

Similarly, there appear to be no meaningful red lines, at least so far, for the world’s two highest courts in responding to Israel’s destruction of Gaza.

The ICJ agreed to put Israel on trial for genocide back in January, after hearing the case made by lawyers representing South Africa, and Israel’s response. 

One might have assumed, given that genocide is the ultimate international crime, that the court would have fast-tracked a definitive ruling. After all, the people of Gaza do not have time on their side. But a year into the slaughter and imposed starvation, there is only silence.

The same court has in the meantime ruled belatedly that Israel’s 57-year military occupation of the Palestinian territories is illegal, that Palestinians have a right to resist, and that Israel must withdraw immediately from Gaza, the West Bank and East Jerusalem.

Western politicians and media have ignored the significance of that ruling, for obvious reasons. It provides the historical context for Hamas’s breakout from Gaza after its illegal siege by Israel for 17 years. Hamas is proscribed as a terrorist group in the UK and other countries.

The problem for the ICJ is twofold. It is under enormous pressure from the US global superpower not to declare a genocide in Gaza by Washington’s favourite client state. Such a verdict would tear off the veil, exposing western powers as fully complicit in that supreme crime. 

Secondly, the court has no enforcement mechanisms outside the UN Security Council, where Washington enjoys a veto that it routinely wields to protect Israel. 

On much the same grounds, the ICC is also dragging its feet. Khan says he has enough evidence to issue arrest warrants against Netanyahu and Gallant for crimes against humanity. European states are obligated to enforce any arrest warrants, so unlike an ICJ ruling, this one could be carried out.  

But for months, the judges of the ICC have delayed approving the warrants, despite the urgency, apparently because they, too, are fearful of incurring Washington’s wrath. 

Both courts can be in no doubt that taking on Washington in these circumstances is a suicide mission.

On the one hand, Israel has shown that it will not abide by any of the legal red lines once insisted upon by the West to avoid a repeat of the horrors of the Second World War. And western powers have demonstrated that not only do they have no intention of restraining Israel, they will assist in its violations. 

On the other hand, by hesitating month after month, the two international courts discredit the very rules of war they are there to uphold. They have returned the world to an era of jungle law, but now in a nuclear age.

International law is being shredded in the maw of a US-imposed, self-serving “international order”.

On the warpath

It is that utter lack of accountability from the centres of power – from western politicians, western media and world courts – that has paved Israel’s way to escalate its bloodletting to now encompass the occupied West Bank, Lebanon, Yemen and Syria.

Israel’s theatre of war is rapidly expanding to fully embrace Iran, too. The world is braced for an imminent Israeli attack. 

There is already an undeclared regional war, and the risk grows daily of this expanding into a world war – and with that, all the inherent risks of a nuclear confrontation. But why? 

For Israel’s apologists - a group that includes the entire western establishment, it seems – the narrative is a simple one, though rarely articulated clearly because its racist premises are so hard to miss.

To make Israelis feel safe again, Israel needs to reassert its military deterrence by crushing Hamas and its supporters in Gaza. To do so, Israel must also take on those in the wider region who refuse to submit to Israel’s – and by extension the West’s – civilisational superiority. 

The mantra of Israel and its apologists is “de-escalation through escalation”. In blunter language, the policy is an updated colonial one of “beat the savages into submission”. 

Israel’s critics – now mostly silenced as “antisemites” – argue that Israelis can never be made safe simply through military aggression rather than diplomatic solutions. Violence begets more violence. Indeed, Israel’s decades of structural violence against the entire Palestinian people led us to this point.

And, they note, Israel hasn’t just ignored diplomatic options; it is actively tearing down any chance of them bearing fruit. It assassinated Hamas political chief Ismail Haniyeh, a relatively moderate figure, as he was leading negotiations towards a long-anticipated ceasefire in Gaza. 

And it now seems likely that Israel chose to kill Hassan Nasrallah, Hezbollah’s leader, shortly after he had agreed, along with the Lebanese government, to a 21-day ceasefire while the international community worked on a peace deal. 

'Clash of civilisations'

But this only gets halfway to understanding the problem.

True, Israel now appears determined to finish once and for all the job it began in 1948 of eradicating the Palestinian people - the native population its western-backed, settler-colonial project was predicated on removing. 

Israel has repeatedly failed to ethnically cleanse historic Palestine, while the fallback position – decades of apartheid rule – could never be more than a holding measure, as South Africa’s experience proved.

Now, armed with 7 October as the pretext, Israel has rolled out a genocidal programme instead; first in Gaza, and, if it gets away with it, soon in the occupied West Bank.

But Israel has long had a much grander ambition – one that it is getting a second bite of the cherry to achieve. 

More than 20 years ago, a group of extreme ideologues known as the neoconservatives seized the foreign policy initiative during the presidency of George W Bush. They have since become a permanent foreign policy elite in Washington, whichever administration is in power. 

What is distinctive about the neoconservatives is the centrality of Israel to their worldview. They regard Israel’s unapologetic Jewish supremacism and militarism as a model for the West – one in which it returns to an unashamed white supremacism and militarism in a revived spirit of colonialism. 

Like Israel, the neoconservatives see the world in terms of a never-ending clash of civilisations against the so-called Muslim world. In this context, international law becomes an obstacle to the West’s victory, rather than a guarantee of global order.

In addition, the neoconservatives view Israel as the battering ram to keep the US in charge of international affairs in the world’s main oil spigot, the Middle East. Israel lies at the heart of Washington’s policy of full-spectrum global dominance.

The neoconservatives have long been sold on Israel’s strategy for achieving such dominance in the Middle East: by Balkanising it. The aim has been to demand utter subservience to Israel, with any source of dissent not only punished, but the social structures that support it crushed into ruins.

In Gaza, that method has been on full show. In destroying government buildings, universities, mosques, churches, libraries, schools, hospitals and even bakeries, Israel has sought to reduce the Palestinian population to the barest of human existence. National identity, and the desire to resist, are luxuries no one can afford. Survival is all.

Israel is beginning to roll out the same scheme for the occupied West Bank, Lebanon and Iran.

Destabilising the Middle East

None of this is new. Just as Israel is currently grasping the pretext of 7 October to justify its rampage, the neoconservatives earlier seized on al-Qaeda’s destruction of New York’s Twin Towers on 9/11 as their opportunity to “remake the Middle East”. 

In 2007, former Nato commander Wesley Clark recounted a meeting at the Pentagon shortly after the US invasion of Afghanistan. An officer told him: “We are going to attack and destroy the governments in seven countries in five years. We’re going to start with Iraq, and then we’re going to move to Syria, Lebanon, Libya, Somalia, Sudan and Iran.” 

Clark added of the neoconservatives: “They wanted us to destabilise the Middle East, turn it upside down, make it under our control.”

As I documented in my 2008 book Israel and the Clash of Civilisations, Israel was supposed to carry out a central chunk of Washington’s post-Iraq plan, starting with its war on Lebanon in 2006. Israel’s attack there was supposed to drag in Syria and Iran, giving the US a pretext to expand the war.

This was what the US secretary of state of the time, Condoleezza Rice, meant when she spoke of the “birth pangs of a new Middle East”. 

The plan went awry largely because Israel got bogged down in phase one, in Lebanon. It blitzed cities like Beirut with US-supplied bombs, but its soldiers struggled against Hezbollah in a ground invasion of southern Lebanon.

The West subsequently found other ways to deal with Syria and Libya. 

To the bitter end

Now we are back where we started, nearly 20 years later. Israel, Hezbollah and Iran have all been preparing for this second round. 

The western-Israeli goal, as before, is to destroy Lebanon and Iran, just as Gaza has been destroyed. The aim is to smash the infrastructure of Lebanon and Iran, their governing institutions, and their social structures. It is to plunge the Lebanese and Iranian people into a primaeval state, where they can cohere only into simple, tribal units and fight among themselves for the bare essentials.

There is no evidence that this goal is any more realisable today than it was two decades ago. 

Even Israel’s top military spokesperson, Daniel Hagari, has had to admit: “Anyone who thinks we can eliminate Hamas is wrong.” 

The Israeli army is once again floundering in southern Lebanon against Hezbollah’s guerrilla fighters. And Iran’s very limited, sampler ballistic-missile attack on Israeli military sites last week showed that its arsenal can get past Israel’s US-supplied defence systems and hit its targets. 

But Israel has made clear that for it, and for the US military titan behind it, there is no going back. 

Last week, US State Department spokesperson Matthew Miller said the quiet part out loud: “We’ve never wanted to see a diplomatic resolution with Hamas.” 

According to “conservative” calculations from Brown University’s Costs of War project, the US has already spent more than $22.7bn on military assistance to Israel over the past year – equivalent to more than $10,000 for every Palestinian man, woman and child living in Gaza. Washington’s pockets appear to be bottomless. 

For Israel and the US, there are no red lines. The same holds true in European capitals. They appear ready to continue this to the bitter end.

[Many thanks to Matthew Alford for the audio reading of this article.]

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