David Stairs


Gaza, before……

With pro-Palestinian sit-ins criss-crossing the nations’ campuses at the end of the ’23-’24 academic year, it seemed like maybe the message about Israel’s ongoing genocidal assaults in Gaza was finally sinking in. But a naive and myopic Congress still approved billions in military aid to the Israelis in spite of their onslaught. The phrase “Israel has a right to defend itself,” coded language for military impunity generated by Tel Aviv’s “hasbara” or propaganda campaign, was on every gullible congressional representative’s lips, proof of the effectiveness of Israel’s dissimulation.

Anyone unsure of Israel’s ultimate intentions need only read Norman Finkelstein’s Gaza: An Inquest into its Martyrdom. Four times since 2008 Israel has fomented an excuse to invade Gaza, destroying more property and killing more Palestinians each time. According to the Goldstone Report (2009), the purpose of 2008’s Operation Cast Lead was to “punish, humiliate and terrorize a civilian population.” It lasted 22 days, killed 350 Palestinian children, and destroyed 6,000 homes.


…..and after

In 2014, with rapprochment between Hamas and the Palestinian Authority threatening Israeli hegemony, the IDF (Israel Defense Forces) launched Operation Protective Edge. Under the pretense of attacking Hamas tunnel systems this incursion lasted 51 days, killed 550 children and destroyed 18,000 homes. The actual goal was pursuit of the Hannibal Directive, which states that Israeli military personnel, if captured, will be killed rather than exchanged. In this case Lieutenant Hadar Goldin had been captured by Hamas. Israel unleashed a firestorm in Rafah, killing Goldin and leveling whole neighborhoods.

Finkelstein, a Jewish American political scientist and the son of Holocaust survivors, compares the Israeli treatment of Gazans to what his parents endured under the Nazis in the Warsaw Ghetto. He is opposed to the efforts of the Zionist movement to isolate and deny human rights to Palestinians. He contends that Hamas attacks on Israel are caused by Israeli provocations, from the land blockade to the sea embargo and specific events like the commando raid on the Turkish freighter Mavi Marmara in 2010. Israel’s military operations in Gaza over the past fifteen years have specifically targeted Gazan civilian infrastructure like flour mills, hospitals, schools, concrete manufactories, first responders and ambulances, and farms, forcing Gazans into an impoverished dependence upon their Israeli overseers.

While maintaining that its military functions under legal rules of engagement, and delivers attacks with “proportional” amounts of force, Israel and its leaders actually have dramatically increased the levels of destruction they visit upon the people of Gaza, all the while arguing for their “ethical” approach to target selection. But the disproportionality of the statistics has lead to a world-wide outcry, culminating with South Africa’s efforts to have Israeli leaders indicted by the ICC for crimes against humanity.

In 2023, after Hamas’s attacks in southern Israel, the IDF invaded northern Gaza in another scorched earth offensive. The numbers of sorties flown by the Israeli Air Force, and the numbers of artillery shells fired by the IDF have dwarfed anything in previous deployments. Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu expressed the determination to continue the incursion until Hamas was completely defeated. Since October 7th 2023 34,735 Gazans have been killed and 78,108 have been injured according to ABC News. 1700 Israelis have died, a 20:1 ratio. 86,000 housing units and 25,000 other buildings in Gaza have been destroyed. 32 Gazan hospitals have been closed, and over 100 schools and universities. Reports from human rights organizations have consistently emphasized the imbalance of the devastation Gazans are facing.

Finkelstein quotes Israeli soldiers who were interviewed in Breaking the Silence about Operation Protective Edge in 2014; their testimonies are sobering. “I remember that the level of destruction looked insane to me,” one said. “The bit about shelling purposelessly? No, because when you look at the bigger picture, that’s something we were doing all the time. We were firing purposelessly all day long. Hamas was nowhere to be seen,” said another. “It was total destruction in there— the photos on line are child’s play compared to what we saw there in reality…. I never saw anything like it,” observed a third. And these are quotes about a much smaller operation than the 2023-24 incursion.

There can be little doubt after reading Finkelstein’s account, copiously documented with citations from the U.N. and various human rights organizations, that the Israeli military objective is to make the Gaza strip unsuitable for habitation, and after the displacement and emigration of its Palestinian citizenry to convert it to Israeli settlement. This has already been happening with the armed settler movement in the occupied West Bank.

In describing Israel’s indiscriminate targeting of civilians in Gaza Norman Finkelstein reaches the devastating conclusion that Israeli society is “united in the dual conviction…—that Arab life was worthless and Jewish life worth its weight in gold.” He maintains that legal and administrative reforms cannot heal the sickness of “…a state that every couple of years launches— with overwhelming popular support and without a hint of remorse— yet another high-tech blitzkreig against a defenseless, trapped civilian population.”

It is only with the most extreme cupidity that Gentile collaborators in America continue to support Israel on the grounds of it being the Middle East’s premier democracy. The canard of “anti-semitism,” floated by Israel and its apologists as a form of distraction from criticisms of Israeli massacres has no remaining value. Finkelstein refers to Israel as the “Jewish suprematist state,” and cogently argues that through a siege-like occupation, a strangling blockade, and four invasions the steadfastness of the Gazan people has demonstrated their “indomitable will.”

Clearly, the leaders of the United States are out of touch. President Biden can pretend to hold back devastating munitions after the war criminal Netanyahu has already flattened everything, but Joe isn’t fooling many. It behooves him and the rest of the callow representatives of the American government to emerge from their 75 year Rip Van Winkle slumber, and adapt to contemporary reality by joining the world community in condemning Israel’s war of extermination. Otherwise, history will hold them complicit in this most vengeful of modern genocides.

UPDATE (5-29-24) Israel’s lackeys in Congress continue to equate terrorism with the Palestinian independence movement, and propaganda organizations, like the Anti-Defamation League (ADL), push for extending U.S. anti-terrorism laws that would throttle truthful reporting of Israel’s terror against the occupied territories and make human rights support for Palestine illegal. A recent white paper on this topic can be found here.

David Stairs is the founding editor of the Design-Altruism-Project.