After speaking with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on the telephone last week, President Biden affirmed that the State of Israel “has the right to defend itself” against rocket attacks from Gaza. Taking the president’s comments as confirmation that the United States was washing its hands of the mounting crisis in the Middle East, the State of Israel immediately escalated its aerial offensive against the Palestinian enclave, and mobilized ground troops for an invasion. (Whether Israeli troops actually invaded Gaza is an open question; the Israel Defense Forces initially reported that it had, before abruptly denying its own report an hour later.)
There has been a pathetic inevitability to all of this. The sequence of events that led to the tragedy in Gaza was as predictable as the overused plot of a tired romantic comedy: Israeli authorities upheld the eviction of Palestinian families in occupied East Jerusalem to make way for an illegal Israeli settlement… Palestinians in East Jerusalem organized demonstrations… Israeli police responded with heavy-handed force to clear the way for a right-wing Zionist parade through the Palestinian neighborhood around the Damascus Gate… Militants in Gaza fired volleys of unguided rockets into Israeli territory… Claiming the right to defend itself, the State of Israel responded with an overwhelming military offensive.
More predictable still – and far more pathetic because of it – was how the State of Israel’s supporters and Zionist proxies circled the wagons (itself, a time-worn cinematic cliché) to defend the Israeli government against criticism that, maybe, its brutal military response might be overkill. Always eager to parrot the party line at the expense of anything resembling truth, American Jewish Committee Executive Director David Harris tweeted an open letter, of sorts, to the State of Israel’s growing international gallery of critics.
If there was a “terror regime” on the border of the United States, he wrote, if “that regime amassed arms, fired 1000s of missiles, & said its goal is to destroy the neighbor, what would the neighbor do? It’d have no choice but to respond, just as Israel is doing.”
To Israel’s critics:
If there was a terror regime on border of 🇺🇸 or (fill in the blank),
If that regime amassed arms, fired 1000s of missiles, & said its goal is to destroy the neighbor,
What would the neighbor do?
It’d have no choice but to respond, just as Israel is doing.
— David Harris (@DavidHarrisAJC) May 13, 2021
Superficially, it seems like a slam dunk: The State of Israel has been attacked, so it has no other choice but to respond with devastating force. Indeed, it mobilizes one post-1948 Zionism’s most cherished canards, the idea that Israel is a beleaguered state “surrounded by enemies.” This was of course, certainly the case in 1948 when, the moment the State of Israel declared its independence and the British Mandate for Palestine expired at midnight on 15 May 1948,* armies from Syria, Transjordan, Egypt, Lebanon, and Iraq sped across the UN partition line to kill the infant state in its crib.
The 1948 war was brutal. The State of Israel was outnumbered and outgunned. The Israelis, armed with surplus Czech and French rifles, improvised artillery, some cast-off armored cars, and less than 100 used Spitfires and Czech-built Messerschmitts flown by a ragtag band of mercenaries and volunteers, defended and extended their territory, but at the cost of some 8,000 lives. The State of Israel’s origin myth was both miraculous and traumatic, and the narrative of the tiny, embattled Jewish state became a shibboleth of Zionism. “The reality is not quite so dramatic, for the existence of Israel is in no sense at stake,” the editorial board of the New York Times opined four years after independence. “At the same time, it is a fact that Israel is ringed around by enemies and is, in a sense, besieged.”
Indeed, the State of Israel has been attacked only once since 1948 by the military forces of its Arab neighbors and, though the first days of the 1973 war were dicey, and casualties were high, the hostile invasion was an abject failure. The Israelis have, more often, been the aggressors, joining Britain and France in their last-gasp imperialist adventure against Egypt in 1956, and launching a “pre-emptive” attack against its Arab neighbors after, as the historian Tom Segev noted in his book 1967: Israel, the War, and the Year That Transformed the Middle East, doing all they could to provoke Syrian and Egyptian bellicosity.
Today, with Syria and Iraq otherwise preoccupied by their own civil wars, peace treaties and normalized relations with Jordan and Egypt, and tacit working partnerships with Saudi Arabia and the Gulf States explicitly confirmed by last summer’s Abraham Accords, it is beyond the realm of reason to suggest that the State of Israel faces any existential threat from its Arab neighbors. In many ways, its relations with the Saudi and Emirati monarchies are actually warmer than those between the United States and its erstwhile allies in Europe and Canada. The State of Israel is more secure today than at any time in its 73-year history.
Yet, the fable of “the embattled Jewish state” has been repeated so often and so fervently that it has become something of a truism – a holy myth that Zionists cleave to more passionately than the laws of kashrut, and an axiom that leaders like President Biden lack either the courage or inclination to dispute. So, Harris can simply mobilize the specter of the State of Israel’s mythical vulnerability to a neighboring regime that has “amassed arms, fired 1000s of missiles, & said its goal is to destroy the neighbor,” and heads around the world obediently nod in unison: “Israel is besieged, it must defend itself.”
Make no mistake: Hamas, the political movement that governs Gaza and holds a majority of seats on the moribund Legislative Council of the Palestinian Authority, is a reactionary, vicious terrorist organization committed to the destruction of the State of Israel. Operating like a ruthless gang out of 1920s Chicago, it consolidated its rule in Gaza through violence, intimidation, and the elimination of rivals. Hamas’ monopoly on power has essentially bought the acquiescence of Gazans exhausted by decades of poverty and violence – abandoned by Egypt in 1967, immured in a ghetto of desperation by the State of Israel in the half-century since, they do not have an embarrassment of options.
And it is true that Hamas militants, about 35,000 of Gaza’s 2,000,000 residents (a little less than two percent of the population), have waged a war of terror against the State of Israel, firing barrages of unguided rockets (not the “missiles” of Harris’s imagination) and improvised mortars across the border, often as far as Tel Aviv, since 2001. Dozens of Israelis have died in these attacks, and almost 2,000 have been injured.
Hamas is a despicable organization, and the violence and destruction it has brought to Israeli life are real and horrifying. At the same time, it is worth noting that more than 6,000 Israelis have died in traffic accidents during in the 20 years since the rocket and mortar attacks began. While that should not serve to minimize the horror of Hamas’ attacks – rocket falling on your home is the stuff of nightmares – it is necessary to put the State of Israel’s military response in perspective.
On closer examination, all justifications for the brutal Israeli offensive in Gaza just evaporate, as arguments based on myths and lies invariably do. For one thing, the equivalence implied by Netanyahu’s rhetoric that “Israel will defend itself!” and Harris’s simplistic reasoning is utterly indefensible. Since the rocket offensive began, the State of Israel’s strategy has been to strangle the enclave even further with security barriers and economic sanctions, and to respond to each barrage with overwhelming force. The IDF has repeatedly fired artillery volleys, and sent helicopter gunships and F-16 fighter-bombers to pummel Gaza. It has answered every 50-pound rocket warhead with American-made 500-pound and 1,000-pound bombs. The Israeli government claims that it never targets civilians, and does not bomb indiscriminately, but in Gaza – the most densely-populated place on Earth, with more than 13,000 people occupying each square mile of territory. The 500-yard blast radius of a Mark-84 1,000-pound bomb causes a lot of indiscriminate damage, no matter how-well aimed.
So, the State of Israel officially regrets the “collateral damage” but shrugs when its bombs destroy homes and schools, and block the approaches to hospitals and emergency services with rubble so the injured cannot receive care. And what of the media tower IDF jets demolished last week, conveniently making the work of news organizations, like the Associated Press, who have been reporting from inside Gaza nearly impossible? The official Israeli line is that the building also housed Hamas militants. Setting aside the fact that AP has reported that there was no Hamas presence, the reality of Gaza is that there is no way to strike at the militants without killing and injuring noncombatants.
This is a vastly lopsided fight… And it is a very dirty war.
Most shameful is the fact that its stated aim – defending Israelis from terrorist violence – is unachievable, and that the State of Israel has gone to war against Gaza, and not just Hamas, while utterly rejecting any alternative solutions. The IDF, numbering some three million men and women on active service and in primary reserve, outnumbers the entire population of Gaza. It is one of the best-equipped and best-trained military forces on the planet, armed with supersonic jet fighters, tanks, submarines, and the Iron Dome air defense system. As vicious as Hamas might be, it is a poorly-armed rabble trapped inside a minuscule territory.
Yet, this latest war is the fifth all-out offensive that the State of Israel has launched against Gaza in the last fifteen years. Inevitably, the homes and buildings rebuilt since the last war will be reduced to ruin, and hundreds of Gazans – mostly non-combatants – will die, joining the 15,000 already maimed and 3,500 killed under the IDF’s bombs and shells. With resources strained, and support flagging, Hamas will agree to a ceasefire, and the shelling and bombing from both sides will stop.
But then it will start again; either Hamas will rashly respond to some provocation, or the State of Israel will brazenly break the ceasefire like it did in 2008.
One might hope that there was some way to end the cycle of violence; that, before next time, those Israelis, Zionists, and diaspora Jewish community leaders who so zealously support the State of Israel’s “right to defend itself” might ask why this keeps happening. How is Hamas able to mobilize Gazans’ support to the extent that it has remained in power while they live in misery? Gaza’s per capita gross domestic product is less than $900. According to the Tel Aviv-based New Family Organization, almost two-thirds of Gazans subsist on less than $2.50 per day. Even the most oppressive dictatorship requires the support, or at least the tacit consent of the ruled, and Gazans are miserable, desperate and enraged – conditions that mobilize support for Hamas and encourage violent resistance to the state that has contributed most to their misery and desperation.
The State of Israel’s ongoing blockade, the periodic airstrikes that drop bombs on schools and kill civilians are hardly likely to reduce their desperation and anger, and are thus unlikely either to weaken Hamas’s appeal, or ensure Israeli security. The State of Israel’s policies are almost certainly guaranteed to strengthen Hamas and ensure that Israelis will continue to feel threatened… And that’s the point.
Neither Netanyahu, nor his Likud party, nor Zionist chauvinists like Harris are really concerned about Israel’s security. Just as when the New York Times reviewed the situation in 1952, the security and “the existence of Israel is in no sense at stake.” What is at stake, in the fractious and fluid Israeli political culture, is power.
Netanyahu needs Hamas so that he can continue to monopolize power, avoid prosecution for corruption, and win the next election. Increasingly dependent on the most reactionary elements in Israeli society, he has deftly stoked the politics of fear. Hamas needs Netanyahu, the imminent threat of attack, and the inevitable provocation served up by Likud’s extremist partners to guarantee support for – or acquiescence to – its government by reliably ensuring that life within the Gaza security fence will be nigh unendurable well into the future.
This is not a war between the State of Israel and Hamas, nor between Israelis and Palestinians. It is between Likud and Hamas, and the two organizations, heirs to and advocates of militant, violent extremism, are locked in a geopolitical embrace that looks a lot more like love than hate. The violence feeds the power of criminals who use that power to perpetrate more violence. People – mostly Palestinian civilians – are dying and will continue to die.
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* The Declaration of Independence actually came on the afternoon of 14 May, several hours before the end of the mandate because it was a Friday and the British planned to leave during the Sabbath.