Israel/Palestine: update on the conflict and personal reflections

Further evidence of genocide/ethnic cleansing in Gaza; Mearsheimer on Israel’s real intentions; whitewashing Nazism to demonise Hamas; the role of terrorism in the creation of the State of Israel.

Hi everyone. Sorry it’s been so long since the last Israel/Palestine update. I promise to get back to my regular updates — every two or three days. The fact that two weeks have gone by since my last update also means that there is a lot to talk about, which is why this update will be longer than usual. Very long, in fact. There will be lots of data about what is happening in Gaza, but there will also be all sort of collateral information relating to the wider history of the Israel-Palestine conflict. The topics that I cover include: further evidence of genocide/ethnic cleansing in Gaza; Israel targeting children as a matter of policy; Mearsheimer on Israel’s real intentions; whitewashing Nazism to demonise Hamas; little-known aspects of Hamas’s history; the role of terrorism in the creation of the State of Israel; Israel’s expansion of the war to the West Bank, and much more. Feel free to skim through until you find something that tickles your brain.

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Now let’s get started. It’s been a month since the beginning of Israel’s attack on Gaza, which has now officially entered its entered its “second phase”. This entails not only expanding ground operations — while continuing to pound the Strip with indiscriminate, almost round-the-clock air strikes — but also stepping up the war on Palestinians in the West Bank, where we are witnessing a massive surge in anti-Palestinian violence by both settlers and the military.

The announcement of this new phase was accompanied by a deranged eschatological speech by Netanyahu in which he claimed: “We are the people of the light, they are the people of darkness... we shall realise the prophecy of Isaiah”.

On other occasion, he likened the Palestinians to the Amalekites, the first nation to attack the Israelites after they left Egypt. In the Old Testament, God commands King Saul in the first Book of Samuel to kill every person in the rival nation of Amalek. “This is what the Lord Almighty says”, the prophet Samuel tells Saul. “‘I will punish the Amalekites for what they did to Israel when they waylaid them as they came up from Egypt. Now go, attack the Amalekites and totally destroy all that belongs to them. Do not spare them; put to death men and women, children and infants, cattle and sheep, camels and donkeys’”. The Amalekites were reportedly wiped out almost entirely as the result of Israelite victories; hence, the genocidal implications of Netanyahu’s statement are pretty straightforward.

So what has Israel’s military operation achieved so far? Here’s a visual summary (from a couple of days ago, so the numbers are not perfectly up to date):

Let’s start, as always, with the death toll — which has reached truly staggering levels. According to the latest data from the Palestinian authorities, more than 11,000 Gazans have been killed in air and artillery strikes since October 7. Around 40% of them — over 4,100 — are children.

The actual number is probably much higher, considering that thousands of people are still missing, most likely trapped under the rubble. Indeed, according to a senior Israeli security source quoted by Yedioth Ahronoth, the number of dead is closer to 20,000 (though he specified that these were “mostly terrorists”, which is of course ludicrous).

That includes at least 40 journalists and more than 100 UNRWA aid workers, more than have ever been killed in any single conflict in history — though in a crescendo of increasingly deranged statements, Israel has accused many UNRWA workers of being “themselves members of Hamas”.

Around 60 Israeli hostages have also been killed in the Israeli strikes, according to Hamas.

But the most shocking aspect is without a doubt the number of children casualties, which represent almost half of all casualties. In a month, Israel has killed more children in Gaza than the children killed in all the world’s conflict zones since 2019. “Gaza is becoming a graveyard for children. Hundreds of girls and boys are reportedly being killed or injured every day”, said UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres. “Without fuel, newborn babies in incubators and patients on life support will die”. According to the head of the World Health Organization, one child killed in Gaza every 10 minutes on average. As one Washington Post article put it: “Families are mourning not just their own losses, but what feels like the loss of an entire generation”.

What’s important to understand is that it would be a mistake to put this down “just” to criminal negligence on Israel’s behalf; the collateral damage of Israel’s policy of indiscriminate bombing of Gaza. The reality is much worse. And that is that targeting Palestinian children as long been a matter of policy for Israel. In September (so before latest Hamas attack), the Palestinian-American journalist Ramzy Baroud wrote an article detailing this gruesome reality. Here’s an excerpt:

Israel kills Palestinian children as a matter of policy. This claim can easily be demonstrated and is supported by the latest findings of a Human Rights Watch report. The question is: why? When the police or military shoot a child anywhere in the world, though utterly tragic, it can be argued, at least in theory, that the killing was an unfortunate mistake. But when thousands of children are killed and wounded in a systematic, “routine” and comparable method within a relatively short period of time, the killing of children must be deliberate.

In a recent report, entitled “West Bank: Spike in Israeli Killings of Palestinian Children”, HRW reaches a strong conclusion based on an exhaustive examination of medical data, eyewitness accounts, video footage, and field research. As of August 22, 34 Palestinian children in the West Bank were killed, adding yet more tragic numbers to a foreboding year that promises to be the most violent yet, since 2005.

For Palestinians, the killing of their children is not a random act of a military that lacks discipline and fears no repercussions. Palestinians know that the Israeli war on children is an intrinsic component of the larger Israeli war on all Palestinians. Israel does not officially declare that it is purposely targeting Palestinian children. That would be a public relations disaster... Data collected by international rights groups, however, leaves no doubt that the nature of the killings is part of a comprehensive strategy deployed by the Israeli military. “In all cases”, recently investigated by HRW, “Israeli forces shot the children’s upper bodies”. This was done without the “issuing of warnings or using common, less lethal measures”. Specifically, the killing of Palestinian children is a centralized and deliberate Israeli military strategy.