Mr. Netanyahu, antisemitism is a vile and disgusting form of bigotry that has done unspeakable harm to millions.
Do not insult the intelligence of the American people by attempting to distract us from the immoral and illegal war policies of your extremist and racist government. pic.twitter.com/CnM6oOrHKd
What to say? Bernie hits it out of the park. He kills it. How can one disagree with a word he says?
This post is an update to the one I posted two weeks ago, at the six month (plus one week) mark of this wretched war. I received several comments on it, mainly from friends and which were positive, though did get one that was critical, by André Bauer, posted on a comments thread on the Middle East 101 tab on Claire Berlinski’s substack site, The Cosmopolitan Globalist, and to which I responded yesterday at some length. As the comments thread is subscriber-only and hard to find in the forest of other threads on the site, I am reposting the exchange here. First, André’s comment:
[Arun, you say] that “whatever one’s sympathies in this conflict, there can be no dispute over what Hamas did on October 7th—and for which it must pay the maximum price. To be precise, I had in mind that it would be just Hamas who would/should pay that price, not the people of Gaza.”
I hear you Arun, but Hamas has other plans. Whenever they need money, recruits and international outrage, they start yet another war.
I also am puzzled about why so many people don’t treat Palestinian Arabs like adult people. They are human beings with agency. They are responsible for their and their elected government‘s actions. What happened on Oct. 7th? The crowds in Gaza cheered Hamas. Handing out sweets, as they did to ‚celebrate’ Al Quaida and Osama bin Laden on 9/11.
The rule is quite simple: If you can’t stomach the response, do not start a war! When did Israel and Egypt initiate the blockade of Gaza? After Israel left and handed the territory over to the PA, which promptly lost it to Hamas.
There is no magic wand to make Hamas disappear.
Insofar as the great majority of the countless millions of those who have a decided POV on the conflict are in one camp or the other, most of Claire’s fans and readers—not to mention Claire herself—are resolutely pro-Israel or skew in that direction. My reply to André (lightly edited and with links inserted) was composed with that in mind.
André: On Hamas—and the Palestinians more generally—and human agency, I did mention this in the AWAV post if you caught it, and have done so on numerous occasions over the years. But however the Gaza electorate voted eighteen years ago—or eight months ago—and however many ordinary Gazawis celebrated the October 7th massacres—whether it was 2,000 or 200,000—they are, as civilians, protected by the laws of war. Which is to say, if Israel bombs densely populated urban areas with wanton disregard for the lives of non-combatants—which is what it has been doing—then it is committing war crimes. Period.
And then there’s the destruction of civilian infrastructure, of hospitals, farmland, the water supply, waste treatment, roads, schools, universities, and you name it, so as to render life in Gaza impossible for the foreseeable future (one reads in Le Monde this weekend that it will take at least 14 years to clear the rubble and unexploded munitions in the Gaza strip). And insofar as there is nowhere for Gazawis to go, the conditions for famine on a massive scale are all there. It is increasingly difficult to escape the conclusion that Israel is using hunger, if not outright starvation, as a weapon of war; that Israel, in its trauma and rage over October 7th, has decided to settle its Gaza problem once and for all, to dramatically reduce Gaza’s population, preferably pushing it into the Sinai, where it would be dispersed to third countries, but failing that, to take more drastic measures. The sheer scale and gratuitousness of the destruction—of institutions, cultural patrimony, and everything cited above—in fact goes beyond wanton disregard for human life. As I mentioned in the AWAV post, Israel decided that it was going to kick the shit out of Gaza; not just Hamas but Gaza and its inhabitants. Insofar as Israel considers this war to be existential—that Hamas/Gaza threatens the very existence of the state of the Jewish people—it is going to take extreme measures to eradicate that existential threat. And if the rest of the world has a problem with that, then Israelis will, along with Judith Levy, reply to the rest of the world with a loud Fuck You! In the AWAV post I said that I was staying away from polemics over the G-word—genocide—but if famine sets in in the coming months and the civilian death toll heads into the six figures—and please don’t dismiss these as “Hamas numbers,” as there is no reason to doubt their accuracy—then I’m going to have to get off the fence on this one. And Israel is going to be in deep trouble at the ICJ, ICC, UNSC, et j’en passe.
On the assertion by Israel’s partisans (which includes some of my best friends) and hasbara operatives (Michael Oren et al) that it’s Hamas that bears responsibility for the death and destruction in Gaza, because Human Shields! and Tunnels!, a couple of points. First, on the human shields, there is a gap between the common understanding of this term and its legal definition, so far as I understand it, which refers to compelling people to serve as protection from a possible enemy attack. If Hamas invites people to their rooftops, or to stay in their homes, and they obey voluntarily, that’s not shielding. Second, on the tunnels. If Hamas operates these under residential areas, that’s co-locating, which, so I am informed, is a violation of the laws of war only if Hamas has militarily feasible alternatives, which it doesn’t in Gaza. If the laws of war required that Hamas conduct its “resistance” only from open fields more than one kilometer from the nearest house, those laws of war would be laughed out of town. And if Hamas ever obeyed them, Israel would turn its fighters into hummus (as I put it in my prediction in Cosmopolitan Globalist on October 7th).
Returning to the question of human agency, if the Palestinians do indeed have it, well, Israel has it too. Israel is insisting that this war was imposed on it by Hamas, that Israel was attacked on October 7th, and that the scale of the atrocities committed by Hamas were such that Israel had No Choice but to start the saturation bombing of Gaza before the day was out—and after the invading terrorists had been liquidated or fled back to the strip—and to wage the war in the way it has done so: as an offensive operation with the aim of eradicating Hamas, killing its leaders and as many of its fighters and cadres as possible. And whatever the collateral damage, so be it. However laudable the objective of eliminating Hamas, the war Israel is waging to that end is, in fact, one of CHOICE. It was not imposed on Israel.
An anecdote: In Tel Aviv in April 2009, I met with a former student of mine, a secular Israeli in her mid-20s, not a leftist; we talked about Operation Cast Lead, which had happened a few months earlier and that she supported at the outset, but, so she said, when the death toll among Gazawis hit 1,500, she declared Enough! Stop! and that others in her social world felt likewise. And the guns indeed fell silent when the (relative) carnage became increasingly intolerable. So if 1,500 was the limit of how many civilian Palestinians killed by IDF bombs liberally-minded Israelis were willing to accept fifteen years ago, what is the limit today? Israelis are clearly good with 40K and counting (even if one subtracts Hamas fighters from the total; Michael Oren tossed out the round figure of 10K, or was it 12K? Wherever he got his number, who knows?). If it takes, say, half a million dead Gaza Palestinians to definitively destroy Hamas, will Israel and its supporters accept this? What is the threshold? The bottom line: Israel, exercising agency, chose this war—and bears responsibility for the death, destruction, and suffering that have ensued. This is on Israel.
And the (simple and obvious) conclusion that I left hanging in the AWAV post: Israel had to respond to Hamas but not in the way it has. There is no justification whatever for even a fraction of what Israel has done in Gaza—and for a goal that can only be attained at the cost of a lasting international isolation such that Israel has never before experienced (and which I do think would be too bad; N.B. I am not a BDSer). Israel could have chosen another way to deal with Hamas and to make it pay for October 7th. As for what that way should have been, that’s above my pay grade. Go ask Thomas Friedman. Seriously: he has some good ideas. And what should happen now? Immediate cease-fire, exchange of all the hostages for Palestinian prisoners in Israel (the number to be negotiated), and safe passage of Hamas leaders and fighters to Qatar. For starters. Just do it.
On Israel’s growing international isolation—and which is sure to be lasting—Haaretz (April 25) has this lengthy report: “‘We’re Persona Non Grata. Almost Satan’: Global Boycott of Israeli Culture Ratchets Up.” The lede says it all: “Israeli filmmakers, publishers, producers, artists, curators and musicians all have the same message: We and our creative work are unwanted internationally.”
This is terrible. I will personally never boycott Israeli culture or academia—I am hostile to the BDS campaign in these domains—but it is alas inevitable that others will jump on that bandwagon.
As for academia, this from Haaretz (April 12): “‘I Won’t Work With You. You’re Committing Genocide’: Israeli Academia Faces an Unprecedented Global Boycott.” Again, the lede says it all: “Canceled invitations to conferences, a freeze on hiring Israelis at overseas institutions, rejection of scientific articles on political grounds, disruption of lectures abroad – Israeli scholars from various disciplines paint a painful picture of the foreign boycott that has afflicted them since the war broke out in Gaza.”
The Haaretz articles equate the isolation of Israeli culture and academia with that of Russia since February 2022. They happily do not blame it on anti-Semitism. Whew!
I am presently in the US and am very closely following the campus protests (N.B. MSNBC’s coverage has been exceptional over the past week), on which I have much to say. Bientôt.
In the meantime, the protesting students—some of them, at least—would do well to read the article in Jacobin (April 28), “The Palestinian Resistance Isn’t a Monolith,” by Bashir Abu-Manneh, who is head of classics, English, and history at the University of Kent and a Jacobin contributing editor.
And then there’s this tweet by the well-known Republican pollster, to which all I can say is: Wow!
This might be the most serious tweet I have ever sent:
Last night at the @WHCA dinner, I spoke privately with 4 members of Congress: 2 Dems and 2 GOPers. All 4 are big foreign policy players and all 4 are strongly pro-Israel in every way.
[N.B. This post was begun early last week, before the latest crisis with Iran].
Six months plus one week, to be precise, in this latest round of the Israel-Hamas war—and the fifteenth round that Israel has waged in Gaza war going back to 1948—and which could possibly be the final one if Israel, taking a leaf from Gen. Curtis LeMay, succeeds in bombing Gaza back to the Stone Age, or of seeing Gaza figuratively sink into the sea, as Yitzhak Rabin dreamt of in the pre-Oslo days. My previous post on the war—the one that I’ve had so far—was on day 14, which I concluded with the assertion that “whatever one’s sympathies in this conflict, there can be no dispute over what Hamas did on October 7th—and for which it must pay the maximum price.” To be precise, I had in mind that it would be just Hamas who would/should pay that price, not the people of Gaza.
I have since modified my view on that, more on which below. In the meantime, here is the editorial in Le Monde on this six-month anniversary (7-8 April issue; I have taken the liberty of editing Le Monde’s mediocre online English translation), aptly titled “Israel-Gaza: The Triumph of Hatred.”
It has been six months since the massacre of Israeli civilians by Hamas on 7 October 2023 and with no end in sight to the bloodshed in Gaza. Israel is waging in Gaza the longest, deadliest, and most devastating war in its history, and which is rising to a frightening new level, in a conflict that has long been prisoner to its tragedies.
The past few months have confirmed the worst fears. Israel’s army (IDF) has responded to the terror spread by Hamas with new military paradigms. Disproportionality has become the norm, obliterating the distinction between militia fighters and civilians. According to a report by an Israeli investigative website [+972 Magazine: report here], the IDF has used AI to select thousands of human targets based on the assessment of the very same intelligence services that had foreseen neither Hamas’ preparations for October 7 nor the magnitude of Hamas’ tunnel network. And for what result? Four months after taking over Gaza’s largest hospital to hunt down Hamas fighters, the IDF found it necessary to launch another deadly and particularly destructive assault on the hospital at the end of March. And which will no doubt be followed by yet another one.
Under the impetus of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, whose political survival is indexed to the destruction of Gaza and who has been unable to either free the hostages taken on October 7 or to eradicate Hamas, Israel is reoccupying the narrow strip of land that is Gaza after having asphyxiated it for 16 years. The maximalism of what is the most extremist government in Israel’s history is not only creating a humanitarian crisis on an unprecedented scale but is also signaling that it will impede the reconstruction of Gaza whenever the guns eventually fall silent.
This extremist drift in Israel has been enabled by the blindness of the US, whose timid reservations have been rightly understood as tacit support. With the decimation of Palestinian civilians, journalists, and humanitarian aid workers, it finally took the deaths of six foreign employees of an American NGO, killed by successive Israeli drone strikes during a trip that had even been coordinated with the Israeli army, for President Joe Biden to speak out in anger. And to obtain what? A promise to facilitate the arrival of the humanitarian aid needed to prevent famine in Gaza. In other words, the bare minimum that would be expected of any democracy worthy of the name.
Joe Biden’s pro-Israel bias, which may cost him re-election in November, is not solely to blame. It is important to also note the almost deliberately assumed impotence of European governments, which has fueled criticism of the inconsistency with which they evoke their moral principles; the reaction of Arab states that have signed normalization agreements with Israel, who seem to have little objection to what is happening in Gaza; and the cynical posture of Russia and China, who have done little more than to profit from the Gaza war by heaping contempt on the West.
The sum total of these paralyzing forces has buried the already fragile hope that emerged during the first weeks of the war: the realization that only a political perspective could guarantee security for these two peoples who are locked in hatred. Six months after 7 October 2023, hatred has triumphed as never before.
Speaking on France Inter last Monday, Libération editor-in-chief Dov Alfon—who is Franco-Israeli, a former editor-in-chief of Haaretz, and who served as an officer in the IDF’s directorate of military intelligence—said that October 7th has brought about a profound change among Israelis, who, having seen the plethora of video and other filmed images of what happened on that day—of the suffering of the victims and the terror visited upon them—have in effect ceased to see Palestinians as human beings meriting respect or worthy of consideration. Conversely, Alfon continued, “for the Palestinians, who are being bombed, massacred, and starved, the possibility of seeing the Israelis as human no longer exists. This is the profound tragedy of the October 7th attacks”.
Of the filmed images of that day that have so traumatized Israeli society, one that is particularly excruciating to watch—and contemplating the horror of that moment—is of the music festival site after the terrorists and marauders had fled or were neutralized, of the sight of the dozens of dead bodies, of the young people machine-gunned at close range. This was Paris on 13 November 2015 by several magnitudes.
🔴 NEW FPV VIDEO | AFTERMATH OF HAMAS ATTACK ON SUPERNOVA MUSIC FESTIVAL, 7 OCTOBER. A new footage showing aftermath of the Hamas attack against the Supernova Music Festival on October 7, seen through the eyes of an FPV cam mounted to the helmet of an IDF soldier at the scene. pic.twitter.com/zQ4Yyt1cuS
During the final scene in this movie I saw in December—which takes place on 21-22 June 1941 in a Jewish village in Soviet Ukraine (in the part of Poland annexed by the USSR two years earlier), near the border with German-occupied Poland—I thought of the morning of October 7th, of the people at the festival and in the communities that were hit by the terrorist onslaught, when they realized what was happening. Everything is fine and normal one day, and then suddenly, early the next day, out of the blue…
The final scene in the movie was the beginning of Operation Barbarossa, with the Wehrmacht and SS rolling into the shtetl in the wee hours, and doing what they did to the Jews they encountered.
The largest locality hit on October 7th was Sderot, a perennial target of Hamas rockets that I briefly visited after the 2008-09 Operation Cast Lead. As it happens, I had an AWAV post in 2012 (here, scroll down), in which I reported on a documentary I had seen (in Paris, at an event sponsored by a radical left-wing association) about the film school at Sderot’s Sapir College, with its mixed Jewish and Arab/Palestinian student body (including from Gaza), leftist faculty and dean (who advocated negotiations with Hamas at the time), annual film festival, conferences on peace, and everything else one associates with a progressively-minded establishment of higher education. If the Hamas gunmen had come across the film school and known all the above, they would have still shot up the place and everyone they encountered.
The post-October 7th Israeli zeitgeist—the horror and trauma mixed with rage—is captured in an email sent to Claire Berlinski by her American-Israeli friend, Judith Levy, who lives near Tel Aviv, and which Claire published last November 11th on her Substack site.
(…) Absolutely no one of any political persuasion is advocating that we do what we usually do, which is give Hamas a good kicking and then stop before the job is done in order to minimize the global shrieking that we’re Nazis. Our fear of global opinion, combined with Bibi’s catastrophic commitment to the sustaining of Hamas as a foil to Fatah and a guarantor that a Palestinian state would never emerge, ensured that time and space (and even money, unbelievably) were always given to Hamas to rearm and come back even stronger. This time, Israel (meaning both the decision makers and the population) is much less concerned about world opinion and absolutely determined to end Hamas in Gaza once and for all. The scale of the atrocities committed on October 7 woke everyone up at once.
What I am hearing again and again is this: Fuck everyone. Fuck Bibi and what he’s done to us. Fuck world opinion. Fuck the antisemites. Fuck the useless braindead college students aligning themselves with butchers and rapists and child killers because they believe in their stupidity that that’s a good way of signaling their virtue. Fuck the “Cease-fire now!!” hysterics. Oh, you don’t like how we’re reacting when 1,400 of our citizens were murdered in a single day? When teenage girls were sodomized until they were pouring blood and then dragged by their hair behind jeeps before being abducted? When Israeli women were gang-raped, murdered, and then had their naked bodies dragged back to Gaza to be paraded through the streets for baying mobs screaming “Allahu Akbar?” When mothers and their children were burned alive and fathers had their eyes gouged out in front of their children before they were shot to death? “Cease-fire now?” Fuck you.
You see this new outlook in the highly unusual determination of the decision makers not to negotiate a cease-fire without all the hostages being released. No more begging and pleading and throwing hundreds of blood-drenched convicted monsters back to their nests in exchange for Israeli body parts. Not this time. We will keep pounding and pounding until they release them all. You don’t like it, world? Fuck you. (…)
Judith’s coup de sang expressed not only her own rage but also that of the near-totality of Israeli Jews in the aftermath of October 7th—a collective rage that remains intact six months later.
For an in-depth report on October 7th, and replete with graphic images, do watch the one-hour documentary by Al Jazeera’s Investigative Unit—which can hardly be suspected of pro-Israel bias—posted March 21st on the Al Jazeera English website: “October 7: Forensic analysis shows Hamas abuses, many false Israeli claims.”
A few comments on the slick, professionally-produced Al Jazeera report. First, while it is an important documentary and should be watched regardless of one’s POV, it is—surprise!—not entirely objective. As the friend who sent it to me correctly remarked, AJ seems to be more interested in what did not happen that day then what did happen, and likewise focuses more on the Israeli civilians who may have been killed, accidentally or inadvertently, by Israeli forces than those who were murdered, many in atrocious circumstances, by Hamas and other gunmen—but also by mobs of men from Gaza who streamed through the breaches in the fence to loot, pillage, and rape (and who indeed look to have committed many, if not most, of the rapes and sexual abuse that occurred that morning). AJ also spends time grilling ZAKA’s shifty Yossi Landau but asks no tough questions of Dr. Bassem Naim of the Hamas political bureau, but whom there is no more reason to trust than Landau
A comment on Naim. Bringing up the Great March of Return, he laments that “we went peacefully in thousands but what was the response of the international community? Nothing…In this context we [the Hamas political bureau] have discussed many times and in many sessions, what can we do?” The 2018-19 marches were, IMHO, a case in which both Hamas and Israel were equally culpable. Hamas first, in cooking up the publicity stunt of inciting thousands of Gazawis to march to the border fence, intimating that they would try to enter Israel to recover the homes of their great- or great-great grandparents—which no longer exist or are inhabited by other people—knowing full well that this is the ultimate Israeli nightmare, the very idea is bonkers to begin with, and the trigger-happy Israelis could be expected to react in the way that they did. Which is precisely what Hamas wants. As for the Israelis and their reaction, they killed, over a two year period, 223 Gazawis and wounded or maimed over 9,000—the wounded/maimed being shot in the legs or knees, an IDF specialty with teenage boys in the West Bank—all of whom were marching perhaps rowdily, but still peacefully, on the Gaza side of the fence. For the Israelis to react so violently, and play Hamas’s game while they were at it, was simply outrageous, if not downright criminal.
On Dr. Naim sighing “what can we do?,” i.e. what can Hamas do to make sure that the United States and Europe don’t forget about Gaza and the Palestinians, implicitly concluding that Hamas had little choice but to launch Operation Al-Aqsa Flood. Naim’s question has been posed for the past 17+ years as the narrative has set in of Gazawis being in a cage, or open-air prison, and that the Israeli blockade is the sole, exclusive cause of their collective distress. But while the Israelis may indeed be SOBs, the notion that Hamas possesses no agency in this particular matter is, IMHO, debatable in the extreme. Whenever the open-air prison metaphor has come up in contradictory exchanges on Hamas and Gaza over the past 17 years, I have asked the simple question: if Hamas wants to take the initiative and, turning the tables on Israel, proactively lay the groundwork for an end of the Israeli siege and kickstart the process that would hopefully free Gazawis from the open-air prison, why doesn’t Hamas simply accept, unilaterally and unambiguously, the three principles of the Middle East Quartet? Rhetorical question obviously and to which, ça va de soi, I have never received a response. And it’s a moot question today in any case.
There is, of course, an answer to why Hamas could never accept the aforementioned three principles, which is in its very name: Al-Muqawama. Resistance!
On the question of resistance, what this signifies for Hamas, and some problems with it, the prominent (in France) psychoanalyst, Gérard Miller, who is on the radical left (and close to Jean-Luc Mélenchon), offered this incisive commentary.
If following the French is a problem, the gist: no French Resistance fighter, facing Nazi barbarism, would have tortured anyone, raped women, machine-gunned teenagers; no Vietnamese resisting US imperialism ever hijacked a plane or put bombs in the New York subway, etc.
Back to Al Jazeera’s October 7th report, one is struck, indeed stunned, by the breathtaking, unbelievable incompetence of the Israeli Defense Forces, the intelligence services, and, above all, Israel’s political leadership, i.e. Benjamin Netanyahu. To call this humiliating for the IDF et al is an understatement. That the Israelis were going to collectively react with rage and fury went without saying—and with the people of Gaza paying the price. Hamas knew this, as did the useful idiots outside Palestine who cheered Hamas’ action or apologized for it (because Resistance!). And if they didn’t know, then they’re idiots tout court.
A historical parallel and point of comparison. In July 1996, in conversing with the great Algerian historian Mohammed Harbi—who was a singular personality in Algeria’s independence struggle (1954-62)—I expressed dismay over the outcome of the Israeli election two months earlier, which saw the utterly unexpected victory of Benjamin Netanyahu and his Likud party over the incumbent Shimon Peres, who was supposed to win easily in the wake of the assassination of Yitzhak Rabin. Harbi—a man of the left—responded to the effect of, “Well, what did you expect? It was only normal that the Israeli electorate would move to the right in view of the context.” The context: Prime Minister Peres, trying to look tough on terrorism and to counter Netanyahu’s demagoguing the Oslo peace process, ordered the targeted assassination of Yahya Ayyash, a.k.a. The Engineer, Hamas’ infamous bombmaker, who had fabricated the devices that killed several dozen Israelis in terror attacks over the previous two years, and whom the Israelis had tracked down in his Gaza hideaway. Whacking Ayyash may have made Israelis feel good (my personal reaction at the time: “Couldn’t have happened to a nicer guy…” #irony #SecondDegree) but then Hamas inevitably retaliated in the way it always does, which was to stage a series of suicide bombings, in Tel Aviv, West Jerusalem, and Ashqelon, which killed some 60 people and injured/maimed close to 300 (all going to show that you knock off one bombmaker and another will take his place).
This being the context, Harbi told me a story from his time in the FLN during the Algerian war of independence, which broke out when he was a university student and activist in Paris, him rallying to the FLN soon after, going underground, evading arrest, fleeing France, and, in 1958, landing at the headquarters of the FLN’s provisional government in Tunis. As the French military’s counter-insurgency looked to be succeeding, the FLN leadership in Tunis debated opening a new front in the war, in metropolitan France, with the FLN’s underground organization there waging a terror campaign: bombs in cafés, public transportation, and the like. French public opinion had largely been supportive of the “operation for the maintenance of order,” as the Algerian war was officially called in France—turning against it only in early 1962, in its final months—though an increasing portion of the left opposed the war from 1956 onward, thanks in part to the persuasive efforts of pro-independence Algerian activists infused with universal values imparted by the French educational system, Mohammed Harbi being one. Harbi was, as he recounted to me, vehemently opposed to targeting civilians; while he certainly had moral objections to terrorism, in his argument with the FLN leadership, he impressed upon them that the painstaking efforts of FLN militants in France to enlist Frenchmen and women to the cause of Algerian independence would have been wiped out in an instant if FLN bombs had started going off in buses and restaurants in metropolitan France. The ensuing crackdown on the Algerian migrant population in France—a large portion of which lived in shantytowns on the urban periphery, where the underground FLN reigned—would have been like nothing ever seen.
Harbi’s argument won the day. The FLN finally did not wage a terror campaign in metropolitan France, the French electorate approved in a referendum (and by a landslide) the principle of negotiations with the FLN, the negotiations happened, and the rest was history. (If one doesn’t know about Mohammed Harbi, who is one of the persons in this world whom I most admire, but is known outside Algeria and France only to academic specialists of Algeria, see my good friend Adam Shatz’s profile of him in The New York Times, in February 2003). For the record, it should be said that the FLN nonetheless carried out sabotage operations in France and targeted policemen, some 50 of whom were killed—and which fueled the fury of Maurice Papon’s men on the night of 17 October 1961.
One shudders to contemplate the reaction in France, the fury and rage—of public opinion, the army, police, you name it—if the FLN had carried out terror attacks in metropolitan France on the scale of October 7th in Israel. The 17 octobre would have been child’s play by comparison. There was, of course, what was already happening in French Algeria at the time, a little further back, and in history, but we won’t get into that. Or into any of the countless other massacres and counter-massacres in modern times that can be compared with what’s happening in Israel-Palestine right now.
The point I want to make here is that in the way Israelis have reacted to October 7th, they have behaved no differently than any other people would have in the same circumstances. Israelis are no worse than any other people. But they are also no better.
In the immediate aftermath of October 7th, a few things were clear: the main thing being that Israel, in view of the horror, trauma, shock, fury, rage, humiliation, et j’en passe, was going to, pardon my French, kick the shit out of Gaza. Not just Hamas, but Gaza. Turn Gaza into a parking lot, as MAGA-type Americans would say. Bomb it back to the Stone Age, dixit Gen. Le May. Apply Hama Rules (which Thomas Friedman, who coined the expression, said himself). And while I don’t believe the Israelis set out to bomb indiscriminately or kill randomly—that would be an inefficient use of resources and the IDF, I am quite sure, does not operate on the same moral level as, say, its Russian counterpart; and I am staying away from polemics in regard to the G-word—it is beyond doubt that they have, in pursuit of their putative military objectives, been raining bombs on Gaza with wanton disregard for the lives of non-combatants (and that the Israelis drop leaflets from the sky giving people 24 hours to evacuate their homes—their property, their livelihoods, everything they own, leave their pet cats and dogs behind, and to do what and go where?—does not attenuate the cruelty of their action). And while Israelis say all sorts of things, including cabinet members in a government, it is clear that the prevailing sentiment after October 7th was that it was not only Hamas that was the guilty party for what happened on that day but Gazawis themselves: a large percentage of the population, if not all of it. Even the most liberally-minded Israelis, who are for the two-state solution and all, freely admitted—and this was so widely reported, and which I heard myself—that, with the emotions of October 7th, they did not have it in them to feel empathy for what Gazawis were experiencing under the rouleau compresseur of the IDF and the carpet bombing of its air force. As the Israelis have always imposed collective punishment on Palestinians under their occupation—village lockdowns, home demolitions, arbitrary checkpoints, entre autres—it went without saying that they were going to impose it on Gaza, with Gazawis seen as either in cahoots with Hamas or in sympathy with its action on October 7th.
Israeli television is also showing few images of what its army is doing in Gaza, as, in the words of Jérôme Bourdon of the communications department at Tel Aviv University, “Israelis in their majority do not want to see the suffering of the Gazawis.” This does not, however, mean that Israelis are seeing no images from Gaza or are unaware of what’s happening there. Au contraire. They’re seeing plenty, via social media, from soldiers who are exulting in what they’re going. E.g. this video, the title of which really does express the current zeitgeist. (N.B. This “commentary based” Twitter/X account has nothing to do with the Mossad intelligence agency).
The soldiers who took the one below are pleased that they’ve wiped out peoples’ homes (whose owners will likely not see a shekel in insurance), some of which may have been of Hamas officials but more that were surely not. Israelis and others have apparently been surprised to learn that there is—or was—a middle class in Gaza and who lived in nice homes. If one has not seen it, do take a look at the photo-essay in the NYT by Balakrishnan Rajagopal of the United Nations and Yaqeen Baker, Domicide: The Mass Destruction of Homes Should Be a Crime Against Humanity.”
The luxurious neighborhood of Rimal in Gaza where senior Hamas nazi officials lived pic.twitter.com/N2QPKe1hiy
Israel’s hasbara operatives will say that the soldiers posting these videos and the schadenfreude commentaries are bad apples and in no way representative of their brothers-in-arms. Perhaps. I wouldn’t know, but there is no a priori reason to assume that their sentiments are not widely held among Israelis, let alone their brothers-in-arms.
The enemy's government communications bureau updates the heartwarming data 104 days of fighting 🟡 31,620 dead and missing. 🟡 Of which 24,620 dead arrived in hospitals. 🟡 And 7,000 are missing under the rubble. 🟡 The number of injured rose to 61,830 . 🟡 2 million displaced… pic.twitter.com/YdjbhDNuBH
When criticized for the massive physical destruction caused by the IDF, Israel’s partisans reflexively respond with “the tunnels!” and “human shields!,” as if the alleged existence of the former under a building automatically justifies reducing that building to a pile of rubble, no questions asked, and the fact of the latter—and yes, Hamas does indeed have a strategy of human shields—somehow absolves Israel of any responsibility for killing those “human shields”—as if the Israelis had no agency in the matter—by pinning the blame on Hamas.
The lengthy comment by Philippe Lemoine below is worth the read.
This is probably the best thing I've read on the controversy over al-Shifa hospital, whether Israeli strikes can be justified, and the question of "human shields." Read it. https://t.co/oZtdcN0QUz
The image below: how can this gratuitous demolition of such an important institution possibly be excused or explained away?
It is impossible not to conclude that the centers of power in Israel have decided to simply destroy the Gaza strip, to wipe out not only its infrastructure but also its institutions—all of them—to make the place uninhabitable.
And the fate of the 2 million Gazawis: The thinking of the decision-makers in Jerusalem will come out at some point but, again, it is impossible not to conclude that the Israelis really did think that hundreds of thousands of Gazawis, even over a million, could be sent over the Egyptian border on a one-way trek to tent city refugee camps in the Sinai, where the international community (so-called) would deal with the situation, ultimately resettling the Gazawis in third countries.
And if this scheme didn’t pan out (and it hasn’t), then what? Well, whatever. There is very possibly no coherent plan for how to deal with the Gazawis or what happens on the “day after.” The whole Operation Swords of Iron looks like one big fuite en avant (French expression meaning “a rash course of action the consequences of which have not been thought through)”. In other words, the Israelis don’t know WTF they’re doing.
Israel blows up Gaza's "Palace of Justice" compound which housed the Palestinian Supreme Court, the Court of Appeal, the Court of First Instance & the Magistrate.
Of the time I devote to keeping up with this wretched war, I spend a fair amount of it following the pro-Israel camp, listening to podcasts in particular, some via Israel-based platforms that are centrist or rightwing (on the Israeli spectrum). Among the personalities I’ve listened to with interest are Michael Oren, David Hazony, Daniel Gordis, and Haviv Rettig Gur. I may also add that I do have a few friends who are resolutely pro-Israel (and who all seem to be getting their information and arguments from the same sources, as they talk about the war in much the same way). Reading mainstream press reports and analyses, and then listening to a pro-Israel podcast is like watching MSNBC or CNN and then flipping to Fox (which I do on occasion when in the US). It’s a strange, sometimes jarring experience, as the two sides, if they’re even talking about the same thing, have such hugely different perceptions of reality. All do agree, though, that the humanitarian catastrophe in Gaza is real; the question is, whose fault is it? The pro-Israel camp says Hamas, because Tunnels! and Human Shields! There’s a lot of “shooting and crying” among these folks, who, to a man and woman, profess their deep pain and anguish at the images of suffering in Gaza, of how they are so personally devastated by it all that it keeps them up at night. The fact that the suffering is the consequence of Israeli bombing on an almost unprecedented scale is acknowledged but with the retort that the IDF is fighting in an exceptionally complex, difficult urban environment—with its Tunnels and Human Shields—and has gone to extraordinary lengths to minimize civilian casualties, because, you know, Israelis really do care about Palestinians! (this is literally a direct quote, and from one who shared the post-October 7th sentiment that Israelis did not have it in them to feel compassion for the Palestinians in Gaza who were being bombed back to the Stone Age). The mindset here—of moral superiority—reminds one of that quote by Golda Meir, “We can forgive the Arabs for killing our children. But we can never forgive them for forcing us to kill their children.” The bottom line here: Israel is waging this war because it has no choice!
On moral superiority: Tenacious Israeli narratives in regard to the moral code of its army are being brandished—by Michael Oren in particular, a onetime IDF spokesman—and with increasing insistency in the face of global criticism of Israel’s action in Gaza. As for why Israel is being denounced for, in this view, simply trying to defend itself against a terrorist organization that murdered 1,200 of its citizens in a single morning, it’s because: Antisemitism. Everyone hates the Jews. This is an important subject, which I’ll get into another time. A few points, though. First, no, Michael Oren, everyone does not hate the Jews. Second, it is incorrect to say that there is an upsurge in antisemitism in the world; it just seems that way, as persons who kept their Jew-hatred to themselves are now acting it out. Third, a lot of what seems like antisemitism is, in fact, Fanonism, which is not the same thing. Fourth, one suspects that Israelis who assert that the whole world is antisemitic find comfort in that, as it conveniently allows them to dismiss objections to their behavior and actions in the occupied Palestinian territories; moreover, it puts Israel in the same category with the Russians, Turks, 1990s Serbs, and other such nations with paranoid narratives that everyone hates or is out to get them; it is not good that Israel should feel this way. Fifth, the two countries I know the best and both of which I am a citizen, the United States and France, and good places for Jews and will remain so.
One issue on which there is unanimity in the pro-Israel camp is the media coverage of Gaza and its apparent anti-Israel bias. Anglophones are thus denouncing the US and UK media—with one throwing temper tantrums at the NY Times and Washington Post, which s/he considers sans rire to be in the tank for Hamas. Sérieux. In France, Israel’s partisans like to beat up on press organs identified with the left, e.g. Libération, whose coverage is, in fact, first rate. When it comes to the media coverage of Gaza, I have a question. I recently listened to a podcast with Haviv Rettig Gur on the delivery of humanitarian aid to starving Gazawis, in which he asserted that Israel is desperately trying get the aid into Gaza but is being thwarted by numerous obstacles, the principal one being the determination of Hamas to either steal the aid or prevent it from reaching the starving people of Gaza, as Hamas wants them to starve to death, so as to make Israel look bad (which may or may not be the case, but how is it that there are still Hamas fighters roaming the strip north of Rafah six months after the Israeli invasion, the strip a vast pile of rubble, 12,000 Hamas fighters killed according to the Israelis, and the tunnels presumably out of commission?). In contrast are recent articles in Le Monde by its Jerusalem correspondents, Louis Imbert and Samuel Forey, on the humanitarian aid issue but which paint a very different picture, with Israel being the big problem and impediment.
The Le Monde reports are well-sourced. Haviv Rettig Gur, a major figure in the Israeli press, certainly has his. What both have in common is that neither have been into Gaza, not independently at least. Since October 7th, the only journalists who have been into Gaza are those who are embedded with the IDF for brief forays into the strip. Otherwise, there has been no independent reporting from Gaza—excepting by local Palestinian journalists, over a hundred of whom have been killed so far—as the IDF will not allow it. The only reporter from a major international news organization who managed to slip into Gaza under the noses of the IDF was CNN’s Clarissa Ward last December.
Scores of Palestinian journalists have been documenting the horrors suffered in Gaza, and many of them have lost their lives doing so. Now @CNN’s @clarissaward, @scottycnn and @BrentSwailsCNN managed to enter without Israeli military escort. Watch their extraordinary report. pic.twitter.com/JLioOfXf12
This means that for Israeli journalists and podcast pundits who hew to the official line on the war, their main sources of information of what’s happening inside Gaza are government and army briefings. À propos, the Uber-Zionist American-Israeli author, Daniel Gordis, who is no gauchiste (e.g. he has called Peter Beinart “a traitor to the Jewish people”), had this to say in a podcast discussion:
If you look at the press this past weekend [late December 2023], this was the first weekend since the war started in which there was lots of stuff about how all these army briefings are basically BS. The army is telling us what they want us to hear, and they are not covering all of the military failures that have taken place since the beginning of the war.
FYI, BS means bullshit. In the absence of independent reporting from Gaza, those who rely on the IDF for information are getting a lot of bullshit.
On the moral code of the IDF, which Michael Oren mentioned a dozen times in one recent podcast,, please watch six minutes (from 45″) of this discussion with the Israeli-American historian and Holocaust scholar, Omer Bartov, on James M. Dorsey’s fine podcast. What Bartov has to say about the IDF today compared to what it was when he served (in the early !970s) is very interesting. If Israeli soldiers used to “shoot and cry,” today they just shoot. I’ll post the transcript in the comments thread.
I have a conclusion to this longer-than-expected post, which I will add as an update later this week. In the meantime I highly recommend this article (March 28) by Phil Klay in The Atlantic, “U.S. Support for Israel’s War Has Become Indefensible: A good pretext for war is not enough to make a war just.”
Arun with a View 