Dogs of war

The main concern of Western governments is to create a narrative that will buy Israel time to do the punitive killing that it feels is necessary before the civilian death toll becomes unseemly

Israel’s ‘incursions’ into Gaza follow a pattern. The main concern of Western governments and mainstream Western media is to create a justificatory narrative that will buy Israel time to do the punitive killing that it feels is necessary before the civilian death toll becomes unseemly.

The savagery of Hamas’s mass murder of civilians gave Israel a reason to attack Gaza and forced its ambushed politicians and military to promise that this assault on Gaza would level the enclave and uproot Hamas. Unlike previous bombardments and invasions of Gaza, this one would be more ambitious and, therefore, more violent. More civilians would die and their deaths would need more elaborate justifications over an extended period.

The Economist published an article on international humanitarian law which explained that collateral damage in the form of civilian deaths needed to be proportionate to the military objective of the assault. The proportionality here was not to be reckoned in the number of civilians who died incidentally; in a densely populated enclave like Gaza where Hamas is embedded in the population, its ‘uprooting’ could, theoretically, justify a large, unquantifiable death toll. This was one way in which public opinion could be prepared for large death tolls that dwarfed Hamas’s murder of civilians in Israel.

Bassem Youssef, the Egyptian comedian, asked the unaskable question in an interview with Piers Morgan. He wanted to know what the going ‘exchange rate’ was between the Israeli and Palestinian dead. The Economist’s answer was that there wasn’t one, that it all depended. The killing of large numbers of civilians during military operations was not in itself illegal. Since no tribunal had successfully held Israel accountable for military actions in the past, it wasn’t clear which court would make a reckoning of proportionality this time round. It was a way of telling its readership not to be swayed by the size of the civilian death toll because it wasn’t, as Americans like to say, dispositive.

The next step was to discredit the death toll itself. After a disagreement about the number of people killed by missile/bomb at the Al-Ahli Arab Hospital, some Western analysts and reporters argued that the casualty figures put out by the Hamas-controlled health ministry in Gaza could not be trusted. This was curious because UN agencies and global media outlets had routinely used these figures before.

The US president joined in, saying that he had “no notion that the Pa­lestinians are telling the truth about how many people are killed.” Gaza’s health ministry responded by publish­ing a list of nearly 7,000 people killed in the Israeli bombardment, complete with names and identity card numbers. It was a peculiarly re­ve­aling moment, coming as it did when civilian casualty figures, especially the numbers of children killed, be­gan to spike and draw the attention and sympathy of Western civil society.

The unqualified support for Israel’s bombardment and blockade of Gaza, including the cutting off of fuel, water and food, by the likes of Joe Biden, Ursula von der Leyen, Rishi Sunak and Keir Starmer was spun as a way of establishing trust with Israel’s political leadership before pivoting to a counsel of restraint and humanitarian aid. Gideon Rachman wrote a column in the Financial Times where he endorsed the idea that the “… best chance of preventing a humanitarian catastrophe in Gaza is to support Israel.”

Twelve days later, Gaza has no drinking water, no electricity, no internet connectivity and the death toll is headed towards 8,000. The long-signalled military invasion of Gaza has begun. The humanitarian aid that, Rachman argued, justified the West’s embrace of Netanyahu has barely arrived. The whole notion of the United States of America and its European satellites as honest brokers in this war is implausible. Biden’s relative interest in war and peace can be measured by the fact that he asked Congress to sanction 14 billion dollars in military aid to Israel and 100 million dollars for relief supplies to Gaza. Biden is Israel’s second in this contest, he isn’t the referee.

When Israel ordered the entire population of northern Gaza to move south to ostensibly minimise civilian casualties, some Israeli officials and their chorus in the mainstream press began to explore a more ambitious idea: the relocation of large numbers of Gaza’s Palestinians over the border in Egypt’s Sinai desert. The Financial Times ran a story about the prospect of Gazan refugees ‘looming’ over Egypt.

But, as always, it was The Econo­mist that amplified the idea and spun it as a humanitarian game changer. In a piece that was so disingenuous that it couldn’t have been parodied by The Onion, The Economist argued that Israel had to destroy Hamas and the only way of avoiding more civilian casualties than necessary wasn’t Israeli restraint but the relocation of Gazans to Sinai.

Israeli bombing has already displaced more Palestinians in Gaza than the Nakba did in 1948. Much of Gaza’s population consists of the descendants of refugees from that first catastrophe. Arab countries are studded with Palestinian refugee camps that are now permanent settlements. The ethnic cleansing of Palestinian Arabs helped create modern Israel. The idea that the coerced displacement of Gaza’s Palestinians via vio­lent bombardment into refugee camps in Egypt is a reasonable solution to the present crisis is grotesque. The fig leaf The Economist proposes for this act of naked ethnic cleansing is that this exile would be temporary. The US, Israel and well-meaning Arab states would guarantee this. And pigs have wings.

The forced expulsion of a community over an international border amounts to ethnic cleansing. This is what happened to the Rohingya, a Muslim community in Myanmar, in 2017. Nearly a million Rohingya were violently driven out of Rakhine province and into Bangladesh where they remain in slum-like camps. In a piece in the New Statesman,
Yair Wallach warns that “[p]ermanent mass ethnic cleansing of Palestinians is a very possible scenario in the event of a regional escalation.” If Israel’s invasion and the razing of Gaza force Palestinians into Egypt, it will be, as it was with the Rohingyas, a war crime, not a ‘humanitarian relocation’.

To watch charter members of the rules-based world order legitimise the collective punishment of the Palestinian population in Gaza has been an education. If anything good is to emerge from this dreadful war, let it be the death of Western doublespeak.