{"id":60357,"date":"2015-06-29T12:00:21","date_gmt":"2015-06-29T11:00:21","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/?p=60357"},"modified":"2015-06-27T17:15:10","modified_gmt":"2015-06-27T16:15:10","slug":"the-question-is-just-when-max-blumenthal-on-war-in-the-gaza-strips-past-and-its-future","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/2015\/06\/the-question-is-just-when-max-blumenthal-on-war-in-the-gaza-strips-past-and-its-future\/","title":{"rendered":"\u201cThe Question Is Just When\u201d: Max Blumenthal on War in the Gaza Strip\u2019s Past \u2014 And Its Future"},"content":{"rendered":"

Author of <\/em>The 51 Day War: Ruin and Resistance in Gaza tells what he saw in the rubble of a land under siege.<\/em><\/p>\n

\"Cover<\/a>

Cover detail from the book “The 51 Day War: Ruin and Resistance in Gaza” (Credit: Nation Books)<\/p><\/div>\n

27 Jun 2015 – <\/em>If for whatever reason you are one of the very few people on this Earth who wants to go into<\/em>,\u00a0rather than get out of<\/em>,\u00a0the Gaza Strip, you may want to know what to expect.<\/p>\n

Because although it\u2019s been just a bit less than a year since the Israeli-Gaza conflict of 2014 \u2014 or \u201cOperation Protective Edge,\u201d as the Israeli Defense Force called it \u2014 came to a halt, you shouldn\u2019t expect to find a society rebuilding. No, according to \u201cThe 51 Day War: Ruin and Resistance in Gaza<\/a>,\u201d the new book from Max Blumenthal, the journalist behind 2013\u2032s incendiary \u201cGoliath: Life and Loathing in Greater Israel<\/a>,\u201d what you\u2019ll see instead is mountains of rubble, barely any less than there was at the conclusion of the war.<\/p>\n

Based on his contacts in Gaza as well as his own first-hand reporting, Blumenthal\u2019s book does two things, neither of which are especially welcome in U.S. politics and the mainstream media. Blumenthal not only provides a methodical breakdown of the run-up to the conflict \u2014 one that differs in crucial respects from the narrative most commonly found in American media \u2014 but also offers a more detailed accounting of what was happening behind the fog of war. He also tries to answer some of the still-vexing questions about the war: Why did it last so long? Why so many civilian casualties? And what was even accomplished?<\/p>\n

Recently, Salon spoke over the phone with Blumenthal to discuss the book, the history of Gaza many Americans don\u2019t know, why he believes the war was an almost deliberate result of longstanding Israeli policy, and why he believes it won\u2019t be the last. Our conversation is below and has been edited for clarity and length.<\/p>\n

You argue that last summer\u2019s war cannot really be understood in isolation, that one has to see it in a larger context. For example, why do you think the situation today is a consequence of former Prime Minister Ariel Sharon\u2019s \u201cdisengagement\u201d from Gaza in 2005?<\/strong><\/p>\n

The withdrawal of religious nationalist Israeli settlers (who numbered about 9,000) from the Gaza Strip was celebrated by liberals, because they saw these fanatics being forced by Israeli troops from an area that Israel [had] occupied. This actually should have been a scenario, this unilateral withdrawal, that anyone who had any concern for the people in the Gaza Strip would have opposed, because the agenda was very clear and out in the open. It was to remove [Israel] from the obligations of the Geneva Convention regarding the Gaza Strip, to claim that it was no longer occupied.<\/p>\n

What did that new footing do for Israel?<\/strong><\/p>\n

It enabled it to establish a panopticon-style system, where it controls the exterior; the sky, the sea; and can place the Gaza Strip under a very high-tech siege, a robotically-controlled siege. Secondly, it allowed Israel to retrench its control of the major settlement blocks around East Jerusalem. They received a letter from George W. Bush [requesting] the unilateral withdrawal from the Gaza Strip, and guaranteeing these gigantic settlements on top of the Palestinian aquifer \u2014 which cut deep into the heart of the West Bank and will eventually separate the West Bank from itself \u2014 will remain in permanent Israeli hands under any US negotiated peace agreement. That\u2019s point number two.<\/p>\n

And point number three?<\/strong><\/p>\n

Point number three is that withdrawal, in the words of then Shin Bet chief Avi Dichter, allows the military more \u201cfreedom of action\u201d in the Gaza Strip. If there aren\u2019t Jewish Israelis in the Gaza Strip, that allows you to start using 150-mm artillery shells during these barrages of the border regions; that allows you to use 2,000-pound fragmentation bombs. As soon as the withdrawal took place, you started seeing the use of experimental weapons, like dime weaponry. Gaza started to become a laboratory for the Israeli weapons industry, and for the entire mechanism of control that Israel\u2019s trying to market and export to the word as field-tested.<\/p>\n

I just want to make one more point: we have to understand to what the Gaza Strip is, in the grand scheme of things \u2014 not just since 2005, but since 1948.<\/p>\n

What do you mean?<\/strong><\/p>\n

Seventy-two to 80 percent of the Gaza Strips\u2019 population qualify as refugees. That means that they are the descendants of people who, during \u201cthe Nakbah<\/a>,\u201d between 1947 and 1948, were forcibly expelled from what is now Israel. These people can\u2019t be allowed to return to their homes under the Right of Return \u2014 which is guaranteed to them under UN Resolution 194 \u2014 because they\u2019re not Jewish. If they come back, Israel\u2019s Jewish demographic majority will be compromised.<\/p>\n

That is how the rulers of Israel, who also rule all Palestinians, see it. They see the population of the Gaza Strip as a demographic threat. So the Gaza Strip is a human warehouse for a surplus population \u2014 it\u2019s anachronistic in the modern world. A population is being warehoused because they are of the wrong ethnicity. That\u2019s why the Gaza Strip resists. To me, that is really the essence of the crisis.<\/p>\n

Your mentioning the demographic angle brings me to Arnon Soffer, whose colleagues nicknamed him \u201cThe Arab Counter.\u201d Who is he? Why is he important?<\/strong><\/p>\n

Arnon Soffer is a chief adviser on demographic engineering \u2014 i.e., how to forcibly engineer a Jewish majority in areas under Israeli control \u2014 to successive Israeli governments. He conceived of not only the unilateral disengagement from Gaza, but also the separation wall. In each case, he said that they wouldn\u2019t lead to greater national security for Israel, but they would lead to the maintenance of a Jewish [demographic] majority. He\u2019s obsessed with maintaining a threshold of 70 percent. His last name, Soffer, means \u201ccounter\u201d in Hebrew; so his colleagues at Haifa University refer to him as \u201cArnon, the Arab Counter.\u201d<\/p>\n

He anticipated that his policy recommendations would reduce Israel\u2019s national security, all in the name of maintaining a demographic majority?<\/strong><\/p>\n

Listen to his words. As he was explaining the need for the unilateral disengagement from Gaza, he said, \u201cWhen 2.5 million people live in a closed off Gaza, it\u2019s going to be a human catastrophe. These people will be even bigger animals than they are today, with the aid of an insane, fundamentalist Islam. Pressure at the border will be awful; it\u2019s going to be a terrible war. If we want to remain alive, we will have to kill and kill and kill. All day, every day.\u201d<\/p>\n

He said that to the Jerusalem Post \u2014 and this is when he was a close adviser to Sharon. Sharon credited Soffer with convincing him to disengage [from the Gaza Strip]. It was printed in Israel, but not in the U.S.. I don\u2019t endorse Soffer\u2019s racist language or ideology, but what he said has come true. What we saw last summer with Operation Protective Edge was the fulfillment of his bloody prophecy: \u201ckill, and kill, and kill every day.\u201d That is what the Israeli army did for 51 days.<\/p>\n

What caused last summer\u2019s conflict? What lit the spark and caused that 51-day war?<\/strong><\/p>\n

The war was an extension of an ongoing campaign to destroy the Palestinian national movement. \u00a0It\u2019s what the Israeli sociologist Barruch Kimmerling called \u201cpoliticide<\/a>,\u201d which is the destruction of an entire political identity. He\u2019s extrapolating out of the term \u201cgenocide,\u201d which is the destruction of an entire people. I think it\u2019s a really accurate distillation of the long-term Israeli strategy.<\/p>\n

In which ways?<\/strong><\/p>\n

I don\u2019t think that Israel has any intention of physically exterminating Palestinians by the hundreds of thousands. It simply wants to eliminate them as a national movement, and make them into wandering Arabs who are either confined to Bantustans in the West Bank; a human warehouse in the Gaza Strip; fourth class citizenship and providing menial labor in Israel proper, or just simple refugee status. But with no political leadership, and no nationalistic goal.<\/p>\n

That requires enormous violence. That\u2019s what we\u2019re seeing take place in the Gaza Strip. This war represents the frustration of the Goliath that Israel has become. It is an extension of the war that began in 1948, and even before then. It\u2019s the war of a settler-colonial movement against an indigenous people which is, after decades of trauma and many military failures, increasingly under the influence of Islamism. They\u2019re resisting their dispossession, as every other indigenous group has.<\/p>\n

The war also reflects the unfettered support Israel has received from from the military junta of Egypt (which is even more determined than Israel to destroy Hamas) and from the world\u2019s lone superpower, the United States.<\/p>\n

What role did the United States play during the war?<\/strong><\/p>\n

During a conflict in which Israel had already killed hundreds of children \u2014 about 590 children were killed, total \u2014 and in which it had already destroyed several cities in the Gaza Strip \u2014 and we\u2019re not talking just buildings, not even neighborhoods; we\u2019re talking about 20 percent of the Gaza Strip, wiped off the face of the Earth \u2014 Barack Obama reauthorizes Israel, in order to replenish its stock of mortar and artillery rounds, to dip into a supply of weapons that the Pentagon maintains inside Israel. The Obama administration did this without a second thought.<\/p>\n

At every turn, and in order to prevent Hamas from receiving any political gains, the administration prevented actual diplomacy from taking place. All of Hamas\u2019s conditions were humanitarian; they wanted an airport in the Gaza Strip, a sea port, permits for people to get out \u2014 things that everyone takes for granted. But the Obama administration, through Secretary of State John Kerry, collaborated with the military regime in Egypt to prevent any of these demands from being fulfilled. That continued the war, kept the casualty rate skyrocketing, and gave the Israeli military latitude to ratchet-up the violence.<\/p>\n

This happened before Obama and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu had that big, public row \u2014 but even still, it doesn\u2019t fit the description we\u2019re often given of Obama being less enamored with Israel than his predecessors.<\/strong><\/p>\n

When Barack Obama had his play-fight with Netanyahu, it was remarkable to me to see Democratic members of Congress coalesce behind him, to see groups of J Street support him, to see so many prominent liberals take his side. It wasn\u2019t because they were upset that Netanyahu had just engaged in a campaign of unprecedented violence against the civilian population of the Gaza Strip; it was because he was insulting their president, and the leader of the Democratic Party. Barack Obama, at the end of his second term, after basically letting the leader of a country that\u2019s barely the size of New Jersey insult him in public for years, was simply trying to save face.<\/p>\n

Now that this play-fight is over, we\u2019re seeing an initiative [in Congress] to increase the annual aid to Israel from $3 billion to $4.5 billion. We\u2019re seeing the White House promise more weapons. We heard Barack Obama compare Zionism to the civil rights movement. I don\u2019t understand where Obama has mistreated Israel, or \u201cabandoned\u201d Israel, in [former Israeli ambassador] Michael Oren\u2019s words. What we\u2019re seeing is a mock conflict that papers over the real dynamic of [the U.S.] endlessly supplying [weapons to] the world\u2019s only settler-colonial state with a nuclear army.<\/p>\n

Let\u2019s go back to Gaza for a moment, since that\u2019s the overwhelming focus of the book. For readers who don\u2019t know, what are some distinguishing characteristics of the population in Gaza? And what is life like in the Gaza Strip?<\/strong><\/p>\n

Increasingly, the Gaza Strip is populated by the young and the very young. About 50 percent of the population in the Gaza Strip \u2014 which is 1.8 million people; it\u2019s one of the most densely populated areas in the world \u2014 is under the age of 18. Of those under the age of 18, a disproportionate number are under the age of seven, which means these children have known nothing but war. A fatalistic attitude about these wars is actually leading people to have more<\/em> children. Because their children keep getting killed.<\/p>\n

The pressure on the public sector in the Gaza Strip, which is actually fairly well-maintained for a developing country that\u2019s under siege, is enormous. Israeli bombardments have destroyed the septic sanitary systems. There is no electricity. There are no services. For the past year, people in the Gaza Strip have been living with four to eight hours of electricity a day. That makes it really hard for young people to do their schoolwork.<\/p>\n

There\u2019s an entire generation of Palestinians who have never met a Jew that didn\u2019t approach them with a gun pointed at them, or approach them and attack. Many, if not most, of the young people I\u2019ve met have lost family members, have seen limbs blown off in front of their eyes, have had their homes destroyed, have lost friends. What that trauma does to you is, it makes you want revenge. You want a way to restore your dignity. You want to resist.\u00a0It\u2019s a terrifying scenario.<\/p>\n

Why \u201cterrifying\u201d?<\/strong><\/p>\n

Not because Palestinians are anti-Semitic and will attempt to kill Jews. I don\u2019t see that. It\u2019s terrifying because Judaism is being represented to those Israel is occupying as a religion of pure force, and a religion of domination. To me, this is the exact opposite of what Judaism represents and what it means to most of the Jews I know. If you go to the Gaza Strip and talk to men over 50, most of these men have worked in Israel; they knew Jewish Israelis and had relationships with them, friendships with them. And they have a different attitude.<\/p>\n

If you meet young people, like the kind I describe [in the book], the attitude is frightening. Israelis are simply faceless monsters who\u2019ve come to kill them. How are you going to build a future together based on that? I believe that the right-wing government of Israel is actually trying to deepen this divide. It started with the physical separation, through the siege. And it leads to a psychological separation that has terrifying implications for the future of Palestinian society, Jewish-Israeli society, and the whole world.<\/p>\n

And, unfortunately, it sounds like there\u2019s little reason not to expect another war like last summer\u2019s is in the short- or medium-term future.<\/strong><\/p>\n

It may not come as soon as I\u2019d thought, because Israel is reportedly in negotiation with Hamas to at least stave off another conflict. That may be because they don\u2019t want any military activity on their southern border while they\u2019re clashing with Hezbollah on the northern border; it may be because Israel\u2019s military-intelligence apparatus, in which there\u2019s more strategic thinking [than in the civilian government], sees Hamas as a force of stability in Gaza. They actually want Hamas to be there because Hamas is governing. Hamas actually uses its own military units to prevent rocket launches during ceasefires.<\/p>\n

But these wars are inevitable as long as Israel remains a Jewish state. As long as it remains a Jewish state, it has to maintain its artificial demographic majority through violent means; by warehousing people, by occupying and controlling them, or by excluding them as refugees. Avigdor Lieberman, the former Israeli foreign minister, has said that a fourth war in the Gaza Strip is inevitable \u2014 just as a third war in Lebanon is inevitable. The question is just when.<\/p>\n

_____________________________________<\/p>\n

Elias Isquith is a staff writer at Salon, focusing on politics.<\/em><\/p>\n

Go to Original \u2013 salon.com<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Author of “The 51 Day War: Ruin and Resistance in Gaza” tells what he saw in the rubble of a land under siege. If for whatever reason you are one of the very few people on this Earth who wants to go \u2018into,\u2019 rather than get \u2018out of,\u2019 the Gaza Strip, you may want to know what to expect.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[54],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-60357","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-palestine-israel-gaza-genocide"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/60357","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=60357"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/60357\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=60357"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=60357"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=60357"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}