A New Model Of A Cold War Of Extermination

After the 1948 war, the founders of apartheid Israel, including its first Prime Minister, David Ben-Gurion, established several “fundamental principles” that the newly established state must adhere to in future wars with its neighbours.

Foremost among these “principles” was that Israel waged its wars on the enemy's territory, never on its own. The second “principle” was that the war should be swift and intense, ending with the enemy's annihilation.

Now, if we look back at the history of Israeli wars, the current one against Gaza—if we consider it a war-- is the longest. It thus breaks Ben-Gurion's second rule. The longer the war lasts, which requires a resolute resistance, the more Israel will bleed to its core, both internally and externally.

Palestinians of Gaza have endured and continue to endure sacrifices unseen by any people in human history. Even if the Israeli war cabinet has decided to "take complete control of Gaza," that doesn't change anything.

On the contrary, the decision brings to the surface further disagreements between the military and the political leaderships, because the occupation's two stated goals—eliminating Palestinian resistance and recovering the Israeli prisoners—are mutually exclusive, according to the new Chief of Staff, Eyal Zamir, who told ministers that Israel must be prepared for the possibility that the Israeli prisoners will never be recovered if it wants to eliminate Hamas once and for all.

But is it a “war?” Or rather, a combination of genocide and ethnic cleansing, as so many Palestinian and international intellectuals, legal experts, and governments have argued?

As I write this piece, I am told that in hours most community kitchens in Gaza will close as food runs out and famine intensifies. And that more than 144 civilians have been killed and 560 injured in the last 24 hours alone.

Over 55,432 are now documented killed in Gaza by this genocidal spree in a year and a half, 70% of whom are women and children. That is not counting those beneath the rubble of their homes. And the more undocumented deaths that occur by untreated injuries, by deliberate starvation and thirst, and by communicable disease. Those latter deaths are estimated to have been in the hundreds of thousands.

On the 18th of March, Apartheid Israel decided to tighten its blockade on the Gaza Concentration Camp, leading to a severe shortage of food, medical supplies, and fuel. It has also cut off the only electricity line that reaches the center of the Strip, and which supplies the main water desalination plant and one of the main sewage plants there, compounding the tragedy of the already besieged population.

This came at a time when the newly appointed Chief of Staff of the IOF at the time, General Eyal Zamir, revealed that he would implement a fundamental change in the process of distributing humanitarian aid and that his army would either handle the distribution process in the Strip or closely supervise it.

This plan was devised by the IOF during the genocide before the ceasefire, but it was not implemented, especially after reaching the agreement for the first phase of the ceasefire. This is being done based on military plans to tighten the siege on the Strip, in a way that exacerbates the stifling humanitarian crisis that the residents of the tiny coastal Strip have been suffering from since the beginning of the genocide. This is why it has come up with the idea of establishing 4 “aid centers” run by American mercenaries.

What apartheid Israel is doing in Gaza goes beyond being a traditional military aggression or a long-term economic blockade. Rather, it is a new model of cold wars of extermination, where we Palestinians are tested between the jaws of death by starvation or death by bombing, and where aid is transformed into a tool of collective torture and a prelude to uprooting us from our land.

In this context, the massacres accompanying the distribution of aid are no longer mere military transgressions or errors in coordination, but rather calculated milestones in a deep displacement project, ethnic cleansing, aiming to reproduce the Nakba with less noisy but more precise and effective tools.

What is striking about Israel's policy is that it does not limit itself to destroying infrastructure and exterminating people from the air, but rather employs hunger as one of the most lethal and influential field weapons in the decision to survive and persevere. Here, the Israeli occupation is not inventing a new weapon, but rather reusing old colonial tactics practiced by the major colonial powers in Africa and Asia, when they opened relief corridors in exchange for loyalty, displacement, or submission.

The only difference is that Israel is practicing this in front of the eyes of the world, under the banner of the United Nations, and the platforms of the Western media, which do not care about the names of the children killed as long as they are on the Palestinian side of history.

And the so-called ‘International community”?! Brotherly Arab and Islamic worlds?

In fact, Europe and the US have merely watched. Apartheid Israel has carried on because it knows the West and its Arab allies make noises, but they do not stand up to Israel. Worse, the colonial West has decided to directly get involved in a way that brings back the orientalist, racist clichés and stereotypes about “brown” Arabs, or, in the words of Israel’s Minister of War, “human animals.”

So, on behalf of the colonial West, Israeli political and military leaders deliberately unleashed the first live-streamed genocidal war to wreak havoc on Gaza, making it unlivable and severely punishing its population, especially women, children and the elderly for daring to challenge its colonial invincibility, for breaking its “fundamental principles”, for merely reminding it and the world of its original sin, namely the Nakba of 1948.

As the Palestinian BDS Movement has argued, Palestine has become a litmus test for international law and human rights. Europe’s hypocrisy, shameless selective application of international law, and full partnership in Israel’s illegal occupation, apartheid and genocide against Indigenous Palestinians are accelerating the collapse of the rule of law and respect for human rights – which will pose a serious threat to all justice movements. And this must unite all those seeking justice, considering the rise of the far Right in so many countries, including the United States, some European countries, and India.

I am writing this piece from South Africa, a country that managed to unite the world in the 1960s, 70’s, and 80’s against another inhumane system until it crumbled. Will Palestine, Gaza in particular, do the same?!

Haidar Eid is a Palestinian-South African academic. He is the author of Banging on the Walls of the Tank: Dispatches from Gaza. The views expressed here are the writer’s own.