Gaza Burning Israelis Enjoying The View (Part II)

Part II

The core of the military action in Gaza right now is what’s being called the Dahiya Doctrine, a strategy that was formalized back in 2006 when, in violation of the Geneva convention and international law, Israel decided to target an entire neighborhood in South Lebanon called Dahiya , completely destroying the place and killing over a thousand innocent people because Hezbollah kidnapped two Israeli soldiers.  Israel described the strategy quite openly as a conscious attempt to punish the civilian population of the area for Hezbollah’s actions through disproportionate, massive military action.  Ever since then Israel, in her dealings with the Palestinians, has stuck to this illegal strategy of deliberately targeting civilian populations and forcing them to labour under the yoke of permanent occupation.

Dahiya Strategy is not about an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth but two hundred eyes for an eye, two hundred teeth for a tooth.  It is as if, back in the second half of the last century, the British government responded to a terrorist attack by the IRA by ruthlessly bombing the Catholic areas of North Ireland for months, destroying every hospital, school and church there, blocking the escape of ordinary Catholics to Ireland and then forcing them to live in tents and continually flee as the British air force relentlessly bombed the place.  Had Britain done so the Irish lobby in the United States would surely have ensured that the government there intervened and put an end to British military actions.  The British Prime Minister and several of the country’s political leaders would also have been able to be prosecuted by an International Criminal Court as happened to Slobodan Milosevic, Ratko Mladic and as is being recommended in the case of Netanyahu and Yoav Gallant, Israel’s Defence Minister.

I’m afraid that the kind of logic behind the Dahiya policy, two hundred eyes for an eye, two hundred teeth for a tooth, is now deeply rooted in Israeli political culture.  One former right-wing member of the Knesset, Moshe Feiglin, recently cited a statement by Hitler when calling for drastic action against the Palestinians of Gaza.

“As Hitler said” he commented “I can’t live if one Jew is left.  We can’t live in this land if one Islamo-Nazi remains in Gaza.”

Members of Netanyahu’s war cabinet, including Netanyahu himself, have called for the implementation of a policy of mass killing or genocide against Palestinians.  These calls have been pieced together in a data base on the Law For Palestine  websiteand were central to the case South Africa brought at the International Court of Justice against Israel in which it accuses the country of committing deliberate genocide.

It’s not just the far-right in Israel who have called for the implementation of a policy of mass killing, unfortunately.  Recently, in an article in the left wing Israeli daily newspaper Haaretz, one of the country’s most well known intellectuals, the historian Benny Morris, recently called for a nuclear bomb to be dropped on Iran before that country could develop the capacity to build its own bomb.  Some hysterical students at Universities around the world might protest against the action, he said, but Israel would be able to cope just fine with that.

But the official narrative about Israel may now be strained in the United States and in Britain as people from different walks of life, including Jews themselves, turn against Israel and accuse it of genocide.  Even Trump has acknowledged that Israel is losing the propaganda battle.