Behind the Bloodbath
in Gaza

Foiling Another Palestinian
Peace Offensive


Norman Finkelstein
CounterPunch
January 28, 2009

Early speculation on the motive behind Israel’s slaughter in Gaza that began
on 27 December 2008 and continued till 18 January 2009 centered on the
upcoming elections in Israel. The jockeying for votes was no doubt a factor
in this Sparta-like society consumed by “revenge and the thirst for blood,”
where killing Arabs is a sure crowd-pleaser. (Polls during the war showed
that 80-90 percent of Israeli Jews supported it.) But as Israeli journalist
Gideon Levy pointed out on Democracy Now!, “Israel went through a very
similar war…two-and-a-half years ago [in Lebanon], when there were no
elections.” When crucial state interests are at stake, Israeli ruling elites
seldom launch major operations for narrowly electoral gains. It is true that
Prime Minister Menachem Begin’s decision to bomb the Iraqi OSIRAK reactor
in 1981 was an electoral ploy, but the strategic stakes in the strike on Iraq were
puny; contrary to widespread belief, Saddam Hussein had not embarked on
a nuclear weapons program prior to the bombing. The fundamental motives
behind the latest Israeli attack on Gaza lie elsewhere: (1) in the need to
restore Israel’s “deterrence capacity,” and (2) in the threat posed by a new
Palestinian “peace offensive.”

Israel’s “larger concern” in the current offensive, New York Times Middle
East correspondent Ethan Bronner reported, quoting Israeli sources, was to
“re-establish Israeli deterrence,” because “its enemies are less afraid of
it than they once were, or should be.” Preserving its deterrence capacity
has always loomed large in Israeli strategic doctrine. Indeed, it was the
main impetus behind Israel’s first-strike against Egypt in June 1967 that
resulted in Israel’s occupation of Gaza (and the West Bank). To justify the
onslaught on Gaza, Israeli historian Benny Morris wrote that “[m]any
Israelis feel that the walls…are closing in…much as they felt in early June
1967.” Ordinary Israelis no doubt felt threatened in June 1967, but—as
Morris surely knows—the Israeli leadership experienced no such trepidation.
After Israel threatened and laid plans to attack Syria, Egyptian President
Gamal Abdel Nasser declared the Straits of Tiran closed to Israeli shipping,
but Israel made almost no use of the Straits (apart from the passage of oil,
of which Israel then had ample stocks) and, anyhow, Nasser did not in
practice enforce the blockade, vessels passing freely through the Straits
within days of his announcement. In addition, multiple U.S. intelligence
agencies had concluded that the Egyptians did not intend to attack Israel
and that, in the improbable case that they did, alone or in concert with other
Arab countries, Israel would—in President Lyndon Johnson’s words—“whip
the hell out of them.” The head of the Mossad told senior American officials
on 1 June 1967 that “there were no differences between the U.S. and the
Israelis on the military intelligence picture or its interpretation.” The
predicament for Israel was rather the growing perception in the Arab world,
spurred by Nasser’s radical nationalism and climaxing in his defiant
gestures in May 1967, that it would no longer have to follow Israeli orders.
Thus, Divisional Commander Ariel Sharon admonished those in the Israeli
cabinet hesitant to launch a first-strike that Israel was losing its “deterrence
capability…our main weapon—the fear of us.” Israel unleashed the June 1967
war “to restore the credibility of Israeli deterrence” (Israeli strategic
analyst Zeev Maoz).

The expulsion of the Israeli occupying army by Hezbollah in May 2000 a
major new challenge to Israel’s deterrence capacity. The fact that Israel
suffered a humiliating defeat, one celebrated throughout the Arab world,
made another war well-nigh inevitable. Israel almost immediately began
planning for the next round, and in summer 2006 found a pretext when
Hezbollah captured two Israeli soldiers (several others were killed in the
firefight) and demanded in exchange the release of Lebanese prisoners held
by Israel. Although Israel unleashed the fury of its air force and geared up
for a ground invasion, it suffered yet another ignominious defeat. A respected
American military analyst despite being partial to Israel nonetheless
concluded, “the IAF, the arm of the Israel military that had once destroyed
whole air forces in a few days, not only proved unable to stop Hezbollah
rocket strikes but even to do enough damage to prevent Hezbollah’s rapid
recovery”; that “once ground forces did cross into Lebanon…, they failed to
overtake Hezbollah strongholds, even those close to the border”; that “in
terms of Israel’s objectives, the kidnapped Israeli soldiers were neither
rescued nor released; Hezbollah’s rocket fire was suppressed, not even its
long-range fire…; and Israeli ground forces were badly shaken and bogged
down by a well-equipped and capable foe”; and that “more troops and a
massive ground invasion would indeed have produced a different outcome,
but the notion that somehow that effort would have resulted in a more
decisive victory over Hezbollah…has no basis in historical example or logic.”
The juxtaposition of several figures further highlights the magnitude of the
setback: Israel deployed 30,000 troops as against 2,000 regular Hezbollah
fighters and 4,000 irregular Hezbollah and non-Hezbollah fighters; Israel
delivered and fired 162,000 weapons whereas Hezbollah fired 5,000 weapons
(4,000 rockets and projectiles at Israel and 1,000 antitank missiles inside
Lebanon). Moreover, “the vast majority of the fighters who defended villages
such as Ayta ash Shab, Bint Jbeil, and Maroun al-Ras were not, in fact,
regular Hezbollah fighters and in some cases were not even members of
Hezbollah,” and “many of Hezbollah’s best and most skilled fighters never
saw action, lying in wait along the Litani River with the expectation that
the IDF assault would be much deeper and arrive much faster than it did.”
Yet another indication of Israel’s reversal of fortune was that, unlike any
of its previous armed conflicts, in the final stages of the 2006 war it fought
not in defiance of a U.N. ceasefire resolution but in the hope of a U.N.
resolution to rescue it.

After the 2006 Lebanon war Israel was itching to take on Hezbollah again,
but did not yet have a military option against it. In mid-2008 Israel
desperately sought to conscript the U.S. for an attack on Iran, which would
also decapitate Hezbollah, and thereby humble the main challengers to its
regional hegemony. Israel and its quasi-official emissaries such as Benny
Morris threatened that if the U.S. did not go along “then non-conventional
weaponry will have to be used,” and “many innocent Iranians will die.” To
Israel’s chagrin and humiliation, the attack never materialized and Iran has
gone its merry way, while the credibility of Israel’s capacity to terrorize
slipped another notch. It was high time to find a defenseless target to
annihilate. Enter Gaza, Israel’s favorite shooting gallery. Even there the
feebly armed Islamic movement Hamas had defiantly resisted Israeli diktat,
in June 2008 even compelling Israel to agree to a ceasefire.

During the 2006 Lebanon war Israel flattened the southern suburb of Beirut
known as the Dahiya, where Hezbollah commanded much popular support.
In the war’s aftermath Israeli military officers began referring to the “Dahiya
strategy”: “We shall pulverize the 160 Shiite villages [in Lebanon] that
have turned into Shiite army bases,” the IDF Northern Command Chief
explained, “and we shall not show mercy when it comes to hitting the
national infrastructure of a state that, in practice, is controlled by
Hezbollah.” In the event of hostilities, a reserve Colonel at the Israeli
Institute for National Security Studies chimed in, Israel needs “to act
immediately, decisively, and with force that is disproportionate….Such a
response aims at inflicting damage and meting out punishment to an extent
that will demand long and expensive reconstruction processes.” The new
strategy was to be used against all of Israel’s regional adversaries who had
waxed defiant—“the Palestinians in Gaza are all Khaled Mashaal, the Lebanese
are all Nasrallah, and the Iranians are all Ahmadinejad”—but Gaza was the
prime target for this blitzkrieg-cum-bloodbath strategy. “Too bad it did not
take hold immediately after the ‘disengagement’ from Gaza and the first
rocket barrages,” a respected Israeli columnist lamented. “Had we
immediately adopted the Dahiya strategy, we would have likely spared
ourselves much trouble.” After a Palestinian rocket attack, Israel’s
Interior Minister urged in late September 2008, “the IDF should…decide on a
neighborhood in Gaza and level it.” And, insofar as the Dahiya strategy
could not be inflicted just yet on Lebanon and Iran, it was predictably
pre-tested in Gaza.

The operative plan for the Gaza bloodbath can be gleaned from authoritative
statements after the war got underway: “What we have to do is act
systematically with the aim of punishing all the organizations that are
firing the rockets and mortars, as well as the civilians who are enabling
them to fire and hide” (reserve Major-General); “After this operation there
will not be one Hamas building left standing in Gaza” (Deputy IDF Chief of
Staff); “Anything affiliated with Hamas is a legitimate target” (IDF
Spokesperson’s Office). Whereas Israel killed a mere 55 Lebanese during the
first two days of the 2006 war, the Israeli media exulted at Israel’s “shock
and awe” (Maariv) as it killed more than 300 Palestinians in the first two
days of the attack on Gaza. Several days into the slaughter an informed
Israeli strategic analyst observed, “The IDF, which planned to attack
buildings and sites populated by hundreds of people, did not warn them in
advance to leave, but intended to kill a great many of them, and succeeded.”
Morris could barely contain his pride at “Israel’s highly efficient air
assault on Hamas.” The Israeli columnist B. Michael was less impressed by
the dispatch of helicopter gunships and jet planes “over a giant prison and
firing at its people” —for example, “70…traffic cops at their graduation
ceremony, young men in desperate search of a livelihood who thought they’d
found it in the police and instead found death from the skies.”

As Israel targeted schools, mosques, hospitals, ambulances, and U.N.
sanctuaries, as it slaughtered and incinerated Gaza’s defenseless civilian
population (one-third of the 1,200 reported casualties were children),
Israeli commentators gloated that “Gaza is to Lebanon as the second sitting
for an exam is to the first—a second chance to get it right,” and that this
time around Israel had “hurled [Gaza] back,” not 20 years as it promised to
do in Lebanon, but “into the 1940s. Electricity is available only for a few
hours a day”; that “Israel regained its deterrence capabilities” because
“the war in Gaza has compensated for the shortcomings of the [2006] Second
Lebanon War”; and that “There is no doubt that Hezbollah leader Hassan
Nasrallah is upset these days….There will no longer be anyone in the Arab
world who can claim that Israel is weak.”

New York Times foreign affairs expert Thomas Friedman joined in the chorus
of hallelujahs. Israel in fact won the 2006 Lebanon war, according to
Friedman, because it had inflicted “substantial property damage and
collateral casualties on Lebanon at large,” thereby administering an
“education” to Hezbollah: fearing the Lebanese people’s wrath, Hezbollah
would “think three times next time” before defying Israel. He expressed hope
that Israel was likewise “trying to ‘educate’ Hamas by inflicting a heavy
death toll on Hamas militants and heavy pain on the Gaza population.” To
justify the targeting of Lebanese civilians and civilian infrastructure
Friedman asserted that Israel had no other option because “Hezbollah created
a very ‘flat’ military network…deeply embedded in the local towns and
villages,” and that because “Hezbollah nested among civilians, the only
long-term source of deterrence was to exact enough pain on the civilians…to
restrain Hezbollah in the future.”

Leaving aside Friedman’s hollow coinages—what does “flat” mean?—and
leaving aside that he alleged that the killing of civilians was unavoidable but
also recommends targeting civilians as a “deterrence” strategy: is it even true
that Hezbollah was “embedded in,” “nested among,” and “intertwined” with
the Lebanese civilian population?

Here’s what Human Rights Watch concluded after an exhaustive
investigation:

“we found strong evidence that Hezbollah stored most of its rockets
in bunkers and weapon storage facilities located in uninhabited fields
and valleys, that in the vast majority of cases Hezbollah fighters left
populated civilian areas as soon as the fighting started, and that
Hezbollah fired the vast majority of its rockets from pre-prepared
positions outside villages.”

“in all but a few of the cases of civilian deaths we investigated,
Hezbollah fighters had not mixed with the civilian population or
taken other actions to contribute to the targeting of a particular home
or vehicle by Israeli forces.” Indeed, “Israel’s own firing patterns in
Lebanon support the conclusion that Hezbollah fired large numbers of
its rockets from tobacco fields, banana, olive and citrus groves, and
more remote, unpopulated valleys.”

“the key battlefields in the land campaign south of the Litani River
were mostly devoid of civilians, and IDF participants consistently
report little or no meaningful intermingling of Hezbollah fighters and
noncombatants. Nor is there any systematic reporting of Hezbollah
using civilians in the combat zone as shields.”

There is an opportunity to deal with this conflict in a manner different
than Israel and, behind it, the U.S. is dealing with it today. There is
an opportunity to achieve a Palestinian national consensus on a
political program based on the 1967 borders, and this is an exceptional
circumstance, in which most Palestinian forces, including Hamas, accept
a state on the 1967 borders….There is also an Arab consensus on this
demand, and this is a historic situation. But no one is taking advantage
of this opportunity. No one is moving to cooperate with this
opportunity. Even this minimum that has been accepted by the
Palestinians and the Arabs has been rejected by Israel and by the U.S.

was not a clear and present danger: Its existence was always known
and its use could have been prevented on the Israeli side, or at least the
soldiers stationed beside it removed from harm’s way. It is impossible
to claim that those who decided to blow up the tunnel were simply
being thoughtless. The military establishment was aware of the
immediate implications of the measure, as well as of the fact that the
policy of “controlled entry” into a narrow area of the Strip leads to the
same place: an end to the lull. That is policy—not a tactical decision
by a commander on the ground.