[News] Genocide Begets Genocide: Rafah Waits for the Hammer to Fall

[Anti-Imperialist News]

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Genocide Begets Genocide: Rafah Waits for the Hammer to FallFebruary 19,
2024
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Palestinian refugees in Rafah, in the southern Gaza Strip. (Photo: Mahmoud
Ajjour, The Palestine Chronicle)

*By Jeremy Salt <https://www.palestinechronicle.com/writers/jeremy-salt>*

Disgracefully, shamefully, favoring the perpetrator, as Rafah awaits its
turn for the hammer to fall, western governments continue to shut their
eyes to all of this.

In Palestine, the descendants of the victims of genocide are now accused of
genocide. Whether the “plausible” accusation is eventually upheld by the
International Court of Justice remains to be seen but what we can see,
livestreamed around the world every day, are the horrifying consequences of
what Israel is doing.

Gaza is “uninhabitable,” says Martin Griffiths, the head of the UN Office
for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) humanitarian affairs;
Gaza is “gone,” says  Doctors Without Borders.

Hundreds of thousands of Gazans have been hounded into the south near the
Egyptian border: nearly 30,000 men, women and children have been killed in
Israeli missile and land attacks. Thousands of other bodies lie entombed
under rubble which can only be removed by hand because there is no fuel for
machines.

Neither is there any anesthesia for the hospitals, most of which have been
bombed, some repeatedly. Most are now closed down or closed to new
patients. Wounded children are treated on blood-smeared floors because
there are no more beds.

The dead are buried within hospital compounds because anywhere and anyone
can be the target of missile strikes. Anywhere near the hospital or leaving
a hospital, staff, patients, or family members, are likely to be shot.

Disgracefully, shamefully, favoring the perpetrator, as Rafah awaits its
turn for the hammer to fall,  western governments continue to shut their
eyes to all of this, consigning their own civilization and sham laws into
the rubbish bin of history.

The World Health Organization (WHO) reported very recently that since
October 7 the Israeli military had launched 378 attacks on healthcare
facilities in Gaza, killing 659 people (340 staff and 319 civilians) and
destroying close to 100 ambulances. From 2019-2021, the WHO reports, the
army of occupation had attacked 563 attacks on healthcare facilities in
Gaza and on the West Bank so there is nothing aberrant even in its current
wave of destruction.

The current main target is the Nasser Hospital in Khan Yunis, which is
besieged by tanks and soldiers sniping even through the hospital windows
from a short distance away and further terrorizing staff and patients with
threats and abuse.

In one especially despicable event recently, soldiers sent a young
Palestinian man into the hospital wrapped in a white robe, with wrists
bound and a mock yellow paper crown on his head,  to tell everyone to
leave. When he walked out he was shot dead – murdered – by the same
soldiers.

Yellow, of course, was the color of the star Jews were forced to wear by
the Nazis during their genocide. Was the intention just to taunt the
Palestinians, or in the minds of these murderers, was the yellow intended
to send the message to the Palestinians that now it’s your turn?

Just by late December, cases of diarrhea among children were up 50 percent,
UNICEF reported; 90 percent of children under the age of two were suffering
from “severe food poverty.” The health of more than 155,000
pregnant/breastfeeding women was similarly threatened.

By early January 2024, 70 percent of housing in Gaza – 300,000 out of
439,000 dwellings – along with shopping malls, bakeries, churches, mosques
and more than 200 heritage and archaeological sites had been destroyed.
Almost all buildings that have not been completely flattened are too badly
damaged to be repaired.

The still living squat in tents, with no heating and little food. They are
making flour from bird seed. Essential water, health and sanitation systems
have been damaged or destroyed and diseases are spreading. Terrorized,
scarcely able to survive, they wait in fear while the Israeli regime
decides when to unleashed its next concentrated wave of terror, on Rafah.

The killing and destruction fits Achille Mbembe’s definition of
necropolitics as living conditions which reduce  the life of a subjugated
population to the status of the living dead. This is not accidental but
deliberately imposed.  Other descriptions would be sociocide and
urbanicide, all of them adding up to genocide.

On the West Bank, hundreds of Palestinians have been killed since October 7
by soldiers and settlers and drone attacks on refugee camps. Thousands have
been abducted by Israeli soldiers: many are being held in ‘administrative
detention.’ Their treatment is a replay of the humiliation heaped on
Palestinian men in Gaza.

According to OCHA, Israeli soldiers have videoed and photographed
themselves “abusing, degrading and humiliating Palestinians,” by stripping
the men naked or half-naked, blindfolding and cuffing them and physically
abusing them, leaving them screaming in pain.  They have also been
humiliated by being forced to pose with the Israeli flag, sing songs in
Hebrew and dance with soldiers.

*‘Not a Village Must Be Left’*

The eradication of Gaza is not accidental but deliberate, the end product,
up to this point, with possibly even worse ahead, of a process beginning in
the late 19th century with Theodor Herzl’s solution to the problem of
establishing a Jewish state in a land already populated by someone else.

In a well-known quote from his diary he wrote of its “penniless population”
being “spirited out” beyond Palestine’s borders, at the blow of a whistle,
as he put it. The “land without a people for a people without land,” the
Zionist slogan, was a lie, at best a self-deserving delusion. Herzl knew
the ‘Arabs’ were there and so did the leaders of the Zionist movement who
followed him.

Despite  public declarations of meaning no harm,  the problem for the
Zionist leadership was not how to live with the Palestinians but how to
live without them – how to get rid of them.

Only in the privacy of their diaries or letters did David Ben-Gurion and
others reveal their true intentions. Thus, Joseph Weitz, the Polish head of
the land and afforestation office of the Jewish National Fund (JNF) wrote
in his diary that “it must be clear that there is no room in this country
for both peoples .. there is no way but to transfer the Arabs from here to
neighboring countries, to transfer all of them. Not one village must be
left, not one tribe.”

Ben-Gurion, the future prime minister, regarded partition only as a first
step towards the establishment of a Jewish state over all Palestine. Where
there was resistance, for example in the Naqab (Negev), “We must expel the
Arabs and take their place.” In February 1948 he wrote that “The war will
give us land. The concept of ‘ours’ and ‘not ours’ are peace concepts only,
in war they lose their whole meaning.”

The Zionist leadership knew ‘the Arabs’ would resist and began paramilitary
preparations early with the establishment of the Watchtower movement to
protect their colonies.

In the 1930s Palestinian resistance was aimed at Britain, which had handed
Palestine to the Zionists and given them senior positions in the
occupation regime, including ‘immigration’ and law.

British garrisons were reinforced and the Palestinian uprising of 1936-39
crushed through military force, collective punishment and the execution of
‘rebels.’ About 6000 Palestinians, including Shaikh Izz al Din al Qassam
and many others who would have led the Palestinians in 1948, were killed.

Still numerically weak, the Zionists declared the doctrine of *havlagah*
(restraint) but by the late 1930s they were rolling barrel bombs into
Palestinian markets and killing dozens of people.

Increasingly, with a European war on the horizon and Britain backing away
from some of its more extreme pro-zionist policies, British police stations
and soldiers as well as the indigenous population became the targets of
Zionist militias

In 1944, Lord Moyne, British minister of state for the Middle East, was
assassinated in Cairo by agents of the Lehi movement, later the Stern gang,
a collaborator with the Irgun in the Deir Yassin massacre of Palestinians
(one of many) in 1948.  Moyne was Churchill’s friend and Churchill was
shocked at the “ingratitude” of a movement he had supported so strongly for
so long, now culminating in “the smoke of assassins’ pistols.”

In 1948 the Zionists felt strong enough to go to war to take what they
wanted.  Far from being surrounded by an Arab ‘ring of steel,’ they knew
that the Arab states were weak, poorly armed and either dominated by the
imperial powers or dependent on them for economic and military aid.

*White House Bullying *

Talking publicly of the threat of extermination, in private Chaim Weizmann,
who was to be Israel’s first president, was confident of victory over the
Arab forces sent to Palestine.

The partition plan of 1947 had only recommended the partition of Palestine
into Arab and Jewish states, the smaller portion going to the numerically
dominant native population and the greater to European colonialist settlers.

At a time when self-determination and decolonization were guiding
principles at the UN, the partition resolution tabled in the General
Assembly would never have passed – as it did, by a bare majority – but for
the bullying of vulnerable delegations by the White House.

The war of 1948 was a war of necessity for the Zionists, as by that time
they had managed to purchase only 5-6 percent of the land.

Furthermore, had the terms of reference of the partition resolution been
observed, the ‘Jewish state’ would have had almost as many Palestinian
Muslims and Christians inside it as Jews.  In such a situation a ‘Jewish
state, at least a democratic Jewish state, would have been a contradiction.
The Palestinians would have to be removed and a war was needed to do it.

Between early 1948 and the signing of truce agreements in 1949, the
Zionists seized 78 percent of Palestine, 24 percent more than the ‘Jewish
state’ had been allocated in 1947.  However, winning the war was not
enough.  For the Zionist program to succeed, Palestine would have to be
eradicated.

The story of the *nakba – *or the first stage of the *nakba* – is too well
known to need repeating here except for the worst of it. About 800,000
Palestinians were ethnically cleansed, driven out into Lebanon, Syria,
Jordan and Gaza.  Some 500 of their villages and hamlets were destroyed,
all their land seized and the western half of Jerusalem captured before a
ceasefire prevented the Zionists from taking everything.

Weizmann was gleeful at the flight of the Palestinians and the vast
quantity of their agricultural land that had been seized,  describing the
* nakba* as a “miraculous simplification of Israel’s task.”  The fact that
it had all fallen into Israel’s hands at no cost was further cause for
celebration.

In the 1950s Israel began launching ruthless attacks on Gaza, then in the
hands of Egypt, but whoever was in charge, Gaza has been a focal point of
Israeli military operations ever since.

As a garrison state bent on consolidating its occupation and settlement of
Palestine, Israel could only survive by crushing anyone that got in its
way, through war,  military ‘incursions’ and assassination within Palestine
and across borders. The tactics have not changed in 75 years.

*Only especially Horrifying*

The destruction and atrocities we are seeing in Gaza now are especially
horrifying only because that they are worse than anything we have seen
before, not because Israel has not behaved like this before. Previous
outrages include massacres in surrounding countries, including Lebanon,
where close to 20,000 Palestinian and Lebanese civilians were killed in
Israel’s 1982 onslaught.

The savagery in Beirut included the slaughter of 1200-3000 Palestinians in
the Sabra and Shatila refugee camps by Israel’s Lebanese fascist iron
guard. Israel was fully in charge of the operation.  It surrounded the
camps, organised the killers and ushered them into the camps, even lighting
them up at night.

The genocide of Palestinians has been incremental and pursued by violence,
semi-legal and illegal means, indeed, anything that would move Israel
closer to the goal of absorbing all of Palestine. The *nakba *was not one
event in 1948 but an incrementally realised rolling series of events.

In 1967 another war which Israel launched gave it the opportunity to drive
 350,000 Palestinians – many already refugees from 1948 – out of the West
Bank into Jordan or off the occupied Syrian Golan Heights. The colonisation
of land occupied in 1967 has continued relentlessly since that time, with
complete disregard by Israel of, or contempt for, international law.

The ‘peace process’ of the 1990s was all process and no peace, a
well-publicised sham that left the Palestinians worse off than before and
set up a framework that allowed Israel to continue expanding its
settlements. On the West Bank a collaborationist ‘Palestinian Authority’
was reminiscent of an earlier attempt – the ‘village leagues’ project of
the late 1970s – to put a Palestinian stamp on the occupation.

In Gaza a Hamas government, democratically elected,  ruled since 2006,
despite the combined efforts of Israel, the Palestinian Authority and the
US to destroy it. Just in the past 15 years Gaza has been savagely attacked
many times, with thousands of civilians killed, including many hundreds of
children on each occasion.

Israel’s onslaughts have had the same consequences in Lebanon. At no stage
has Israel been punished in any way for its violations of international
law; at no stage have any of these attacks caused any outrage, let alone
the outrage triggered off by Hamas’ military response to 75 years of
occupation on October 7.

The statement by UN secretary-general Antonio Guterres that October 7 “did
not happen in a vacuum” was a wild understatement.  The Palestinians have
been fighting against the occupation of their land ever since the British
government decided to give what it did not own to the Zionists in 1917.

The Palestinians have not fought intermittently but literally every day,
establishing their resistance as one of the longest in history if not the
longest. Their determination in sticking to their rights and fighting for
them has been extraordinary. Even if they had accepted Jewish statehood on
their land, Israel had no right under any law or UN resolution to drive
them off it.  Their rights remain as intact now as they were in 1948.
Nothing Israel does can rub them out.

The settlements on the other side of the Gaza fence were built on land from
which the Palestinians were ethnically cleansed in 1948.  The settlers know
or should know that they are living on land belonging to people living as
refugees just a few kilometers away.

One of the settlements attacked on October 7 was Sderot, whose residents
only a few years ago were sitting outside on garden chairs at night
cheering the latest round of destruction of Gaza from the air by the
Israeli military. Now a number are dead.  Some may have been sitting on
those same chairs.


*– Jeremy Salt taught at the University of Melbourne, at Bosporus
University in Istanbul and Bilkent University in Ankara for many years,
specializing in the modern history of the Middle East. Among his recent
publications is his 2008 book, The Unmaking of the Middle East. A History
of Western Disorder in Arab Lands (University of California Press). He
contributed this article to The Palestine Chronicle. *
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