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<div class="header reader-header reader-show-element"> <font
size="-2"><a class="domain reader-domain"
href="http://www.palestinechronicle.com/israeli-general-mounts-challenge-to-netanyahu-by-flaunting-gaza-carnage/">http://www.palestinechronicle.com/israeli-general-mounts-challenge-to-netanyahu-by-flaunting-gaza-carnage/</a></font>
<h1 class="reader-title">Israeli General Mounts Challenge to
Netanyahu by Flaunting Gaza Carnage (VIDEO)</h1>
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<div class="reader-estimated-time"><span
class="entry-meta-date updated"><a
href="http://www.palestinechronicle.com/2019/01/">January
28, 2019</a></span></div>
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<p><strong>By <a
href="http://www.palestinechronicle.com/writers/jonathan-cook"
title="Display all articles for Jonathan Cook">Jonathan
Cook</a></strong></p>
<p><span>With April’s elections looming, Benjamin
Netanyahu has good reason to fear Benny Gantz, his
former army chief. Gantz has launched a new party,
named Israeli Resilience, just as the net of
corruption indictments is closing around the prime
minister.</span></p>
<p><span>Already, at this early stage of campaigning, some
31 percent of the Israeli public prefers Gantz to head
the next government over Netanyahu, who is only months
away from becoming the longest-serving leader in
Israel’s history.</span></p>
<p><span>Gantz is being feted as the new hope, a chance to
change direction after a series of governments under
Netanyahu’s leadership have over the past decade
shifted Israel ever further to the right.</span></p>
<p><span>Like Israel’s former politician generals, from
Yitzhak Rabin to Ehud Barak and Ariel Sharon, Gantz is
being portrayed – and portraying himself – as a
battle-hardened warrior, able to make peace from a
position of strength.</span></p>
<p><span>Before he had issued a single policy statement,
polls showed him winning 15 of the 120 parliamentary
seats, a welcome sign for those hoping that a
center-left coalition can triumph this time.</span></p>
<p><span>But the reality of what Gantz stands for –
revealed this week in his first election videos – is
far from reassuring.</span></p>
<p><span>In 2014, he led Israel into its longest and most
savage military operation in living memory: 50 days in
which the tiny coastal enclave of Gaza was bombarded
relentlessly.</span></p>
<p><span>By the end, one of the most densely populated
areas on earth – its two million inhabitants already
trapped by a lengthy Israeli blockade – lay in ruins.
More than 2,200 Palestinians were killed in the
onslaught, a quarter of them children, while tens of
thousands were left homeless.</span></p>
<p><span>The world watched, appalled. Investigations by
human rights groups such as Amnesty International
concluded that Israel had committed war crimes.</span></p>
<p><span>One might have assumed that during the election
campaign Gantz would wish to draw a veil over this
troubling period in his military career. Not a bit of
it.</span></p>
<p><span>One of his campaign videos soars over the rubble
of Gaza, proudly declaring that Gantz was responsible
for destroying many thousands of buildings. “Parts of
Gaza have been returned to the Stone Age,” the video
boasts.</span></p>
<p><span>This is a reference to the Dahiya doctrine, a
strategy devised by the Israeli military command of
which Gantz was a core member. The aim is to lay waste
to the modern infrastructure of Israel’s neighbors,
forcing survivors to eke out a bare existence rather
than resist Israel. The collective punishment inherent
in the apocalyptic Dahiya doctrine is an undoubted war
crime.</span></p>
<p><span>More particularly, the video exults in the
destruction of Rafah, a city in Gaza that suffered the
most intense bout of bombing after an Israeli soldier
was seized by Hamas. In minutes, Israel’s
indiscriminate bombardment killed at least 135
Palestinian civilians and wrecked a hospital.</span></p>
<p><span>According to investigations, Israel had invoked
the Hannibal Procedure, the code name for an order
allowing the army to use any means to stop one of its
soldiers being taken. That includes killing civilians
as “collateral damage” and, more controversially for
Israelis, the soldier himself.</span></p>
<p><span>Gantz’s video flashes up a grand total of “1,364
terrorists killed”, in return for “three-and-a-half
years of quiet”. As Israel’s liberal Haaretz daily
observed, the video “celebrates a body count as if
this were just some computer game”.</span></p>
<p><span>But the casualty figure cited by Gantz exceeds
even the Israel army’s self-serving assessment – as
well, of course, as dehumanizing those “terrorists”
fighting for their freedom.</span></p>
<p><span>A more impartial observer, Israeli human rights
group B’Tselem, estimates that the Palestinian
fighters killed by Israel amounted to 765. By their
reckoning, and that of other bodies such as the United
Nations, almost two-thirds of Gazans killed in
Israel’s 2014 operation were civilians.</span></p>
<p><span>Further, the “quiet” Gantz credits himself with
was enjoyed chiefly by Israel.</span></p>
<p><span>In Gaza, Palestinians faced regular military
attacks, a continuing siege choking off essential
supplies and destroying their export industries, and a
policy of executions by Israeli snipers firing on
unarmed demonstrators at the perimeter fence
imprisoning the enclave.</span></p>
<p><span>Gantz’s campaign slogans “Only the Strong Wins”
and “Israel Before Everything” are telling.
Everything, for Gantz, clearly includes human rights.</span></p>
<p><span>It is shameful enough that he believes his track
record of war crimes will win over voters. But the
same approach has been voiced by Israel’s new military
chief of staff.</span></p>
<p><span>Aviv Kochavi, nicknamed the Philosopher Officer
for his university studies, was inaugurated this month
as the army’s latest head. In a major speech, he
promised to reinvent the fabled “most moral army in
the world” into a “deadly, efficient” one.</span></p>
<blockquote data-width="550" data-dnt="true">
<p dir="ltr" lang="en">Benny <a
href="https://twitter.com/hashtag/Gantz?src=hash&ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">#Gantz</a>
‘Stole’ <a
href="https://twitter.com/hashtag/Gaza?src=hash&ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">#Gaza</a>
Destruction Footage for a Campaign Video <a
href="https://t.co/KXMc4jWKbV">https://t.co/KXMc4jWKbV</a>
via <a
href="https://twitter.com/PalestineChron?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">@PalestineChron</a>
<a href="https://t.co/5BpNanBasQ">pic.twitter.com/5BpNanBasQ</a></p>
<p>— Palestine Chronicle (@PalestineChron) <a
href="https://twitter.com/PalestineChron/status/1089900504153501696?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">January
28, 2019</a></p>
</blockquote>
<p><span>In Kochavi’s view, the rampaging military once
overseen by Gantz needs to step up its game. And he is
a proven expert in destruction.</span></p>
<p><span>In the early stages of the Palestinian uprising
that erupted in 2000, the Israeli army struggled to
find a way to crush Palestinian fighters concealed in
densely crowded cities under occupation.</span></p>
<p><span>Kochavi came up with an ingenious solution in
Nablus, where he was brigade commander. The army would
invade a Palestinian home, then smash through its
walls, moving from house to house, burrowing through
the city unseen. Palestinian space was not only
usurped but destroyed inside-out.</span></p>
<p><span>Gantz, the former general hoping to lead the
government, and Kochavi, the general leading its army,
are symptoms of just how complete the militaristic
logic that has overtaken Israel really is. An Israel
determined to become a modern-day Sparta.</span></p>
<p><span>Should he bring about Netanyahu’s downfall,
Gantz, like his predecessor politician-generals, will
turn out to be a hollow peace-maker. He was trained to
understand only strength, zero-sum strategies,
conquest and destruction, not compassion or
compromise.</span></p>
<p><span>More dangerously, Gantz’s glorification of his
military past is likely to reinforce in Israelis’
minds the need not for peace but for more of the same:
support for an ultranationalist right that bathes
itself in an ethnic supremacist philosophy and
dismisses any recognition of the Palestinians as human
beings with rights.</span></p>
<p><i><span>(A version of this article first appeared in
the National, Abu Dhabi.)</span></i></p>
<p><i><span>– Jonathan Cook won the Martha Gellhorn
Special Prize for Journalism. His books include
“Israel and the Clash of Civilisations: Iraq, Iran
and the Plan to Remake the Middle East” (Pluto
Press) and “Disappearing Palestine: Israel’s
Experiments in Human Despair” (Zed Books). He
contributed this article to PalestineChronicle.com.
Visit his website </span></i><a
href="http://www.jonathan-cook.net/"><i><span>www.jonathan-cook.net</span></i></a><i><span>.
</span></i></p>
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