GAZA AFTER A YEAR OF WAR
A new documentary chronicles destruction and abuse
Last week Al Jazeera released Investigating War Crimes in Gaza. The 81-minute documentary is a searing indictment of the treatment of those who always suffer most in war—women and children—during Israel’s retaliation for the horrid murders Hamas inflicted inside Israel a year ago this week.
Israel’s initial ground attack failed to rescue all the Israeli hostages or to destroy the several hundred miles of the Hamas tunnel system. The ongoing air attacks have resulted in the indiscriminate killing of men, women, and children, day and night, in houses, apartments, and office buildings. Home to more than two million Palestinians, Gaza has been torn apart, with immense casualties from the bombings that have eventually left little sign of civilization: no hospitals, universities, markets, restaurants, or civic life.
The war in Gaza has extended into the West Bank and now to Lebanon. The Israeli leadership, headed by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu with religious fanatics in charge of key ministries, has edged the nation into economic misery, and they continue a campaign of assassinations and bombings. Sirens sounded throughout Israel yesterday morning—a tragic anniversary—as a few easily intercepted missiles were fired from a still operating tunnel by a remnant of Hamas. Hezbollah’s much more formidable arsenal of missiles remains operational, and capable of striking deep into Israel. The Israeli Air Force struck what were described as Hamas targets last weekend in Gaza, and the IDF continues the air and ground war against Hezbollah in Lebanon. There has been fear of an Israeli attack on Iran in retaliation for Iran’s missile attack on Israel following Israel’s assassinations of Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah last month in Lebanon and a senior Hamas official last summer in Tehran. Murder is in the air in the Middle East and there is no international leader—certainly no one in the Biden administration—with the standing and the will to keep it from happening.
In all of this, Netanyahu’s administration has been constantly supported by the Biden administration which has reportedly provided Israel $18 billion in military aid since last October 7. Biden remains publicly resolute in his support of Israel, as does Vice President Kamala Harris. His foreign policy aides, headed by Secretary of State Antony Blinken, are now quiet. Blinken and his colleagues have spent the past several months telling Americans that a ceasefire deal between Israel and Hamas would happen, and some or all of the remaining hostages would be recovered. All along Netanyahu had other plans.
The destruction of Gaza, observed daily online and on television by the world, is the background for one the major themes of the documentary: the callous indifference of Israeli soldiers operating amid the devastation. There is little contact throughout with Hamas, which has been battered by Israeli bombing and has not posed a significant above-ground threat. There also is no evidence today of a continuing intense Israeli hunt for the remainder of the more than 250 hostages initially seized by Hamas and others. The usual signs of intense urban warfare in the Middle East—ambushes and door-to-door and house-to-house fighting—do not appear in the Al Jazeera documentary because the anticipated intense ground war with Hamas never came to be.
Instead we have video after video, taken by Israeli soldiers and relayed to family and friends, of bored Israeli soldiers ransacking the apartments and homes of Gazan families who fled in panic, perhaps because of an Israeli warning that their neighborhood was to be targeted. Such warnings did take place, but surely were not seen as a humanitarian gesture by Gazans who fled to the streets despite being terrified to venture outside.
The documentary showed that some apartments, once vacated, were ransacked by Israeli fighters, with flak jackets off, weapons down, and their cellphones filming away. With their commanding officers watching and participating, the Israeli soldiers filmed themselves pawing through the apartments, destroying appliances, smashing furniture, and making fun of Arab food. There is a hunt for money, and, as young males in wartime will do, a ransacking of the clothing of women and the usual fascination for women’s underwear that often is worn by a prancing IDF soldier as his colleagues record away.
The videos, which were forwarded by social media to friends and families back home, reek of contempt for Palestinians, as if all the men in Gaza and their wives and children were hardcore members of Hamas. The documentary shows us that they turned out to be big hits at the many early pro-war dance parties back home. There is not much dancing today in financially stricken Israel. Other scenes in the video show clusters of Israeli soldiers, in uniform and on duty in Gaza, standing in close quarters on the top of emptied buildings—no bombs were coming their way—and cheering as a cluster of apartment buildings ten or so stories high a few hundred yards away began to tremble, obviously because of unseen bombs set off below ground, and then slowly fold away.
As the journalist who broke the stories of the My Lai massacre in South Vietnam and of the photographs of sexual abuse of prisoners in Iraq’s infamous Abu Ghraib prison by untrained American Army Reserve prison guards, I understand that soldiers in combat do horrid things, including rape and murder, to noncombatants. But the Abu Ghraib photos were circulated only among the members of the unit on duty; they were not meant for outsiders, including the Army chain of command. It was understood that their actions, if made known to higher-ups at headquarters, would lead to prosecution.
That was not the case with the photos taken in Gaza and passed around widely, including among the soldiers’ commanding officers. Such evidence of enduring corruption among the officer class may be impossible to cure in the short term, given the degradation of Israel’s political and military leadership today.
There were other photos that I found far more troubling in the documentary, specifically the scenes of a forced march to the south, monitored by Israeli soldiers, by families who had found sanctuary in a hospital in Gaza City. The march was widely reported at the time, but the documentary added facts that were not known. The marchers—including young children and the elderly, some hobbling on crutches in the daytime heat—were ordered to wave a white flag in one hand and hold their IDs in another as they walked. Those who dropped either of these were not allowed to stop walking to retrieve the dropped goods. It was a form of gratuitous collective punishment seen rarely since World War II. It was shaming to watch.
Netanyahu and the religious zealots in control today in Israel obviously have their eyes on Gaza and West Bank as real estate that will soon be open to the possibility of future settler domination. Just who will rule the two million or so surviving residents of Gaza is not known, but any such leadership will be approved by Israel. Self-rule is not going to happen for the desperate surviving Palestinians—if they are allowed to stay in Gaza. A precise death toll in the last year of the war is not yet possible; estimates vary today from the official Gaza health ministry count of more than 41,000 to academic projections four times as high.
Netanyahu has been clear in his view of the Palestinians’ future. Last October 28, he told Israeli troops about to go into battle: “You must remember what Amalek has done to you, says our Holy Bible.” It was a reference to a biblical command in which God gave the Israelites permission to entirely destroy an enemy known as the Amalekites. “And we do remember,” Netanyahu said.
Chapter 15.3 of the first Book of Samuel has God commanding Samuel: “Now go and smite Amalek, and utterly destroy all that they have, and spare them not; but slay both man and woman, infant and suckling, ox and sheep, camel and ass.”
Netanyahu is not alone in his modern day fanaticism. Last April 30, Bezalel Smotrich, the extremist Israeli finance minister and member of the security cabinet, who is a close associate of Itamar Ben-Gvir, the equally fanatical minister of national security, returned to the Bible in publicly calling for the “total annihilation” of Israel’s enemies. He specifically cited three cities in Gaza that should be destroyed. “There are no half measures,” he said before quoting Deuteronomy: “‘You will blot out the remembrance of Amalek from under heaven. There is no place under heaven.’”
Smotrich ominously said that after Hamas is destroyed, Israel must “clear out, with God’s help, with one blow, wicked Hezbollah in the north, and really send a message that what will happen to those who harm the Jewish people is the same as those who tried to harm us in the past—they will be destroyed, destroyed, destroyed. And it will echo for decades to come.”
Netanyahu has begun bombing “wicked” Hezbollah in Lebanon. Can anyone doubt the fate of Gaza and the West Bank? I cannot. This is no longer the civilized Israel I have visited and reported upon for many decades.
Is anyone in the Biden White House paying careful attention to the words of Netanyahu, Smotrich, and Ben-Gvir as America continues to ship more bombs and other arms to a deeply traumatized and terrorized Israel?
No comments:
Post a Comment