The latest phase of slaughter and seizure on the part of Israeli forces in Gaza has commenced. Following relentless airstrikes that have left hundreds of Palestinians dead, Operation Gideon’s Chariots is now in full swing, begun even as Israel and Hamas concluded a second day of ceasefire talks in Doha. The intention, according to the Israeli Defense Forces, is to expand “operational control” in the Strip while seeking to free the remaining Israeli hostages. In the process, it hopes to achieve what has, to date, been much pie in the sky: defeating Hamas and seizing control of the enclave.
The mendacious pattern of the IDF and Netanyahu government has become clearer than ever. It comes in instalments, much like a distasteful fashion show. The opening begins with unequivocal, hot denial: famine is not taking place, and any aid to Gaza has been looted by the Hamas authorities; civilians were not targeted, let alone massacred; aid workers were not butchered but legitimately killed as they had Hamas militants among them. And there is no ethnic cleansing and genocide to speak of. To claim otherwise was antisemitic.
Then comes the large dollop of corrective, inconvenient reality, be it a film, a blatant statement, or some item of damning evidence. The next stage is one of quibbles and qualifications: Gaza will receive some necessaries; there is a humanitarian crisis, because we were told by the United States, our main sponsor, that this was the case; and there might have been some cases where civilians were killed, a problem easily rectified by an internal investigation by the military.
Just prior to the latest assault, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, in leaked quotes, revealed another dark purpose of the new military operation. “We are destroying more and more homes. They have no nowhere to return to,” he said in testimony before the Knesset’s Foreign Affairs and Defence Committee. “The only inevitable outcome will be the desire of Gazans to emigrate outside the Gaza Strip.” Here was a state official’s declaration of intent to ethnically cleanse a population.
Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich was even blunter, something praised by Netanyahu. Israel’s objective, he revealed in a statement on March 19, was to destroy “everything that’s left of the Gaza Strip”. What was currently underway involved “conquering, cleansing, and remaining in Gaza until Hamas is destroyed”.
The Netanyahu government has also added another twist to the ghastly performance. On March 18, the provision of various “basic” forms of humanitarian aid into Gaza was announced. The measure was approved by a security cabinet meeting pressed by concerns from military officials warning that food supplies from UN sources and other aid groups had run out. The pressure had also come from, in Netanyahu’s words in a March 19 video address, Israel’s “greatest friends in the world”, the trying sort who claimed that there was “‘one thing we cannot stand. We cannot accept images of hunger, mass hunger. We cannot stand that. We will not be able to support you’”. How inconveniently squeamish of them.
That same day, United Nations aid chief Tom Fletcher said nine aid trucks had been cleared by Israeli authorities to enter Gaza through the Karem Abu Salem crossing. This was an absurd, ineffectual number, given the 500 trucks or more that entered Gaza prior to October 2023.
Fanatics who subscribe to the ethnic cleansing, rid-of-Palestine school were understandably disappointed, even at this obscenely modest provision of aid. “Any humanitarian aid that enters the Strip… will fuel Hamas and give it oxygen while our hostages languish in tunnels,” moaned National Security Minister Itamar Ben Gvir. “We must crush Hamas, not simultaneously give it oxygen.” He also wished that Netanyahu “explain to our friends in the White House the implications of this ‘aid’, which only prolongs the war and delays our victory and the return of all our hostages.”
Israel’s Heritage Minister Amichai Eliyahu, also of Ben Gvir’s Otzma Yehudit party, was in a similar mood, making the farcical resumption of aid sound like criminal salvation for a savage people. “This is our tragedy with Netanyahu’s approach. A leader who could have led to a clear victory and be remembered as the one who defeated radical Islam but who time after time let this historic opportunity slip away. Letting humanitarian aid in now directly harms the war effort to achieve victory and is another obstacle to the release of the hostages.”
The picture emerging from Israel’s latest mission of carnage is one of murderous dysfunction. It made little sense to Knesset member Moshe Saada, for instance, that a broader, ever more lethal offensive was in the offing with five new IDF divisions even as aid was being provided. This was implicitly telling. Did Palestinian civilians matter in so far as they should be fed, even as they were being butchered and encouraged into fleeing?
The extent of the horror has now reached the point where it is being acknowledged in the capitals of Israel’s close allies. A joint statement from the UK, France and Canada affirmed opposition to “the expansion of Israel’s military operations in Gaza.” Israel’s permission of “a basic quantity of food into Gaza” was wholly inadequate in the face of “intolerable” human suffering. Denying essential humanitarian assistance to the Palestinian population in the Strip “is unacceptable and risks breaching International Humanitarian Law. We condemn the abhorrent language used recently by members of the Israeli Government, threatening that, in their despair at the destruction of Gaza, civilians will start to relocate.”
For much time, the notion of consciously eliminating the Palestinian presence in Gaza, through starvation, massacre and displacement, was confined to the racial, ethnoreligious fringes of purist lunacy typified by Smotrich and Ben Gvir. Their vocal presence and frank advocacy have now made that ambition a grotesque, ongoing reality.
Dr. Binoy Kampmark was a Commonwealth Scholar at Selwyn College, Cambridge. He currently lectures at RMIT University. Email: [email protected]
