There is every urge to look away from Gaza at the moment. One of the ways in which that is done is to dive into geopolitics, strategy and comparative analysis, to speak of angles and eventualities, of paradoxical action and reversals. Which is all inevitable at some stage. But prior to it, one needs to simply bear witness again to what is happening in our time, hour-by-hour, side-by-side with whatever else we happen to be doing.
That is required, though it is likely to attract scorn in a world of protective professionalism and cynicism masquerading as surgical precision. It seems important to think it out loud, whether or not, in journalist terms, a certain repetition might creep in.
In reading back the reporting on the horrors of the 20th century — which, deemed as “short” a while back, now seems long again — one gets the strong feeling that there were times to just stop, stop the breathless analysis looking forward to the next event so as to fully contemplate things as they revealed themselves at the time to some, and then for everyone in retrospect.
What is happening in Gaza is one of those events. What is happening now will be “an event” for decades, even centuries. That does not mean it will necessarily be remembered, except by specialists. Should the destruction of this sequestered province succeed in Israeli terms, the occurrence of it may slip into the folds of history, a completed destruction and annihilation. That is all the more reason to remember it as it happens.
Some geopolitical framing prior to that is necessary. Israel, as a fact on the ground, is simultaneously: a product of a colonial process, of the exceptional historical event of the Holocaust, of a collective act of violent political will by a Zionist movement in relation to that and, finally, by the new entity that resulted being drawn into cold war processes.
The state was founded by ethnic cleansing: the terrorising of a pre-modern agricultural people out of their land within living memory. With no right of return on offer, the moral demand on the victor becomes that of offering a deal for a separate homeland that has the capacity for some sort of independence as a state. The vanquished’s leadership’s earlier rejection of such deals, whether wise, hubristic, reckless, whatever, does not remove the moral obligation of the victor to keep offering it.
That successive Israeli governments have been working for decades towards making such an arrangement a practical impossibility, is the immorality — evil is not too strong a word — at the heart of this predicament. The violent oppression by the Zionists of 1948 brought the Palestinians into being as a people (as distinct from a culture, regional groupings etc); the settlement program from 1982 was designed to make it impossible to gain a state to house the nation they had become.
The steady expansion of settlements in the West Bank was one part of this. Israeli assistance in the establishment and maintenance of Hamas in Gaza was the other. Hamas has never been an existential threat to Israel. If its missile and rocket program had expanded into much heavier explosive, or chemical/“dirty” nuclear payloads, Israel would have knocked it on the head immediately, with cause. But it wouldn’t have occurred, because it’s pretty clear that there has been an arrangement between Hamas, its Qatari hosts and Israeli governments to maintain a balance of power for quite some time.
Had it ever been so, had very much larger, or chemical/dirty payload been in the offing, Israel would have struck immediately, and with some sort of realpolitik right to do so. Instead, it responded to an atrocity/outrage, made possible by incompetence or connivance, by choosing to construct it as a national security threat and act according to that framing.
The result is a politics of will, which uses moral claims as a pretext for action of unlimited lethality. Israel has leaned into a steady application of death and destruction, which has no reasonably arguable proportionate relation to its object — and therefore no relation to it at all. It is pure imposition, the act that defines the actor as doing it simply because it can and wishes to.
Gazans are told to go south, and then bombed there because Israel says Hamas was there. It may have been, but whether it was or not, Israel would bomb anyway. Ditto ambulance conveys, hospitals and universities. This is clearly the destruction of Gaza as a place that could sustain any sort of life that one could call social and cultural. It is the transformation of Gaza into a place that can be nothing other than a vast camp in which people will live a purely administered existence, with the blue plastic ID foot tags of Palestinian day workers returned from Israel to Gaza.
This is not the worst atrocity of recent years — the recent Tigray war caused tens, or hundreds of thousands of civilian deaths. But there is something especially “of midnight at noon” about this steady block-by-block destruction of the means and possibility of life.
Though it is in the colonial tradition, it is the contrast of the created squalor for the victims on one side, and the cold remorselessness of the perpetrators, that feels somehow new. New, above all, because it is communicated at the individual level, via social media, the dead speaking through Twitter and Facebook.
This is a horror beyond all horrors, death itself so raw and unadorned by anything other than its annihilating core. The desire for death so as to be spared the fear of it, the children convinced that their death is certain. This is playing out in video clips and TikToks, popping into the timeline. One recites these things if for no other reason than to prevent them from becoming accepted.
Gaza has become the province of death. Israel is wrapping itself around it, letting this big death become the whole of it. This is about the furthest possible statement from geopolitics you could get, but it seems right. It is the only way to characterise the daily doled-out extinction, the cold-voiced, emotionless IDF spokespeople on the airwaves and, below, the Gazans who have nothing to eat but death, nothing to expect but death.
Zionism’s worst dimension, its historic backchannel connections to fascism, its strange, repeated apeing of Nazi manner and style, is coming to the fore. The more relentless, measured and impersonal the death it allocates, the more hopped up and malignantly crazy the ministers in its fascistic, settler-led government become, as do its local backers. Israel’s supporters deprave themselves by their active indifference to these grey, franchised extinctions.
The inevitable result, which occurred while I was writing this, was that an Israeli minister, Amihai Eliyahu, could speak of using a nuclear weapon on the Gaza Strip. The Netanyahu government could get away with merely suspending him as a minister because an atomic bomb has a cartoonish quality in the mind’s eye. What if he had said that Gaza should be firestorm-bombed, using napalm as per Vietnam or World War II? Or that an even layer of sarin gas should be laid over the area? There will be worse schemes of mass death, verging on extermination, to come. Worse, because they will be less extreme, and thus more practicable.
Prompted by a chosen response to an outrage, protected from outside intervention by its nuclear capability, Israel is remaking itself around a mix of cynical bumping off, and a purportedly righteous retribution that is open-ended in its death accounting, and thus beyond even the rules governing collective punishment under Mosaic law.
What this changes for Israel, it will do so also for the supporters in the West who have attached themselves to it. Anyone in it would have to be a fool to believe they can control where it goes. It seems necessary to say without hyperbole before the geopolitics resumes, that this is the triumph of the will in Israeli politics.
In very different ways, neither Gaza nor Israel will survive this event, though that does not mean one side will not be victorious. Since history may forget this, the task now amid a field of broken concrete, death, Twitter feeds going silent, and soon, fading Western interest, is to remember it, for what it is, as it’s happening.
