In the most protracted conflict around the world, each side needs the other to sustain their lifelines, thus entrenching their deep animosities and exacerbating the hostilities with each round of fighting.
In the fallout of the latest round of this asymmetric Israeli-Hamas war, the number of dead Israelis stands out as the greatest indicator of how misleading Israel’s policy to isolate Gaza really is.
More than 60 Israelis died: 62 Israeli soldiers and two civilians. Not surprisingly, on the other side nearly 2,000 Palestinians were eliminated by Israel’s military machine. According to the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA), nearly 75 per cent of those were civilians.
The gross disproportion of ratio between Israel-Palestinian casualties is already staggering but then the civilian-military ratio on both sides is even more incredible and indicative of the intentions and more importantly the results of each side’s tactics.
Israel accuses Hamas of using civilians as “human shields” to defend its fighters from its armed forces, hence the high degree of collateral damage, that Israel also proclaims to want to avoid. How Israel can manage to hit UN schools again is mind-boggling and begs for a real investigation.
But then this is where the conflict is really most telling: There will be no real investigation into who ordered the firing of missiles on a UN school. There is no international body that can hold Israel accountable for such actions. What happened to those who dropped phosphorus bombs on the UN schools in the previous round of fighting Israel and Hamas?
Does anyone remember that in 2008-2009 Israel dropped white phosphorus on Gaza? Someone gave an order to use white phosphorus and someone pressed a trigger that released these bombs. It is a flagrant violation of the Fourth Geneva Convention to use chemical weapons on civilian populations.
The Fourth what? Where’s Geneva? What Convention? No one really knows what this means or how to implement it. It is meant to be the cornerstone of international law, but no one is there to make sure that countries such as Israel are held accountable because each time they use the security card.
Israel’s security is at stake. Each time it’s the same argument. Just as Hamas needs Israel to maintain its raison d’etre as a resistance group, so Israel needs Hamas to play its threatened existence security card with the international community, but that resonates particularly well in Washington.
Most telling was US President Barack Obama’s comment about half way through this round of fighting when he announced that he did not see a cease-fire taking effect. The insinuation is clear: Keep going Israel until you finish these Islamists militants off.
Or at least deal them such a blow that they will not stand up again for years. That’s what Israel said it would do and proceeded to push over half a million Palestinians towards the sea. (There is a certain historic irony in this gesture… )
Deepening the divide
More than 5,000 Israelis fled their homes in fear of the incremental number of missiles coming from the Gaza Strip. Not only is the number of missiles increasing, the precision and impact is becoming greater and stronger. Every round the casualties go up and the technology improves.
The name of Israel’s Operation Iron Dome reveals precisely what it is trying to implement: The “iron dome” is a high-tech radar system that intercepts incoming projectiles. The smaller ones are harder to detect and often make it past the Israeli response, but the larger ones are knocked down by Israeli missiles thus protecting the larger urban areas further north.
This sounds like a video-game … and actually Google had to remove the “Bomb Gaza” game from its Android Play store at the end of July. The mobile app game was considered of bad taste given the real circumstances being inflicted on Gaza.
Images of smiling Israeli soldiers strutting out of Gaza also come to mind. A smiling soldier is a scary sight: A sight of ignorance and arrogance. Despite the great technology of this “iron dome”, Israel lost over 60 soldiers, that the most ever in hostilities with the Palestinians.
But worst of all is the repeated destruction of Gaza. In a post-modern world where one state can bombard another territory without mercy, without being held accountable, severing Gaza literally from adjacent lands, we will see the thin strip completely isolated from Egypt and Israel.
Like Jose Saramago’s great critique of westernisation in his novel The Stone Raft (1986) when the Iberian Peninsula detached from Europe to float towards the Americas, Gaza is symbolically being cut out of the eastern Mediterranean to float aimlessly around the Sea.
At least that’s what Israel would like: to get rid of Gaza. As long as the international community continues to pay for reparations, Israel will claim no responsibility.
Stuart Reigeluth is the founder of Revolve.
