On Gaza

Contra Murtaza Hussain

“One by one, the children and young women were pegged out naked beside the camp fire. They were skinned, sliced, and horribly mutilated, and finally burned alive by vengeful women determined to wring the last shriek and convulsion from their agonized bodies.”

“When the moon set over the charred corpses, there could never again be peace between the People and the Texans, so long as any of the People stood on Texan soil.”

— T.R Fehrenbach, Comanches

“So they hanged Haman on the gallows that he had prepared for Mordecai.”

— Esther 7:10

“[The] Jews in the king’s provinces gathered together and protected their lives, had rest from their enemies, and killed seventy-five thousand of their enemies; but they did not lay a hand on the plunder.”

— Esther 9:16

Murtaza Hussain

writes that Israel is committing a genocide in Gaza, and this action has permanently altered its relationships with its neighbours, who will now never be able to accept it. He notes that American brutality in Japan and Iraq was never genocidal — despite the much higher death tolls — because the Americans never contemplated population extermination or extraction.

The thing is that Israel’s neighbours have never accepted her. Not in 1936. Not in 1948 or 1956 or 1967 or 1973 or 2000 or 2006 or 2023. What happened on October 7 2023 was celebrated on the streets of Gaza. Israel has many problems, but antagonising Gazans is not one of them: they have already maximally hated the Jews for a very long time.

My view is that Israel’s actions in Gaza are not genocidal, and the future in the region as messy as ever. But before turning to the specifics of Gaza, let’s consider some historic examples.

Comancheria

For the better part of two centuries, the Comanches lorded over one of the most terrifying stretches of land in history. Never numbering more than up to 30,000 heads, Comancheria spanned a territory larger than modern France. From this territory, the Comanche brutalised and repelled countless rival native peoples, the Spanish Empire, the French Empire, the Mexicans, and even the United States of America. At the nexus of these competing peoples, they became the largest slaveholders in the American Southwest. They harvested border regions for horses — their fiercest weapon — as well as slaves, arms, and sport. Sport for the Comanche was the raid and torture and rape of outsiders, skinning their victims alive over fire or leaving them speared without eyelids to scorch beneath the southern sun.

The Comanches’ reign of terror ended with the invention of the Colt revolver (which could finally match their superb horseback archery), the mass slaughter of the American buffalo on which they relied, and the counter-raid. The Texan Rangers — Los Tejanos Diablos — learned that while the Comanches were excellent raiders, their wives and children and elders were left largely defenceless in their home encampments. And so the rangers struck them there, and the Comanches learned they could raid no more without impunity. The Comanches learned and were reduced and were in the end moved to reservations and defanged by careless and corrupt bureaucracies. The Comanches’ warrior ethos and wild reign over the Plains was simply incompatible with the United States of America. And so it ceased to exist.

More kvetches on Comancheria here, here, here, here, here.

Chechnya

After the collapse of the Soviet Union, Chechnya declared independence from Russia. Russia attacked to put down the separatist movement. It lost and withdrew. After a series of apartment bombings that killed 300 Russian civilians, Russian attacked again in 1999.

The UN in 2003 called Grozny the “most destroyed city on Earth”. Despite heavy reliance on aerial and artillery bombardment, Russian military deaths were still ~10,000-15,000, while Chechen civilian deaths were ~50,000-100,000. Chechnya is now basically pacified under the rule of a Russia-backed strongman. This war was not considered a genocide. Whilst against Muslim terrorists / separatists, it did not inflame the Muslim world against Russia. Whilst not perfect, it seems to have worked.

Germany

After World War II, between 12 and 14 million ethnic Germans were forcibly expelled or fled westward from Eastern and Central Europe. It was the largest forced migration in modern European history.

Some of this was driven by local retribution for Nazi atrocities and collaboration. But it was also official Allied policy, sanctioned at the Potsdam Conference of 1945. The Allies wanted to create ethnically homogeneous states to reduce future conflict (how quickly we forgot this lesson…). It was pretty brutal. An estimated 500,000 to 2 million died during the expulsion from disease, starvation, exposure, executions, or violence. Many were expelled with only what they could carry. Train transports, forced marches, and looting were common. (I wrote more about the great ethnic sorting post-WWII here.)

Greece and Turkey

The League of Nations and the West endorsed the population exchanges between Greece and Turkey in 1923. The homogenisation of these states was understood to reduce ethnic tension. 1.5 million people were moved. Was that ‘ethnic cleansing’?

Gaza

How does the death of even 100,000 (the most aggressive estimates) of 2.1 million constitute a genocide? Obviously if Israelis literally wanted to kill all Gazans they could have already. But much like the term ‘ethnic cleansing’ — a pejorative term for moving a population from one place to another — such semantics seem to distract from the substantive point.

Maybe the only difference today that really matters is that we have the smartphone and social media, blasting every gritty detail and rogue actor’s bad behaviour.

The reality is that how we perceive this war will depend on its outcome. If Gaza is beaten to a pulp and nothing changes, it will be an ugly failure: a spasm of retribution by one traumatised polity on another. If the remaining hostages are returned in exchange for conquered Gazan land (instead of prisoners), that will probably count as a success for Israel. If Gaza is ‘fixed’, the current brutalisation will be totally irrelevant. What does fixed mean? Gaza looking like Chechnya today — a totally compliant polity. Or Gazans moved somewhere else like the Germans — to join their Palestinian brethren in Jordan perhaps, or disappeared into the maw of whatever Arab polity would suffer them. Hopefully somewhere they can live in peace and thrive and not bother anyone.¹

Perhaps there are other, stranger outcomes we can't foresee. Who could have predicted the destruction of Hezbollah, the fall of Assad, and the denuding of Iran even twelve months ago? Who could have predicted the rise of great Gulf Arab cities in the desert, and their rulers’ willingness to treat with Israel?

Israel has never wanted to rule Gaza. Faced with the prospect of either continued Egyptian rule in Gaza so near Israel’s centre or itself rule over hundreds of thousands of Palestinians, David Ben Gurion in 1956 said: “If I believed in miracles I would want it to be swallowed up by the sea.” Gaza was a “a bone stuck in our throats”, said prime minister Eshkol in 1967. When Israel and Egypt brokered peace in 1979, Israel tried to give Gaza back to Egypt but Sadat refused.

Of course, it is the Arab neighbours who have been explicitly genocidal towards the Jews for the past century. Accusations of genocide against Israel have always carried an element of projection. Any combination of Israel and the Palestinian territories would see the destruction of the Jews. Tel Aviv would turn into Ramallah and not the other way around. ‘Oh well,’ would say western liberal Palestinian supporters, and the Arab / Israel conflict would finally disappear into that great maw of indifference where live other recent genocides by Muslims of Christians in Darfur or Nigeria, or the steady vanishing of ancient Christian communities from Arab lands.

Not once have the Palestinians accepted the idea of a Jewish state.²

The Arabs and the Arab states started the war of 1948 with the explicit aim of driving out the Jews and they lost — but Israel has been forced to bear their humiliation since.

Hafez al-Assad in 1967:

“The cream of our troops stand at the front. Strike the enemy’s settlements, turn them into dust, pave the Arab roads with the skulls of Jews. Strike them without mercy.”

In Egypt in 1967:

“The streets of Cairo looked more like a carnival rather than a city preparing for war,” commented Mahmud al-Jiyyar, a high government official and close associate of Nasser. The city was now festooned with lurid posters showing Arab soldiers shooting, crushing, strangling, and dismembering bearded, hooknosed Jews. (Six Days of War by Michael Oren)

Saddam Hussein in 1975:

“The Jews must be exterminated. We shall only accept complete liberation of Palestine.”

The rhetoric of the PLO and Hamas has been the same: in their constituent documents, in their daily broadcasts, in their relentless murder of Jewish men, women and children in Israel and abroad. Jews have lived under the constant thrum of terror attacks since even before the establishment of the State of Israel. Nearly 5,000 Israeli civilians have been killed since 1948.

Source.

Israeli athletes were massacred and mutilated in the Olympic village in Munich, and the Games didn’t even stop, the world too choked on Arab oil.

No other nation would suffer this.

But that’s not quite true. British trains and stadiums are blown up, organised rape practiced on an industrial scale, and stabbings now more common across Europe. Today it’s less a question of oil and more a question of hostile domestic regimes and hostile imported populations. An anti-role model for Israel and all sensible nations surely.

Israeli nihilism

When national warriors turned would-be peace makers like Rabin and Barak offered the Palestinians everything, they were rejected. When Sharon withdrew from Gaza in 2005 in a big gamble, it didn’t pay off. Exactly what he predicted 15 years earlier in his own memoir came to pass, culminating in the massacre of October 7, 2023.

Withdrawal from the territories is, unfortunately, an easy answer that may satisfy a certain number of people initially but which will inevitably create more violence and a greater threat to our survival than we have faced since the first part of the War of Independence. What will happen if we withdraw is not a matter of conjecture. We have seen it already along the northern border. We did not face all-out war there, only terror—ordinary terror first, then artillery terror. A shell here, a shell there, not more than that, and soon normal life was disrupted. We know exactly what would happen in southern Lebanon if Israeli troops were removed from our security zone there. (Warrior by Ariel Sharon with David Chanoff, 1990)

Can you blame Israelis for their nihilism, their loathing at risking their own soldiers’ lives, and their indifference to the Palestinians in Gaza? In return for enormous Israeli political risks in the 1990s, Israelis got bombs on buses and cafes. They built walls and fences to stop the attacks after decades of relentless murder, and they still got October 7.

It’s been almost 80 years. It’s time for a new solution. What mad man would want to keep Gazans in Gaza? For whom? In 1949 Gaza’s population was ~200,000. ‘Genocide’ since has meant its population today is 2.1 million. Jordan’s population was ~1.4 million in 1949, today it’s 11 million. What difference would 2.1 million make to Jordan? Jordan was a gift to the Hashemites, sliced from Ottoman Palestine in 1920. It is literally a majority Palestinian state today. This is a very boring and old solution, because Israeli leaders got hoarse in the throat stating the bleeding obvious for so many decades. But Israel’s enemies have kept this bone wedged in her throat. The Palestinian problem is convenient for the Arabs.

I’ll leave you with a spot of optimism. Ariel Sharon recalls a period in the 1970s when he quelled Gazan violence and ordinary Gazans and Israelis were permitted to live in peace. The concern and minimisation for Gazan civilian life and apparent success make it sound almost idyllic beside today’s horrorshow. Another timeline perhaps.

My main success in Gaza was that over a period of seven months, from July 1971 to February 1972, we enabled the people in that district to begin living normal lives again. In those seven months, we managed to kill 104 terrorists and arrest 742 others, essentially all who had been operating in the district. (The last to die was the terrorist, military commander Ziad el Hussein, who committed suicide while hiding in the house of Rashad Ashawa, Gaza's mayor.) And we had accomplished this remarkable feat with an absolute minimum of harm to the civilian population. Specifically, two Gaza civilians had died accidentally in the seven-month-long operation, one woman who had been used by a terrorist as a shield during a firefight, the other a deaf man who was mistaken for a terrorist and did not hear the warnings shouted at him.

At the same time we succeeded in maintaining the calm that we had worked so hard to achieve. The settlements we built cut off the flow of weapons from Sinai, and we also devised a way of preventing the infiltration of arms into Gaza by sea. With hundreds of fishing boats operating out of the district, this task required a complicated system of registration and controlled embarkation and debarkation checkpoints. It was cumbersome, and it imposed inconveniences on the Arab fishermen, but it did put a stop to the flow of arms that came in through them, and it did allow them to continue their fishing.

Another danger point we successfully dealt with was the potential for confrontations between Israeli soldiers and Arab schoolchildren, a problem that has become so painful over the last few years. I gave the strictest orders that Israeli soldiers were not to enter schools. I did not like the idea, and I refused to allow it. But to make sure that there would be no stoning or other dangerous provocations, I invited all the Arab parents to meetings in the schools where our policy was explained to them. There they were told that they themselves would be held responsible for their children. I would not accept a situation where our soldiers would be stoned by students, just as I would not accept a situation where students would be beaten by soldiers. The parents were told that if a child was caught stoning a soldier, that child’s father or eldest brother would be given a jar a [sic] water, a loaf of bread, a head covering, some Jordanian money, and a white flag. We would then transport him to the Jordanian border, point out the direction of the nearest Jordanian town, and send him on his way.

In fact we did this. On two separate occasions we deported a small number of people, less than thirty altogether. That was all that was necessary. Soldiers did not beat students, let alone shoot at them, and students did not stone soldiers. On the other hand, when you walked through the streets of Gaza, you often heard parents disciplining their children vigorously. None of them wanted to end up in Jordan, and none of them was going to tolerate a youngster whose behavior put them in such jeopardy.

Overall, I got tremendous satisfaction from our success in Gaza. I felt I had brought quiet to a place that had been suffering the tortures of the damned. (A comparatively long quiet as it turned out. For ten years afterward there was no terrorism in Gaza; it was completely peaceful.) Achieving this had required innovation and imagination.

1. Palestinian history in Lebanon and Jordan is not hopeful, nor in Denmark. In his memoir, Ariel Sharon writes that he opposed Israel intervening at the request of the United States to support the Hashemite monarchy during the 1970 Palestinian uprising in Jordan — specifically, by deterring advancing Syrian tanks that had entered Jordan to aid the Palestinians. He would have preferred that what was already a de facto Palestinian state officially become one, which would have dulled the Palestinian nationalist dagger against Israel. At the very least we may have been spared decades of deranged political discourse about a ‘two state solution’.

2. I highly recommend Benny Morris’s One State, Two States: Resolving the Israel/Palestine Conflict for a grim history of the so-called two state solution.