Supporters of Israel, who are mostly on the Right, believe the Israeli government’s official story, which is that the Jewish state’s bombing campaign and ground invasion of Gaza has one objective: deposing Hamas so its fighters and government no longer pose a threat. According to this narrative, Palestinian civilian deaths are unavoidable collateral damage in a densely populated urban environment.
Those who are not siloed into Team Politics on the conflict, like human rights groups, are convinced that the bombing is indiscriminate — that Israel is bombing willy-nilly because they’re reacting with blind rage to Hamas’ Oct. 7 attack.
Supporters of Palestine, mostly on the Left, think that Israel is actively targeting civilians in a gleeful bloodthirsty campaign of genocide, trying to massacre as many innocents as possible.
They are all wrong.
Israel isn’t trying to kill people.
It’s trying to kill buildings.
People die when buildings get bombed. But killing people is not the Israelis’ goal. They’re out to flatten Gaza. Flattening some Gazans is a side effect of flattening buildings.
Most species don’t go extinct after being hunted to death. Their habitat is destroyed.
Israel’s war aim in Gaza, I believe, is to destroy so many apartment buildings and shops and schools and hospitals and other infrastructure that the territory becomes uninhabitable.
The Israel Defense Forces may already have accomplished that. According to the United Nations, 45% of the housing stock in the Gaza Strip has been destroyed. Over 1.5 million out of a total population of 2.3 million are “internally displaced,” i.e., homeless and living on the streets. Only one out of the 18 hospitals in northern Gaza, until six weeks ago the Strip’s most populous area, is still functioning. Four weeks into the war, 61% of all employment in Gaza was gone — this in a previously impoverished place with sky-high unemployment.
Imagine if the protesters calling for a ceasefire got their way. That a permanent ceasefire took effect tomorrow. Imagine that the war came to an end, that Israel told the residents of Gaza that they could safely return home.
Return to what?
Half the population has no home to return to. (That number increases with each Israeli bomb.) Upon returning to their homes, many of them damaged, the other half would have no water or electricity or fuel or telephone or internet service, no shops or stores to buy food or clothing or anything else, no income and therefore no money to buy it with, no school to send their kids to, no hospital to treat them when they fell sick or were injured.
A New York Times reporter, who described himself as “stunned” and who had lived in Gaza before the latest war described “a landscape so disfigured by 42 days of airstrikes and nearly three weeks of ground warfare that it was hard at times to understand where we were.”
David Ignatius of The Washington Post reports that northern Gaza “has been reduced to a skeleton. Standing on Salah al-Din Street in Gaza City a week ago, I saw shattered buildings in every direction.” It will be impossible for anyone to live in such a disaster zone. It’s not like Israel or the Saudis or anyone else will rush in to clean up the mess.
Anti-Zionist leftists think Israel is planning Nakba 2.0, a forced removal of the Palestinian population from Gaza in which the IDF would truck or march them out at gunpoint. Hot-headed Israeli politicians have fed that theory. So has a leaked internal Israeli government memorandum that touts “a unique and rare opportunity to evacuate the whole Gaza Strip in co-ordination with the Egyptian government.” In a replay of 1948, the Israeli government refuses to guarantee a “right to return” home after the conclusion of military operations.
All this adds up to an inescapable conclusion: After the Gaza Strip has been ethnically cleansed of its Palestinian population, Israel will annex it.
https://www.unz.com/trall/israels-objective-in-the-gaza-war-kill-the-buildings/