Saving Israel by Ending Its War in Gaza
JEFFREY D. SACHS • JANUARY 1, 2024
https://www.unz.com/article/saving-israel-by-ending-its-war-in-gaza/
The Israeli government argues that it is in a mortal
fight for survival against Hamas, and therefore must take every measure,
including the very destruction of Gaza, to survive. This is false.
When Congress returns in January, President Joe Biden
will push the case to deepen American complicity in Israel’s war in Gaza
through another US armaments package for Israel. Americans should raise their
voice in a resounding no.
An arms package for Israel is not only against
America’s interests but also against Israel’s interests. The only path to real
security for Israel is peace with Palestine. The US can help bring this about
by ending the supply of munitions for Israel’s brutal war and by promoting the
two-state solution as called for by international law.
I spelled out the diplomatic path to the two-state
solution in a previous column for Common Dreams. That path remains
open. It is actively promoted by the Arab and Islamic countries and supported
by nearly the entire world.
If Israel ends the genocide, it will end the global
opposition it now faces.
Israel’s brutality in Gaza is becoming a true threat
to Israel’s survival. Because of Israel’s extraordinary violence, the world is
uniting against Israel, while Israel is suffering massive military losses.
Incredibly, some Israeli leaders are now openly advocating an even wider war in
the Middle East, one that could well spell utter disaster for Israel.
The surging global opposition to Israel’s policies is
not antisemitic. It is anti-genocide. It is also pro-peace, pro-Israel, and
pro-Palestine. If Israel ends the genocide, it will end the global opposition
it now faces.
Defeating Hamas is not Israel’s real aim in Gaza
The Israeli government argues that it is in a mortal
fight for survival against Hamas, and therefore must take every measure,
including the very destruction of Gaza, to survive. This is false. There is no
ethical, practical, legal or geopolitical case for destroying Gaza—killing tens
of thousands of civilians, and uprooting 2 million people—to protect Israel
against the kinds of preventable and controllable threats that Hamas actually
poses.
During the years 2008-2022, Hamas and other
militants killed around a dozen Israeli civilians per
year, while Israel
usually killed at least ten times more civilian Palestinians. There was a spike
in 2014, when Israel invaded Gaza, with 19 Israeli civilians killed versus
1,760 Palestinian civilians. Hamas launches many rockets, but almost all are
intercepted or cause little damage. Israel responds with periodic massacres (as
in 2014) and with more regular airstrikes. The Israelis even have a cynical
name for their periodic killing, called “mowing the grass.” It is common knowledge inside Israel that Hamas long served as a “low-cost” political
prop used by Netanyahu to “prove” to Israelis that a two-state solution is
impossible.
In all the years of Hamas rule in Gaza after 2007,
Hamas has never captured Israeli territory, much less remotely threatened
Israel’s existence or survival. Simply, it couldn’t do so even if it wanted.
Hamas has around 30,000 fighters, compared with more than 600,000 active and
reserve personnel in the IDF. Hamas lacks an air force, armored units, a
military-industrial base, and any geographic maneuverability outside of Gaza.
On October 7, Hamas fighters made a surprise incursion
into Israel that lasted that horrific day. This did not reflect a new
super-ability of Hamas to invade Israel but rather a shocking failure of
Israeli security. Israeli leaders had ignored extensive warnings of an upcoming
Hamas attack and had inexplicably left the Gaza-Israel border severely
under-manned. Even more astoundingly, they did so just days after Israeli
extremists had stormed the al-Aqsa Mosque complex, one of the Islam’s holiest sites. Hamas exploited
Israel’s astounding security lapse by breaching the border in an attack that
led to around 1,100 Israeli civilian deaths, and Hamas’ taking of 240 hostages,
with an unknown number of the Israeli civilian deaths that day caused by
Israeli aerial bombing and crossfire in the IDF’s counterattack.
By re-fortifying the border with Gaza, Israel has
stopped further ground incursions by Hamas. Netanyahu has ordered the
destruction of Gaza not to protect Israel from Hamas, but to make Gaza
uninhabitable and thereby to fulfill his longstanding intention to impose
permanent Israeli rule over the territory. Netanyahu gets the added bonus of
clinging to power despite his grievous other failures.
The Israeli government’s more basic objective is to
solidify its total control over “Greater Israel,” meaning all of the land from
the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea. Its objective with the incursion in
Gaza is to push the population out of the territory. On October 10, Israel’s
Defense Minister Yoav Gallant stated that “Gaza won’t return to what it was before.
We will eliminate everything.” More recently, Netanyahu spoke of “voluntary
emigration” of
the Gazan population—voluntary, that is, after Gaza has been laid to waste and
Gazans told to evacuate. Metula Mayor David Azoulai declared that “the whole Gaza Strip needs to be empty.
Flattened. Just like in Auschwitz. Let it be a museum for all the world to see
what Israel can do. Let no one reside in the Gaza Strip for all the world to
see, because October 7 was in a way a second Holocaust.” He later clarified
that he would like to see the Gaza population “relocated,” not murdered. Most
recently, Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich, a self-declared fascist, called for Gaza’s population to be
cut to 100,000-200,000 from
the current population of more than 2 million. Israel aimed from the start of
its invasion of Gaza to push the Gazans into Egypt, but Egypt adamantly refused
to be a party to ethnic cleansing.
In the 1970s, the aim of dominating Palestine to
create Greater Israel as a Jewish state was a fringe belief. Now it rules
Israeli policy, in part reflecting the enormous political weight of hundreds of
thousands of Israeli settlers in the occupied West Bank and East Jerusalem.
“Greater Israel,” defined as Israel of pre-1967-War
borders, plus Gaza, the West Bank, and East Jerusalem, is home to roughly seven
million Jews and seven million Palestinian Muslims and Palestinian Christians.
Israel can rule Greater Israel only by dominating seven million Palestinians,
or by driving them out of their homes by war, violence, and extreme
discrimination. The quest for Greater Israel in practice leads Israel to commit
grave crimes against the people of Palestine. The ongoing crime is Apartheid
rule, with its severe injustices and indignities. The graver crime is ethnic
cleaning as Israel is attempting in Gaza. The gravest of all is genocide,
witnessed in the thousands of deaths of innocent civilians occurring each week
now in Gaza.
Israel’s turn towards extremism
The American people need to understand that Israeli
politics has become dominated by extremists who mix religious fervor with
murderous violence against the Palestinians. This ultra-violent side of Israel
is readily apparent in Israel but is still largely unknown to the American
public. Israeli brutality in Gaza comes as a surprise to many Americans, yet it
has become par for the course in Israel itself, although some Israelis are no
doubt in denial of the facts on the ground in the Occupied Territories. The
Grayzone has put together a shocking compilation of Israeli soldiers and leading personalities
celebrating Palestinian deaths.
Israel’s genocidal violence towards the Palestinian people appeals to much
of the Israeli public for several reasons. First, always lurking in the shadows
in Israel is the memory of the Holocaust. Politicians like Netanyahu have long
stoked the terror of the Holocaust to argue crudely and falsely that all
Palestinians want to kill all the Jews, so that the violent suppression of the
Palestinians is a matter of life and death for Israel. Of course, as in any
spiral of hatred, there is a self-fulfilling prophecy to Netanyahu’s rhetoric
and actions, leading to counter-actions and hatreds from the other side. Yet
rather than trying to solve those through dialogue, interaction, diplomacy, and
peacemaking, the cycle of hatred is stoked.
Second, orthodox rabbis have expanded upon the
security narrative by insisting that Israel has a sacred right to Palestine
because God gave all the land from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean to the
Israelites.
Third, with 700,000 Israeli settlers living in the
Palestinian lands conquered in 1967, Greater Israel has become a fait
accompli for a large part of the Israeli people, with a large voice in
Israeli politics. These settlers moved into conquered territory and now
fervently insist on defending their settlements. The UN Security Council (UNSC Resolution 2334) has unequivocally declared Israel’s settlements in
occupied Palestine to be in flagrant violation of international law, yet
Smotrich himself, in the inner cabinet, is a leader of the settler movement.
The emergence of this violent strand of Judaism dates
to the early 1970s, just after the 1967 Six-Day War. The policy question in
Israel after 1967 was what to do with the newly occupied Palestinian land.
Drawing on the proposals of Yigal Allon, a leading Israeli politician, Israeli leaders
decided to keep East Jerusalem and to establish settlements in the occupied
West Bank and Gaza to put “facts on the ground” to protect Israel’s security.
From the start, Israeli governments defied UN Security Council Resolution 242
(1967), which rejected Israel’s acquisition of territory by war.
What happened next was momentous. Ultra-religious Jews
took up the cause of Israeli settlements in the occupied territories as part of
a messianic calling to make Israel the “Earthly support of the Lord’s throne,”(here p. 69). In 1974, Gush Emunim was
launched as an ultra-nationalist religious settler movement by followers of the
father-son rabbis Abraham Isaac Kook and Zvi Yehuda Kook, whose teachings
combined the land claims of the Book of Joshua, Talmudic law, Chassidic
mysticism, nationalism, and political activism.
The religious motivation of Greater Israel is that God
gave the Jews all the land from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea. In
the Book of Joshua, probably completed in the 6th century BC, God
instructs the Israelites arriving from Egypt after 40 years in the desert to
annihilate the nations of Canaan in order to take the land for themselves. God
promises the land extending “from the Negev wilderness in the south to the
Lebanon mountains in the north, from the Euphrates River in the east to the
Mediterranean Sea in the west, including all the land of the Hittites. (Joshua
1:4, New Living Translation). With God’s backing, Joshua’s armies commit a series
of genocides to capture the land.
This extraordinarily violent text and related parts of
the Bible (such as the annihilation of the Amalekites in the Book of Samuel),
have become crucial points of reference for right-wing Israelis, both religious and
secular. As a result, today’s Israel pursues a 6th century BC messianic vision
of securing all of Palestine for the Jews. Supporters of Greater Israel often
label the opponents of this ideology as anti-Semites, but this is wildly off
the mark, as the former Executive Director of the Harvard Hillel has eloquently argued. The opponents of Greater Israel are against
extremism and injustice, not against Judaism.
The Jewish settler movement led to a murderous disdain
of the Palestinian. In his book Jewish Fundamentalism in Israel,
Prof. Israel Shahak draws attention to the religious zealotry of Rabbi Eliezer
Waldman, a leader of the West Bank settlers:
“Let us say clearly and strongly: we are not occupying
foreign territories in Judea and Samaria [the West Bank]. This is our ancient
home. And thank G-d that we have brought it back to life … Our responsibility
to Jewish faith and redemption commands us to speak up in a strong and clear
voice. The Divine Process of uniting our people and our Land must not be
clouded and weakened by seeming logical concepts of “security” and “diplomacy.”
They only distort the truth and weaken the justice of our cause, which is
engraved in our exclusive national rights to our land. We are a people of
faith. This is the essence of our eternal identity and the secret of our
continued existence under all conditions.” [2002]
In Jewish History – Jewish Religion
(2nd edition, 2008), Shahak quotes the Chief Chaplain of the Central
Regional Command of the Israeli Army in 1973: “In war, when our forces storm
the enemy, they are allowed and even enjoined by the Halakhah (Jewish law) to
kill even good [Palestinian] civilians, that is, civilians who are ostensibly
good” (p. 76).
The tactic of using violence to provoke mass
Palestinian flight has been part of Israel’s playbook from its inception. On
the eve of Israel’s independence, during 1947-8, Jewish militant groups used
terror to provoke the mass departure of hundreds of thousands of Palestinians
in a sordid process called nakba by the Palestinians
(“catastrophe” in Arabic).
Netanyahu’s government aims to repeat the nakba in
the Gaza war by forcing Gazans to flee to neighboring Egypt or other parts of
the Arab Middle East. However, unlike in 1947-8, the world is watching in
real-time, and is expressing outrage at Israel’s blatant attempt at ethnic
cleansing. Egypt told Israel and the US in no uncertain terms that it would not
be a party to Israel’s ethnic cleansing, and would not accept a flood of Gazan
refugees.
The quest for Greater Israel is doomed to fail
Israel’s attempt to violently create a “Greater
Israel” will fail. The Israeli Defense Forces are suffering massive losses in
the brutal urban warfare in Gaza. While Israel has killed more than 20,000
Gazans, mostly women and children, it has not destroyed Hamas’s capacity to
resist Israel’s invasion. IDF leaders say that the battle against Hamas will
require many more months, but well before then, global opposition will likely
become insurmountable.
In desperation, Israeli leaders such as Defense
Minister Benny Gantz want to expand the war to Lebanon and probably to Iran. US hardliners
such as Republican US Senator Lindsey Graham of South Carolina have dutifully
and predictably chimed in, urging a US war with Iran. This Israeli gambit too will likely fail. The US is
in no position to fight a wider Middle East war, after having drawn down its
stockpile of munitions in Ukraine and Gaza. The American people too strongly
oppose another US war, and their opposition will be heard in an election year,
even by a Congress in the pocket of the
military-industrial complex.
Israel’s diplomatic setbacks, unless reversed, will
prove devastating. Israel has hemorrhaged political support worldwide. In a
recent UN General Assembly vote, 174 countries, with 94% of the world
population, voted in favor of Palestinian political self-determination, while
just 4 countries with 4% of the world population – Israel, the United States,
Micronesia and Nauru – voted against (another 15 countries abstained or did not
vote). Israel’s hardline militarism has united the world against it.
Israeli leaders and diplomats have to stop shouting
that critics are all anti-Semites and listen to what the world is actually
saying: Israel and Palestine need to live side by side based on international
law and mutual security.
Israel counts entirely now on its one remaining
supporter, the United States, but US support is also waning. By a huge margin, 59% for and 19% opposed, Americans support a cease fire. Americans support
Israel’s security but not its extremism. Of course, America has its own
Christian and Jewish zealots who base their politics on biblical
literalism/orthodoxy, but they are a minority of public opinion. American
support for Israel depends on the two-state solution. Biden knows it and has
reiterated US support for the two-state solution, even as the US supplies
munitions for Israel’s war on Gaza.
While American Jews generally support Israel, they do
not support Israel’s religious messianism. In a 2020 Pew Survey only 30% of American Jews believed that “God
gave the land that is now Israel to the Jewish people.” 63% believed in the
feasibility of peace between Israel and Palestine through the two-state
solution. Only 33% believed as of 2020 that the Israeli government was making
sincere efforts towards peace with the Palestinians.
Even Orthodox US Jews are divided on the question of
Greater Israel. Some orthodox Jewish communities such as the Chabad are
believers in the biblically motivated Greater Israel, while others such as the
Satmar community (also known as Naturei Karta) are anti-Zionists
and outspoken critics of Israel’s war on the Palestinian people
stating that Judaism is a religion not a nation concept. The Satmar community
believes that the revival of the Jewish homeland must follow God’s timeline,
and not a Zionist timeline.
Supporting Israel’s extremism is not in America’s
interest
The US has been providing the munitions for Israel’s
brutal war. This complicity has led to a lawsuit by Palestinian plaintiffs charging the US
Government with violations of the Genocide Convention. As part of this legal
effort, the US-based Center for Constitutional Rights has methodically
documented the genocidal statements by Israeli leaders here and here.
The US is also facing severe and costly diplomatic
isolation as it defends Israel’s indefensible actions. In recent votes of the
US Security Council and the UN General Assembly, the US has stood almost alone
in backing Israel’s hyper-violent and unjust actions. This is hurting the US in
countless other areas of foreign policy and global economics.
The US federal budget is also under tremendous stress
from military-related spending, which will reach around $1.5 trillion in total
in 2024. The American people have had enough of the bulging military spending,
which has been a central factor in raising the public debt from around 35% of
GDP in 2000 to around 100% of GDP today. With soaring debts and the rise in
interest rates on mortgages and consumer loans, the public is resisting Biden’s
calls for more deficit spending to fund the wars in Ukraine and Gaza, and will
vociferously oppose a wider war in the Middle East, especially one that would
draw the US into direct combat.
Of course, US open-ended support for Israel has seemed
to be unstoppable in American politics. The Israel lobby—a powerful
constellation of Israel politicians and wealthy Americans—has played a huge
role in building this strong support. The Israel lobby gave $30 million in campaign
contributions in
the 2022 Congressional election cycle, and will give vastly more in 2024. Yet
the lobby is up against the public’s growing opposition to Israel’s brutality
in Gaza.
The two-state solution remains Israel’s true chance
for peace and it’s security
Israeli leaders and diplomats have to stop shouting
that critics are all anti-Semites and listen to what the world is actually
saying: Israel and Palestine need to live side by side based on international
law and mutual security. The support for a two-state solution is support for
the peace and security of the Jewish people in the state of Israel, just as it
is support for the peace and security of the Palestinian people in their own
state. To the contrary, supporting Israel’s genocide in Gaza and inflaming
anti-Israel (and anti-US) sentiment around the world, is antithetical to
Israel’s long-term security and perhaps even its survival. The Arab and Islamic
states have repeatedly declared their readiness to normalize relations with
Israel within the context of the two-state solution. This goes back to
the 2002 Arab Peace Initiative and includes the important Final statement of the extraordinary
joint Arab Islamic Summit in Riyadh on November 11, 2023. The US and Arab
countries should quickly agree on establishing a joint peacekeeping force to
keep both sides safe in the context of implementing the two-state solution.
Many zealous religious settlers will strongly resist a
Palestinian state, asserting their right to do so based on ancient biblical
texts. Yet the point of Judaism is not to rule over millions of Palestinians or
to ethnically cleanse them. The real point is not to provoke global opprobrium
but to use reason and goodwill to find peace. As Hillel the Elder declared,
“Whatever is hateful and distasteful to you, do not do to your fellow man. This
is the entire Torah; the rest is commentary. Go learn.” The real point is to
fulfill the ethical vision of the Prophet Isaiah (2:4), who prophesied that
“nations shall beat their swords into plowshares, and their spears into
pruninghooks: nation shall not lift up sword against nation, neither shall they
learn war anymore.” So may it be.
(Republished from Common Dreams by permission of author or representative)
