Israel is about to launch a catastrophic ground invasion of the Gaza Strip – or will have already launched it by the time this column appears. The invasion is liable to end in a fiasco the likes of which Israel and Gaza have never experienced. It could make the pictures coming from Gaza over the past several days look like a promo. We may be looking at mass slaughter.
Large numbers of Israeli soldiers would be killed pointlessly. Residents of Gaza would face a second Nakba, the first signs of which are already apparent on the ground. No one would emerge from these horrors for the better.
From hour to hour, the pictures from Gaza are becoming more and more terrifying. Israeli media outlets, which have been enlisted in the fight, are betraying their role and preventing their audience from seeing the scenes. They’re making do with endless boring talk by generals.
But the fact that Israel isn’t showing what’s happening in Gaza doesn’t mean that the catastrophe isn’t unfolding there. On Saturday, more than a million people, half of whom are children, were fleeing for their lives or were remaining in their wrecked homes in a suicidal act.
The elderly, women, children, the disabled, the ill have been fleeing toward the south, on foot, on the hoods of cars, on donkeys or on motorcycles with just a meager number of their possessions. People are heading toward their destruction, and they know it.
There’s no one in the huge procession heading south who believes that they will have a house to return to. There’s no one who isn’t reminded of the scenes of the Nakba that the previous generation of their families went through 75 years ago. Gaza on Saturday resembled Nagorno-Karabakh.
Where will the Gaza Palestinians go? Where will they hide? Where will they find refuge? In the sea, perhaps. There’s no electricity, no water, no medicine and no Internet.
This expulsion is mass collective punishment that provides an omen of what is to come. Israel is saying that the northern Gaza Strip has to be cleared of Hamas, and then it will move further south. Two million people, or those of them who are left alive, will then be ordered to flee back to the north to cleanse the south.
The mission will be accomplished. The Israel Defense Forces will make note of the masses of fatalities that it caused and claim that most of them were from Hamas. Every teenager will be called a Hamas member. More than 600 Palestinian children have already been killed, as of Saturday afternoon, prior to any ground invasion. They weren’t Hamas.
Israel will be victorious. Gaza will be leveled. Hamas’ network of underground tunnels will be cleared. The human animals will be assassinated. The stench of death that will rise from the Strip will mingle with the scenes of those dying of hunger and those near death in the overwhelmed hospitals.
And the world will continue to support Israel. Israel was barbarically attacked and had no alternative. The Israeli hostages might pay the price with their lives.
And morning will dawn on a Gaza in ruins. And then what? Who will assume the reins of government there? Representatives of the Jewish Agency? Gaza’s collaborators? And what will Israel gain from that? And that’s without mentioning a multi-front war that could also erupt and entirely change the game.
Israel is embarking on a military operation that is dangerous and without a prospect of gain. It can ask its ally in Washington what America’s senseless wars waged for regime change around the world produced. About how many people were needlessly killed and who took power through the American sword. But we don’t need America or even to think about the Palestinians’ catastrophe to understand that we are at the threshold of a historic disaster for Israel as well.
If this mission is in fact carried out, and Israel turns the Gaza Strip upside-down on its rulers and inhabitants, it will be etched for generations into the consciousness of the Arab world, the Muslim world, and the Third World. A second Nakba would prevent hundreds of millions of people around the world from accepting Israel. There could be some Arab regimes that at first would exercise restraint, but public opinion in their countries would not permit that restraint to continue.
The price would be paid by Israel, and it will be steeper than Israel currently thinks. Israel is about to embark on a catastrophic war – or it might have already done so.