Israel's war of pacification against the Palestinians is similar to
wars waged by the French in Algeria in the 19th century or European
settlers waged in North America against indigenous peoples
There are numerous examples of IDF tactics that illustrate the logic
of pacification. For example there is the Israeli policy of designating “kill zones”
where anyone entering is killed indiscriminately and anyone killed is
labelled a terrorist and added to the numbers of Hamas fighters
liquidated by the IDF. This includes the killing of Palestinian
civilians, mostly male, trying to return to their homes; it is a mass
slaughter of the male population designed to break the will to resist.
AI has been introduced to power the killing of a large number of Palestinians. The IDF started using an AI program
named “Lavender” for the purpose of ‘target generation.’ Lavender has
produced 37,000 Palestinian targets, supposedly all members of Hamas and
the Islamic Jihad. The AI targeting is treated as a human decision,
despite the IDF knowing that the programme produces an error rate of
approximately 10%. Even more horrifyingly the bombing of targets takes
place when the suspect is at home, usually at night, surrounded by
family members. In essence, the suspected member of Hamas is killed
together with his family, which helps to explain the figure that 70% of
the Palestinian dead are women and children. It is a pacification
strategy that wipes out entire families if one of the family decides to
take up arms against Israel.
The logic of pacification also extends to the use of starvation
tactics by the IDF, with the continued blockade of food and aid to the
besieged population of Gaza. The most recent example is the Israeli
assault on Northern Gaza, with experts warning the UN Security Council
that famine
is imminent in the North, as Israel continues to block the flow of food
and aid. This was accompanied by what Human Rights Watch has called
“war crimes of forced transfer” in effect, ethnic cleansing of the
population of the North another pacification tactic used to quell
resistance.
Added to all these acts of violence are a number of blatant massacres
deliberately targeting civilians. In May there was the flour massacre,
where Israeli soldier killed 187 civilians as they were trying to get flour for themselves and their families. A second massacre occurred
in November, following the same tactic, leading to the death of 70
Palestinians. All of these tactics are combined with the targeting of
civilian infrastructure with the aim to kill as many Palestinians as
possible by making the Gaza Strip unliveable. For example, in October a
UN commission of inquiry accused
Israel of committing war crimes in its deliberate policy of targeting
and effectively destroying the healthcare system in Gaza. This has
served to increase the number of civilian casualties and is causing
immense suffering amongst the wounded, with reports emerging of amputation
on children having to be carried out without anaesthesia. All are
deliberate policies aimed at killing as many Palestinians as possible,
instilling fear in the rest and breaking their will to resist.
The paradigm of a colonial war of pacification would help explain
Israeli policy and is logically consistent with the Israeli apartheid
ideology of Jewish supremacy and continued colonisation of Palestinian
and Arab land. The latest example are the calls made by the far right
Finance Minister and self-declared fascist and homophobe, Bezalel Smotrich, calling for the formal annexation of the West Bank.
However, this colonial war aimed at breaking the will of the native
is deeply problematic for Western powers and the so-called “rule based
international order”, which now appears to be another victim of Israel’s
war of pacification. Such concern, however, is not shared amongst many
people in the Middle East who are deeply aware that this rules based
order never really applied to them and the Western powers ignore it at
will when convenient. One only needs to recall the American invasion of
Iraq and the Russian involvement in the Syrian civil war just to name a
few cases where the rules were ignored. The Israeli war, however, is
qualitatively different from any of these wars in that it is aimed at
the destruction of a people, their national movement, the will to
resist, even the core of what makes them Palestinian. It is for all
intents and purposes an existential war on the Palestinians backed by
the West. How this war proceeds and how it will change the Middle East
is hard to predict. What is certain is that Palestinian resilience and
resistance will not be defeated.
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