Stop Calling It an 'Operation.' Israeli Soldiers Aren't Exercising
From Hebron to Gaza, soldiers are carrying out expulsions of Palestinians under the guise of military operations. The euphemism obscures reality, allowing Smotrich's vision for a Palestinian-free land to advance
This isn't an "operation." Stop this collaborationist use of military jargon that throws sand in people's eyes. Forcing people out of their homes, even if it's "until further notice," is not an operation. What the most moral army in the universe is perpetrating in Hebron since last Friday is another stage, another circle of hell in Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich's "Decisive Plan."
Nineteen-year-old soldiers and 24-year-old officers (your children and nephews and fiancés) may just be following orders, but they aren't participating in a nighttime field exercise. They are E.X.P.E.L.L.I.N.G people.
They're expelling women, elderly people, youth and children. Under the bayonets of their rifles and the movement restrictions they have imposed, around 5,000 people, according to Hebron's municipality, have been forced to leave their homes. Some left in pajamas with a little bit of cash and the gold jewelry from their weddings – if it hasn't been sold long ago to mitigate the effects of the financial attacks Smotrich has perpetrated against the Palestinian subjects and the Palestinian Authority.
Bulldozer drivers, who have been destroying residential, agricultural and commercial buildings and structures in the Hebron area during the past week – aren't "enforcing the law." That phrase, too, is a smokescreen behind which generations of gray bureaucrats and zealous officers hide. All are engaged in mass expulsion. They enforce military orders that were designed from the outset to make life worse for a particular group of people – in other words, dispossession orders disguised as "planning and good governance."
Israel's Civil Administration in the West Bank, which signs off on these demolition orders, isn't the executive branch of a system that respects the separation of powers. The "laws" weren't passed by an elected parliament but are part of the orders imposed by a military regime in which people in uniform and those who send them fulfill every role at once: rulers, lawmakers, judges and executioners.
It's not the demolished buildings that are "illegal," but Israel's reign of terror over a native population deprived of its rights. It's not the occupants of those demolished homes who broke the law, but the officers who ordered their demolition and the soldiers, your children and our neighbors, who happily obeyed.
They know very well why they hide behind "Hague masks." They want to be able to enjoy themselves abroad without fear of prosecution, or get a well-paying job with an international security companies.
The word "evacuation" is also a tool for diluting awareness. In Jenin and Tulkarm, tens of thousands of residents of the refugee camps were "evacuated," and almost two years later, they still haven't been allowed to return to their destroyed neighborhoods. Let them emigrate to Jordan.
In the Gaza Strip, evacuation made destruction possible and left some two million people homeless after they survived wall-to-wall bombing. Let them emigrate to Egypt.
In the Democratic State for Jews (a temporary name), evacuation means expelling Palestinians from their homes for the sake of Jewish settlement. Period.
With their enthusiastic obedience, the soldiers in Hebron draw a continuous line from the expulsions of the past, carried out by their parents, grandparents and uncles from 1948 onward, to the expulsions of the present, which they themselves, or their older brothers, have carried out and continue to carry out in Gaza.
The expulsion they were ordered to carry out last weekend is another link in a chain of "operations": the expulsion of shepherding communities in the West Bank, ordered and orchestrated by the Civil Administration and carried out through settler harassment; the destruction of Bedouin communities in the Negev (following a series of past expulsions); and the expulsion of residents of Palestinian neighborhoods in East Jerusalem – whether through construction bans or home demolitions – ordered and orchestrated by the municipality and the Interior Ministry.
I don't know whether we're currently in circle 13 or circle 54 of the Decisive Plan. It would be more accurate to say that we're in several circles simultaneously, all of which have been normalized and underreported.
There's the ban on olive harvesting (where are the Jewish farmers from the Galilee and the Negev, kibbutzim and moshavim, who will be shocked and protest?). Settlers beat olive pickers until they bleed. It's routine. In the best case, soldiers stand on the sidelines. One may understand them. They are from the same settlement outposts, or guests there.
Then there are the prison guards who starve and torture their prisoners, both on orders and by choice. The video game players keep bombing Gaza, factoring in advance the babies and the elderly as collateral damage. Settlers take over a home or set it on fire. It's all business as usual. On orders from settlement security coordinators, soldier lock the entrances and exits of the Palestinian ghettoes.
Our language is crawling with words that normalize the reign of the military-settler junta and its atrocities. Israelis' family ties to the perpetrators numb them to any historical associations. And the shortage of space dilutes reality. Everything that is published is only a fraction of what is happening and fails to convey the collective sadism in which Israel is mired.
The normalization, the underreporting and Israelis' refusal to see are enabling this chain of erasure, God willing, to keep extending, straight into the nightmare future that Smotrich has dreamed up. He is the mastermind who stands firmly on the shoulders of his predecessors.
Thanks to this nightmare future, those respectable settlers from Judea and Samaria-land – be they salt-of-the-earth sabra or newcomers with refined South African accents or charming French ones – flocked to the polls on Tuesday to vote for Smotrich. After all, while expulsion is the goal, it's also effective election propaganda.
It's no accident that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu raced to Hebron to exploit the gun battle in which two Israeli soldiers and two armed Palestinians were killed last Friday. He was trying to compete with Defense Minister Israel Katz and National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir over who could make the most frightening threats.
But don't worry; you're all frightening, because you're all determined to empty this land of Palestinians. And your rivals from the "anyone but Bibi" camp either aren't interested or don't object.