“I have been to all kinds of conflicts and all kinds of crises,” Arif Hussain, chief economist at the United Nations World Food Program, told The New Yorker this week. “In my life, I've never seen anything like this in terms of severity, in terms of size, and then in terms of speed.”
The humanitarian misery spreading across Gaza finds little sympathy in Israeli public discourse, where the priority remains defeating Hamas – the perpetrators of the deadliest massacre of Jews since the Holocaust – and freeing hostages held in Hamas's strongholds in Gaza. In fact, the incessant drumbeat of Israeli lawmakers and other politicians has urged an even more destructive fate for the territory.
Members of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's right-wing coalition have called for a nuclear bomb to be dropped on the densely populated Gaza Strip, the complete annihilation of the Strip as a sign of revenge, and the impoverishment of its people to the point where they have no choice. Their only option is to leave their homeland.
This week alone, a lawmaker from Netanyahu's Likud party appeared on television and said it was clear to most Israelis that “the entire population of Gaza needs to be destroyed.” Then the Israeli ambassador to Britain He told local radio She said that there was no other solution for her country than to demolish “every school, every mosque, and every second home” in Gaza to weaken Hamas’ military infrastructure.
This accumulated discourse forms part of The 84-page application Submitted by the South African government to the International Court of JusticeHe accused Israel of committing acts amounting to genocide or failing to prevent genocide. Although it condemned the Hamas attack on October 7, South Africa’s case says that “no armed attack on the territory of a State, no matter how serious – even one involving atrocity crimes – can provide any possible justification for or defense of violations.” ” Charter of the United Nations. Genocide Convention. The report explains that the Israeli military campaign in Gaza has “wrought devastation across large areas of Gaza, including entire neighborhoods, and damaged or destroyed more than 355,000 Palestinian homes,” making large swaths of land uninhabitable for an extended period of time. Come. The South African complaint alleged that Israeli authorities failed to suppress “direct and public incitement to commit genocide” by a group of Israeli politicians, journalists and public officials.
This includes far-right figures such as Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich and National Security Minister Itamar Ben Gvir, who do little to hide their vision of an ethnically cleansed Gaza. “What should be done in the Gaza Strip is to encourage immigration,” Smotrich said in an interview with Israeli Army Radio on Sunday. “If there were 100,000 or 200,000 Arabs in Gaza and not two million Arabs, the whole discussion the next day would be completely different.” Ben Gvir separately called for the actual forced migration of hundreds of thousands from Gaza.
American and other Western officials condemned these statements, describing them as “inflammatory and irresponsible.” But such a retreat does little to change the tone of the conflict. Netanyahu himself, according to my colleagues, has tried to persuade Egypt, other Arab governments, and countries elsewhere to take in refugees from Gaza — something unacceptable to many in the Middle East, who fear further expropriation of their land by Palestinians.
Israeli calls for actual ethnic cleansing and potential Israeli settlement in Gaza may not reflect the actual position of the Israeli cabinet in wartime. “In private, Israeli officials say these proposals [to relocate Gazans] My colleagues report that this stems from the political imperatives of Netanyahu's coalition and his reliance on far-right parties to maintain power.
“The specialists in the military and the security establishment know that this is not within the realm of possibility,” a person with direct knowledge of talks within the Israeli government told The Washington Post, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to discuss the matter. It's public. “They know that there is no future without the people of Gaza in Gaza and [Palestinian Authority] As part of the government.”
But Netanyahu and his allies remain distinctly ambiguous about the imagined endgame in Gaza. Analysts stress that this uncertainty only deepens concerns about Israel's intentions among its Arab neighbors, including Gulf states that have been warming toward the Jewish state.
“No one will take the steps that would precede new normalization agreements when Netanyahu rejects the demands of Arab countries for a political process based on a two-state solution and also insists on the need to finance the reconstruction of Gaza without asking questions or attaching conditions,” Michael Koplow wrote. David Halperin of the Israel Policy Forum.
They added: “Iran and its proxies will not be deterred when high-ranking US officials repeatedly present their vision for post-war Gaza, and members of the Israeli government fall over each other in their rush to television studios to offer public rebuttals.” Under the pretext that it is necessary for the Biden administration to push the Israelis to confront these facts.
Meanwhile, a group of prominent Israelis, including former lawmakers and leading scholars and intellectuals, wrote a joint letter on Wednesday condemning Israeli judicial authorities for not reining in widespread genocidal rhetoric. “For the first time that we can remember, explicit calls to commit atrocity crimes, as we mentioned, against millions of civilians, have become a legitimate and regular part of Israeli discourse,” they wrote. “Today, calls of this kind are an everyday matter in Israel.”
