Israel Unleashed

 

By David K. Shipler 

In nearly two years since the Gaza war began, the world has learned what Israel does when it feels its very existence is threatened. It invades, bombs, maims, starves, blockades, sickens, dislocates, and traumatizes an entire population of innocents whose most radical leaders and their followers have committed intimate atrocities against innocents inside Israel: Sacrifice innocents for innocents. It attacks throughout the Middle East, in Lebanon, Iran, Yemen, and Qatar. It defies international condemnation. It dismisses evidence of its victims’ suffering as antisemitic propaganda.

            What it has not done, obviously, is use its nuclear weapons, which Moshe Dayan revealed to me in 1981 could be quickly assembled. As Defense Minister, he reportedly urged consideration of their use when Israel was attacked by Arab countries in the 1973 Yom Kippur War. Whether the possibility came up this year, as Israel bombed Iran’s nuclear facilities, is not yet known publicly.

            The lesson couldn’t be clearer: Born as a refuge for Jews after the Holocaust, Israel inherits a legacy of anxiety and persecution, and therefore treasures its military strength. It feels risk beyond what hard-headed security experts might assess. Nevertheless, as Henry Kissinger once said about the Jewish state, even paranoids can have real enemies.

And so, when its own intelligence and military hierarchy grew so complacent that Hamas terrorists could easily flow in from Gaza on Oct. 7, 2023 to slaughter, rape, and kidnap, a traumatized Israel sensed doom and replied with terrorism of its own, which an international commission of the UN Human Rights Council has now defined as genocide.

No more terrible accusation could be leveled against a state that rose from the ashes of genocide. The label, which carries consequences under international law, is a conversation-stopper. While critics of Israel can disagree about its accuracy, the “g-word” debate has created an odd sense of abstraction. It has become shorthand for a panoply of atrocities, which, when listed, make an indictment even more telling. That is what the UN commission has tried to do.

Israel has generally blocked international journalists from Gaza, thereby preventing independent, neutral reporting. But the commission’s 72-page condemnation assembles in one document a detailed picture from international medical and aid workers, humanitarian agencies, individual Palestinians, and others.

The report gives particular attention to the fate of future generations of Palestinians, charging Israel with deliberately targeting maternity hospitals and clinics, and in one case a facility providing in vitro fertilization. The commission argues that Israel has “destroyed in part the reproductive capacity of the Palestinians in Gaza as a group.”

As early as November 2023, “Oxfam reported that newborns up to three months old were dying of hypothermia, dehydration and infection as mothers had little to no medical support and were living in appalling conditions without water, sanitation, heat or food,” the commission writes.

Children have suffered gunshot wounds, suggesting that they were targeted. Hundreds have had limbs amputated, some without anasthesia, due to Israel’s blockade of medical supplies, the commission says. “Gaza is home to the largest cohort of child amputees in modern history,” according to a representative of the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs.

The famine induced by Israel’s periodic blockade and limits on food shipments have caused deaths, but will also have lifelong consequences for children who survive, given the damage done by malnutrition during critical periods of brain development. As of this month, the report says, acute malnutrition is being experienced by 70,000 children under the age of five and 17,000 pregnant or lactating women.

“Short-term complications could include infants not meeting motor developmental milestones within the first year of life,” the commission says. “In the medium term, children would be unable to develop speech and meet language milestones, and their cognitive abilities could potentially be impaired in the long-term.”

There are many more charges: torture and sexual abuse of prisoners; trauma intentionally induced by threats of killings; widespread destruction of agriculture that curbs food production; the repeatedly forced displacement of some 1.9 million Palestinians; and the targeting of civilian homes, schools, and hospitals.

Israel contends that Hamas has been stealing food from shipments, but of course if there were sufficient food, none would have to be stolen. It is the shortage itself that creates the conditions ripe for theft and black markets.

Israel also argues correctly that Hamas located itself among civilians. That goes unmentioned in the commission’s report, which is a missed opportunity to discuss the ethics of killing civilians in large numbers when they are being used by the enemy as human shields.

A finding of genocide requires a finding of intent, which is hard to prove. The commission cites statements by three top officials: Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu likening the Palestinians to the Old Testament enemy Amalek, whose men, women, children, and infants God ordered the Israelites to annihilate. President Isaac Herzog, who announced absurdly, “It’s an entire nation out there that is responsible.” And Defense Minister Yoav Gallant, who ordered “a complete siege,” declaring: “no electricity, no water, no food, no fuel. We are fighting human animals, and we act accordingly.”

In addition, the commission finds genocidal intent supported by the “circumstantial evidence” of a repeated pattern of conduct that persisted even after its devastating effects on the civilian population were documented.

It’s hard to see any motivation other than to remove Palestinians from Israel’s security landscape.

Although the country’s physical survival was not truly in jeopardy, despite the rhetoric of Israeli leaders, the attack by Hamas, a beneficiary of Iran, was amplified by attacks from Iran itself and its proxies—Hezbollah in Lebanon and Houthis in Yemen—raising the specter of hostile encirclement. Israeli communities near the borders with Gaza and Lebanon were ghost towns after tens of thousands of Israelis fled and became internal refugees.

In response, Israel redrew the region’s military map by obliterating Hamas’s armed capacity, decimating Hezbollah, and, with American help, seriously damaging Iran’s nuclear-weapons program.

But the Israelis have also inflicted one of modern history’s most devastating, sustained assaults on a civilian population, which continues in Gaza far beyond military necessity. Combined with officially permitted vigilante and army assaults in the West Bank, Israel is making life unlivable for many Palestinians in those territories, apparently hoping that most will flee—somewhere—and that Palestinian statehood will evaporate as a realistic prospect.

Israel has a longstanding practice of multiplying the harm it suffers with brutal retaliation a thousand-fold or more. The Gaza war is Israel’s most extreme exercise of that strategy in its history, and history will judge. It will also judge the two weak American presidents who enabled these crimes against humanity: Joe Biden, who merely wrung his hands, and Donald Trump, who is blind to people and sees Gaza as a real estate opportunity.

The supreme irony is this: In securing its physical existence, Israel has lost its existence as a moral enterprise, the basis on which it was founded. Its moral authority is buried in the rubble of Gaza, where it is indeed fighting that existential war—and losing.