Human Shields
I read a story in Haaretz the other day about the latest ethnic cleansing chatter happening at the highest levels of government in Israel — this time from Netanyahu’s finance minister, Bezalel Smotrich, who leads a religious settler political party that wants to annex the West Bank and naturally is opposed to any deal ceding land or rights to Palestinians.
His big ethnic cleansing idea? Reduce the population of Gaza by at least 90 percent.1
Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich said that Israel must control the territory in the Gaza Strip and significantly reduce the number of Palestinian residents in Gaza.
In an interview to army radio, the far-right minister said that his "demand" was for the Gaza Strip to stop being a "hotbed where two million people grow up on hatred and aspire to destroy the State of Israel."
Without outlining his preferred method, Smotrich then suggested that the removal of around 90 percent of Gaza's residents would help achieve his goal. "If there are 100,000 or 200,000 Arabs in Gaza and not two million, the whole discourse about the day after will be different," he said.
Smotrich isn’t saying anything radically new. Various proposals and statements about the need to “voluntarily” relocate Palestinians out of Gaza into some third country — Egypt, Jordan, South America, somewhere in Africa, the EU, whatever — have been bouncing around ever since Israel started destroying Gaza with one of the biggest bombardment campaigns in modern history.2 But Smotrich’s confirms, to anyone who still had any doubts about it, that something like this is still very much in play. Hell, an Israeli real estate company involved in building illegal settlements in the West Bank launched an advertising campaign to boost Israeli morale in this trying time — it wanted Israelis to imagine living in seaside beachside condos and villas in a newly cleansed Gaza strip: “Wake up, a beach house is not a dream!”3 This, along with memes about turning Gaza into a parking lot for Tel-Aviv, is how Israelis have fun now. I’m sure all this stuff will fit right in when Israel argues its case in front of the International Court of Justice.
One thing Smotrich said stood out to me though. He said that it wasn’t enough to depopulate Gaza of Palestinians and to control it militarily. To achieve peace, Israel needed to be repopulate it with Israeli civilians. Haaretz translated his comment like this: “in order to control the territory militarily, you also must have a civilian presence there.”
To control militarily…you must have civilians.
You hear nonstop from Israel and Israel’s backers in the US and Europe about how Israel absolutely abhors killing civilians but it has no choice in Gaza: these Palestinians are such savages they embed their military units among civilians, forcing civilians to be their human shields. “Hamas is at fault that Israel massacres so many children. They made us do it! They hate their own people! They hate life!”
Like a lot of accusations coming out of Israel much of this cynical human shields talk is projection — and this comment from Smotrich is a glimpse into that. He’s basically saying that Israel needs to put Israeli civilians into Gaza for effective military control, setting up a human shields situation where any attack on Israelis by despondent and dispossessed Palestinians in a cleansed and newly reoccupied Gaza would be held up as a symbol of Palestinian barbarity. “Look at these people! They’re targeting innocent Jews women and children! We told you they’re monsters! Ancient hatred of Jews runs in their blood!”
But there’s nothing that surprising about Smotrich’s off-hand remark about using Israeli civilians as human shields in Israel’s escalating occupation. The sad truth is that the zionist project in Palestine has been all about blurring the distinction between civilian and military. How else can you pull off a proto-state settlement project that depends on bringing in a new population and expelling the old indigenous one by force?
Early zionists understood that to succeed with this venture settler Jews needed to form a militarized society. Every civilian needed to be a fighter. It didn’t matter if you were a farmer or a baker or a journalist. The creation of a Jewish majority state in Palestine was predicated on the use of force — both defensive and offensive. The natives weren’t gonna go voluntarily.