This is not a ‘mask off’ moment

The mask was never on

“A searing indictment of the brutality and atrocities inflicted on the Palestinians of Gaza and the collaboration of powerful nations in their murder.”

BLOWING UP EVERYTHING IS BEAUTIFUL: ISRAEL’S EXTERMINATION OF GAZA
IS OUT NOW

THEY TOLD YOU WHAT they were doing while they did it.

No one can hide behind illusion or ignorance. When they speak of Gaza’s annihilation, Israel’s political class and its generals do not bother with fibs or euphemism. The freedom with which they admit their crimes is the same freedom they enjoy from the shackles of the law. In the West, in the territories it occupies illegally, in Israel itself, the state tells you in one harmonious voice precisely their wish and how they shall make it a reality.

A soul worried about its moral condition would in instinct sharply recoil from the nineteen months’ worth of blood caked on the palms of butchers. But these leaders – these experts of the abattoir – are not shy. They are not ashamed. And they are certainly not squeamish. The bare rancour in Israeli rhetoric since it unilaterally broke the January ceasefire will only seem freshly terrifying to anyone who hasn’t been paying attention. This is not a “mask off” moment. The mask was never on.

Here is a simple fact overlooked too often: The Israeli government does not believe that Palestinian civilians exist. In its policy, in its rhetoric, in its actions, the state sees no difference at all between a combatant and a civilian. “It’s an entire nation out there that is responsible,” explained Isaac Herzog, the Israeli president, when he set the tone on October 13, 2023. “It is not true this rhetoric about civilians not aware, not involved.” There is, they say, nothing to separate an elderly man with a walking stick from a fighter. A child is the same as a bombmaker. Thus the child is decapitated in an airstrike. Thus the elderly man has an explosive fuse tied around his neck and is enslaved as a human shield. If the principle were reversed, if non-conscript Israelis were threatened, guileless and sanguinary men like Herzog would discover a sudden and passionate faith in the sanctity of innocents.

But Palestinians have been carved out from humanity, made by viciousness and torture into a nonentity beyond comprehension, beyond law. To his troops the former Defense Minister Yoav Gallant once said “We are fighting human animals, and we are acting accordingly.” And the troops reply in chorus: “There are no uninvolved civilians.” Or take the senior officer of the Golani Brigade, Israel’s most elite and storied infantry unit, who addressed his men as they prepared to re-invade Gaza in early April. “Everyone we encounter is an enemy,” he instructed. “Identify a figure, eliminate them.” Or consider the soldier guarding a demolition team working in the kilometre-deep “buffer zone” the IDF has bulldozed inside the border wall. “They kill us and now we’re going to kill them,” this soldier told the Associated Press. “I found out that we’re not only killing them. We’re killing them, we’re killing their wives, their children, their cats, their dogs, and we destroyed their houses.”

Yoav Gallant was sacked as defense minister last November. His replacement is Israel Katz. He follows sternly in the pattern of his predecessor. He addressed Palestinians directly on March 19 and blamed them for their imminent doom. “Gaza residents: this is a final warning,” Katz said in his ultimatum. “Things will become much more difficult, and you will pay the full price.” He suggested Gazans should overthrow Hamas. If they managed this daring and magical feat, their reward would be “leaving for other places in the world.” If they failed, “the alternative is total destruction and ruin.” Death or exile. These are the choices plainly offered to two million people.

“We will ensure general security in the Gaza Strip and enable the implementation of the Trump plan, the voluntary emigration plan,” said Benjamin Netanyahu, Israel’s prime minister, on March 30. “This is the plan. We do not hide it. We are ready to discuss it at any time” (my emphasis). The seizure of other peoples’ land is a crime. The forced expulsion and deportation of those people from that land is a crime. The methods used to bring about that annexation and that expulsion are also illegal, whether it is by terror-bombing, the demolition of their homes, or the laying of a total siege that has, since March 2, not been relieved by a single truckload of fuel or crate of medical supplies. The ends do not justify the means because both means and ends are outlawed in the most serious legal codes humanity has ever written. This is the same Netanyahu who, in November 2023, instructed his close aide Ron Dermer to begin working on a plan to “thin the population of Gaza to a minimum.” He is getting his wish. (This detail, lest anyone think it was anti-Semitic propaganda, was reported in the free daily newspaper Israel Hayom, owned by the Adelson family who are very close allies with Netanyahu and the Likud).

Amit Halevi, a Likudnik and member of the Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee in the Knesset, was agreeing with Netanyahu when he insisted that Israel needed to “return to Gaza permanently and control this space, because it is part of our homeland…We want to occupy the territory to cleanse it of the enemy.” If there are no “uninvolved civilians,” then the “enemy” means anyone alive in Gaza. The Minister for Settlements (which are illegal) is Orit Strook. She appeared alongside Bezalel Smotrich, the intellectual architect of Israel’s policy of extermination on March 9 and said “There is no way, even if we defeat Hamas…as long as we do not allow the majority of the population to emigrate, we will not remove the threat.”

Israel Katz appeared again on April 2 to announce the IDF’s plan to “capture extensive territory” which will then be “incorporated into Israeli security zones.” The purpose, he said, again failing to notice the difference between a gunman and a pregnant woman, was to “increase the pressure on the Hamas murderers and also on the population in Gaza.” The Israeli state now controls a full fifty percent of the Strip. Every single soul within it has been denied the protection of the law, or even basic dignity. By living, their lives become forfeit.

Donald Trump is not right about many things, but he was right to say “a civilization’s been wiped out in Gaza.” There is not much left of our moral horizon when we need Donald Trump to say what others won’t. And there is even less of that moral horizon if it becomes possible for wicked people to commit a grotesque number of crimes in their own and other countries, and to escape punishment because they created a ruin so general and infectious that it consumed all courts, all codes, and all cries for justice. However enfeebled and faltering, the law is still a bulwark civilisation raises against its own destruction. If destruction is Gaza’s lot, it will not be the last society made a victim.