Early on in the conflict in Gaza Israel unilaterally decided to create a buffer zone stretching from the top right hand corner of Gaza ie. the North East corner by Beit Hanoun down to the Egyptian border. A distance of approximately 48 kilometres. The zone would be 1 kilometre wide so would steralise 48 square kilometres of Gaza territory.
Gaza comprises 360 square kilometres per the CIA World Fact Book which also records a population in the Strip of 2.1m people. This works out at 5,833 persons per square kilometre (ppsqk). This slightly more than London at 5,608 ppsqk but less than Tokyo at 6,362 ppsqk. When the 48 square kilometre’s are taken off however Gaza’s populations density increases to 6,730 ppsqk exceeding that of Tokyo.
Of course the Gaza strip is not a City it is a… territory. If you were to compare with a nearby country, say Israel the population density there is circa 400 ppsqkm.
The reason for the buffer zone is to protect against another 10/7. But there is currently a 20 foot high fence around the whole of Gaza and a blockade of its coastal waters. Will a kilometre wide buffer provide greater security? Or will it just reduce further the land available in the occupied territory?
I do not understand how the leaders of the United States and the United Kingdom can continue to provide diplomatic cover, weapons and military support to Israel. The latest outrage, killing 90 and injuring 300 others in a safe area only confirms this is not a war against Hamas it is against the Palestinians. It was allegedly aimed at two Hamas leaders. It will be interesting to see how the doctrine of proportionality is applied to this.
The justification is that Israel has an absolute right to defend itself against the existential treat posed by the terrorist organisation Hamas, who are responsible for all the civilian deaths because they hide amongst them.
I may be missing something, but I think this justification has limited merit at best and none in relation to the scale and nature of the response to the atrocity.
On 10/7 approximately 1,200 Israelis were murdered and in addition “over 230” Israelis were taken hostage in a barbaric attack. Since the commencement of the war on Hamas, according to Wikipeadia, up until 24 May 2024, an additional 1,478 Israelis had died, giving a total of 2,678 Israeli’s killed at that point.
Over the same period approximately 35,500 Palestinians had died, many civilians, women and children. Killed in what appears to be an indiscriminate bombing campaign.
In addition Gaza has been reduced to rubble making most of its 2m plus inhabitants homeless, reduced to living in temporary accommodation without adequate, water, food, or medical support which it will take decades to recover from. In the West Bank some 500 Palestinians have been killed by the Israeli Defence Force or illegal settlers.
This is what an absolute right to defend oneself against an existential threat against a perfidious enemy who hides behind civilians looks like.
But does the justification that leads to such carnage stand up to scrutiny. The justification is not new. It is one which has been deployed by successive Israeli administrations.
Indeed, the State of Israel has been defending itself since its self-declaration in 1948, occasionally by taking pre-emptive actions against anticipated attacks, as in the Arab Israeli war of 1967.
What is common, and quite remarkable, in all of these campaigns of self-defence is how much territory Israel has gained at the expense of the Palestinians. The two maps below show the original borders of the Jewish and Arab States as proposed by the UN in 1947 and the current plan per PM Netanyahu.
The Israeli state is clearly very adept at defending itself. Existential threats have consistently failed in the past. However, to be fair, the fact such threats have failed in the past does not mean such a threat does not exist now.
So, how credible is Hamas as a threat to the existence of Israel?
Comparing the relative military capacity of Israel and Hamas using rough and ready numbers secured mainly from the CIA World Fact Book shows that Israel has between 250 and 350 jet fighter bombers / Hamas has some (number unknown) Microlites; Israel has 170,000 trained military personnel on active service and 300,000 trained reservists / Hamas has between 40,000 and 50,000 trained soldiers; Israel has circa 1,300 tanks, 7 Corvette Warships, circa 90 Nuclear Warheads / Hamas has nil tanks, nil warships, nil nuclear warheads.
Israel receives c$3.5-$4bn per annum in military support from the United States and can freely import munitions and supplies from around the world. Hamas is provided with rockets from Iran which have to get through an air, sea and land blockade into Gaza. The rockets when fired have to get through the Iron Dome missile defence system which is claimed to be effective in intercepting 90% of missiles targeted on Israel.
In terms of supporters, Israel has the United States, and that support becomes “ironclad” when any third party threat (Iran) seems imminent. When the War on Hamas started the US moved 14 warships into the Eastern Mediterranean to deter any such threat.
If Isael was engaged in a conventional war against Hamas, then Hamas wouldn’t even come second.
But, of course, it is not a conventional war. The Israeli Defence Force (IDF) has made much of the immorality of Hamas using the civilian population as a shield. As I have pointed out elsewhere this moral high ground is more than undermined by the IDF’s willingness to shoot through that shield.
But if we consider for a moment the logic of the critique by the IDF in the context of the asymmetric balance of military power. It amounts to a demand that Hamas, commit suicide.
Terrorists around the world, like the ANC in South Africa, The IRA in Great Britain, the Vietcong in Vietnam, and indeed the Irgun in Israel in 1946 have refused to fight fairly. They have refused to take head on the overwhelming military supremacy of an occupying power.
The truth is there is no existential threat, this is not defence. At best it is ethnic cleansing. Unfortunately, the group being cleansed have nowhere to go. Which means the longer this goes on the less it looks like ethnic cleansing and the more it looks like genocide.
What is happening in Gaza and the West Bank is obviously a moral outrage. The longer our government continues to support it the lower our moral and diplomatic standing in the world. This is not and will not be mitigated by appeals to our having exhorted the Israeli government to stick within the rules of International Humanitarian Law.
What is happening needs to be condemned unequivocally. Further, there should be an immediate recognition of the State of Palestine. After 77 years the recommendation of the United Nations should be given some support on the Palestinian not just the Israeli side. Recognition would perhaps lead to a stronger commitment to serious negotiations on the Israeli side.
Whilst what is happening to the Palestinian people is horrendous and their capacity to respond in kind is nonexistent, my concern is not just for them. The Israeli people have been taken down a path by Prime Minister Netanyahu which will have, I fear, serious consequences for them. It will obviously be a moral stain difficult to eradicate and one which has and will continue to shift global public opinion against Israel.
Even when the “war” ends, as independent reviews of what happened are conducted, there will be a drawn-out documentation of atrocities. Surely, it will start on 10/7, but then it will proceed. Covering month after month after month of death and destruction wrought on the Palestinian people. Slowly building a picture which is almost certain to undermine the credibility of the claim that Israel had to defend itself against an existential threat.
Ironically, and sadly, it may prove that the Israeli defence has created more of an existential threat than the Hamas attack.
In Slaughterhouse-Five, Kurt Vonnegut’s character, Billy Pilgrim, uses the phrase “so it goes” every time he comes across a dead body. The repetition of the simple phrase tallies the fatalities of war and illustrates how people become desensitised to death. In Gaza death must now be so familiar that people are becoming numbed by its occurrence.
For most of us the loss of a family member is a shock and source of deep sadness. Particularly intense if it is a child. How does one cope when 10 members of your family have been killed in an instant, including brothers, sisters, mothers, fathers? Worse, when the cause of that sudden loss continues to threaten your own existence.
For those removed from the conflict the rolling news coverage first shocks, then disgusts and then it risks becoming sedimented, “so it goes.”
I have no doubt that the US Secretary of State, Antony Blinken, is working hard to mitigate the actions of the Israeli government in Gaza, the West Bank, and now Lebanon. War in the Middle East would be a disaster for the global economy and for US interests. Not great in an election year.
One detects an increasingly frustrated tone in his comments about the need to protect civilians and focus on the future when Israel ends the war against Hamas. Particularly in view of the fact that Prime Minister Netanyahu not only ignores Blinken but as much as tells him that he will be ignoring him.
Prime Minister Netanyahu may be happy to risk a regional conflict. He may conclude that Israel has previously benefited at the expense of the Palestinians in such events. However, the world is a different place to what it was in the 1940s and 1960s. Prime Minister Netanyahu may be in danger of overplaying his hand.
At the moment there are two players only who can stop what is happening in Gaza. One is Israel. A right-wing prime minister held hostage from the extreme right in a country where many ordinary Jews feel properly aggrieved at the murderous events of 10/7, does not look like a place to find compromise.
The only other player is the United States who could apply pressure through the $3bn per annum military aid it provides to Israel. So far Secretary of State Blinken does not appear to have even threatened to use that leverage in public. We don’t know what he might have said privately. But whatever he has said does not seem to have impacted much on the Israeli government’s plan of action.
As I have said previously, when this does stop, it is very likely to look like an exercise in ethnic cleansing, whatever the intention. Further, it is going to be difficult for the US and the UK to look shocked and surprised at what has happened. Their credibility in future negotiations with Arab partners after the bombs stop will at best be threadbare.
However much the Palestinians in the West Bank are chased around the strip by bombing campaigns, at the end of the day, they are still going to be there. That reality should be front and centre of any government’s thinking about long term security and screams the need for significant compromise by Israel if they want peace.
Apart from a brief humanitarian pause to secure the release of some of the hostages abducted by Hamas there has been a pretty much continuous campaign of bombing in Gaza. From the start there have been civilian casualties.
On 10/7 around 2,300 Israeli civilians were killed, “so it goes”. Some 240 Israelis, mainly civilians, were abducted, some of whom have since been killed, “so it goes”. More than 250 Palestinians have been killed in the West Bank, “so it goes”. Palestinian deaths in Gaza are well in excess of 20,000, “so it goes.” Of the 20,000 killed, around half have been children, “so it goes”.
The scale of death in Palestine is mind numbing. In three months roughly twice as many civilians have been killed in the Palestinian territories than in Ukraine during almost two years of war, 10,000 Ukrainians, 20,000 Palestinians.
In neither case should we, or more particularly our political leaders, succumb to the dehumanised response, “so it goes”.
However powerful the justification for Israel taking action against Hamas originally, the scale of civilian deaths has undermined the moral force and validity of its campaign. Increasingly the reference back to 10/7 looks more like a rationalisation for something altogether different to a war against Hamas.
If there is no material action taken to apply pressure on Israel to curtail its programme of mass destruction in Gaza there will be no excuses for those that failed to act. The fundamental moral position they have taken will be captured in three words, “so it goes.”
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