ATLANTA, Georgia, Sep 3 (IPS) – Most people think Israel’s primary goal in Gaza is to free the hostages captured by Hamas on October 7, 2023, with a follow-up mission announced to eliminate Hamas as a threat. If you thought that, you’d be wrong. Considerable evidence reveals a different strategic goal: destroying any shred of Palestinian legitimacy as a nation.
Despite constant pleas from the feeble Biden-Harris-Blinken White House to stop bombing civilians in Gaza, Israel refuses to end the carnage. What is going on? As usual in the Middle East, the obvious plot has at least one hidden subplot. Israel’s primary strategic objective during the more than ten months of its senseless, hideously destructive campaign in Gaza has not just been to kill Hamas militants and tens of thousands of Palestinian civilians in Gaza, but instead to kill the much-touted “two-state solution.” The ongoing carnage in the West Bank is aimed at destroying not just Palestinian infrastructure or the hopeless fledgling “Lions Den” resistance, but the idea that Palestinians have any right to self-determination, or any legitimacy as a state at all. While much of the world condemns the genocide in Gaza, the full-fledged war against cities and civilians in the West Bank has escaped attention. The most obvious evidence of this is the fact that Netanyahu’s extremist Likud government continues its gratuitous bombing campaign in Gaza and continues to reject Hamas’ offers to release hostages in exchange for even a temporary ceasefire. Like most of the US intelligence community, Israel’s own military leaders have admitted that Hamas cannot be completely eliminated. Unfortunately, the horrific loss of life in Gaza at this point is not really about Gaza. It is a distraction from a land grab for the West Bank, what Israelis call their own territories of “Judea and Samaria.” Netanyahu has echoed the settlers’ claim that Israel cannot be accused of being an illegal military occupier of what is “our own land.” One of the first shibboleths from President Biden’s mouth after the obscene war crimes of Hamas on October 7 and just before he boarded Air Force One to pay humiliating respects to indicted war criminal Netanyahu was to offer the meaningless phrase “two-state solution.” But the man who had chaired the Senate Foreign Relations Committee for years must have known that the “two-state solution” was already on its last legs and unlikely to be revived. Now Democratic presidential candidate Kamala Harris is echoing “Genocide Joe,” not so much by offering a formula for peace as by simply parroting an empty phrase. The number one lesson in international diplomacy at the macro level is that a regime must have legitimacy as a population before it can achieve any kind of concrete reality as a nation. The birth of the United States is a case in point. The Boston Tea Party, the Patrick Henry speech, and the ride of Paul Revere have all coalesced America’s popular identity.
Washington at Valley Forge and Yorktown effectively birthed the nation. Acquiring legitimacy, the unquestionable right to exist as an organized political entity, is how a population or insurgent movement becomes a state. By destroying peaceful West Bank cities with tanks and jet bombers, bulldozing their streets, and labeling all Palestinians as terrorists, the indigenous community is robbed of its heritage and its present and future legitimacy. Any chance of statehood is wiped out by Israel’s “over-the-top” destruction of civilian life and infrastructure in Gaza and throughout the West Bank. Meanwhile, the political class’s pretense of being pro-peace is a sick charade. Let’s stop saying “Genocide is bad” and “Killing people is bad” without also saying “Killing civil society is also a positive evil,” because it kills the future of an entire population.
James E. JenningsPhD is chairman of Conscience International www.conscienceinternational.org and Executive Director of US Academics for Peace. He provided aid to hospitals in Gaza from 1987 to 2014, including during the 2009 “Cast Lead” bombings and periods of Israeli, PLO, and HAMAS control.
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© Inter Press Service (2024) — All rights reservedOriginal source: Inter Press Service
