Since Hamas’s horrific October 7 attacks on Israel, Israel has responded by unleashing tremendous amounts of violence on the Gaza Strip. This violence, Israel claims, has been targeted at Hamas infrastructure, aimed at preventing a repeat of the October 7 attacks. But Israel’s warfare has come at a terrible, and untenable, human cost, with UN Secretary General António Guterres repeatedly calling for a ceasefire and determining that Israel was responsible for “clear violations of international humanitarian law” in Gaza.[1] After nearly a month of war, some 9,000 people have been reported killed in Gaza by Israeli attacks, largely involving a combination of airstrikes and mortar attacks, including white phosphorus artillery shells, according to Amnesty International, “which may be considered indiscriminate attacks and therefore unlawful.”[2]
Children are being killed in staggering numbers. Between October 7 and 25 alone, more than 2,913 children were reported killed on the Gaza Strip as a result of Israeli attacks,[3] and a week later, this figure had risen to 3,760 Palestinian children killed.[4] One would do well to recall that after fifteen months of war waged by Russia against Ukraine by the summer of 2023, the UN’s top humanitarian official in Ukraine reported “over 1,500 children killed and injured in Ukraine” since the war’s outbreak in February 2022. What took Russia fifteen months to accomplish, then, Israel achieved, and more than doubled, in only fifteen days.
While Israeli officials have done their utmost to cast doubt on the fatality statistics reported by the media, emphasizing that they are provided by the “Hamas-run Palestinian Ministry of Health” on the Gaza Strip, as media outlets like the BBC often point out, UNRWA’s Philippe Lazzarini has stated that the ministry has a track record of providing “credible” figures in the past that there is little reason to doubt.[5] If anything, these horrific figures — evidence of what Israeli lawmakers have previously described in chillingly euphemistic terms as “mowing the lawn,” that is, cutting down future generations of Palestinians — may very well prove to be a significant undercount, as bodies continue to be pulled from the rubble of Gaza’s decimated housing stock in the months and years to come. After all, after less than a month of warfare, the United Nations noted that “at least 45 percent of Gaa’s housing units” were “reportedly destroyed or damaged,”[3] and with limited fuel and machinery, and with the constant threat of bombardment, rescue workers have been hindered from making a full accounting of the death toll wrought by Israeli forces, according to Save the Children.[6] By November 2, the UNOCHA recorded some “1,150 children reported missing and [who] may be trapped under the rubble.”[3] With 40 percent of Gaza’s population under the age of 18, the Israeli war on Gaza is to a significant extent a war on children.
The mass of evidence of what Israel is attempting in Gaza is now compelling and in fact, overwhelming in the overall trajectory it suggests: the “flattening” of significant portions of Gaza, the forcible deportation of at least the northern half of the zone’s residents, a militarily enforced changing of “facts on the ground,” motivated by a far-right, extremist, nativist, ethnoculturalist ideology, such that Gaza as its residents once knew it will no longer be permitted to exist.
For evidence of motives, look no further than to the statements of leading figures in the Israeli establishment and halls of power. Israeli agents in the field of power are, after all, no strangers to muscular rhetoric when it comes to Gaza. Back in 2012, the Israeli Deputy Prime Minister Eli Yishai demanded that the Israeli army “blow Gaza back to the Middle Ages, destroying all the infrastructure including roads and water.”[7] Meanwhile, the same year, the son of former Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, Gilad Sharon, called for a harsh, punitive policy toward Gaza in shockingly candid remarks published by the Jerusalem Post:
We need to flatten entire neighborhoods in Gaza. Flatten all of Gaza. The Americans didn’t stop with Hiroshima — the Japanese weren’t surrendering fast enough, so they hit Nagasaki, too. There should be no electricity in Gaza, no gasoline or moving vehicles, nothing.[8]
These were figures to some degree ahead of their times: While the 2012 Israeli “Operation Pillar of Defense” involved some 1,500 airstrikes and an estimated 101 Palestinian civilian deaths, according to the UN,[9] these figures pale in comparison with the 2023 Gaza War. In 2012, the moment was not yet opportune for a policy of flattening; by 2023, however, it seemed to have arrived in fuller, more fleshed-out form. It would take a major attack by Hamas — which all reasonable people condemn, left or right, North or South — to legitimize a massively disproportionate destruction of civilian lives and infrastructure by Israeli forces. Two days after the October 7 attacks, the Israeli defense minister Yoav Gallant announced his government’s medieval-style policy of a “complete siege,” noting that “there will be no electricity, no food, no fuel.”[10] His government, Gallant said, was fighting “human animals” and his government was “acting accordingly.” For anyone with a historical consciousness, this reduction of the Other to the status of animality was surely chilling. Gideon Levy, the progressive Israeli journalist, noted presciently two days after the October 7 attacks in Haaretz, “The threats of ‘flattening Gaza’ prove only one thing: We haven’t learned a thing.”[11]
But Israel’s response has been precisely to flatten significant portions of Gaza. The conservative Daily Telegraph reported on a Gaza neighborhood, which it claimed had once resembled London’s middle-class district Islington: “Before the war, it was the most upscale neighbourhood in Gaza City, with vibrant shops, cafés, ice cream parlours and a view on to the Mediterranean. Today it stands largely in ruins after ferocious Israeli bombardment, in a clear sign that no part of Gaza will be safe in the coming weeks and months of conflict.”[12] Euronews reported that “northern Gaza” had been “reduced to rubble,” based on inspecting satellite imagery from the space technology company Maxar: “Whole rows of apartment blocks simply disappear in the photos, reduced to smears of dust and rubble.”[13] Some “200,000 housing units” had “either completely or partially” been destroyed after three weeks of warfare alone.[14]
Perhaps the closest analogy to Gaza’s fate is that of Grozny, the Chechen capital, which over the course of a month of fighting at the outset of the 21st century was bombed and shelled intensively by Russian forces, with an estimated 5,000–8,000 civilians killed, and “some 80 percent of residential buildings” destroyed, according to a UN report of this “city razed to the ground.”[15] The “Groznyfication” of Gaza was by early November certainly well under way. By late October, the Norwegian newspaper Aftenposten reported that technology companies, including Maxar, were restricting the flow of satellite imagery to the public, with reporters citing “pressure from the authorities in Israel and changed guidelines from the American authorities“, according to the newspaper — perhaps an attempt to stymie the flow of imagery documenting this Israeli carnage.[16]
Israel’s policy of population dispersal and urban flattening in Gaza was the direct result of the far-right government in power in Israel and its ideology of nativism and anti-Arabism. Itamar Ben-Gvir, the far-right National Security Minister, had in the summer of 2023 given voice, perhaps in the clearest terms thus far, to the Apartheid mentality motivating much of Israel’s policy in the occupied Palestinian territories: “My right, my wife’s, my children’s, to roam the roads of Judea and Samaria are more important than the right of movement of the Arabs,” Ben-Gvir said.[16] In a widely condemned move, Ben-Gvir also ordered the storming of Jerusalem’s Al-Aqsa Mosque in July that same year,[18] the near-equivalent of ordering security forces to disperse the faithful in the Papal Basilica of Saint Peter in the Vatican or St. Paul’s Cathedral. Ben-Gvir, of course, was the man who until entering government proudly displayed a photograph of Baruch Goldstein — who single-handedly shot and killed 29 Palestinians and wounded some 125 Palestinians in Hebron in 1994 —in his living room, according to the Times of Israel.[19] Ben-Gvir only took down the picture as a symbolic gesture of moderation in order to join the government.
The United States has been the most important guarantor of Israel’s policy of dispersal-and-flattening in Gaza. Within weeks, President Biden promised to allocate $14.3 billion in spending assistance to Israel,[20] and 15 naval vessels, including two aircraft carriers and some 15,000 U.S. sailors, were moved to the eastern Mediterranean.[21] On October 15, the U.S. Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin noted in a conversation with the Israeli Minister of Defense Yoav Gallant “the ironclad U.S. commitment to Israel’s defense,” according to an official U.S. Department of Defense readout.[22] Over the next few weeks, the mood subtly shifted in Washington in tandem with the piling up of Palestinian bodies — sometimes literally so, as the Financial Times reported that the “inability to give” victims “the dignity of a proper funeral” meant that “bodies were dumped ‘on top of each other’ in the back of a pick-up truck” instead.[23] By November 2, Secretary Austin once again “reaffirmed the U.S. ironclad commitment to Israel’s right to defend itself,” but now also vaguely “underscored the importance of protecting civilians.”[24] With growing fears among some Democrats that Biden could lose the 2024 election against Trump over his carte blanche policy vis-à-vis Israel,[25] the once-unqualified “ironclad commitment” would now have to be tempered by at least the appearance of concern for humanitarian issues, like the killing of thousands of Palestinian children that UNICEF rightly described as a “growing stain on our collective conscience.”[26]
There is little mystery involved in accounting for these policies. Underlying all of them is what I have previously described as the problem of the “Arab body” in Western politics and culture,[27] that is, the contempt, fear, and disregard for which the Arab has historically been held, evidenced in much of the West’s dealings with the regions historically associated with Arab populations, and in its relating to its peoples, its emigrants, its cultures, and religious expressions. One finds the problem of the Arab body voiced in the most grandiose of policy disasters, from the U.S.-led Iraq War, with its 109,000 deaths, reported in classified U.S. military documents and relayed by Wikileaks,[28] as well as in the minutest of cultural expressions. In Jack Kerouac’s On the Road, for instance, we find the Arab repeatedly represented as a figure of disrepute and revulsion, as when an “Ay-rab” rushes up and “appropriate[s]” a woman’s “ring finger before she could let out a cry” — a source of what I have described as criminal danger and existential risk to the pure, hallowed, sanctified Western body.
This analysis owes much to the Palestinian-American academic Edward Said’s Orientalism, of course, but diverging ever so slightly from Said, I argue that the contempt, if not outright hatred, for the Arab body operates at a deeply precognitive, visceral-corporeal level, which is precisely that of the body, where certain things are taken for granted without cognitive-reflexive awareness: one does not ask for permission to handle this body in any particular way; one simply acts upon it, often without restraint, often without self-critical examination or reflection. The Arab body is a body that can be surveilled, monitored, inspected, x-rayed, scanned, fingerprinted, swab-tested, profiled, registered, logged, and databased (as in a thousand airports post-9/11). The Arab body is a body that can be blindfolded, zip-tied, renditioned, waterboarded, force-fed, truncheoned, beaten, punched, and tortured (as in Abu Ghraib, or more recently, in the West Bank village of Wadi al-Seeq by Israeli forces[29]). The Arab body is a body that can be bombed, shelled, shot at, and buried beneath rubble — often with absolute legal impunity, frequently with only a limited response by the media and leading political figures in the West. The Arab body is a body that need not be mourned or grieved over — at least not to the same extent, and often with a delayed response. As the philosopher Judith Butler rightly asks, in When is Life Grievable?, one way of figuring out “who ‘we’ are” is to ask “whose lives are considered valuable, whose lives are mourned, and whose lives are considered ungrievable.”[30] It is clear that for decades, indeed centuries, the Arab body has been essentially less grievable than its Western counterparts.
Perhaps this is changing. One should not advocate a politics of fatalism nor apocalyptic essentialism: there are signs of change in the form of tens and hundreds of thousands of people flocking into the streets in Western capitals, and there are cracks in the facade of the West’s fundamentally malign relationship with the Arab body beginning to appear in the form of condemnations and negative reporting on Israel’s actions against Gaza.
But if the Palestinians in Gaza are now being forced from their homes, which are flattened behind them, with thousands of their children killed by Israeli bombs and buried under broken buildings, let them at least know that their problems are not solely those of the Palestinian people alone, but those of the Arab body as such.
***
Since writing this essay, the death toll on the Gaza Strip has only risen: By November 8th, more than ten thousand people have been reported killed, with more than four thousand of them children.[31] Meanwhile, an Israeli cabinet minister has called for the use of nuclear bombs against Gaza—for which he was suspended, not fired, from the Israeli cabinet government.[32] (Despite his apparent suspension, the minister was able to take part in voting later the same day, according to the Jerusalem Post.[33]) A group of 83 Israeli doctors urged the bombing of Gaza’s Shifa Hospital, according to the progressive group, Physicians for Human Rights - Israel (PHRI).[34] António Guterres, the UN Secretary General, was unequivocal in his pronouncements upon the war: “Ground operations by the Israel Defense Forces and continued bombardment are hitting civilians, hospitals, refugee camps, mosques, churches and U.N. facilities – including shelters. No one is safe.”[35] The UN reported that 89 staff members of UNRWA had been killed thus far, making the War on Gaza the “deadliest ever for its personnel,” in the words of the New York Times.[36]
References
[1] https://www.un.org/sg/en/content/sg/speeches/2023-10-24/secretary-generals-remarks-the-security-council-the-middle-east%C2%A0
[2] https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/news/2023/10/lebanon-evidence-of-israels-unlawful-use-of-white-phosphorus-in-southern-lebanon-as-cross-border-hostilities-escalate/
[3] https://www.aljazeera.com/news/longform/2023/11/1/know-their-names-palestinians-killed-in-israeli-attacks-on-gaza
[4] https://www.ochaopt.org/content/hostilities-gaza-strip-and-israel-reported-impact-day-27
[5] https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2023/10/27/un-says-gaza-health-ministry-death-tolls-in-previous-wars
[6] https://www.savethechildren.net/news/over-800-children-missing-under-rubble-gaza-rescue-efforts-hindered-ongoing-bombardment-and
[7] https://reliefweb.int/report/occupied-palestinian-territory/%E2%80%98flattening%E2%80%99-gaza
[8] https://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/2012/11/19/gilad-sharon-calls-israel-flatten-gaza_n_2157198.html
[9] https://www.ohchr.org/sites/default/files/Documents/HRBodies/HRCouncil/RegularSession/Session22/A.HRC.22.35.Add.1_AV.pdf
[10] https://www.timesofisrael.com/liveblog_entry/defense-minister-announces-complete-siege-of-gaza-no-power-food-or-fuel/
[11] https://www.haaretz.com/opinion/2023-10-09/ty-article-opinion/.premium/israel-cant-imprison-2-million-gazans-without-paying-a-cruel-price/0000018b-1476-d465-abbb-14f6262a0000
[12] https://www.telegraph.co.uk/world-news/2023/10/11/rimal-gaza-hamas-israeli-bombardment-palestinian/
[13] https://www.euronews.com/2023/10/27/northern-gaza-reduced-to-rubble-satellite-images-show-before-and-after-air-strikes
[14] https://www.aljazeera.com/news/longform/2023/10/26/satellite-images-show-scale-of-destruction-in-israels-assault-on-gaza
[15] https://reliefweb.int/report/russian-federation/chechnya-under-rubble-grozny-january-2002
[16] https://www.nrk.no/nyheter/nye-restriksjoner-pa-satellittbilder-fra-israel-og-gaza-1.16617368
[17] https://www.bbc.com/news/world-middle-east-66614459
[18] https://english.aawsat.com/arab-world/4457306-israel%E2%80%99s-ben-gvir-storms-al-aqsa-mosque-prompting-condemnation
[19] https://www.timesofisrael.com/liveblog_entry/ben-gvir-responds-to-bennett-fine-ill-take-down-baruch-goldsteins-picture/
[20] https://apnews.com/article/joe-biden-ukraine-israel-budget-3762a0bdf00653e3c8a38175d3c3d3cb
[21] https://www.lemonde.fr/en/international/article/2023/10/27/with-two-aircraft-carriers-us-wants-to-create-a-naval-bubble-around-israel_6208194_4.html
[22] https://www.defense.gov/News/Releases/Release/Article/3557633/readout-of-secretary-of-defense-lloyd-j-austin-iiis-call-with-israeli-minister/
[23] https://www.ft.com/content/a3fded7d-7b91-4733-9e28-e3eb84026554
[24] https://www.defense.gov/News/Releases/Release/Article/3578193/readout-of-secretary-of-defense-lloyd-j-austin-iiis-call-with-israeli-minister/
[25] https://apnews.com/article/biden-michigan-arab-american-reelection-bb86bc0059a6ea33fee8a1ec1b0ac743
[26] https://www.unicef.org/press-releases/child-casualties-gaza-growing-stain-our-collective-conscience
[27] For a more fully-fleshed out form of this argument, see Shammas, V. L. (2018) “The Arab body.” Rhizomes, no. 34. DOI:10.20415/rhiz/034.e09. http://rhizomes.net/issue34/pdf/shammas.pdf.
[28] https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/wikileaks-109000-deaths-iraq-war/story?id=11949670
[29] https://www.commondreams.org/news/israeli-torture
[30] https://www.versobooks.com/en-gb/blogs/news/2339-judith-butler-precariousness-and-grievability
[31] https://edition.cnn.com/2023/11/06/middleeast/gaza-10k-deaths-intl/index.html
[32] https://www.nytimes.com/2023/11/05/world/middleeast/amichay-eliyahu-israel-minister-nuclear-bomb-gaza.html
[33] https://www.jpost.com/israel-news/article-771766
[34] https://www.phr.org.il/en/physicians-call-eng/?pr=45
[35] https://www.reuters.com/world/middle-east/israel-says-it-is-open-gaza-fighting-pauses-aid-hostages-2023-11-07/
[36] https://www.nytimes.com/2023/11/06/world/middleeast/un-unrwa-death-toll.html
