The Year of the Israeli Settler

Eiland likes to pose as a hardened
paratrooper: a no-bullshit blusterer, ignorant of political chicanery, who is merely
applying cold analytical logic to a military problem. But his problem—Israel’s
problem—is not military alone. An occupying power is obliged to preserve the
lives of the people under its control, to give them aid, to not dynamite their
homes. But Eiland sees no distinction between citizen and combatant. He does not discriminate. “The
people of Gaza are like the people of Nazi Germany,” the general has said.
He means the people are complicit. He means they are guilty. He means they
deserve to die. And doesn’t that attitude run through the entire upper rank of
the Israeli government? “North Gaza is more beautiful than ever,” claims Amichai
Eliyahu, the heritage minister. “Blowing up and flattening everything is
beautiful.” To the troops, the ex–defense boss Yoav Gallant says, “We are fighting human animals, and we are acting
accordingly.” And the troops reply:
“There are no uninvolved civilians.”

Netzarim
is the puncture wound in Gaza’s side. It drives westward from the border with
Israel, where those settlers had their exultant meeting, to the
Mediterranean. Along this freshly paved road: checkpoints, army camps, supply
dumps, surveillance posts, buffer zones, sewage piping, electricity wires, cell
towers, kitchens, prefab synagogues. To make way for all this superb
infrastructure, these foundations on which the settlers
can later build, everything else—the homes, the shops, the bakeries, the
masjids, the museums—must
be removed. “There was not a single construction left that was taller than
my waist anywhere except our bases and observation towers” one soldier told The Guardian. IDF squads have been so busy they keep running out of
explosives. Similarly, back in the north, Israeli construction firms deeply
connected to the nexus of land clearance and settlement building in the West
Bank are being given
contracts to carry out demolitions. “I think,” Avi Dichter says contentedly, “that we are going to stay in Gaza for a long time.” Avi Dichter is the minister for “food security.”

We all know the old cliché about the first
casualty in war being truth. The powerful and their propagandists need not be
smart creatures, only talented—in
the same way a serial killer is talented. Talent in making black appear
white, a grim picture rosy, a cruel policy necessary. War requires a skill for euphemism of the kind Netanyahu
displayed when he said back
in January that “Israel has no intention of permanently occupying Gaza or
displacing its civilian population.” After Human Rights Watch, in a
long mid-November report, starkly accused
the Israeli government of causing the “mass and forced displacement of the
majority of the civilian population … a widespread and systematic” policy that
amounts to a “crime against humanity,” the Israeli foreign ministry’s
spokesperson Oren Marmorstein replied,
“Israel’s efforts are directed solely at dismantling Hamas’s terror
capabilities.” Sometimes the fables are so blatant you do not know whether to
laugh bitterly or shiver.