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.