SINCE 2008, UN figures show that some 250 Israelis and over 5,500 Palestinians have been killed in the Gaza Strip, which equals a ratio of one Israeli to 22 Palestinians killed during the occupation. (It is safe to assume that most of the deaths occurred during military operations.)

If this ratio does not tell the story then the number of wounded would, as that figure is staggeringly worse. You can google the graph as also a related graphic which shows the progressive expansion of the occupation since the Nakba (the catastrophe — of expulsion) in 1948.

Neither fact is surprising because Israel’s Western backers, particularly in the US, have armed it with state-of-the-art weaponry, which far exceeds the arsenals of even the most powerful militaries in the Middle East, let alone ragtag Palestinian militant groups.

Israel’s military superiority is so overwhelming that it may have sapped any desire for a peace deal based on the return of some Palestinian land for a separate Arab homeland in return for security guarantees for the Jewish state.

In addition, unconditional US support has emboldened extreme right-wing Israeli political parties in power, including the one headed by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, to rely only on military solutions and continue with the unabated expansion of Jewish settlements on Palestinian land.

Truth was indeed a major casualty of the latest round of hostilities.

This expansion has seen centuries-old Palestinian olive farms and agricultural fields obliterated and concrete poured down their natural water sources to seal them, under the eye of the heavily armed soldiers of the Israeli Defence Forces.

Palestinians have also been forced out of their homes during the ongoing expansion which has taken the Jewish settlement population to about 700,000. These settlements are emerging all over Israel whose 9.3 million people have over 21,000 square kilometres to inhabit.

The settlers, who are all heavily armed, treat the Palestinians in the same manner as occupation forces treat the vanquished. This is seen not only in the case of the settlements but of late also in the access to Al Aqsa Mosque. It is an unbearable daily humiliation.

Gaza is 365 square kilometres — 41km long and 12km at its widest, shrinking to 6km for a long stretch. It is fenced in on three sides and faces the Mediterranean Sea on its west. Squeezed into this ‘strip’ are the homes of 2.2m Palestinians.

The Jewish state’s sense of military superiority and the impunity with which the US and some Western allies almost unconditionally back it, regardless of the nature of its transgressions, such as the rapid expansion of settlements in recent years, seem to have led to hubris.

For what else could explain what the militant group Hamas was able to do last week? No, this is by no means to endorse the killing of unarmed civilians. Israel has long prided itself on its exceptional intelligence, proudly claiming to have penetrated the ranks of Hamas and the Islamic Jihad and having a plethora of information about their plans, capabilities etc.

If the scale and brutality of the Hamas blitz had not shocked the Israeli nation and forced it to close ranks, accusations would have reached a crescendo by now and heads may have rolled. It was a massive intelligence failure.

If a survey in Saturday’s Jerusalem Post is an accurate representation of the sentiment in Israel, once Israel’s military retribution phase is over, during which Palestinians — overwhelmingly the civilian population, half of whom consist of children — are being targeted, Netanyahu’s and his allies’ political career may be in jeopardy as they are being blamed squarely for the Oct 7 events.

And if the ferocity of the Hamas attacks, which targeted unarmed civilians, besides military establishments, were not enough on their own, the propaganda war that was unleashed drowned out any sane voice in the outrage over unsubstantiated claims, regurgitated by no less than US President Joe Biden, that babies were beheaded and burned.

It may be a cliché, but truth was indeed a major casualty of the latest round of hostilities, with the bulk of the world media focusing on the atrocities the Israelis faced, with vivid, live images from all affected areas. It took much longer for the world to see the images of some of the 500 children killed in Gaza in Israeli missile attacks and bombing raids and the scale of devastation in Gaza.

Was it the anger of the Israeli Defence Forces, perhaps in frustration at their own failure, that after they ordered 1.1m Palestinians to vacate northern Gaza and head south, they attacked south-bound civilians following their instructions? If you haven’t seen the images of that massacre, please don’t.

Writing in the John Menadue’s Public Policy Journal, Chas Freeman, former US ambassador to Saudi Arabia, who has served in senior positions in the Defence and State Departments, likened the Hamas attack to Vietnam’s 1968 Tet Offensive.

“The Hamas attack on Israel was part jailbreak (from Gaza, the world’s largest prison since the destruction of the Warsaw Ghetto) but more than that it was a revolt of the hopeless by the hopeless for the hopeless. Sometimes suffering becomes so unbearable that anything goes.”

A week on, the global outrage over the Hamas atrocities is being slightly tempered with a realisation in some Western capitals, most notably Washington, DC, that their full support to Israel in the latter’s ‘self-defence’ actions may destabilise the region if Israel tries to achieve its historical kill ratio of 1:22. It has overwhelming numerical and technological superiority over the Palestinians.

Some right-wing Israelis have hinted at ‘cleansing’ Gaza of Palestinians. I know of several who have decided to stay on in the north, saying they have nowhere to go and they won’t facilitate a second Nakba. Like you, I watch in horror. The images are heartbreaking. Humanity seems dead.

The writer is a former editor of Dawn.
abbas.nasir@hotmail.com

Published in Dawn, October 15th, 2023