Israel's Military Operations in Gaza

Marouf Hasian Jr

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781317298625
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politica e relazioni internazionali
• Subtopic: Politica mediorientale

Civilians in Gaza and Israel are caught up in complex, violent situations that have overstepped conventional battle lines. Both sides of the conflict have found ways to legitimate the use of violence, and continually swap accusations of violations of domestic and international humanitarian laws.

Israel's Military Operations in Gaza provides an ideological critique of the legal, military, and social media texts that have been used to legitimate historical incursions into the Gaza, with special focus on Operation Protective Edge. It argues that both the Palestinians and the Israelis have deployed various forms of 'telegenic' warfare. They have each used argumentative rhetorics based on competing interpretations of events, and are locked in a battle to convince international audiences and domestic constituencies of the righteousness of their causes. This critical genealogical study analyses a range of texts and images, from selfies circulated near the Gaza border to judicial opinions produced by the High Court of Israel.

With its multidisciplinary approach and original analysis of the Israel/Gaza situation, this book will be of interest to students and scholars of Middle East studies and the Arab-Israeli conflict, as well as security studies and communication studies.

1 Telegenic lawfare and warfare and the rhetorical framing of Gaza conflicts

For Charles Krauthammer and many other defenders of Israeli policies in Gaza, it is absurd to believe that there is more than one moral story that needs to be told about the events that led up to what Israelis call Operation Protective Edge. We routinely hear this Israel–Gaza fighting described as a morally equivalent “cycle of violence,” he noted, and he thought that this was “absurd.” “What possible interest can Israel have in cross-border fighting?” he asked in July 2014, as he commented on how Hamas’ rockets were producing “dead Palestinians for international television.”¹

In his narration of events, Israel, a magnanimous nation, left Gaza in 2005, pulled die-hard settlers off synagogue roofs, expelled its own citizens, and handed the Palestinians in Gaza greenhouses in a symbolic gesture of peace. For those who believe in his mythic world, the Israelis are the morally superior social actors who have done more than their fair share in granting political concessions to terrorist organizations like Hamas. Figurative olive branches have been handed to those who once talked of destroying Israel.

In this very popular American variation of the tale, Israeli utopias can be contrasted with Palestinian dystopias, and, by implication, moral clarity supposedly comes when international communities learn to leave Israel alone, to the point where viewers are not swayed by all of this telegenic propaganda. In other words, world audiences who see images of Palestinian dead are not supposed to let Hamas off the hook.

For those who are interested in the study of the ideological relationships that exist between textual argumentation and visual representation, Krauthammer’s statement provides an example of what Rebecca Stein has called “inverted empathy,” where “purity of arms mythology” is used to supply exculpatory images of Israeli humanity that “reiterates the central tenets of dominant Israeli discourses.”² This is a fascinating phenomenon, for as Aeyal Gross and others have argued, it means that human rights talk can be appropriated by those who want to underscore the importance of the “security” rights of settlers or the national security “interests” of the Israeli State. Gross contends that this rhetorical posturing is used to create moral equivalence between the rights of settlers and the rights of Palestinians, and this in turn undermines the provisions of the Geneva Convention that were aimed at protecting non-citizens who have to live under the laws of occupying powers.³ In order to rationalize the protection of select precious bodies and populations, the “other” has to die, or at least be dispossessed, in these legal, military, and biopolitical and thanatopolitical (politics of death) struggles.⁴

This book is written with the intention of showing readers that the Israelis are not the only victims who suffer from these episodic twenty-first-century Israeli– Palestinian conflicts, and that the people of Gaza are caught up in the maelstrom of war as Hamas tries to legitimate its terrorist strikes while Israelis respond with violent counterterrorist actions.⁵ As I hope to show throughout this book, this is an incredibly complex situation, filled with competing narrations and interpretations of historical and contemporary events, and no one side has a monopoly on virtue. Both sides are trying to convince international audiences that their rights are being violated, and their deployment of “weaponized” social media has expanded the boundaries of those in the blogosphere who have to hear about the role that “international humanitarian law” (IHL) or the “law of armed conflict” (LOAC) should play in these Gazan conflicts.

Reading and writing about international law used to be the prerogative of a few select experts in the fields of law or international relations, but no more. The blogosphere is filled with commentaries on these topics from citizen-journalists, citizen-soldiers, and others who want to write or talk about the legality, legitimacy, or morality of Israeli strikes in Gaza.

As I write this book, journalists are publishing material on the prospects for lasting peace in the region, Egyptians are monitoring border closures in Gaza, critics comment on how Israeli youngsters circulate selfies showing support for the Israel Defense Forces (IDF), bloggers are still writing about the existential dangers posed by “terror” tunnels and Hamas rockets, and more than a few pundits worry about the viability of two-state solutions in Palestinian–Israeli contexts. Many recall the ceasefire that put an end to some 50 days of fighting, and mainstream newspapers contain stories about the legitimacy of targeting Gazan “infrastructure,” the impact of social media wars, and the UN investigations that are reviewing potential violations of Geneva Convention regulations or principles.⁶ This is just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to locating the tropes, topoi, narratives, myths, visuals, and countervisuals that are being circulated in countless transnational spheres, and Krauthammer’s supposed “moral clarity” can only come from intentional or unintentional bracketing out of many complex factors in some difficult geopolitical situations.

Individuals like Krauthammer, who argue that Israel could not have any “possible interest” in cross-border fighting, are missing all of the short-term and long-term benefits that come from periodically terrorizing Gazan civilians, and these individuals conveniently forget that the firing of rockets has something to do with decades of occupation, blockades, and the restriction of mobility of entire populations. One UK newspaper described Gaza as “the world’s largest outdoor prison,” and this was before the latest round of fighting in that area.⁷ National pride, expansionist sentiments, collective punishment of enemies, demographic pressures, and scarcity of resources have everything to do with this tragedy.

Gazan citizens, after all, can easily be blamed for the firing of those rockets and their own suffering. In the name of military necessity, Israelis have been able to maintain the “visual” and “virtual” occupation of Gaza, control Gazan sea, air, and land, turn electricity on and off, and use information from “good” West Bank collaborators to help with the carrying out of drone or helicopter attacks on “bad” terrorist leaders. At the same time, Hamas leaders, cognizant of their precarious position, have been handing out thousands of dollars to the Gazan families whose homes were destroyed during the latest Israeli incursion. Hamas supporters have their own narratives and mythologies, and they like to argue that their very survival is demonstrative evidence of Palestinian determination and steadfastness.

Myths and realities blur as Gazan civilians try to rebuild their lives while international communities, NGOs, and others write and talk about Hamas war crimes, the power of Israeli tanks, the blockading by Israeli naval vessels, and the F-16s that pound away at mosques, hospitals, schools, UN buildings, refugee camps, and police stations. The Israelis defend some of these practices by alleging that Hamas uses civilians as “human shields,” and IDF websites and YouTube videos are supposed to render visible the complicity of those who hide the terrorists who fire rockets at Tel Aviv or Sderot.⁸

This raises a host of questions regarding disparate power relationships, and given the relative disempowerment of Mahmoud Abbas’ Palestinian Authority and the vilification of Hamas, the Israelis are now in full control of the military and diplomatic fronts, and they have no incentive to negotiate with Palestinians or sign any peace treaties. The international communities who produce document after document complaining about Israeli practices during Operational Protective Edge have done little to end Israeli blockades, closures, or military incursions, and the Israelis know that time is on their side. Israelis often complain about the lawfare of their opponents, or the politicized use of courts, but the Israelis are themselves master rhetors who spend millions of shekels to train military lawyers in the art and science of strategic legal communication.

None of this happened overnight, and this book explains how, over the years (especially between 2001 and 2014), Israelis patrolled the Mediterranean Sea, formed economic blockades, fought off a “peace” flotilla, built a fence in Gaza, and helped distribute “humanitarian aid” during times of emergency in Gaza. Social media outlets were used to justify Israeli initiatives at the same time that military forces search for “terror” tunnels and rockets in Gaza. It is telling that in 2012, when the Israelis launched Operation Pillar Defense, they began their offensive by tweeting and posting videos about the targeted killing of Al-Jabari, a Palestinian militant.

At one time, before the second Intifada, there were many Israeli leftists who expressed the hope that Palestinians might become good neighbors after the end of what was called a “belligerent” occupation, but growing worries about violent terrorism dashed many of these plans. Separatist rhetorics replaced the earlier integrative discourses as hardline politicians like Ariel Sharon and Benjamin Netanyahu showed their constituents that they, too, were steadfast, and that they were determined to stop all sorts of terrorist threats.

The growing power of Hamas, and the apparent unwillingness of Gazan populations to follow the edicts of the West Bank Palestinian Authority, complicated matters for Israeli peace activists and others who supported Palestinian independence. By 2000, it could be argued that Israel’s growing military and economic power was put on full display, and exasperated international critics made little headway as they tried to lobby for the formation of a “two-state” solution or alter Israeli securitization policies toward civilian populations. The very quest for Palestinian human rights, or calls for Gazan food security or economic freedom, were oftentimes viewed by Israelis as measures that only aided Hamas.

Israelis, who were convinced that the spread of their type of Zionist democracy represented the best hope for despairing Gazans, have learned to argue that Hamas, and Islamic fundamentalism, are the root causes of terrorist threats.

The rationale for this book

This book is intended to provide readers with a detailed, critical rhetorical study of Israel–Gaza relationships between 2000 and 2014, and it investigates the question of how elite and public audiences in Israel have gradually come to accept the militarizing narratives that focus attention on the social agency of Hamas. As I note below, countless military and legal arguments are used by those who have trouble expressing open sympathy with the more than 1.8 million Gazans who refuse to bow to Israeli will, and the “Hamas regime” becomes a cipher for all of the ills that are posed by recalcitrant Palestinians.

Again, talk about moral clarity becomes myopic when defenders of the seventh largest military force in the world act as if the Israelis are the only victims in these complex affairs. There is a reason why Benny Morris, one of the most famous historians writing on some of these conflicts, titled one of his books Righteous Victims.⁹ Morris traced how competing mythologies—that go back to the time of the Haganah—have influenced the trajectory of Israeli reactions to Palestinian–Israeli and Arab–Israeli affairs. Benny Morris often writes about how Jews are the real victims who have suffered for 2,000 years, and he likes to frame his history using a rhetorical lens that sees Israelis as a small minority surrounded by a large number of threatening Arabs. Morris’ partisan historiography at least tries to do more than provide simplistic or reductionist pictures of the causes of episodic violence in this region. As Rashid Khalidi has recently argued, the problems in Gaza, and the “question of Palestine,” have been deeply imbricated in the domestic histories that are told of the great colonial powers, and he notes that Israel’s “absolute control of Jerusalem, security, settlements, Israeli settlers, water, and land” shows that today there is “not even an intimation of parity” as Palestinians still fight for their self-determination or independence.¹⁰ Yet the Israelis, through their militarist and humanistic rationales for Operation Protective Edge, are busy rhetorically crafting the appearance of parity.

A review of the elite and vernacular arguments that have been deployed between 2000 and 2014 illustrates how Israelis were gradually moving away from thinking about the “police” control of Palestinian populations in the West Bank and Gaza as they saw themselves invo...