The 51 Day War

Ruin and Resistance in Gaza

Max Blumenthal

• Publisher: Verso
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN: 9781784783112
• eBook ISBN: 9781784783105
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Diplomacy & Treaties
• Index: Politics & International Relations

On July 8, 2014, Israel launched air strikes and a ground invasion of Gaza, that lasted 51 days, leaving over 2,000 people dead, the vast majority of whom were Gazan civilians. During the assault, at least 10,000 homes were destroyed and, according to the United Nations, nearly 300,000 Palestinians were displaced.
Max Blumenthal was on the ground during what he argues was an entirely avoidable catastrophe. In this explosive work of reportage, Blumenthal reveals the harrowing conditions and cynical deceptions that led to the ruinous war. Here, for the first time, Blumenthal unearths and presents shocking evidence of atrocities he gathered in the rubble of Gaza.

CHAPTER 1

Rogues

As the summer of 2014 began, life continued as normal in the Gaza Strip. Israeli Hermes 450 drones hovered overhead at night, lending a persistent buzzing sound to the coastal enclave’s sonic ambiance. Fishermen ran into the teeth of the Israeli navy whenever they attempted to pursue a school of sardines further than three miles into the Mediterranean. Farmers and scavengers risked falling under a hail of bullets if they dared cross into the so-called “buffer zone” that extended three hundred meters from the concrete walls encircling Gaza. Permits to enter and leave Gaza were more rare than ever, prompting hundreds of college students in the fall of the previous year to storm the Rafah crossing on the Egyptian border to make good on their scholarships abroad. Unemployment rates hovered above 40 percent and anemia was frequent in children under the age of two as Gaza residents still reeled from four major Israeli assaults in five years. The siege had become the new normal.

However, it was not in Gaza, but in occupied East Jerusalem and the West Bank where Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s strategy of peace without peace, or perpetual occupation management, would face the first major disruption that summer. Negotiations over the US-led framework for a two-state solution broke down in late April in part because Economics Minister Naftali Bennett of the religious nationalist Jewish Home party—a key junior partner in Netanyahu’s governing coalition—threatened to bolt from the government of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu if Netanyahu agreed to US demands to release a fourth batch of Palestinian prisoners. Netanyahu acceded to the radical right-wing pressure, authorizing the construction of hundreds of new settlement units to mollify his junior partners while flouting the demand to release prisoners. US negotiator and longtime pro-Israel lobbyist Martin Indyk regarded Netanyahu’s actions as flagrant perfidy. He turned to Nahum Barnea, one of Israel’s most influential columnists, to anonymously blame Netanyahu’s government for destroying the negotiations. (Indyk later made his views public.) Within weeks, the US negotiating team had moved out of its luxury suites in Jerusalem while Fatah and Hamas formed a unity government for which Washington offered its qualified endorsement. Rebuked by the Americans and defied by the Palestinians, Netanyahu and his inner circle reacted with outrage.

Meanwhile, in Hebron, in the West Bank, a rogue Hamas cell decided to stage a kidnapping. The members likely hoped the operation would lead to the kind of prisoner swap Israel had just rejected in negotiations. Cell members Marwan Qawasmeh and Amer Abu Aysha had spent years in Israeli prisons, subjected to prolonged isolation. Each had lost family members in the armed struggle against the occupation, and both were prepared to kill and die to achieve their desperate goals.

On June 12, Qawasmeh and Abu Aysha set out in a stolen car from Hebron towards a busy crossroads in Gush Etzion in the occupied West Bank. Three hitchhikers, students at a nearby yeshiva, entered the car, apparently believing the driver was an Israeli Jew like them. Hours later, they would be pronounced missing by the Israeli police. In callous acts of bloodletting and cynical deception that followed, the stage was set for the 51 Day War.

Bound and Gagged

The plan quickly unraveled when one of the students, Gilad Shaar, was caught calling the Israeli police from his cell phone to report his abduction. Qawasmeh and Abu Aysha shot the teens to death almost immediately, then buried their bodies in a shallow grave on property Qawasmeh’s relative, Hussam, had purchased adjacent to his family’s home near Hebron.

Prime Minister Netanyahu and his National Security Council received news of the kidnapping in its immediate aftermath from the Shin Bet and police investigators. They huddled together and listened to the eerie phone call Shaar placed to police, in which the sound of gunshots and the kidnappers’ celebratory singing was audible in the background. (One of the killers can be heard exclaiming, “We got three!”) Then they examined evidence gathered from inside the burned remnants of the kidnappers’ stolen car—blood, bullets, DNA. All signs pointed to a case of triple homicide. Yet instead of announcing that the teens had likely been killed, or releasing the names of the suspects, which by that point they had in hand, then ordering a police action to catch them, Netanyahu engaged in an ambitious act of deception that set the stage for full-scale war.

According to Bat-Galim Shaar, Gilad’s mother, police investigators convinced her that her son was still alive, insisting that gunshots she heard in the recorded call he placed to police were actually blanks. She was not informed that blood and bullets were found throughout the vehicle.

“When [Israeli officials] told me finally at 6:00 a.m. Friday that the army was on the job, I felt better—as if we were in good hands,” Bat-Galim Shaar told Israel’s Channel 10. “I was naïve. I told everyone Gilad would be home before Shabbat.”

Not only had Netanyahu and the investigators hidden key facts from the mothers of the teens, they concealed the details of the case from the entire Israeli public, setting themselves up for a catastrophic reaction when the truth was finally revealed. The Israeli military had imposed a gag order on the investigation, threatening journalists with legal repercussions if they reported a single detail of it. According to the text of the gag order, the military had forbidden Israeli reporters from publicizing “all the details of the investigation” and “all details that might identify the suspect.”

London-based Arabic-language news site Rai Al Youm (which was not subject to the gag order) reported that Israeli police and Shin Bet agents had raided the homes of Qawasmeh and Abu Aysha, the main suspects, near the southern West Bank city of Hebron as early as June 17. But the Israeli media did not report this crucial piece of information, which might have altered Jewish Israeli society’s understanding of the crime.

Hamas leadership had no knowledge of the kidnapping when it took place and played no role in its orchestration. The family of the ringleader, Qawasmeh, was well known for going rogue, acting in direct contravention of Hamas ceasefires with Israel over the years. Though Israeli police spokesman Mickey Rosenfeld later admitted to the BBC’s Jon Donnison that the killers represented a “lone cell,” Netanyahu was not about to allow the facts of the case interfere with what seemed like a prime political opportunity.

The Prime Minister’s target was not the teens’ killers, but the new Palestinian unity government.

#BringBackOurBoys

On June 17, the Israeli army forcibly confiscated security cameras from a shopkeeper in Beitunia that captured footage of its soldiers killing two unarmed Palestinian boys during a Nakba Day protest a month before. That same day, Israeli Permanent Representative to the United Nations Ron Prosor appeared behind a lectern at the UN Mission in New York City.

“It has been five days since our boys went missing,” Prosor thundered, “and I ask the international community—where are you? Where are you?!”

Referring to the Fatah–Hamas unity government, Prosor added: “All those in the international community who rushed to bless this marriage should look into the eyes of the heartbroken parents and have the courage to take responsibility by condemning the kidnapping. The international community bought into a bad deal and Israel is paying for it.”

Beside Prosor stood a large placard displaying the smiling faces of the three missing teens beneath a Twitter hashtag that read: #BringBackOurBoys. Israel’s propaganda blitz was in full swing.

For days, leaders of Israel’s trained online propaganda brigades, from the Israeli army spokesperson’s unit to the Jewish Agency, located in the Prime Minister’s Office, flooded social media with the #BringBackOurBoys hashtag. Mimicking Michelle Obama’s promotion of the #BringBackOurGirls hashtag launched to raise awareness of the kidnapping of Nigerian schoolgirls by Islamist militants, pro-Israel social media networks disseminated an image of Netanyahu’s wife, Sara, frowning and bearing a placard that read, #BringBack OurBoys.

The social media campaign reverberated throughout Jewish communities across the US, as synagogues around the country displayed yellow ribbons in a coordinated show of solidarity with the missing teens. In New York City, local politicians appeared at pro-Israel rallies, while American diplomats from Secretary of State John Kerry to US Ambassador to the UN Samantha Power to National Security Advisor Susan Rice competed with one another to deliver the most emotional tribute to the kidnapped teens.

Rachel Frenkel, the mother of the kidnapped student Naftali Frenkel, was junketed by the Israeli government to the UN Human Rights Council in Geneva, Switzerland to plead for help from the international community in rescuing her son. She was sent abroad in spite of the fact that Netanyahu and his inner circle knew that the teens were almost certainly dead. All this was made possible by the Israeli military’s gag order, which even foreign correspondents honored.

Brother’s Keeper

With the public in a frenzy over the missing teens, the military had all the political latitude it needed to rampage through West Bank cities and towns starting on June 15, even if they were far from the scene of the crime. As far as the Israeli public knew, the kidnappers could have been anywhere in the West Bank, in any schoolhouse or coffee house or henhouse where anyone remotely affiliated with Hamas congregated. So began Operation “Brother’s Keeper,” with thousands of Israeli troops storming into private homes and making mass arrests.

The army claimed to be engaged in a rescue operation, a desperate hunt for the missing teens. In reality, it was targeting the organization that Netanyahu had held collectively responsible for the crime—Hamas—rounding up hundreds of its members including scores of those released under the 2011 prisoner swap for the captive soldier Gilad Shalit. (Khader Adnan and Samer Issawi, two prisoners who had earned hero status in Palestinian society for their successful hunger strikes, were among those re-arrested.) In the process, Israel closed off the entire area around Hebron, trapping some 680,000 people inside the military cordon.

During a raid of Birzeit University near Ramallah on June 19, Israeli troops seized hundreds of Hamas flags, carting them away in a truck as though they had obtained valuable evidence in the kidnapping case. A poll released on July 2 revealed that 76 percent of Jewish Israelis approved of the army’s actions, and expressed overwhelming support for the Shin Bet’s efforts to recover the teens.

As the raids in the West Bank continued with overt cooperation from Palestinian Authority security forces trained and armed by the US to suppress native resistance to occupation—journalist Allison Deger reported Israeli soldiers and PA security officers “working in armed conjunction to suppress Palestinian protesters” on June 22—Hamas leadership watched with consternation. Their political cadres were being herded into prison cells without criminal charges, and all they could do was watch. For them, Operation Brother’s Keeper was an act of war.

All along, the bodies of the three murdered Israeli teens lay in a shallow grave on the Qawasmeh property outside Halhoul, just over fifteen kilometers from the site of the kidnapping. They lay there for eighteen days, somehow eluding the advanced monitoring capabilities of Israeli satellites, surveillance cameras, police investigators, and the vast informant network the Shin Bet operated in the West Bank. The longer the teens’ bodies decayed, the more rapidly Israeli society lost its composure. A spontaneously created Facebook page demanded the execution of one Palestinian prisoner for each hour the teens remained missing, while another called “The People of Israel Demand Revenge” garnered more than 35,000 members, most of whom were young Israelis, in just a few days.

When, at 6:00 p.m. on June 20, a team of soldiers and civilian volunteers happened upon the hitchhikers’ bodies, the bloodlust seething just below the surface of Israeli society exploded into the open.

CHAPTER 2

Human Animals

Polls of Jewish Israeli opinion taken after the discovery of the bodies of the three teens that summer showed Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu under mounting pressure. Economics Minister Naftali Bennett, a youthful and politically savvy tech industry millionaire who had almost singlehandedly brought the hardline Jewish Home Party out of the margins and into the mainstream, was gaining in the polls. For his part, Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman had begun drumming up a full reoccupation of the Gaza Strip, a scenario the military-intelligence establishment considered a recipe for disaster. Having already set the stage for the crisis by blocking the release of Palestinian prisoners, the two would remain a thorn in Netanyahu’s right side throughout June and the days of early July leading up to the 51 Day War, provoking him relentlessly towards inflammatory rhetoric and escalated violence.

When Netanyahu issued his first official statement on the discovery of the teens’ bodies on June 30, he betrayed how much the far-right agitators had aroused his latent radicalism. In remarks delivered to an emergency cabinet meeting and relayed to the world through Twitter, Netanyahu declared that the teens had been “abducted and murdered by human animals.”

He continued with a clear call for tribal revenge: “Vengeance for the blood of a small child, Satan has not yet created. Neither has vengeance for the blood of three pure youths, who were on their way home to meet their parents, who will not see them anymore. Hamas is responsible and Hamas will pay.”

Netanyahu’s comments perplexed outsiders, but for those embedded inside the tight confines of Jewish Israeli life, they carried a familiar resonance. His statement alluded to the final stanza of a poem by the Hebrew writer Chaim Bialik titled “On The Slaughter.”

In Bialik’s verse, a searing lament anchored in biblical language, the poet dramatizes a brutal 1903 pogrom incited by Russian officials that left scores of Jews dead in the town of Kishinev.

Bialik followed his first account of the Kishinev massacre with “The City of Slaughter,” an incendiary poem admonishing the victims of the pogrom for their supposed passivity in the face of armed marauders. (Reports of fierce resistance by the Jews there were overlooked.) This second poem helped radicalize thousands of young Jews across Eastern Europe, inspiring the formation of self-defense committees and winning waves of adherents to the militant wing of Zionism. Among those most influenced by Bialik was Vladimir Jabotinsky, the right-wing Zionist activist who would later become the political mentor to the Prime Minister’s father, Benzion Netanyahu, who served him as his secretary.

In Netanyahu’s demagogic appropriation of Bialik’s verse, the “human animals” of Palestine had inherited the genocidal spirit of the Tsar’s mobs and would repeat their crimes unless Jews were prepared to fight to the finish. Having manipulated the public into believing the teens were alive, he now spurred them to blood vengeance because they were dead.

Within hours, mobs of Jewish youths filled the squares of central Jerusalem chanting “Death to Arabs!” and searching for Palestinians to assault. The “ultras” who comprised the hardcore fan base of Jerusalem’s Beitar soccer club provided experienced muscle to the demonstrations. As active duty Israeli soldiers took to Facebook to demand revenge, posting photos of themselves with the weapons they said they were aching to use, political upstarts rushed to issue calls for the “annihilation” of Hamas.

Ayelet Shaked, the telegenic, thirty-eight-year-old politician and poster girl of the right-wing Jewish Home party, earned thousands of Facebook “likes” from mostly young Israelis when she declared that Palestinians are “all enemy combatants” including “the mothers of the martyrs, who send them to hell with flowers and kisses. They should follow their sons, nothing would be more just,” Shaked continued. “They should go, as should the physical homes in which they raised the snakes. Otherwise, more little snakes will be raised there.” Though more restrained than Shaked, the grand old man of Israel’s so-called “peace camp” and then the ninety-year-old President of Israel, Shimon Peres, used the funeral of the three teens as a platform to call for the Israeli army to “act with a heavy hand until terror is uprooted.” Joining Peres on the dais was Netanyahu, who bellowed, “A broad moral gulf [that] separates us from our enemies. They sanctify death. We sanctify life. They sanctify cruelty. We sanctify compassion.”

Rabbi Noam Perel, the secretary-general of World Bnei Akiva, the world’s largest religious Zionist youth movement, upped the ante when he called for turning the Israeli military into an army of avengers “that will not stop at 300 Philistine foreskins.” (Akiva’s appeal alludes to the first book of Samuel, in which the biblical character David kills two hundred Philistines and brings back their foreskins as evidence that he had done so.)

As ultra-nationalist mobs gathered in cities across Israel, a small car entered the back streets of Shuafat, a Palestinian neighborhood in East Jerusalem. Behind its darkened windows rode three young men. They were on the hunt for Arab boys.

The Wrong Family

The stately stone homes of Shuafat line a four-lane boulevard that serves as the main artery between major bloc settlements like Pisgat Ze’ev and central Jerusalem. The steel tracks of Jerusalem’s light rail system bisect the road, shepherding thousands of settlers through the Palestinian neighborhood each day, along with the private security guards hired to protect them. Shuafat’s ligh...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Halftitle Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Introduction: Why Gaza
• Chapter 1: Rogues
• Chapter 2: Human Animals
• Chapter 3: The Resistance
• Chapter 4: The Battle of Shujaiya
• Chapter 5: A Thin Red Line
• Chapter 6: Bloodlands
• Chapter 7: Human Shields
• Chapter 8: Hannibal
• Chapter 9: Good Night, Left Side
• Chapter 10: The Attrition Factor
• Chapter 11: Three Million Bullets
• Chapter 12: Assassins
• Chapter 14: Defiance in the Rubble
• Chapter 15: Dodging Death
• Chapter 16: The Deadliest Catch
• Chapter 17: Singapore or Darfur
• Chapter 18: The Teacher
• Notes
• Acknowledgments
• Index