Ilan Pappe: Explains that Israel's Gaza assault was practised years in advance
Ilan Pappe is one of the foremost intellectuals of the Israeli peace movement. According to his website:
Ilan Pappe, born in Haifa in 1954 is currently a Chair in the Department of History, the University of Exeter and a co-director of the Exeter Center for Ethno-Political Studies. He was the academic head and founder of the Institute for Peace studies in Givat Haviva Israel (1992-2000) and the Chair of the Emil Touma Institute for Palestinian Studies in Haifa (2000-2008).
Pappe is a both a professional historian and a human rights’ activist who believes that commitment and professionalism do not necessarily clash, but rather reinforce each other.
He wrote extensively on the 1948 Nakbah and is regarded as one of Israel ‘new historians’ who challenged the official Zionist version of events.
Pappe has also written on the Modern Middle East, multiculturalism and historiography.
As a respected academic working in very controverial fields, Pappe is unlikely to invent stories for dramatic effect, which makes his most recent article in the London Review of Books so remarkable.
This is how ‘Israel’s Message‘ begins (emphases added):
In 2004, the Israeli army began building a dummy Arab city in the Negev desert. It’s the size of a real city, with streets (all of them given names), mosques, public buildings and cars. Built at a cost of $45 million, this phantom city became a dummy Gaza in the winter of 2006, after Hizbullah fought Israel to a draw in the north, so that the IDF could prepare to fight a ‘better war’ against Hamas in the south.
When the Israeli Chief of General Staff Dan Halutz visited the site after the Lebanon war, he told the press that soldiers ‘were preparing for the scenario that will unfold in the dense neighbourhood of Gaza City’.
A week into the bombardment of Gaza, Ehud Barak attended a rehearsal for the ground war. Foreign television crews filmed him as he watched ground troops conquer the dummy city, storming the empty houses and no doubt killing the ‘terrorists’ hiding in them.
The rest of Pappe’s article is a gruesome potted history of Gaza in recent decades… and a warning, which comes in the last paragraph. Here it is:
But it is not only in military discourse that Palestinians are dehumanised. A similar process is at work in Jewish civil society in Israel, and it explains the massive support there for the carnage in Gaza.
Gaza: a city in ruins
Palestinians have been so dehumanised by Israeli Jews – whether politicians, soldiers or ordinary citizens – that killing them comes naturally, as did expelling them in 1948, or imprisoning them in the Occupied Territories. The current Western response indicates that its political leaders fail to see the direct connection between the Zionist dehumanisation of the Palestinians and Israel’s barbarous policies in Gaza. There is a grave danger that, at the conclusion of ‘Operation Cast Lead’, Gaza itself will resemble the ghost town in the Negev.
Another friend of Palestine, the courageous ex-BBC journalist Jonathan Cook, writes in Counterpunch that Israeli Attack Injures 1.5 Million Gazans
Surely not? If so, how come the widely quoted figures are so much lower?
Cook explains that Israelis and Palestinains use very different criteria to count casualties. He applies Israeli standards to Gaza – and concludes the entire population has been injured by severe trauma. Here’s his argument:
It appears that the Palestinian health ministry only records as wounded those Gazans who need to stay in hospital because of the severity of their injuries.
That means they only count the more than 4,500 Gazans who have suffered injuries such as severe burns from exploding Israeli phosphorus shells; shrapnel wounds from artillery rounds; broken or lost limbs from aerial bombardment; bullet wounds; physical trauma from falling building debris; and so on.
Gaza: even survivors have been traumatized
But in fact there is another, far more reasonable standard for assessing those injured, one that provides the far higher total of 1.5 million Gazans – or every surviving Palestinian in Gaza. The measure I am referring to is the one employed by Israel.
Here is an example of its use. In September 2007, the international media reported that 69 Israeli soldiers had been wounded when Palestinian militants fired a rocket into the Zikim army base near the Gaza Strip. The rocket struck a tent where the soldiers were sleeping.
It is worth noting the details of the attack. Israeli officials related that, of the 69 wounded, 11 had moderate or severe injuries and one was critically injured. A few more had light wounds. The rest, probably 50 or more, were injured in the sense that they were suffering from shock.
So, if we apply the same standard to Gaza, that would mean 1.5 million Gazans have been wounded. Or is there still some doubt about whether the weeks of bombardment of Gaza, one of the most densely populated places on earth, have left the entire civilian population in a deep, and possibly permanent, state of shock?
