They’re leaving. Some of them, anyway.
Israel said Monday that reservists from two brigades deployed in Gaza will be going home this week. Soldiers from another three brigades will likewise withdraw from the enclave, ostensibly for training back on the “civilized” side of the fence.
Benjamin Netanyahu — whose approval rating may as well be 0% — is under enormous pressure from the international community to curb the pace of civilian casualties in Gaza, where the Israeli military is committing what some critics, myself among them, have dubbed genocide.
As 2024 dawned, nearly 22,000 Palestinians were dead since Hamas’s October 7 massacre which, according to a truly macabre account published by The New York Times last week, included the systematic rape and mutilation of Israeli girls and women. Here are a few excerpts from Times‘s reporting, cited here over the weekend:
The Times viewed photographs of one [Israeli] woman’s corpse that emergency responders discovered in the rubble of a besieged kibbutz with dozens of nails driven into her thighs and groin.
[…]
The first victim [one survivor] said she saw was a young woman with copper-color hair, blood running down her back, pants pushed down to her knees. One man pulled her by the hair and made her bend over. Another penetrated her… and every time she flinched, he plunged a knife into her back.
She said she then watched another woman “shredded into pieces.” While one terrorist raped her, she said, another pulled out a box cutter and sliced off her breast.
“Horrific” is an insufficient adjective. So is every synonym for horrific. There simply are no words.
No words, no. But precedent, yes. Plenty of precedent. All across human history. We’ve been doing that sort of thing to each other for millennia. If you can’t name at least a dozen such atrocities off the top of your head, you’re living in blissful ignorance regarding human nature.
“Within minutes, [they] opened fire. In the hours that followed, forces killed hundreds of old men, women and children. They raped and tortured. They razed the village.” That’s not another account of Hamas in the kibbutzim on October 7, 2023. Rather, that’s an account of the US Army, in uniform, in Mai Lai, on March 16, 1968. There are lots of famous pictures of the aftermath. And they look a lot like the aftermath of Hamas’s rampage. Were the young American men in Mai Lai “evil terrorists”? If not, why not?
The reality is as straight forward as it is God-awful in Gaza. Because Israel is a state actor with pretensions to being the only advanced society in a region full of what the West generally views as hopeless primitives, useful only for the oil they’re standing on and swimming in, the option to visit upon 1,200 Palestinians the barbaric, up close and personal horrors Hamas subjected Israelis to on October 7 isn’t available. So instead, Israel will just “normal” kill 20 or 30 or 40 or 50 Gazans for every Israeli innocent maimed, raped, tortured and executed.
Generally speaking, women and children comprise three quarters of Gazans killed since the onset of the war, and the overwhelming majority of dead and injured are noncombatants. From New Year’s Eve through New Year’s Day, at least 150 Palestinians died in Israeli strikes and combat missions.
That pace simply isn’t tenable. The Muslim-to-non-Muslim death ratio is now nearly 20:1 in less than three months of fighting, and because Hamas doesn’t have the kind of armaments necessary to inflict mass casualties on the Israel military, it’s only going to get more lopsided. The primitives-to-civilized kill ratio could be 40:1 or even 50:1 by mid-March. That’s pushing it even in Washington, a place where trigger-happy decision makers aren’t exactly shy about breaking a few brown eggs to make a national security omelette.
But Israel’s decision to withdraw some of its troops from Gaza isn’t entirely (or even mostly) predicated on reducing the death toll among Palestinian innocents. After all, death mostly comes from the sky in the territory. As Palestinian poet Mosab Abu Toha, who was briefly abducted by the IDF in November, put it, while speaking to The New Yorker‘s David Remnick late last month,
I’m 31 years old and November 19 was the first time in my life I’ve seen an Israeli soldier. Or an Israeli tank. Or an Israeli rifle. Which is, I think, very strange. You’ve been under siege and you haven’t seen any soldiers in your life. You’re bombed from the sky. You don’t see the soldiers who’re killing you, and who kill your family and who bomb your houses.
You can read Abu Toha’s description of his experience with the IDF here. (Do note: His son is a US citizen with an American passport.)
Israeli boots or no Israeli boots, Gazans will continue to die for the foreseeable future. The bombardment will continue. And on some days (most days) it’ll look “indiscriminate,” to quote Joe Biden.
The tentative troop withdraw is more about the Israeli economy, apparently. As the Times put it on Monday, “The [reservist] call-up added to the economic burden faced by hundreds of thousands of Israelis who fled their homes on Israel’s borders following the attacks.”
If you’re wandering through a desolate concrete maze in Gaza, you’re not in the workforce. It’s not obvious the Israeli economy can sustain itself (where that means grow) in perpetuity when the military is engaged in a full-on invasion of the strip.
Although Hamas doesn’t have the capacity to kill enough Israeli soldiers to have an economic impact on Israel, I’ll grimly note that any soldiers killed in Gaza won’t be reentering the Israeli labor force. And it seems unlikely that the government’s work permit program for Gazans will be expanded anytime soon.
On Monday, the Israeli central bank cut rates by 25bps to 4.5%. It was the first cut since the pandemic. The shekel has recovered losses seen following the October 7 attacks.
“The interest rate path will be determined in accordance with developments in the war and the uncertainty derived from it,” the central bank said Monday.
Fighting continued as 2024 dawned. Just after midnight, Hamas lobbed 27 rockets into Israel. “These are not midnight fireworks,” the Israeli embassy in Washington remarked, in a captioned video posted to social media. Hamas said the rockets were “a response to the massacre of civilians.”
According to The Integrated Food Security Phase Classification initiative, around half of Gazans now face starvation. More than a quarter are staring at a “reasonable probability” of famine.
“Between December 8 and February 7, the entire population in the Gaza Strip, about 2.2 million people, is classified [as in] Crisis or worse,” the latest IPC assessment said.
The same report noted that this is “the highest share of people facing high levels of acute food insecurity that the IPC initiative has ever classified for any given area or country.”
Underscoring the unprecedented nature of the food crisis in Gaza, Arif Husain, chief economist at the World Food Program, told the Times that in two decades on the job, he’s never seen a food crisis as acute.
“I’ve been doing this for about 20 years,” Husain said. “I’ve been to pretty much any conflict, whether Yemen, whether it was South Sudan, northeast Nigeria, Ethiopia, you name it. And I have never seen anything like this.”
I was born in 1944. I never spoke until my father came home from Guam. His last official duty was to be in the first group of our naval personnel to venture into Hiroshima. His job was to document the devastation during which time he was exposed to significant radiation. At that time no one really knew what meant. Fortunately, he was seemingly unaffected by the experience, although I do remember the stress of his post-war job did seem to make him easy to anger. That didn’t last a long time. I spoke my first sentence when I first met him walking through the door of his father-in-law’s house. I greeted him and wished him well. I was walking but not talking at that time. From that day, in my opinion, nothing the US has done with its armed forces or its massive treasure has accomplished a single thing that protected any of us from harm. We lost tens of thousands in men Korea, and accomplished nothing. We sent millions of soldiers and tens of billions of dollars to Vietnam and accomplished nothing. They are still communists, relatively prosperous, and one our larger trading partners. In the Mideast we have engaged in three wars, all in retaliation for supposed actual or threatened “terrorist” attacks, only one of which occurred on our shores. Trillions of dollars has been expended with no effect. The Taliban, which we funded and helped to set up, along with the indigenous drug lords, took control of Afghanistan less than a week after we left. We have no control in Iraq. The British, the French, the Russians and the US have been trying to take over SE Asia and the Middle East for nearly 100 years on whatever phony pretext they could muster, paid a huge price in lives and treasure and accomplished virtually nothing. At this rate I can see no future for humanity. We just have to drink blood and try to dominate those we consider less qualified to mange their own lives and property. We send money to Ukraine to keep a bully we dislike in check and to Israel to help the bully we do like butcher those it considers inferior and unworthy. We have no chance to prevent decline. Entropy and its accompanying disorder is the law and it is inevitable. BTW, there’s was a new entry yesterday from “Disgraceland” opining on some of these very points.
How right you are. Pretty depressing if you ponder the situation too much. If we have 10 thousand years of civilization behind us, then we’ve been heading directly where we are now for that long. The Geneva Convention rules are sorely outdated. We no longer bring warring armies to a neutral sight and let them slug it out. All wars are now house to house and no one can win them. Israel vs Gaza is the result. There is no good or just way to proceed. We lost that opportunity thousands of years ago.
Dr. Lucky. A thoughtful & moving piece, well written.
Mr. Lucky — I grew up as a kid during Vietnam and only really knew two things at that time — news of the war often made my mom cry while she was making dinner and that she was planning to use my college money to ship me off to Canada should the war drag on another decade or so when I would become eligible for the draft. My family does not have a long history of military service, so I have grown up respecting that commitment and sacrifice. But my takeaway from your elegant summary is wondering if (and then when) this country will reach the point that it does NOT entrust our government leaders to decide when there is a just and worthwhile cause of action. I fortunately missed Vietnam, but have yet to see either a righteous or worthwhile commitment of our service men and women in my lifetime. If I had military-age kids, I know I wouldn’t want any recent President deciding that feeding them to the meat grinder was a sacrifice my family needed to bear as proud and good Americans. I am thankful I was never confronted with the dilemma.