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“A generation of settlement are we, and without the steel helmet and the maw of the cannon we shall not plant a tree, nor build a house,” Dayan said, after speaking of the hostile threats arrayed around the fledgling Jewish state. “Our children shall not have lives to live if we do not dig shelters; and without the barbed wire fence and the machine gun, we shall not pave a path nor drill for water.”
But Dayan, who would later take up prominent posts in government, was clear-eyed about the motivations of the fighters on the other side in Gaza, a tiny strip of territory that was then controlled by Egypt. The bulk of its population was comprised of Palestinian refugees who less than a decade prior had been forced to flee their homes and native villages amid the bloody Israeli expulsion campaigns that followed the country’s creation in 1948. Hundreds of Palestinian towns were wiped off the map, while thousands of Palestinians were killed in numerous documented massacres carried out by Israeli troops and paramilitary organizations. The displaced communities in Gaza already lived in a cage of trauma and grief.
“Let us not hurl blame at the murderers,” Dayan said. “Why should we complain of their hatred for us? Eight years have they sat in the refugee camps of Gaza, and seen, with their own eyes, how we have made a homeland of the soil and the villages where they and their forebears once dwelt.”
Now, Israeli steel and fire is again being brought to bear upon the population of Gaza. At the time of writing, an Israeli ground offensive appears to be preparing to roll into the Gaza Strip, a narrow, 25-mile stretch of land squeezed against the sea that is one of the most densely populated places on the planet. Roughly half of the territory’s more than 2 million people are children. And, for the better part of a generation, they have lived under blockade from an Israeli state in permanent conflict with Islamist militant group Hamas, which holds sway in Gaza.
On Saturday, Hamas militants based in Gaza orchestrated the single bloodiest day for Israelis since the founding of the modern-nation state, launching a brazen set of raids into Israeli territory that led to more than 900 deaths and the abduction of more than 100 Israeli hostages, including children. Taken by surprise, Israeli authorities vowed a merciless operation to root out Hamas once and for all. Airstrikes on buildings in Gaza have already claimed more than 680 lives, including at least 91 children.
In an address Monday, Defense Minister Yoav Gallant said he had ordered “a complete siege” on the territory where Hamas first emerged and now operates. Gallant went on to invoke rhetoric that rights groups claimed was tantamount to announcing war crimes. “There will be no electricity, no food, no fuel, everything is closed,” Gallant said of Gaza. “We are fighting human animals and we act accordingly.”
A long, complex ground, sea and air operation is underway. Since Hamas’s takeover of Gaza in 2007 — which came after its victory in Palestinian elections the year prior that led to a rupture with the Palestinian Authority, headquartered in the West Bank — Israel has carried out numerous major military operations against the Islamist militants, who have found ways to periodically puncture Israel’s sophisticated security cordon with rocket strikes, drones and other unorthodox methods, including incendiary balloons.
Each time Israel has ramped up its attacks on militants in Gaza, many Palestinian civilians die. The three-week-long Operation Cast Lead that began at the end of 2008 saw the deaths of more than 1,300 Palestinians. Operation Pillar of Cloud in 2021 led to more than 100 Palestinian civilian deaths. In 2014, Israel launched its 50-day-long Operation Protective Edge, which involved airstrikes and a limited ground operation. According to the United Nations, 7 out of 10 of the more than 2,000 Palestinians killed during the 2014 campaign were civilians.
In the parlance of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, Israel’s periodic actions against Hamas have earned the bleak euphemism of “mowing the grass.” But each time, Hamas has shown a capability to pick itself up from the rubble, reorganize and reinforce itself, whatever the misery experienced by those living in its midst. This time may be different, and the price ordinary Palestinians in Gaza will pay is expected to be hideously steep.
In 2005, after the bruising experience of the second intifada, the Israeli government withdrew its forces from within the Gaza Strip, which it had controlled since 1967, and removed some 9,000 Jewish settlers living there. Hamas, which, unlike the Palestinian Authority, doesn’t recognize Israel’s right to exist, de facto captured Gaza in 2007, triggering an Israeli air, sea and land blockade. As a result, conditions in the territory have been degraded for years, with the United Nations estimating that the blockade has cost Gaza’s economy nearly $17 billion in roughly a decade. Israel’s critics cast the territory as the world’s largest “open-air prison.”
For them, “Gaza is a one-word argument for Israel’s brutality toward a blockaded enclave living in miserable conditions,” Natan Sachs, director of the Center for Middle East Policy of the Brookings Institution, told the New York Times. But for Israelis, he added, “Gaza is a one-word argument for the danger of unilateral withdrawal and trusting in Palestinian rule.”
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Ishaan Tharoor
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