by Jonathan Cook, Global Research:
As the UK and US back Israel’s aggression against Palestinians, including an imminent ground invasion of Gaza, are they also about to assist Israel’s ethnic cleansing proposal for a “Greater Gaza” – in Egypt?
As Israel masses its forces along the fence encaging Gaza, waiting for a green light from the United States for a ground invasion, the question few are asking is: What is the ultimate endgame for Israel?
Instead, British and US politicians, backed by their media, have limited themselves to amplifying Israel’s bogus rationales for indiscriminately bombing men, women and children in the tiny coastal enclave and preparing to send in troops. Only 80 or so British MPs, out of 650, have so far called for a ceasefire.
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Israeli strikes are known to have killed more than 7,000 Palestinians, nearly half of them children, with many times that number seriously injured. They are being treated in hospitals without medicines or electricity. The United Nations estimates at least 600,000 Palestinians are homeless from the bombing.
At first, Western establishments justified the carnage as Israel’s “right to defend itself” – a right Palestinians had been denied for the previous 16 years while Israel enforced a brutal military siege of the enclave that prevented basic goods and medicines from entering.
Israel’s supposed “right to self-defence” – the official line from both sides of the political aisle in Britain – serves as western cover for, and complicity in, the crimes against humanity Israel has been committing: mass killing and wanton destruction; a “complete siege” of Gaza, starving it of food and water; and attacks on community infrastructure such as hospitals, schools, mosques, and UN compounds.
But now, as the death toll becomes increasingly obscene, the rationale has shifted. In chorus, British and US politicians say Israel must be given the time and space to “destroy Hamas”.
That requires a ground invasion by Israeli troops – many of them religious extremists from illegal settlements in the West Bank – who are certain to be seeking vengeance for Hamas’ attack on October 7. The atrocities are only likely to intensify.
Military Madness
But there is method in Israel’s military madness. And the main goal is not the one being promoted. Israel has much larger ambitions than “destroying Hamas”.
Israel knows enough history to understand that occupied and oppressed peoples never come to accept their subjugation. They continue to find ways to resist. Even if Hamas can be wiped out, a new, more fearsome adversary will emerge among the next generation currently being traumatised by Israel’s bombs.
In fact, after Israel removed its physical presence from Gaza by pulling out settlers and soldiers in 2005, it began to understand that it had boxed itself into a strategic corner.
It was still occupying the enclave, but at arm’s length. This was the rationale for the blockade that tightly limited what was allowed in and out of the strip. Gaza had been turned into an open-air prison, controlled by Israel through intensive surveillance via drones, eaves-dropping and local collaborators.
In practice, however, Israel found it much harder to police Gaza from afar. Hamas managed to create a much more sophisticated resistance movement in the small spaces left inside the prison that Israel could not surveil, such as a network of underground tunnels.
The results became fully apparent in the preparation and execution of Hamas’ attack on 7 October.
Israel’s strategic problem was compounded by the humanitarian crisis it had created by penning such a large and growing population into a tiny area with no resources.
Poverty, malnutrition, unclean water, overcrowding and lack of housing, as well as the trauma of being encaged and intermittently bombed by Israel to subdue any resistance, was slowly turning Gaza from a prison into a death camp. The UN had warned that the enclave would be effectively “uninhabitable” by 2020.
