American intelligence estimates that Israel has dropped 29,000 bombs on Gaza. Just over half have been accurate. The rest, less sophisticated, can miss the target by more than 30 meters. In an urban area, with a high population density, it is impossible to avoid the death of civilians.
Israel says it only attacks military targets, but more than 18,000 people have been killed in Gaza. The vast majority are women and children. Hamas has around 30,000 guerrillas and in more than two months of war Israel estimates that it has killed around 5,000 of them. Joe Biden spoke this week of “indiscriminate bombing”, which is almost the same as talking about collective punishment, a useless and repeated strategy.
Israel acted similarly in 1953 on Palestinian refugee cities and camps, and again in Gaza in 1971 and 1972: massive bombing by land, sea and air, and selective killing. The doctrine was refined from Operation Defensive Shield in 2002. It was the response to a suicide bombing that killed 30 Israelis. The army bombarded Ramallah and Bethlehem, the Nablus casbah and the refugee camps of Tulkarem, Jenin and Balata. The battle transcended the public space to enter homes. The soldiers knocked down the walls of the houses to move inside, through the living rooms, kitchens and bedrooms, avoiding the barricades, booby traps and snipers outside.
As in Gaza, the guerrillas resisted from underground, but they could not prevent the Israeli army from razing everything above. More than 400 buildings were destroyed in the center of Jenin, in an area of ??just 40,000 square meters. First the air force acted and then the armored excavators, the Caterpillar D9, alias Dubi, which in Hebrew means teddy bear, and which today operate in the strip. The UN rebuilt following the Israeli military criteria of permeability and transparency: six-meter avenues to facilitate the entry of combat tanks.
Thus began the postmodern war that eliminates private space and the possibility of refuge. Everyone is exposed to destruction because there is no distinction between civilian and militant. Any goal is legitimate. There is no border, wall or wall that cannot be crossed.
The Israeli military can see inside homes thanks to ultra-wideband radars, with ultrasound systems that produce thermal images of the biological life inside a home.
The objective is to prevent the guerrilla from disguising himself as a civilian and for this he must always have his rifle in his hand. He must not be given a break and there is no humanitarian truce that counts. The enemy must have no chance of living to fight another day.
While fighting you kill and that is the main mission. Killing is more important than occupying. Israel does not want to occupy the territory. He wants to destroy it and then rebuild it so that it is easier to control it without needing to occupy it. It can try thanks to the superiority of its weapons and technology, the walls surrounding the Palestinian population and the all-seeing cameras and radars.
The doctrine of destruction and control, however, is useless. It has not prevented October 7th, just as it has not prevented Jenin and Nablus from continuing to be cores of the Palestinian armed resistance.
On October 7, he reiterated that the reliance on destruction and control reduces the training of combat units. The same thing happened in 2006, in the war against Hezbollah in Lebanon, in which Israel was defeated. The Shiite militia then had 10,000 rockets and today nearly 200,000. You can whitewash almost anywhere in Israel.
After putting an end to Hamas in Gaza, Israel will try to eliminate the threat of Hezbollah. The military strategists, as always, see no alternative but to fight to the end and the political leaders, guilty of the tragedy of October 7, want to redeem themselves with Palestinian blood.
Hamas resurrected after the 2009, 2012, 2014 and 2021 wars and will do so again now. You cannot defeat a guerrilla that is a social movement an idea, and least of all from the air. Americans learned this in Vietnam, Iraq and Afghanistan.
Collective punishment, moreover, has never succeeded in making the bombarded society rise up against its leaders. The Nazi Blitz against Britain in 1940-1941 caused more than 40,000 civilian deaths and Churchill responded with his famous “we will never surrender”. The following year, 1942, Allied aviation destroyed 58 German cities. There were 40,000 dead in Hamburg and 25,000 in Dresden, but the population did not rise up against Hitler.
The collective punishment on Gaza has not yet put an end to the military capability of Hamas, which fired rockets at Jerusalem again yesterday, and has also failed to free any hostages.
Israel is fighting for its security, but it has lost the reason for this fight: it produces more terrorists than it kills. And the worst of all is that he knows it and will continue to do it, trapped as he is in the cult of heroism and patriotic death.
Kabbalah, which for many Jews heralds and determines history, assigns the same numerical value to the Hebrew words meaning destruction and Holy Land. The birth of Israel corresponded to Shoa. Can Israel now bring about its own destruction?
