George Yancy: I feel so much outrage toward the Israeli state. It is an outrage born of bearing witness to the continual massive and inhumane existential devastation of Palestinian lives. As you know, just this week, Netanyahu said that the recent vicious bombing of Gaza was “only the beginning.” Over 400 people were killed, including “at least 183 children, 94 women, 34 elderly people, and 125 men. At least 678 others have been injured, many critically, with more still trapped under the rubble.” It is false to say “only the beginning” when there has been no end and where the “beginning” began decades ago. Please speak to this most recent act of violence perpetrated by the Israeli state.
Muhammad Ali Khalidi: In some ways, the Zionist project has succeeded beyond the wildest dreams of the early settlers, and in other ways, it is an utter failure. It is a failure because it is premised on eliminating the Palestinian inhabitants of the land, and the Palestinians have not been eliminated, nor have they been reconciled to the status of a permanent underclass. There is a passage that haunts me from an essay published in 1907 by Yitzhak Epstein, a Russian-born Jew who was part of the first wave of Zionist settlers in Palestine in the 1880s: “While we feel the love of homeland, in all its intensity, toward the land of our fathers, we forget that the people living there now also has a feeling heart and a loving soul. The Arab, like any person, is strongly attached to his homeland.… The lament of Arab women on the day that their families left Ja’uni — Rosh Pina — to go and settle on the Horan east of the Jordan still rings in my ears today. The men rode on donkeys and the women followed them weeping bitterly, and the valley was filled with their lamentation. As they went they stopped to kiss the stones and the earth” (excerpted from Adam Shatz’s edited book, Prophets Outcast: A Century of Dissident Jewish Writing about Zionism and Israel). There is a direct through line from that early act of Zionist expulsion to this latest act of Israeli violence. Here we are, 120 years later, still listening to the lamentation of Palestinian mothers and fathers, as they mourn not just the loss of their land, but too often, the loss of their children to Israeli state violence.
In an article published back in 2015, you write that “by the admission of its own top military commanders, Israel deliberately targets civilians.” You also discuss how then-Deputy Speaker of the Israeli Knesset Moshe Feiglin argued for “the wholesale destruction and depopulation of Gaza, leading to the eviction of Palestinians from their homes and their permanent ‘elimination’ from their homeland.” Since October 7, 2023, more than 62,000 Palestinians have been killed. You also mention what’s known as the Dahiya Doctrine, named after Israel’s leveling of the Beirut suburb in its 2006 war against Lebanon, which has been cited as a potential guiding principle for Israel in its genocide in Gaza. What is Israel’s motivation behind its use of this kind of disproportionate, wholesale destruction?
The numbers are staggering and unprecedented in the modern history of Palestine. They may also be severe underestimates, according to research recently published in the medical journal, The Lancet, which found that the number of dead may have already been over 64,000 by last June. What’s more staggering to contemplate is that behind each number is a life that was cut short, and that each victim has parents, or children, or cousins, or neighbors, or coworkers — all of whom are now grieving. The entire population of Gaza is bereft and collectively traumatized, and many of them are physically and psychologically injured, so the effects will be with us for decades to come. Moreover, the dead are predominantly innocent, unarmed civilians who were simply trying to survive — so why this unprecedented carnage?
When I wrote the article in 2015, Israel had launched four major attacks on the Gaza Strip in the previous 10 years (2006, 2008-2009, 2012 and 2014), and there were another three major assaults before October 2023. Between 2000 and 2023, the Israeli military killed almost 8,000 Palestinians in Gaza, most of them civilians. With every successive assault on Gaza, it becomes clearer that Israel lashes out indiscriminately against Palestinian civilians and is using what even the New York Times has called “loosened standards” for bombing civilian targets, an “expanded list of targets,” and crude means of “target generation,” including artificial intelligence. There is also plenty of evidence that the Israeli military has extensively used Palestinian civilians as human shields in Gaza, as well as in the West Bank, even according to the mainstream media in the United States. So why does Israel target civilians when it has the precision weaponry and ability to distinguish combatants from noncombatants? I think that there are two main reasons.
First, there is a long-standing Israeli military doctrine that striking hard at civilians, in both Palestine and Lebanon, puts pressure on militant groups. This was most notoriously articulated by former Israeli military chief of staff Gen. Gadi Eisenkot with reference to Lebanon. He stated in 2006 that the Israeli military would apply disproportionate force to civilian areas and that it would even consider such areas military bases. This became known as the “Dahiya Doctrine” (after the southern suburb of Beirut) and Eisenkot indicated that it was an “approved” plan. I have argued that this doctrine is grounded partly in a couple of papers published in academic journals, coauthored by the former head of Israeli military intelligence and a philosophy professor, which purport to justify flouting the principle of distinction between combatants and noncombatants in international humanitarian law. The fact that articles justifying Israeli war crimes were published in academic refereed journals is itself telling; I’ve tried to respond to their spurious moral arguments elsewhere. This work, which is just a small indication of the ways in which Israeli academia is complicit in war crimes, claims to provide moral justification for prioritizing the lives of Israeli soldiers over Palestinian civilians. Of course, explicit rejection of the principle of distinction is morally repugnant, as is the idea that militancy will be stamped out by attacking civilians.
The second reason is that one of the aims of this entire onslaught has been to render Gaza unlivable and to try to drive its population out. Quite simply, Israel continually attacks Palestinian civilians with the intention of coercing them to leave their homeland. The Israeli leadership hopes that the sheer level of death and destruction will be a prelude to deportation or will lead to mass migration.
