"Nothing apart from pressure in the form of sanctions, boycotts and
divestment will stop the murdering of innocent civilians in the Gaza Strip.
There is nothing we here in Israel can do against it. Brave pilots refused
to partake in the operations, two journalists - out of 150 - do not cease to
write about it, but this is it. In the name of the holocaust memory let us
hope the world would not allow the genocide of Gaza to continue." -Ilan
Pappe

Genocide in Gaza By Ilan Pappe

A genocide is taking place in Gaza. This morning, 2 September, another three
citizens of Gaza were killed and a whole family wounded in Beit Hanoun. This
is the morning reap, before the end of day many more will be massacred. An
average of eight Palestinian die daily in the Israeli attacks on the Strip.
Most of them are children. Hundreds are maimed, wounded and paralyzed.

The Israeli leadership is at loss of what to do with the Gaza Strip. It has
vague ideas about the West Bank. The current government assumes that the
West Bank, unlike the Strip, is an open space, at least on its eastern side.
Hence if Israel, under the ingathering program of the government, annexes
the parts it covets - half of the West Bank - and cleanses it of its native
population, the other half would naturally lean towards Jordan, at least for
a while and would not concern Israel. This is a fallacy, but nonetheless it
won the enthusiastic vote of most of the Jews in the country. Such an
arrangement cannot work in the Gaza enclave - Egypt unlike Jordan has
succeeded in persuading the Israelis, already in 1948, that the Gaza Strip
for them is a liability and will never form part of Egypt. So a million and
half Palestinians are stuck inside Israel - although geographically the
Strip is located on the margins of the state, psychologically it lies in its
midst.

The inhuman living conditions in the most dense area in the world, and one
of the poorest human spaces in the northern hemisphere, disables the people
who live it to reconcile with the imprisonment Israel had imposed on them
ever since 1967. There were relative better periods where movement to the
West Bank and into Israel for work was allowed, but these better times are
gone. Harsher realities are in place ever since 1987. Some access to the
outside world was allowed as long as there were Jewish settlers in the
Strip, but once they were removed the Strip was hermetically closed.
Ironically, most Israelis, according to recent polls, look at Gaza as an
independent Palestinian state that Israel has graciously allowed to emerge.
The leadership, and particularly the army, see it as a prison with the most
dangerous community of inmates, which has to be eliminated one way or
another.

The conventional Israeli policies of ethnic cleansing employed successfully
in 1948 against half of Palestine's population, and against hundreds of
thousands of Palestinians in the West Bank are not useful here. You can
slowly transfer Palestinians out of the West Bank, and particular out of the
Greater Jerusalem area, but you cannot do it in the Gaza Strip - once you
sealed it as a maximum-security prison camp.

As with the ethnic cleansing operations, the genocidal policy is not
formulated in a vacuum. Ever since 1948, the Israeli army and government
needed a pretext to commence such policies. The takeover of Palestine in
1948 produced the inevitable local resistance that in turn allowed the
implementation of an ethnic cleansing policy, preplanned already in the
1930s. Twenty years of Israeli occupation of the West Bank produced
eventually some sort of Palestinian resistance. This belated anti-occupation
struggle unleashed a new cleansing policy that still is implemented today in
the West Bank. The Gaza imprisonment in the summer of 2005, which was
paraded as an Israeli generous withdrawal, produced the Hamas and Islamic
Jiahd missile attack and one abduction case. Even before the abduction of
Giald Shalit, the Israeli army bombarded indiscriminately the Strip. Ever
since the abduction, the massive killing increased and became systematic. A
daily business of slaying Palestinians, mainly children is now reported in
the internal pages of the local press, quite often in microscopic fonts.

The chief culprits are the Israeli pilots who have a field day now that one
of them is the General Chief of Staff. In the 1982 Lebanon war, the Israeli
airforce issued orders to its pilots to abort missions if within 500 square
meters of their target they spotted innocent civilians. Not that these
orders were kept, but the pretense for internal moral consumption was there.
It is called in the Israeli airforce, the "Lebanon Procedure" [Nohal
Levanon]. When the pilots asked a year ago if the "Lebanon procedure" is
intact for Gaza, the answer was no. The same answer was given to the pilots
in the second Lebanon war.

The Lebanon war provided the fog for a while, covering the war crimes in the
Gaza Strip. But the policies rage on even after the conclusion of the
cease-fire up in the north. It seems that the frustrated and defeated
Israeli army is even more determined to enlarge the killing fields in the
Gaza Strip. There are no politicians who are able or willing to stop the
generals. A daily killing of up to 10 civilians is going to leave a few
thousand dead each year. This is of course different from genociding a
million people in one campaign - the only inhibition Israel is willing to
undertake in the name of the Holocaust memory. But if you double the killing
you raise the number to horrific proportions and more importantly you may
force a mass eviction in the end of the day outside the Strip - either in
the name of human aid, international intervention or the people's own desire
to escape the inferno. But if the Palestinian steadfastness is going to be
the response, and there is no reason to doubt that this will be the Gazan
reaction then the massive killing would continue and increase.

Much depends on the international reaction. When Israel was absolved from
any responsibility or accountably for the ethnic cleansing in 1948, it
turned this policy into a legitimate tool for its national security agenda.
If the present escalation and adaptation of genocidal policies would be
tolerated by the world, it would expand and used even more drastically.

Nothing apart from pressure in the form of sanctions, boycotts and
divestment will stop the murdering of innocent civilians in the Gaza Strip.
There is nothing we here in Israel can do against it. Brave pilots refused
to partake in the operations, two journalists - out of 150 - do not cease to
write about it, but this is it. In the name of the holocaust memory let us
hope the world would not allow the genocide of Gaza to continue.

-Ilan Pappe is senior lecturer in the University of Haifa Department of
political Science and Chair of the Emil Touma Institute for Palestinian
Studies in Haifa. His books include among others The Making of the
Arab-Israeli Conflict (London and New York 1992), The Israel/Palestine
Question (London and New York 1999), A History of Modern Palestine
(Cambridge 2003), The Modern Middle East (London and New York 2005) and
forthcoming, Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine (2006)