Israel’s Goal: Smashing Palestinian Legitimacy
Credit: UNRWA
By James E. Jennings
ATLANTA, Georgia, Sep 3 2024 (IPS)
Most people think that Israel’s main goal in Gaza is to recover the hostages seized by HAMAS on October 7, 2023 with an announced follow-up mission to eliminate HAMAS as a threat. If you thought that, you would be wrong. Substantial evidence reveals a different strategic aim—destroying every shred of Palestinian legitimacy as a nation.
Inspite of continual pleas from the weak Biden-Harris-Blinken White House to stop bombing civilians in Gaza, Israel refuses to end the carnage. What’s going on? As usual in the Middle East, the obvious plot has at least one hidden sub-plot.
Israel’s most important strategic goal throughout the more than ten months of its senseless, horrifically devastating campaign in Gaza has been, not only to kill HAMAS militants and tens of thousands of Palestinian civilians in Gaza, but instead to kill the widely trumpeted “Two-State Solution.”
The ongoing carnage on the West Bank aims to destroy, not just Palestinian infrastructure or hopeless young “Lions Den” resistance, but the very idea that the Palestinians have a right to self-determination, or any legitimacy at all as a state. With most of the world decrying the genocide in Gaza, the full-blown war on cities and civilians in the West Bank has escaped scrutiny.
The most obvious proof of that is the fact that Netanyahu’s extremist Likud government continues its gratuitous bombing campaign in Gaza, and continues to refuse HAMAS’ offers for releasing hostages in return for even a temporary cease-fire. Like most American intelligence experts, Israel’s own military leaders have admitted that HAMAS cannot be completely eliminated.
Sadly, the horrific loss of life in Gaza is not at this point really about Gaza. It’s a distraction from a land grab for the West Bank of the Jordan River, what the Israelis call their very own territories of “Judea and Samaria.” Netanyahu has echoed the settlers’ claim that Israel cannot be accused of being illegal military occupiers of what is “our own land.”
One of the first shibboleths from the mouth of President Biden following HAMAS’ obscene war crimes on October 7 and just before he got on Air Force One to make humiliating obeisance to the indicted war criminal Netanyahu, was to offer the meaningless words, “Two-State Solution.”
But surely the man who had for years been Chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee must have known that the “Two-State Solution” was already on its last legs and unlikely to be revived. Now Democratic presidential candidate Kamala Harris is echoing “Genocide Joe,” not so much by offering a formula for peace as simply parroting an empty phrase.
Lesson number one in international diplomacy on the macro scale is that a regime must have legitimacy as a people group before it can achieve any kind of concrete reality as a nation. The birth of the United States is an example. The Boston Tea Party, Patrick Henry’s speech, and Paul Revere’s ride coalesced America’s popular identity.
Washington at Valley Forge and at Yorktown actually birthed the nation. Achieving legitimacy, the unquestionable right to exist as an organized political entity, is how a population or insurgent movement becomes a state.
By smashing peaceful West Bank towns with tanks and jet bombers, bulldozing their streets and tagging all Palestinians as terrorists, the native community is being robbed of its heritage as well as its current and future legitimacy. Any chance for statehood is being obliterated by Israel’s “over the top” ravages on civilian life and infrastructure in Gaza and throughout the West Bank.
Meanwhile, the political class’s pretense of being pro-peace is a sick charade. Let’s stop saying “Genocide is bad” and “Killing people is bad,” without also saying “Killing civil society is a positive evil as well,” because it kills the future of an entire people group.
James E. Jennings, PhD is President of Conscience International www.conscienceinternational.org and Executive Director of US Academics for Peace. He delivered aid to Gaza’s hospitals from 1987-2014, including during the 2009 “Cast Lead” bombing and periods of Israeli, PLO, and HAMAS control.
IPS UN Bureau