One of Israel’s most celebrated images is David Rubinger’s photograph of a trio of paratroopers at the newly captured Western Wall in 1967, an event that would mark the beginning of the Israeli occupation of the West Bank, East Jerusalem and the Gaza Strip.
You see it arriving at Tel Aviv’s Ben Gurion airport. It has been used to illustrate the Israel Defense Forces’ “values” page, and appears endlessly in the Hebrew media and on pro-Israel sites.
It is ironic that at the end of his life the central figure in the picture, Yitzhak Yifat, rejected at least some of the photograph’s meaning. Speaking to the Guardian in 2017, with the benefit of five decades of hindsight, he reflected on that conquest.
“I can say that the results of the war were bad. We realised that we had conquered another people. A whole people. And now it seems we cannot now get to a true peace, a real peace,” he said.
What was true then remains true today, as Israel’s security cabinet has authorised the full occupation once again of Gaza, beginning with Gaza City.
While Benjamin Netanyahu has suggested it will be required until Hamas can be replaced, the international community should consider the strong likelihood that Israel will maintain an open-ended control of all of Gaza – a recipe, say critics, for perpetual war.
And although the statement from Netanyahu’s office describing the decision and its aims is absent the word “occupation” – with all the international legal obligations that would entail – no one should be in any doubt that this is what is envisaged
Netanyahu’s history in politics and diplomacy is one of endless excuses for why Israel should never meet the commitments it made in the Oslo peace process towards real self-determination and a Palestinian state, describing endlessly over the years the lack of a “partner for peace” or claiming that any Palestinian state would be a threat to Israel.
In practical terms, Israel’s decision to seize full control of Gaza appears as reckless as it is delusional and inhuman, not least the notion that Israel will maintain control until the “establishment of an alternative civil administration that is neither Hamas nor the Palestinian Authority”. As it currently stands, that alternative remains a fiction of Netanyahu’s imagination.
What will seem more plausible for many will be the far-right finance minister Bezalel Smotrich’s unpalatable parsing of the decision on Friday. “We are erasing the Palestinian state,” he declared, “first in action and then officially.”
In financial terms, as Israeli media have pointed out, the move is likely to place another huge financial burden on a country that has been haemorrhaging money during more than two years of conflict in theatres from Lebanon to Syria, Iran, Yemen and Gaza.
Speaking to the rightwing Israel Hayom newspaper this week, Ram Aminach, an expert in Israel’s military economics, suggested that the cost of taking Gaza under full control could run to almost $6bn in the coming months, with “incomprehensible costs” associated with sustaining a Palestinian population of 2 million people in a shattered territory.
“Look at the international pressure Israel faces today and multiply that by five, at the least,” he said. “To ease that pressure, we’ll need to take care of the population in Gaza. No international player is going to help pay for that, not while Israel is seen the way it is right now.”
And there is an even bigger question: whether Israel has the resources to maintain an occupation that may be long-term.
Envisaged, according to briefings to Israeli journalists, as involving five divisions in an operation lasting five to six months, it assumes that the IDF is capable of achieving more than it has in two and a half years of war in which it has been forced to launch multiple operations in areas where it has claimed Hamas was defeated only to see fighters return.
Nor is the recent history of military occupations encouraging, not least the US and British experience of insurgencies in Iraq and Afghanistan.
That appears, at least in part, to have been in the mind of the IDF’s chief of staff, Eyal Zamir, when he made clear his opposition to the plan, suggesting it would lead to the death of the remaining Israeli hostages and greater risk to soldiers in an already exhausted Israeli military from IEDs.
While Zamir has expressed his opposition in private to Netanyahu, others have made the same points publicly, among them the Israeli opposition leader, Yair Lapid, who described the decision as a “disaster that will lead to many more disasters”.
Charging that Netanyahu had been dragged into the decision by his far-right allies who have campaigned for Jewish settlement in Gaza, he described the plan as “a move that will kill the hostages and many soldiers, will cost Israeli taxpayers tens of billions and will destroy Israel’s diplomatic relations”.
“This is exactly what Hamas wanted: for Israel to end up stuck in Gaza without a goal, in a useless occupation, the point of which no one understands,” Lapid said.
All of which leaves what will be regarded by many in the international community as the most glaringly problematic issue. While the IDF controls 75% of Gaza, the remaining 25% of territory where the new Netanyahu offensive will be focused is where 80% of Gaza’s population has been displaced to.
How Israel plans to achieve its full control without a massive increase in civilian deaths in an already starving and desperate Palestinian population is chillingly undescribed.
Multiple mass fatality incidents around the Israeli- and US-backed Gaza Humanitarian Foundation’s food distribution sites – where, according to the UN and other aid organisations, Israeli soldiers have killed hundreds of aid seekers – suggests that the IDF should not be counted on to behave humanely when confronted by those civilians.
Keir Starmer, the UK prime minister, said on Friday: “The Israeli government’s decision to further escalate its offensive in Gaza is wrong and we urge it to reconsider immediately. This action will do nothing to bring an end to this conflict or to help secure the release of the hostages. It will only bring more bloodshed.”
