[ Gaza is being devastated as we watch. A stated goal of
Israel’s assault, is to “destroy Hamas”. Israel’s goal is less
to vanquish Hamas—impossible in any case—than to finally expel
Palestinians from Gaza without international censure or sanction.]
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THE LONG WAR ON GAZA  
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Sara Roy
December 19, 2023
The New York Review of Books
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*
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_ Gaza is being devastated as we watch. A stated goal of Israel’s
assault, is to “destroy Hamas”. Israel’s goal is less to
vanquish Hamas—impossible in any case—than to finally expel
Palestinians from Gaza without international censure or sanction. _

Palestinians in Rafah, a city in the southern Gaza Strip, conducting
search and rescue operations in the rubble of buildings destroyed by
Israeli airstrikes, December 14, 2023, Photo credit: Ali
Jadallah/Anadolu // The New York Review of Books

 

Gaza is being devastated as we watch. A stated goal of Israel’s
assault, which has so far killed more than 19,400 people, is to
“destroy Hamas” in retaliation for its attack that killed 1,200 in
Israel’s south in October. But a number of critics, such as the
Palestinian ambassador to the UK, Husam Zomlot, have argued
persuasively that Israel’s goal is less to vanquish
Hamas—impossible in any case—than to finally expel Palestinians
from Gaza without international censure or sanction.

There is mounting evidence for their claims. In mid-October,
Israel’s intelligence ministry drafted a “concept” paper
proposing the forcible and permanent transfer of Gaza’s 2.3 million
residents to the Sinai Peninsula. The ministry is less influential
than its name suggests, but its policy ideas are nonetheless
distributed among government and security services. In November a
USAID official approached a colleague of mine and asked about the
feasibility of building a tent city in the Sinai, which would be
followed by a more permanent arrangement somewhere in the northern
part of the peninsula. Later that month the daily _Israel
Hayom_ revealed
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Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu seeks to “reduc[e] the number of
Palestinian citizens in the Gaza Strip to the minimum possible.”

The current desecration of Gaza is the latest stage in a process that
has taken increasingly violent forms over time.

 In the fifty-six years since it occupied the Strip in 1967, Israel
has transformed Gaza from a territory politically and economically
integrated with Israel and the West Bank into an isolated enclave,
from a functional economy to a dysfunctional one, from a productive
society to an impoverished one. It has likewise removed Gaza’s
residents from the sphere of politics, transforming them from a people
with a nationalist claim to a population whose majority requires some
form of humanitarian aid to sustain themselves.

Violence in Gaza has not only or even primarily been a military
matter, as it is now. It has been a matter of everyday, ordinary acts:
the struggle to access water and electricity, feed one’s children,
find a job, get to school safely, reach a hospital, even bury a loved
one. For decades the pressure on Palestinians in Gaza has been immense
and unrelenting. The damage it has done—high levels of unemployment
and poverty, widespread infrastructural destruction, and environmental
degradation, including dangerous contamination of water and soil,
among other factors—has become a permanent condition.

*

I first visited Gaza as a graduate student in 1985. Right away I fell
in love with the locals, who embraced me as a Jew, an American, and a
woman. In those early days one of the first questions I was typically
asked was “Are you a Christian?” When people learned I was Jewish
there was some initial shock and confusion but also curiosity. Once I
explained I was there to learn about their society and economy and how
the occupation affected their lives, it didn’t take long to gain
their trust. In fact, being Jewish became an asset: people who barely
knew me invited me into their homes and businesses. Many of them would
later help me collect data when I lived in Gaza during the first
intifada, or uprising, which began in 1987.

I had a great deal to learn, but it was clear from the outset that
Gaza had historically been the center of Palestinian resistance to the
occupation, a point of pride for those I worked and lived with. It has
also long been the center of Palestinian historical memory. The vast
majority of residents come from families who were ethnically cleansed
in 1948 from such places as Isdud, al-Majdal, and al-Faluja. Some of
my earliest memories from Gaza are of young refugee children
describing in great detail the homes and villages that their
grandparents had lived in but that they had never seen. They were
strikingly intimate with their ancestral homes. I remember the delight
they took in their descriptive power and the self-esteem it gave them.

Israel has never known what to do with this tiny strip of land. From
the beginning of the occupation, the country’s leaders recognized
that Gaza would have to be pacified to preclude the creation of a
Palestinian state—their primary objective—and minimize Palestinian
resistance were they to annex the West Bank. During the first two
decades of the occupation, from the six-day war of 1967 to the start
of the first intifada, their preferred tactic was controlling Gaza’s
economy. Over 100,000 Palestinians from Gaza and the West Bank worked
inside Israel. Taken together, the territories were Israel’s second
largest export market after the US, and they came to depend heavily on
Israel for employment and trade. The result was a combination of
individual prosperity—standards of living improved—and communal
stagnation. Gaza’s own productive sectors—including manufacturing
and agriculture—received little investment, which precluded
development.

The first intifada made it clear that this strategy of pacification
had failed. Improved living standards could no longer compensate for
the absence of freedom. With the 1993 Oslo Accords, which marked the
end of the first intifada, Israeli policy gradually shifted from
regulating Gaza’s economy to attenuating and then disabling it by
prohibiting more conventional trade and the movement of workers
between Gaza and its primary markets in Israel and the West Bank. This
strategy is often said to have begun in 2007, when Hamas, having
defeated Fatah in the previous year’s legislative elections, took
control of Gaza. That year Israel imposed a blockade that severely
limited both trade with Gaza and the entry of specific food products
into the Strip. But the blockade—now in its seventeenth year—is
only a more extreme form of measures that were already in place.

Early in 1991—before Hamas started launching rockets and
orchestrating suicide bombings—Israel began restricting and
periodically blocking the movement of workers to and from Gaza, as
well as the trade upon which its small economy disproportionately
depended. Initially the aim was to contain and suppress unrest. But as
the Israeli journalist Amira Hass has written, it “soon developed
into something more far-reaching.”

 In January 1991 Israel canceled the general exit permit that made it
possible for Palestinians to move freely through Israel, the West
Bank, and Gaza. Palestinians were thereafter required to secure
individual permits in order to leave Gaza or the West Bank, even to
travel from one to the other. Over time these permits were subject to
increasingly strict political and security criteria. “The Gulf
War,” Hass wrote,

provided the occasion to reverse [the] situation of free movement for
the many and prohibition for the few. From then on, there was a
blanket denial of the right for all Palestinians, with exceptions
being made for certain explicit categories—including workers,
merchants, people in need of medical treatment, collaborators, and
important Palestinian personalities.

The cancellation of the general exit permit marked the start of
Israel’s closure policy. After a series of attacks inside Israel in
1993, “the military commander issued another order canceling the
personal exit permits,” according to HaMoked
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an Israeli-based human rights NGO assisting Palestinians. “In
practice, this order, which has been continuously renewed, established
the ‘general closure’ of the Territories in effect to this day.”
As B’Tselem [[link removed]], another rights
group focused on the West Bank and Gaza, has put it, “Isolating Gaza
from the rest of the world, including separating it from the West
Bank, is part of a longstanding Israeli policy.”

This policy of separation and containment became more explicit in the
aftermath of the Oslo Accords. In 1994 Israel built a fence around
Gaza, the first of several enclosures. When the second intifada broke
out in 2000, travel restrictions were placed on Gazans, including
students, who were banned from pursuing higher education in the West
Bank. “Entry of Gaza residents into Israel for the purpose of family
visits or reunification with a spouse was prohibited,” in
B’Tselem’s words.

Visits by Palestinian citizens of Israel and residents of East
Jerusalem to relatives in Gaza were reduced to a minimum. In addition,
Israel severely restricted the ability of the entire population of
Gaza to travel abroad, with many prohibited from doing so altogether.
Import and export were restricted and often halted. Israel also banned
most Gaza residents from working inside Israel, taking away the source
of income of tens of thousands.

In 2005 Israel “disengaged” from the Strip, removing all of its
settlements and military forces. Israeli officials have since argued
that this formally ended the country’s occupation of Gaza. According
to international law, however, Israel remains an occupier
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as it maintains “effective control” over Gaza’s borders (except
for Rafah, which Egypt controls), sea access, airspace, and population
registry.

 Over time it grew more difficult both for policymakers to envision a
political settlement that would treat the Gaza Strip and the West Bank
as a single entity and for Palestinians themselves to imagine a
collective future.

*

Another crucial effect of Israeli policy—more noticeable after Hamas
came to power in 2007—was to transform the occupation from a
political and legal issue with international legitimacy into a dispute
over borders to which the rules of armed conflict apply. Israel in
effect recast its relationship with Gaza from occupation to warfare,
as evidenced by the numerous deadly assaults it launched on the
territory over the past seventeen years—among them Operation Summer
Rains (2006), Operation Hot Winter (2008), Operation Cast Lead
(2008-09), Operation Pillar of Defense (2012), Operation Protective
Edge (2014), Operation Guardian of the Walls (2021), Operation
Breaking Dawn (2022), and Operation Shield and Arrow (2023). Its
international allies quickly accepted this shift: Gaza came to be
identified solely with Hamas and treated as a hostile foreign entity.

Under this new approach, Israel dispensed altogether with the notion
that Gaza could have a market economy. “As part of their overall
embargo plan against Gaza,” US officials wrote from Tel Aviv
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November 2008, “Israeli officials have confirmed … on multiple
occasions that they intend to keep the Gazan economy on the brink of
collapse without quite pushing it over the edge.” More specifically,
they aimed to keep it “functioning at the lowest level possible
consistent with avoiding a humanitarian crisis.”

 The goal, that is, was not to elevate people above a specific
humanitarian standard but to ensure they stayed at or even below that
standard.

 

[Palestinian children collecting food at a donation point in Rafah,
Gaza, December 6, 2023.  (Photo: Mohammed Abed/Agence France-Presse -
AFP)]
Since 2010, Israel has periodically eased restrictions, but the
blockade has nonetheless almost entirely destroyed Gaza’s economy.
On the eve of the current conflict, unemployment
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at 46.4 percent. (In 2000, before the blockade, it was at 18.9
percent.) Approximately 65 percent of the population was
food-insecure, meaning they could not safely access enough nutritious
food to meet their dietary needs, while 80 percent required
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form of international assistance to feed their families.

Perhaps the most striking result of this policy was the transformation
of the Palestinians in Gaza from a community with national, political,
and economic rights into a humanitarian problem. The needs of over two
million people were reduced to sacks of flour, rice, and
sugar—assistance for which the international community was, and
remains, entirely responsible. Gaza could only experience relief, not
progress. Humanitarianism has since become the primary way that
international donors interact with Palestinians in Gaza—in effect, a
device the Israeli military uses to manage an undesirable population,
with no vision of anything but more management. “The West Bank and
Gaza are now almost completely delinked,” a World Bank
report stated in 2008
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“with Gaza starkly transforming from a potential trade route to a
walled hub of humanitarian donations.”

Israel has, in other words, created a humanitarian problem to manage a
political problem. It not only compelled humanitarian intervention but
transformed ordinary life into war by other means, using the threat of
catastrophe as a form of governance and suffering as an instrument of
control. Until recently the goal was to avert a large-scale disaster
such as starvation.

Now that goal has been superceded. For the past ten weeks, with the
exception of a one-week “humanitarian pause,” Gaza has been under
a total siege; Israel has virtually halted the entry of fuel and
restricted the entry of food, among other critical necessities.
Palestinians who refused to relocate to the southern part of the Strip
after warnings by the Israeli military early in the assault were told
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they “might be identified as an accomplice in a terrorist
organization.” The metric has changed from starvation to death.
“I’m still alive” is the measure by which my friends in Gaza
live.

*

In Gaza, where the overwhelming majority of the population is confined
to a tiny strip of land that they are not allowed to leave, the
occupation has prevented any kind of normal social environment from
emerging. Young people, who account for over half the population, have
no conception of the world beyond the Strip. They do not know what it
means to board a plane or a ship or even a train. During my last trip
to Gaza in 2016
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a friend and colleague told me:

People are afraid to enter the world, or they enter it defensively
with weapons. Our openness to the world is narrowing, and more and
more people are afraid of leaving Gaza because they do not know how to
cope with the world outside, like a prisoner released from prison
after years of confinement.

In Gaza, daily life entails a narrowing of space and of one’s
certainty in that space as a place to live, as well as a narrowing of
desire, expectation, and vision. “Given the immense difficulties of
everyday life,” I wrote for _The London Review of Books_ after
that 2016 trip, “mundane needs—having enough food, clothing,
electricity—exist for many only at the level of aspiration.” Now
even the mundane is largely out of reach.

In 1946 Chaim Weizmann, Israel’s first president, addressed the
viability of the Zionist project. “The economic absorptive capacity
of a country is what its population makes it,” he said.

Natural conditions, area fertility, climate will exercise their
influence . . . but by themselves they can give no indication of the
number of inhabitants which the country can ultimately sustain.
Ultimate results will depend on whether a people is educated and
intelligent…whether its social system does or does not encourage the
widest expansion of economic effort; whether intelligent use is made
of natural resources; and finally—and in very high degree—on
whether the government exerts itself to increase the country’s
absorptive capacity or is indifferent to it.

These are the very factors—an educated populace, a healthy and
empowered economy and society, productive use of natural resources,
and indigenous control over the land’s absorptive capacity—that
Israel has largely denied Palestinians. Since the beginning of the
occupation, that denial has been said to be indefinite or
transitional—a condition imposed on Palestinians with the promise of
something better on the horizon. I will never forget what a dear
friend, the late medical doctor Hatem Abu Ghazaleh, told me on my
first trip to Gaza in 1985: “Nothing is more permanent than the
temporary.”

_[SARA ROY is an associate of the Center for Middle Eastern Studies at
Harvard University. Her most recent book is Unsilencing Gaza:
Reflections on Resistance
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* Gaza
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* Israel
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* Hamas
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* Palestine
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* Israel-Gaza War
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* Benjamin Netanyahu
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* war crimes
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* Genocide
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* Oct. 7
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* Hostages
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* West Bank
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* Israeli bombing
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* Israeli airstrikes
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* apartheid
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* Palestinians
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*
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