ISRAEL’S VIETNAM—AND OURS  
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Van Gosse
January 18, 2024
The Nation
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_ Everything that Israel is doing to the people of Gaza—especially
killing civilians through intensive aerial bombardment—was
prefigured during the American “ground war” in Vietnam. _

Palestinians in a destroyed residential area try to collect usable
items under the rubble., (Ashraf Amra / Anadolu // The Nation)

 

Comparisons between Israel’s destruction of Gaza and America’s war
in Vietnam are becoming more and more overt (see “In Campus Protests
Over Gaza, Echoes of Outcry Over Vietnam
[///Users/vgosse/Desktop/In%20Campus%20Protests%20Over%20Gaza,%20Echoes%20of%20Outcry%20Over%20Vietnam,?utm_source=xxxxxx-general&utm_medium=email],” _The
New York Times_, December 24, 2023). Then as now, we see an
ever-widening divide between a part of the citizenry motivated by
shame over the slaughter of innocents, versus a political
establishment that maintains its killing regime regardless of growing
horror among the world’s peoples.

Of course, there are differences. The unyielding government in this
case is Israel and only secondarily its uneasy enabler, the Biden
administration. The protest movement rises here in the United States,
led in large part by Palestinian and Arab Americans, while anti-war
forces in Israel itself are isolated and repressed. Most tellingly, by
the late 1960s, the cutting edge of the movement against the Vietnam
War was inside the US military, in mutinies and systematic attacks on
officers
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There are few such cracks in the IDF
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other than the remarkable solidarity with Palestinians shown by groups
like Ta‘ayush [[link removed]] and B’Tselem
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identity as a warrior society, as if there is no other way to survive
than total domination. Finally, there is no comparison between the
fragmented Palestinian national movement and Vietnam’s disciplined
struggle for national liberation, which humbled first the French and
then American militaries. The Vietnamese constantly reiterated that
they were not fighting the American people, whom they counted as
allies, only the US government that occupied their country. Hamas
makes no such distinction, and on October 7 sought to slaughter as
many Israelis as it could.

Regarding these two wars, there is a deeper parallel, however, which
Americans need to remember. Everything that Israel is doing to the
people of Gaza—especially the killing of tens of thousands of
civilians through intensive aerial bombardment—was prefigured during
the eight years of the American “ground war” in Vietnam,
1965–73. Then as now, this was a scorched-earth strategy, to
eradicate invisible enemy fighters by destroying everything around
them, like setting fire to a haystack to expose the needle. It was
also a strategy focused on minimizing one’s own casualties,
regardless of how many civilians died in the process. Like their
Israeli counterparts today, US commanders in Vietnam were unwilling to
order their men to engage the enemy face-to-face, as the cost would be
much greater than their populations would accept. American troops went
on “search and destroy” missions mainly as bait to attract fire,
so that combined air and artillery attacks could then pulverize the
landscape. It’s a coward’s way of war, and also essentially
criminal—if the law of war as codified in the Geneva Convention
means anything.

Nor was this in any way new, as Vietnam’s killing fields extended a
military doctrine developed decades earlier. As Benjamin Netanyahu has
pointed out with his characteristic schadenfreude, the indiscriminate
murder of enemy noncombatants is exactly what the Americans and
British practiced in World War II. Well before Hiroshima and Nagasaki,
Gen. Curtis LeMay oversaw the firebombing of 63 Japanese cities
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100,000 civilians in Tokyo alone. From February 1942 on, the Royal Air
Force made no pretense of hitting military targets and simply unloaded
as many bombs as it could to destroy civilian morale by
“dehousing” German cities. This was war as retribution; the tens
of thousands of Dresdeners incinerated in February 1945 were the final
victims of an RAF “area bombing
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campaign that killed 600,000 civilians. (Although the Nazis were
blamed for beginning this practice, notably the 1940–41 “Blitz”
targeting British cities, which killed 40,000, it was actually Britain
that first used airpower against civilians, to put down Iraqi rebels
in the 1920s.)

This way of war carried over to Korea, where every city in the North
was systematically firebombed, before reaching its apogee in Vietnam,
where the United States dropped 4 million tons of bombs on rural South
Vietnam. For good reason, the historian Nick Turse called his book
documenting this carnage _Kill Anything That Moves_. An estimated 3
million Vietnamese died in that war, of which 1 million or so were
combatants of the People’s Army of [North] Vietnam or the National
Liberation Front of South Vietnam. The majority were civilians
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blown up, napalmed, shelled, or machine-gunned by US forces. And that
is the real parallel to what is happening today. If the word
“genocide” is invoked by respected historians
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describe the destruction of Gaza , that word surely applies to the US
war against the people of Vietnam.

No one should read this historical comparison as normalizing the
atrocities ordered by Netanyahu and his generals. With methodical
efficiency, they have compressed the worst lessons of war as practiced
since 1939 into a killing zone of exemplary savagery. But this need
not be a moral wasteland. The American war in Vietnam generated the
largest mass movement in our country’s history, a tidal wave
mobilizing millions of every age and description to say, “Not in my
name!” The United States was forced to withdraw from Vietnam in
large part because its citizens no longer supported the war—and its
soldiers were no longer willing to fight it. Let us hope that an
equivalent awakening comes to Israeli Jews, inspired by the powerful
organizing of Jewish Voice for Peace, IfNotNow, and groups like them
here in the United States. May they be a light unto the world.

_Van Gosse is a professor of History at Franklin and Marshall College
and cochair of Historians for Peace and Democracy
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_Copyright c 2024 The Nation. Reprinted with permission. May not be
reprinted without permission
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Distributed by PARS International Corp
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* Israel-Gaza War
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* Vietnam War
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* Genocide
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* community destruction
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* Anti-War Movement
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