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WAR OF WORDS: FROM THE MEKONG DELTA TO GAZA  
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Lawrence Tritle
February 20, 2025
LA Progressive
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_ It is the Palestinian’s people’s refusal to disappear, to hang
on to their land, that has led so many Israelis to deploy the racist
imagery of “human animals.” _

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As a young Army advisor arriving in the Mekong Delta in 1970, I soon
learned the language of war. From adjoining quarters, I overheard
voices: “What do you call a Viet Cong suspect?” “Any living
Vietnamese.” “What do you call a Viet Cong?” “Any dead
Vietnamese.”

While My Lai is the best-known example of the carnage such thinking
incites, far worse was the 9th Infantry Division’s operation called
“Speedy Express.” Just a few days before, John Paul Vann, the
senior advisor in the Delta, had briefed me and other incoming
advisors how in six months (1968/69), as many as eleven thousand Viet
Cong were killed. Yet fewer than nine hundred weapons were taken.

Who were most of those killed? If you’re guessing civilians, you’d
be right. Their only mistake – living among Viet Cong sympathizers
and fighters. Sound familiar? Substitute the Palestinians of Gaza for
the Mekong Delta’s Vietnamese. Do that and you’ll begin to
comprehend how there may be as many as two hundred thousand
Palestinian casualties – possibly as many as fifty thousand dead –
since 7 October 2023.

Let’s be clear. What Hamas and its fighters did (and rogue
sympathizers too) violated the laws of war as set forth by Geneva,
particularly the taking of hostages. Yet the Israeli response also
violated these same laws. This is clear regarding proportionality: the
prohibition of military action that produces incidental loss of
civilian life.

It's in the Numbers

If you care to look. The disproportionate casualties, Palestinian
versus Israeli, point to the so-called “Israel-Hamas War,” more
accurately, the “Nakba War of 2023,” as slaughter, not war.
Israel’s assault on Gaza, including the systemic deprivation of
food, water, and medical care has resulted in horrific civilian
casualties, particularly children. An urban center for millennia, Gaza
has been reduced to a wasteland. This is not a war between two armies.
It is an act of violence to destroy Palestinian society and culture,
efface memory, and take land.

What easier way is there to do this than to reduce the Palestinians to
“human animals” or “beasts walking on two legs?” Such labels
are familiar to Israelis. Onetime military chief Rafael Eitan once
told Israeli parliamentarians in 1983 that “Arabs are like drugged
cockroaches in a bottle.” More recently, Benjamin Netanyahu and his
extremist ministers have both in words and in their Gaza policy
reiterated that the Palestinians need to be removed from their
ancestral homes: that they have no place in Israel where full and
unrestricted citizenship is predicated on Jewish identity. What
explains racial profiling
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this?

Racism – What it is

Racial epithets have always come readily to Americans, from those
directed at Native and Black Americans to the Vietnamese. Watch Oliver
Stone’s _Platoon_ for authentic interactions of the latter. In
contrast, the Viet Cong simply called Americans “imperialists,”
“invaders,” or just “My,” that is, American. Absent were the
pejorative labels so richly used of them. Designating those outside
your own social group emerges from typical (and age-old) human
attitudes. Psychologist Eric Erickson explained this human propensity
as pseudospeciation, another way of saying, “inventing the Other.”

For the last eighteen months, the Israelis have made clear how they
classify Palestinians.

They are simply, but hardly simple, “human animals.” Yoav Gallant,
the former Israeli Defense Minister (now a fugitive wanted by the
International Criminal Court), made this assessment immediately after
the Hamas October attack. Netanyahu anticipated him in 2014. Such
labels were already conventional in Israeli society. Recent Israeli
school graffiti complements, shouting out, “Death to Arabs:” an
abbreviated trope of the “only good Arab is a dead Arab.”

You might wonder, who are these “Arabs”? They are the Gazans; they
are the West Bankers who survive, for now, an oppressively (and
increasingly) violent Israeli occupation; they are the naturalized
second-class citizens of Israel; they are the Palestinians of the
Diaspora. Collectively they are the descendants of the native
population of the territory that became the State of Israel in 1948.

From its inception and rooted in Zionist ideology, Israeli success has
always been based on exclusive Jewish ownership and control of
Palestine. In such a zero-sum game, it should not surprise that
Israeli politicians have long had a dream that the whole population
would simply disappear. Hence Yitzak Rabin’s disappointed dream that
Gaza had not sunk into the Mediterranean. More recently, Israeli
minister Bezalel Smotrich has stated that “There is ‘no such
thing’ as Palestinian people” – the words themselves implicit
recognition that there is. Israeli bombing of Gaza constitutes a step
in that direction. President Donald Trump’s latest plan to empty
Gaza of its inhabitants amounts to a realtor’s swindle on steroids,
ethnic cleansing reconfigured.

It is the Palestinian’s people’s refusal to disappear, to hang on
to their land, that has led so many Israelis to deploy the racist
imagery of “human animals.” Critically minded Israelis reject such
language, and not just those living abroad. Journalist and filmmaker
Yuval Abraham, for example, has brought this to light in his
documentary _No Other Land_. In an interview in _The New
Yorker_ about this film and his work_,_ he reveals the intricacies
of the Israeli military’s AI program codenamed Lavender, utilized to
track down Palestinian fighters. This he learned of anonymously from
Lavender’s own operators, disturbed by flawed data and bureaucratic
notions used to identify Hamas fighters and others (see further
below).

Racism and Killing Others

Although there is widespread belief that the conflict between Israel
and the Palestinians is rooted in religion, the reality is much more
complex. Whereas it is true that religion has been weaponized by both
sides and has taken nationalist xenophobia to higher levels, this is a
nationalist conflict over land – two peoples and one – tiny –
land. Moreover, the Palestinians are stateless while Israel ranks
among the most militarized states on earth and a military nuclear
power to boot.

Yet more destructive in leading a nation to commit mass murder is the
promotion of racist discourse. The embrace of such language by Israeli
leaders has resulted in untold carnage in Gaza – hostages killed –
Palestinian civilians murdered. Reflect on these examples. Israeli
soldiers killed their own citizens without regard to their identity.
Witness the three hostages gunned down in December 2023 attempting to
escape. This is a vivid demonstration of how Palestinians are treated.
About the same time, a civilian bureaucrat of a Gaza-based cultural
institution, was discovered in a building by Israeli soldiers with his
nephew and others. The nephew, Moemen Raed al-Khaldi, recalls, “my
uncle came closer and told me, put your head between my body and the
wall, and May God save you, my dear son.” Then he was shot, dying
immediately.

While there are additional cases of such killings, the greater
slaughter of Palestinians has resulted from bombing, particularly from
the building destroying two-thousand-pound bombs, gifted Israel by the
U.S. Filmmaker Abraham explained the planning and execution of the
Israeli bombing campaign in _The_ _New Yorker _magazine article
mentioned above. Hundreds, if not thousands of innocent Gazans, died
because, like the Vietnamese victims of Speedy Express, they were in
the wrong place at the wrong time. As Abraham tells, Israeli military
planners identified members of the military wings of Hamas and Islamic
Jihad then set out to kill them. He adds, “anybody in those groups,
regardless of age, regardless of military importance, not only can we
bomb them but we can bomb them with civilians present.” Abraham’s
story reveals more of the decision-making process, how it erroneously
targeted civilians (example: same name but different person), how it
deemed acceptable the killing of entire families, neighbors of
targets, sometimes to kill a single individual.

Since 2006, Gaza inhabitants have been assaulted by the sophisticated
weaponry of Israeli forces designed for the battlefield, not a
civilian environment. These have included “dumb” or unguided (or
indiscriminate) bombs, white phosphorus, and two-thousand-pound bombs.
Gazans have witnessed pilots of the Israeli Air Force dropping the
latter on defenseless civilians, totally lacking any kind of air
defense. Gazans have watched Israeli Merkava tanks and self-propelled
guns blasting neighborhoods with their primary weapons, 120- and
155-mm guns respectively.

Suffice it to say that the use of battlefield weapons in areas
occupied by civilians is prohibited by the Geneva Convention. This is
outlined in Protocol I (1977), the focus of which is the protection of
civilian populations against the effects of hostilities occurring in
non-international armed conflicts. This is defined in Article 1, Point
4, which makes clear that the rules of war “include armed conflicts
in which peoples are fighting against colonial domination and alien
occupation and against racist regimes in the exercise of their right
of self-determination.”

Israel rejects Protocol I, taking a smorgasbord approach to Geneva.
Adhere to the rules you like, ignore those you don’t. Chapter II,
Article 51, 2 of Protocol I further declares that “_neither the
civilian population as such, nor individual civilians may be the
object of attacks_” (italics supplied). Part III, Section 1, Article
35, 1 (of Protocol I) further stipulates the correct conduct of
combatants during hostilities. The fundamental principle forming the
basis of these rules is “_that the right of the Parties to the
conflict to choose methods or means of warfare is not unlimited_”
(italics supplied).

The Israeli Right to Self-Defense, but Not Palestinian

Early on, the Biden Administration justified its support of Israel
against Hamas with the claim that Israel had the right to defend
itself. The right of self-defense is an integral part of the
international law of war. But how is it that this has not been
accorded the Palestinians when Geneva’s Protocol I grants it? In
effect, the Israelis have conned the world community and the
transactions of the international political hierarchy, namely the
United Nations, building a racist state that denies the Palestinians
fundamental rights of self-determination and freedom. Yet when
Palestinians resort to self-defense and attempt to secure what has
been granted them, the response is brutal, enveloped in racist
language and spurious claims of terrorism. As made clear in Gillo
Pontecorvo’s _The Battle of Algiers_ (1966), the oppressed fight
with whatever weapons they have at hand. Those holding them down will
never admit that such means, or their struggle itself, are legitimate
in any way.

War’s Terror Recognized

In setting out to destroy Hamas, a faction they enabled in its
creation, the Israelis have inflicted colossal harm on Gaza, its
people, their society and culture. There has been only modest
acknowledgement of the illegalities of what has been an all-out
assault. When Moshe Yaalon, a former military chief of staff,
characterized Israeli actions in Gaza as constituting war crimes and
ethnic cleansing, he was condemned as “worse than our biggest
enemies.”

In contrast stands the critical appraisal of the measures, and their
morality, employed by American air forces against Japan in 1945. The
fire-bombing raids directed and conceived by General Curtis LeMay
(Tokyo’s were worse than the Hiroshima A-Bomb), persuaded him that
if the U.S. lost the war, he would be prosecuted as a war criminal.
Robert McNamara, privy and contemporaneous to LeMay’s reflections
(and the source of them), expands on LeMay’s observation. What
determines war’s morality, war’s justice, is whether you win or
lose. This realization by as hard a driving combat leader you’ll
ever find, clarifies Yaalon’s statement and those of his critics.
The former sees reality, the latter only illusion and lies.

Conclusion

Dehumanization of Palestinians and disregard of Israeli lawbreaking is
morally and intellectually reprehensible. In the 1930s and 1940s, the
U.S. stood up, finally, for the oppressed: the Chinese against
Japanese expansionism, the Ethiopians against Italian imperial
ambitions, Europeans against the terror of Nazi Germany. Today,
American policies shrink from defending the values upon which the U.S.
was founded. Instead, as concerns the Israeli-Palestinian conflict,
the U.S. defends, assists, and upholds aggression against the weak and
vulnerable, denying what the United Nations declared and promised in
1947, a Palestinian state. President Trump’s recent plan to expel
the Palestinians of Gaza, then rebuild and repopulate it with others,
is just the latest example of mismanaging a tragedy of epic
proportions created by racism and ignorance.

What lies behind this? Demagoguery now trumps rationality, learning,
and compassion. Democracy is under attack by lobbyists, their
influence and money, and insinuating elites. In short, the American
sense of noblesse oblige, itself sometimes wayward, has been
bastardized. One need only recall, e.g., the ethnic cleansing of
Native Americans, the Chinese Exclusion Act (1882), the incarceration
of Japanese Americans (1942-45). Lending support to the unjust acts of
other states, no matter their history or identity, serves no one,
neither policy makers in the U.S. nor elsewhere, or the citizens they
serve.

_LAWRENCE TRITLE, PhD, emeritus Daum Professor of History at Loyola
Marymount University, Los Angeles, is author and editor of 13 books,
including From Melos to My Lai: War and Survival (2000), A New
History of the Peloponnesian War (2010), and The Oxford Handbook of
Warfare in the Classical World (2013, edited with Brian Campbell). He
is currently at work on The Beast War. The Story of Us Humans. _

_The LA Progressive openly and unapologetically supports and employs
advocacy journalism. We believe the media not only informs the public,
but it also works towards engaging citizens and creating public
debate. We embrace the idea of civic journalism and reject the idea
that objective reporting is even possible. We don’t believe that
journalists can be objective spectators of politics, and we don’t
pretend otherwise._

_A host of gifted WRITERS
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articles a week. Dick and Sharon write as well as edit and publish.
The LA Progressive covers the gamut of progressive issues both on the
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issues in Los Angeles, the home of the LA Progressive._

* Vietnam War
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* Israel-Palestine
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* Gaza
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* Racism
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