The enormous devastation in Gaza is the very strategy of Israel
In other words, there are already more refugees and more dead people in the Gaza Strip than there were in the original Nakba in ‘48… The IDF is systematically destroying the Gaza Strip. ■ Cleansing Gaza of its inhabitants — who by fire and who by water, who by the sword and who by the disease. ■ What in normal countries around the world is seen as a horrific catastrophe — many in Israel view as an achievement. And as their achievements pile up, Israeli society as a whole will sink into deep water.
By Yoana Gonen • Haaretz • Translated by Sol Salbe
“According to the figures from the Gaza Health Ministry, which the defence establishment accepts as accurate to a very large degree, more than 30,000 Gazans have been killed so far in the war… The number of wounded is more than seventy thousand. This is the number that the hospitals and clinics in Gaza are aware of… To them must be added the people who broke out of Gaza [into Israel on 7 October and were overwhelmingly killed]… Assuming that there are 1.8 million people in the Gaza Strip, Israel has so far hit and taken out of operational ability to take action against it about eight per cent of Gaza’s population. That’s a huge percentage… In terms of housing, tens of thousands of housing units have been damaged in Gaza, alongside a massive degradation of road, sewage, water and electricity infrastructure. All of these have resulted in refugee status [for the majority of Gazans], which will take a long time to be reversed. The pressure on these refugees is increasing as they become hungrier and hungrier… In other words, there are already more refugees and more dead people in the Gaza Strip than there were in the original Nakba in ‘48… The IDF is systematically destroying the Gaza Strip.”
These harsh words did not appear in Amira Hass’s article in Haaretz. They were published — word for word, though without a single comma in the original — by court jester journalist Shimon Riklin in a post on X (formerly Twitter) on Saturday night. His goal was not, God forbid, to express empathy for the tens of thousands of deceased, refugees and starving people, but to brag about them: In response to “talk of stagnation and lack of decisive victory in Gaza,” as he put it, Riklin proudly noted that Israel had achieved amazing results in the field of ethnic cleansing and systematic destruction of Gaza.
For many weeks, senior politicians in the United States and Europe have been warning Israel about the widespread harm to innocent people and the escalating humanitarian disaster in Gaza. They don’t understand that the detailed documentation of the suffering in Gaza amounts to a list of achievements in the eyes of people like Riklin — and people like Riklin are currently sitting in the government. And it’s not just about the extreme Right: the belief that “there are no innocent people in Gaza” and the call for uninhibited revenge has spread among large segments of Israeli society.
To Riklin’s credit, it can at least be noted that he does not try to deny the figures and does not belong to the school of “starving them and crying” — those who do feel slightly uncomfortable at the horrific scenes of starving toddlers in Gaza, but immediately calm themselves down by claiming that the victims brought it upon themselves and that Israel bears no responsibility for what happened.
An estimated seventy per cent of Gaza’s fatalities are women and children, but Riklin does not discriminate between a month-old baby and an armed Hamas member — he is proud of all thirty thousand bodies, the collapse of the health system, the thirst and the hunger, the destroyed sewage system and the mass flight. His Tweet, besides being a disturbing glimpse into a murky soul, is also proof that the enormous and ongoing devastation in Gaza is not a byproduct of strategy, but rather it is the intended strategy.
It is no coincidence that as far as the delusional Right is concerned, one of the country’s most difficult hours is a period of euphoria and elation — “an amazing time,” as journalist and politician Yinon Magal described it in an interview with Roni Kuban two weeks ago.
Our fundamentalists exploit moral apathy and public lust for revenge to achieve their real goal, which Riklin draws out with no embellishments: cleansing Gaza of its inhabitants — who by fire and who by water, who by the sword and who by the disease.
What in normal countries around the world is seen as a horrific catastrophe — many in Israel view as an achievement. And as their achievements pile up, Israeli society as a whole will sink into deep water.
