“Method and Madness: the Hidden Story of Israel’s Assaults on Gaza”,

“Method and Madness: the Hidden Story of Israel’s Assaults on Gaza”, by Norman Finkelstein. OR Books, New York, 2014. ISBN 978-1-939293-71-8.

This past summer, Israel committed its most brutal assault on the Gaza Strip yet, the latest in three attacks it has launched against the territory in recent years. Thousands were killed and maimed, nearly all of them Palestinian. Thousands more were displaced, and entire civilian neighborhoods were smashed to bits.

For all the recent discussion over the deterioration in U.S.-Israel relations, Washington was steadfast for three weeks in refusing to condemn the Israeli military’s atrocities in Gaza. Its repeated, fatuous references to Israel’s “right to defend itself,” amounted to full diplomatic support for the carnage (not to mention material support in form of ongoing U.S. arms supplies). It was only after Israel shelled a UN school housing refugees on Wednesday July 30, 2014 that the Americans felt compelled to speak out. Shortly afterward, Israel began deescalating the assault, commencing withdrawal of ground troops on August 3, 2014. By this stage, however, much of the damage had been done, all with the approval and backing of Barack Obama, the great liberal hope, and his team of celebrated humanitarians such as National Security Adviser Susan Rice and Ambassador to the UN Samantha Power.

One of the major services performed by Norman Finkelstein’s latest book, the compact and highly accessible “Method and Madness: The Hidden Story of Israel’s Assaults on Gaza,” is to challenge and dismantle the conventional framing that Israel is doing no more than defending itself against Hamas. This narrative confines debate to the narrow parameters of determining whether Israel’s measures, which are considered fundamentally justified, are in any way excessive. Drawing extensively on impeccable sources, such as Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch, Finkelstein exposes the lie that Israel makes every effort to avoid civilian casualties. He also sets out compelling arguments to show how each of Israel’s Gaza assaults have been wars of choice, with the strategic aim of intimidating its neighbors and crushing the occupied, besieged Palestinians.

Rewind to ‘Operation Cast Lead,’ which took place between December 2008 and January 2009. This was the first of Israel’s three, recent full-on assaults on Gaza, in which 1,383 Palestinians were killed, including 333 children, and 5,303 people injured, including 1,606 children. Finkelstein identifies two Israeli objectives involved in this war. First, the Israeli government aimed to restore its military “deterrence capacity.” Hezbollah had ejected Israel from Lebanon in 2000, and fought it to a humiliating standstill in the summer of 2006. Israel’s subsequent push for an attack on Hezbollah’s patron Iran had been rejected by the United States. Gaza’s relative defenselessness made it an ideal target for a massively damaging assault designed to restore Israel’s ability to intimidate its enemies.

The second objective was to counter the diplomatic threat posed by the Palestinians. Finkelstein quotes former Mossad head Ephraim Levy who noted that “[t]he Hamas leadership has recognized that its ideological goal is not attainable and will not be in the foreseeable future. They are ready and willing to see the establishment of a Palestinian state in the temporary borders of 1967…They know that the moment a Palestinian state is established with their cooperation, they will be obligated to change the rules of the game: They will have to adopt a path that could lead them far from their original ideological goals.” Hamas had also been careful to enforce the ceasefire with Israel that was entered into in June 2008.These two signs of growing moderation threatened to rob Israeli hardliners of a key excuse for intransigence. The Hamas bogeyman was too valuable, and needed to be pushed quickly into another conflict. By launching a bloody border raid, Israel broke the ceasefire in November 2008, triggering a backlash from Hamas that Israel used as a pretext for full scale war.

Finkelstein argues that “the massive death and destruction visited on Gaza were not an accidental by-product of the 2008-09 invasion but its barely concealed objective.” Israel blamed Hamas’ use of ‘human shields’ for civilian fatalities, but as Finkelstein notes, Amnesty International found that the most deadly attacks were those where “the victims…were not caught in the crossfire…nor were they shielding militants or other legitimate targets” but simply going about their normal lives. This included “women and children…shot at short range when posing no threat to the lives of Israeli soldiers” where “there was no fighting going on in their vicinity.” Human Rights Watch even documented the killing of Palestinian civilians who were waving white flags, in areas where Israel was in control and no fighting was taking place.

By the eve of the next conflict in late 2012, Hamas was on a roll politically. Its friends in the Muslim Brotherhood were in power in Egypt, the Emir of Qatar had come to Gaza promising a $400 million aid package, and a visit from Turkish Prime Minister Erdogan was scheduled to follow. Meanwhile, Netanyahu’s continued efforts to manufacture a war on Iran were getting nowhere. Credibility and deterrence needed to be restored, so once again, out came the big club.

In November 2012, Israel launched a new war by assassinating the leading Hamas official responsible for enforcing periodic cease-fires and who, at the time, was working toward a permanent truce. Unsurprisingly, another round of violence, with more death and destruction (again overwhelmingly affecting Palestinian civilians) ensued. The result was another strategic failure for Israel. The war ended with Hamas leader Khalid Mishal goading Netanyahu to launch a ground invasion, and the Israeli prime minister backing off, with the United States and Egypt working to spare his embarrassment through a new ceasefire deal.

By 2014, the situation had improved in some respects from the Israeli point of view. The July 2013 coup in Egypt saw Hamas’ allies replaced by its sworn enemies. During the same year, Iran downgraded its support for Hamas following the latter’s decision to come out against Tehran’s key ally, Bashar al-Assad. But, then, in April 2014, Hamas and Fatah formed a “consensus government,” which the United States and EU surprisingly did not boycott. The U.S. government primarily blamed Netanyahu for the collapse of U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry’s peace initiative, which the Israeli PM had obstructed even though it would have, at most, created a bantustan Palestinian “state.”

Against this backdrop, Netanyahu seized upon the kidnapping and killing of three Israeli teenagers in the West Bank in June 2014 with opportunistic relish. Though there was no evidence showing the involvement of Hamas leadership, Israel launched a huge crackdown on its members in the West Bank, arresting hundreds, ransacking homes and businesses, and killing at least five Palestinians in an all too characteristic outburst of collective punishment. The predictable response of rocket fire from Gaza was then used as a pretext to smash Hamas, the Gaza Strip, and the Palestinian unity government in the bargain.

In terms of the outcome, the figures Finkelstein cites speak for themselves. Over 2,200 Palestinians were killed, of whom 70-75 per cent were civilians and over 500 children. Eleven thousand Palestinians were injured, including 3,300 children, of whom 1,000 were permanently disabled. Israel suffered sixty-six combatant and five civilian casualties, including one child. One hundred and twenty were injured, including one Israeli who was seriously wounded. Finkelstein quotes Peter Maurer, president of the International Committee of the Red Cross, who remarked after surveying the scene in Gaza, “I’ve never seen such massive destruction ever before.”

As Finkelstein notes, the war, known as “Operation Protective Edge,” was another failure for Israel. The Palestinian unity government held together. In fact, Israel was forced to negotiate with a united Hamas-Fatah government in order to end the hostilities. Rather than turning the spotlight on Hamas, Israel dragged its own international reputation to a new low. The horrific impact the IDF’s assault had on Gaza’s civilians was relayed to the outside world by NGOs, reporters on the ground, and by Palestinians themselves. This information spread via social media, eliciting a wave of condemnation from European and North American civil society. By the end of the conflict, Israel’s military objectives had not been met, either during the assault or under the terms of the eventual ceasefire, with Hamas, battered and bruised but fundamentally still in place, able to point to heavy losses inflicted on Israeli troops during the ground offensive.

The dreadful questions Finkelstein’s book forces us to contemplate, then, are, if Israel has still failed to establish the “deterrence capacity” it seeks and fight off the diplomatic threats it perceives, when will the next war come, and how much worse can things get for the surviving residents of Gaza?

In the event of a fourth war over Gaza, Finkelstein’s book will be an invaluable resource. It is short, clearly written, thoroughly researched, and devastating in its critique of the Israeli state’s “self defense” narrative and the apologists who excuse the inexcusable. Above all, Finkelstein underlines the crucial point, to be remembered if and when violence resumes: “The refrain that Israel has the right to self-defense is a red herring. The real question is, ‘Does Israel have the right to use force to maintain an illegal occupation?’ The answer is no.”

http://muftah.org/why-israel-really-goes-to-war-over-gaza/#.VRS-YPnF_F3