The lesson of Israel’s unfathomably cruel war: ours is still a world where might is right | Nesrine Malik

More than a year into Israel’s war in Gaza, it is hard to talk of “escalation”. Because to isolate single moments of military escalation, such as Israel’s attack on Iran on Saturday, seems to suggest that otherwise, what is taking place in Gaza is normal or acceptable. Perhaps, instead, we can talk of confrontation. Perhaps we can talk about how, over the past couple of weeks, Israel’s campaign in northern Gaza has confronted the world with what has become increasingly difficult to deny: ethnic cleansing is upon the residents of Gaza. Civilians, including children, are being killed in ways that can only suggest an indiscriminate assault to eliminate Palestinians, or scare them into moving en masse from ever-expanding zones of death and starvation. “The entire population of northern Gaza,” said the UN’s acting humanitarian chief on Saturday, “is at risk of dying.”

Where are they to go? Well, we also have an answer to this question. Earlier this month, a conference called Preparing to Resettle Gaza, attended by hundreds of people, was held outside the Gaza Strip. Within earshot of artillery and gunfire, Israelis gathered to decide what to do with Gaza and those who live in it once the war is over. One young woman suggested: “We should kill them, every one of them.” Israel’s national security minister, Itamar Ben-Gvir, was a little more reasonable. “We will encourage voluntary transfer of all Gazan citizens,” he said. “We will offer them the opportunity to move to other countries because that land belongs to us.”

What does such “encouragement” look like? Based on the events of the past year, it is safe to say it does not involve reason and persuasion. What encouragement looks like is the “relentless” airstrikes on northern Gaza, as the UN has described the latest phase of the assault. The burning alive of patients in hospital beds, as happened to Sha’ban al-Dalou, with an IV line still connected to his arm. The targeting of children with drones, and then “double tapping”: sending a secondary strike to hit those who gathered around to help. The creation of conditions of starvation by blocking supplies. The ordering of medical and civil defence teams to leave Jabalia refugee camp. And designating several Al Jazeera reporters still working in the area as “terrorists”.

These are extreme strategies but broadly in keeping with an approach, practised across the occupied territories, of forcing the “voluntary” movement of Palestinians by scorching the earth on which they live. I recently visited several cities in the West Bank, and it was obvious how much the expansion of illegal Israeli settlements was secured by giving Palestinians no choice but to move – through intimidation, suffocating economic activity by sealing off market areas and populating them with checkpoints and soldiers, and the bureaucratic chicanery that licenses house demolitions and shop closures. The Palestinian city of Hebron is getting higher and denser, as people build apartments to relocate from the old historic area whose population is being thinned out, “voluntarily”, through measures that make the area unliveable. The Palestinians who remain find themselves locked into confrontations with settlers and soldiers, then branded security risks and killed for defying the plan.

There is a loud echo of this in Gaza. Prof Uzi Rabi, the head of the Moshe Dayan Center at Tel Aviv University, said in a radio interview in September that he hopes there would be a removal of “the entire civilian population from the north, and those who remain there will be lawfully sentenced as terrorists and subjected to a process of starvation or extermination”. This is in keeping with the so-called generals’ plan, a proposal to the Israeli government in early October by a number of retired generals, advocating giving Palestinians a few days to leave northern Gaza, then declaring it a military zone and killing and starving those who remain.

There is something paralysing about this new, blatant, even celebratory phase of the war. Something stunning in its unfathomable cruelty, which the rest of the world must swallow every morning. All the discursive and legalistic wins from the past year, all the protests and outcry and condemnations from international organisations, count for nothing if where we have ended up is a place where Palestinian children now carry their injured siblings for hours. Yet still it cannot, no, will not be stopped.

What Israel is confronting the world with now is not the knowledge that the system is broken, but that it is working precisely as designed. And that design is one where the self-interested calculations of the imperial powers and their allies are all that matters. Palestinians sit in the crosshairs not only of Israel, but of Arab regimes stabilised by their closeness with a US that demands quiescence when it comes to Israel’s actions. Of a weapons industry too lucrative to be curtailed. Of an American-run system that has bartered Palestinian lives in order to sponsor a hegemon in the region that will limit the power of Iran. And of an entire western, centrist-style of government that has refused to meaningfully curb Israel’s actions while chiding citizens who threaten to take their votes elsewhere.

“I also do know that many people who care about this issue care about bringing down the price of groceries, they also care about our democracy,” said Kamala Harris last week, when asked about voters who may go for a third party to register their anger at the administration’s Gaza policy. Do you want a fuller belly or no more dead Palestinians? What a choice.

We are catapulted back into history, where only might is right, and our votes and voices turn to dust. If the mangled bodies of babies have not moved a hair on Harris’s head, then what difference does it make if one votes for her or not, if one votes at all? How can one rationalise the unfolding erasure of a people in plain sight, find some way to incorporate it into a political logic where their suffering under another Democratic administration is still the lesser of two evils? How to put enough distance between yourself and Palestinians in Gaza, without accepting that some of your humanity dies along with that?

The last stage of grief is acceptance. But we can only accept what has already passed. In Gaza, the death is so constant, the devastation so relentless, the intention so explicit, there can be no acceptance – only rupture, withdrawal, disorientation. There can be no accommodation with what is happening. And as Israel reaches another sickening summit, what becomes undeniably clear is that the powers that let it all get this far cannot be reasoned with and cannot be shamed. They can only be rebelled against.