Politicide in Gaza: How Israel's Far Right Won the War

Key takeaways

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Reading notes

• At the end of the fifty-day Israeli offensive on the Gaza Strip, neither Israel nor Hamas had achieved their stated goals there: the armed resistance was still standing (despite the massive damage the territory and its people sustained) and the crippling Israeli siege was not lifted.

• Israel’s far right that emerged the victor.

• Not only did religious nationalists and secular extremists outflank the right-wing establishment, they justified the brutality of their actions in the military battle zone with messianic pronouncements, and fanned the flames of genocide in the public arena.

• The far right’s wartime success represented the culmination of a strategy Israeli sociologist Baruch Kimmerling has called “politicide,” a coinage denoting the partial or total destruction of a community of people with a view to denying them self-determination.

• For Israel’s right-wing rulers and the future leaders of its military, there was no doubt as to what the practice of politicide achieved during Operation Protective Edge: Haneen Zoabi had been silenced; the leftists were leaving; Gideon Levy could not walk through Tel Aviv without a bodyguard; Palestinians of East Jerusalem were too terrified to travel outside their neighbourhoods; and Gaza had been literally flattened. The “people of Israel” had gotten their revenge.

• Meanwhile, Colonel Winter re-armed and readied for the next round. “I cannot promise you, like the song does, that this will be the last war,” he declared, “but I promise that this war, which is so just, will push the next war a good few years away.”