Israel’s (and America’s) War on Gaza and Language

Who's the terrorist, and how's Israel's months-long one-sided assault on Gaza a war?

Israel’s destruction of Gaza with thousands of 2000-lb bombs is reminiscent of WWII (CNN screen grab)

Ever since the 9/11 attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon in September 2001, the US and many other western countries allied with the US have been debasing the English and other languages, by using the terms “terrorist” and “terrorism” to apply to any attack that seeks to kill people, and not just civilians but the armed forces of America and other allied nations. 

This application of the term to fighters, typically from poorer, less modern countries that are under the control or  repression by those more powerful nations, either economically and politically or militarily is not just a stylistic offense. It distorts the reality of what is happening and is promoted by governments in Washington and Jerusalem to gain public support for military policies that would otherwise be not so popular.

A good early and long-lasting example of this was the US application of the term “terrorists” to the Taliban in Afghanistan, and to irregular fighters in Iraq who fought for years against US troops occupying Iraq following the US invasion of that country and ouster of its government in 2003-4. In fact, the Taliban were the government of most of Afghanistan when the US invaded and ousted them and then became “freedom fighters” seeking to oust the foreign military occupying their land. Similarly the fighters battling the US army of occupation in Iraq after Saddam Hussein’s ouster were freedom fighters seeking to oust the foreign invader.  

Now we see an analogous situation in the case of Israel’s obscenely one-sided “war” on Gaza, where both Israel and the US, its sole political and diplomatic enabler, funder and arms supplier, refer to Hamas fighters as “terrorists,” always harking back to the vicious slaughter of 1200 Israelis, mostly civilians but including several hundred Israeli troops whose job was guarding the wall containing Palestinians to Gaza (making therm legitimate targets and captives). 

  It does seem clear that the attack by Hamas fighters who broke through those walls, fences and minefields that for over 17 years have cut off the territory of Gaza from Israel, Egypt and the world, creating what amounts to a walled-off ghetto of 2.3 million Palestinians, was a deliberate act of terror. It was likely designed to sabotage what looked like a looming mutual diplomatic recognition between Israel and Saudi Arabia. But that act(a war crime to be sure), which killed mostly civilians including women and children, is no more or less an act of terror than the almost routine Israeli aerial bombardment of apartment buildings, homes and offices in Gaza over the years meant to “take out” Hamas military leaders or weapons caches regardless of the cost to civilians.  

It has famously been said that the only difference between the  bombing of an open-air  market or wedding party by a Third World militant group and by the US or Israeli military force is that the former uses a car bomb or suicide vest while the latter use an F-16, F-35 or B-52.

Hamas has no aircraft to qualify its attacks on targets in Israel as acts of war. The organization  has in recent years acquired or constructed rockets capable of reaching Israeli targets, though with minimum targeting ability, but these are still called “terror attacks” by Israel and the US. Meanwhile, the leveling of Gaza City and most of the rest of the northern half of Gaza, and increasingly in southern Gaza where virtually all Palestinians have now been driven, is being called part of a military campaign. This despite the fact that this “military campaign” has illegally targeted hospitals, schools and United Nations facilities as well as countless mosques, churches, residential areas and apartment buildings known to be sheltering desperate civilian families. These Israeli bombings and shelling by tanks and howitzers have over 11 weeks, killed 20,500 people representing over 1% of Gaza’s entire population, with most of the victims being children and women, not Hamas fighters — as well as over 60 journalists. (The percentage of the population killed could be closer to 1.5% if those dying from the lack of food and clean water, and those missing, buried and assuredly. by now dead under the rubble of concrete structures collapsed by Israeli bombings are added in.) 

It is absolutely necessary to acknowledge the context of the Hamas Oct. 7 strategy in this crisis, not to justify it asa war crime, but to understand why it was done and why it will happen again and again. 

Hamas,  with the secret support and funding of the Israeli government, replaced the Palestinian Authority as the elected government in Gaza 17 years ago after which Israel began a total blockade of the territory it conquered from Egypt and has had responsibility for since 1967. From that point on, it controlled all supplies of food, water, fuel and medicine and most of the electricity allowed into into the territory, for which as the occupier or the 140-square-mile region, it was legally responsible. With the blockade that was established by Israel in 2007, Gaza essentially essentially became something between a prison camp and a colony. This naturally led to nearly two decades of militant opposition to Israel within Gaza, primarily from Hamas, which was the de facto and de jure  government of the territory and a militant resistance organization.

The deliberate misidentification of Hamas as a terrorist organization, by both Israel and the US, much like the similar misidentification of the Taliban as a terrorist organization by the US, has led many Americans who increasingly tell pollsters they oppose US military actions and military aid to countries that violate the Geneva Conventions on war in many parts of the world, to support the US diplomatic and military support of Israel in its war on Gaza. 

One reason many if not most of the protests in the US against Israel’s brutal assault on Gaza, (which Brown University’s Watson Institute Project on Costs of War has described as reminiscent of the US bombings of Germany and Japan in World War II and which AP has termed “one of the most devastating military campaigns in modern history’), have been led by American Jews and Rabbis, is that these are people who have an understanding of the repression Palestinians have endued not just in Gaza but in the Israeli-occupied West Bank and in Israel itself for generations. They know the reason that for decades in face of IDF violence and repression, militant Palestinian resistance has continued. 

A first step in ending this horror is a cease-fire to halt the killing of Palestinians and to end the captivity of civilian hostages taken to Gaza by Hamas fighters on October 7. A second step must be an end, both in the US government and in the US media, to the endless mislabeling of Hamas fighters as terrorists. They are no more terrorists than are the Israeli soldiers shooting children in the West Bank or bombing apartment buildings in Gaza or American soldiers and pilots destroying entire cities in Iraq and Syria, or the US ppilots bombing peasants in the rice paddies of South Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia.

Palestinians, no less than Jewish Israelis have a right to self-determination and self defense, and if they rise up to fight for that right and to end to the \occupation, repression and control by the self-described “Jewish state” of Israel and its so-called Israeli “Defense” Force, they are exercising that right.  And until that right is recognized and is actively supported by the United States, Israel and the Palestinians will have no peace, and the entire Arab region of North Africa and the Middle East will be a region of instability and war. 

And while we’re correcting language in this crisis, let’s have an and to calling what is happening in Gaza a “war” between Israel and Hamas. The Palestinians confined within the walls of Gaza, as well as the Hamas militants fighting there, are captives of Israel. Their battle against IDF troops is more akin to a prison riot nd break-out than a war. What Israel is engaged in is an effort to crush a prison camp revolt.

But it’s worse that, both because of the size of the “prison camp” of Gaza, and because they generally aren’t children in prisons or prison camps. In Gaza they represent 40 percent of the casualties.

NOTE (12/30/2023): Two pro-Palestinian peace groups, one in Oakland, California and the other in Tacoma, Washington, have blockaded and impeded the loading and departure of a Navy supply vessel, the Cape Orlando, after a whistleblower alerted the two groups that it would be delivering US weapons, including white phosphorus bombs and shells, to the Israeli military. In a report by Al Jazeera, Patricia Gonzalez, a member of the Water Warriors of the Puyallup Tribe in Washington and one of seven indigenous people who paddled a ceremonial canoe around the ship, said she relates to the Palestinians’ history of experiencing violence and displacement. “When it comes to genocide, we definitely understand that,” she said. “It touches our hearts really close. Our ancestors went through that, and we’re affected by it every single day. And we would never wish hat upon another nation.”