By James E. Jennings*
ATLANTA, Georgia | 12 August 2024 (IDN) — At a carnival or county fair the chances are you’ll be accosted by a huckster with a shell game—“Step right up—try your luck!” It’s a game of distraction, and you’re a sucker if you think you can beat the quick fingers of the trickster and win. You are sure to lose.
Nobody would believe that the same game is happening on the international stage before the eyes of the world, fooling everybody. Yet in Palestine that trick is taking place right now. What if the war in Gaza is actually a subterfuge for Israel’s founding dream of owning Palestine “From the River to the Sea” and destroying the “Two-State Solution” once for all?
That makes a certain amount of sense and explains several irrational things about the Gaza War. First, why have the devastating attacks on civilians in Gaza continued so long when everybody from the White House in Washington to the UN, to protesters in eighty nations and even many Israelis are urging a cease fire?
Why too have Israel’s Likud party extremists, led by the trickster Netanyahu, continued their genocidal attacks on Gaza when they could have long ago secured a cease fire and the release of the remaining hostages as HAMAS is willing to do—and crowds in Tel Aviv and Jerusalem are begging them to do?
And why kill chief HAMAS hostage negotiator Ismail Haniyeh in Tehran if the goal was to bring the captives home? That has simply prolonged the war and left the hostages in limbo.
The only answer that makes sense is that the inhumane, bloody, lengthy, and unnecessary bombing of Gaza’s desperate civilians is a deliberate distraction, a smoke screen, a shell game to hide the main action. If so, Israel’s goal for the Gaza War is not to free the hostages but to drag it out—to keep it going.
It’s designed to turn the world’s eyes away from what is really going on—the unprecedentedly bloody crushing of Palestinian resistance by a full-fledged military assault on West Bank towns that will at last guarantee Israel’s complete political sovereignty over historic Palestine.
If that is indeed the case, the plan has so far succeeded. Nobody in the international arena is making a fuss about it despite 75 years of UN resolutions. Many of the Palestinians in the West Bank who have resisted Israeli occupation, including many innocent civilians just minding their own business, are either dead or in Israeli prisons. “Extra-judicial killing” is legalese for “Murder, murder, murder most foul.” The one-state solution will soon be a fait accompli.
Israel’s announced goals were to destroy HAMAS and rescue the hostages. But the idea of making Gaza unlivable for the 2.3 million mostly refugee Palestinians who still cling to life there and to drive them into the Sinai desert is also a utopian dream of Israel’s far right settlers.
Netanyahu’s publicly announced goals are in fact secondary. The real dream of the Likud Party has always been the Colonial-Settler notion of making Israel racially homogenous “From the River to the Sea.” The real action is on the West Bank.
Continuing the pointless bombing of Gaza’s tortured people at this late date is just a convenient distraction from the main goal of annexing the West Bank as part of “Eretz Israel” and declaring eternal political sovereignty over the area that was supposed to be the future Palestinian state.
Killing X number of people in Gaza has already proven to be a matter of indifference to Israel’s thuggish Likud government. Bombing Gaza’s civilian continuously and unnecessarily for ten months, killing tens of thousands of non-combatants—mostly women, children, and the aged—is like stepping on ants to Israeli Likudniks. “Cockroaches in a bottle,” was the phrase used by former Israeli Prime Minister Golda Meir.
Previous Israeli governments have found that it’s unrealistic to try to live in Gaza and govern the people of by force of arms. That has proven to be impossible. Israel has fought 15 wars with Gaza and has occupied the territory repeatedly but withdrew under the Oslo accords in 1994 and again in 2005 when it dismantled 21 settlements. HAMAS gained control of the Strip from the PLO in 2007.
Egypt, already burdened with millions of impoverished people and fearful of political unrest, refuses to let Palestinians from Gaza into their territory. Consequently, the IDF “Defense Forces” are still bombing the unfortunate people of Gaza day after day and night after night for ten months, with no end in sight.
Schools, hospitals, and even refugee tents have been struck repeatedly. That is militarily nonsensical, and very much “Over the top” in President Biden’s understatement of the century.
Directly killing over 40.000 Gazans and then enabling the unnecessary deaths of up to 180,000 people overall—particularly women, children, and the aged, as the British Medical Journal the Lancet, has recently charged—is apparently an acceptable price for the Netanyahu government to make sure Gaza is completely crushed and that nobody remembers the West Bank.
They have already demonstrated that killing any number of people is acceptable. It has served as a convenient smoke screen for crushing resistance on the West Bank—in short, for killing the idea of a Palestinian State.
These facts suggest that the main objective for continuing the war, when even many Israelis demand its end as a way to free the hostages, is to enable the Likud Party to carry out its no holds barred military control of West Bank Palestine.
Israel’s de facto annexation of the few Palestinian areas allowed by the tortuous and deceptive “Oslo Process” on the West Bank, plus the massive and populous Jewish settlements there, will end once for all any dream of a “Two State Solution.”
The shell game of distraction continues. Is anybody fooled?
*James E. Jennings, PhD is President of Conscience International http://www.conscienceinternational.org/ and Executive Director of US Academics for Peace. [IDN-InDepthNews]
Photo: Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu held a map of “The New Middle East” without Palestine during his 22 September 2023 address to the United Nations General Assembly in New York. Credit: United Nations.
