Mowing the Lawn in Palestine

 

 

 I recently came across some telling observations about the murder and destruction in the Gaza Strip. Here’s a small sample:

From an Israeli soldier: “It was total destruction in there – the photos online are child’s play compared to what we saw in reality … I never saw anything like it.”

Another Israeli soldier: “The unfathomable number of dead on one of the sides, the unimaginable level of destruction, the way militant cells and people were regarded as targets and not as living things – that’s something that troubles me.”

Sarah Roy of Harvard University: “In the thirty years I have spent researching and writing about Gaza and her people, I can say without hesitation that I have never seen the kind of human, physical, and psychological destruction that I see here today.”  (1)

 

The quotes are telling because they all refer to the situation in Gaza in 2014, nine years before the current slaughter was supposedly “started” by the Hamas uprising of October 2023.

What the quotes above are describing is an earlier Israeli campaign called Operation Protective Edge, the destruction of which, though seemingly unprecedented at the time, absolutely pales in comparison to the current show of high-tech barbarity.

And Protective Edge was only one in a line of regularly scheduled operations that Israelis call “mowing the grass” –  a metaphor (obviously) for “short, sharp military operations to maintain a certain level of control over the area without committing to a long-term political solution, similar to how one would mow a lawn to keep it neat and tidy.”

The lawn-mowing events are conducted in both Palestinian enclaves, the Gaza Strip and the West Bank. Most are given clever names like Operation Cast Lead and Operation Hot Winter. All involve military sieges extremely disproportionate to the Palestinian crimes they are supposedly in response to.

Each lawn-mowing event also puts the two Palestinian enclaves into a tighter squeeze, their movements increasingly restricted, their access to food, water, medical care, and employment increasingly reduced, their homes and property increasingly destroyed and – in the case of the West Bank – their homes increasingly replaced by government-subsidized modern housing developments for Israeli Jewish “settlers” only.

This all ensures that sooner or later a Palestinian or group of Palestinians will again lash out violently, providing the Israeli military with a new excuse for another lawn mowing.

Recent operations in both Gaza and the West Bank are clearly more devastating than previous lawn-mowing operations. They are more like end games to finish the process of ethnic cleansing begun in 1948.

And this is why the often-parroted question, “does Israel Have a Right to Defend Itself?” is an absurdity.  Norman Finkelstein, an extremely serious scholar who has devoted his life to studying the Israel-Palestine conflict, suggests two other questions that are far more relevant. They are:

1.      “Does Israel have the right to use force to perpetuate an illegal occupation?” (“The answer is no.”) (2)

2.      “Do Palestinians have the right to symbolically resist slow death punctuated by periodic massacres, or is it incumbent upon them to lie down and die?” (3)

 

References

(1)   Norman Finkelstein, Gaza: An Inquest Into Its Martyrdom.” Oakland, CA, U. of California Press, 2018, pp, 216, 218.

(2)   Finkelstein, p. 235.

(3)   Finkelstein, p. 237