The Logic of Israeli #Violence | Jacobin
▻https://www.jacobinmag.com/2014/07/the-logic-of-israeli-violence
... describing such violence as aimless misses the underlying logic of Israel’s conduct throughout Operation Protective Edge and, indeed, for much of its history.
As Darryl Li points out, “Since 2005, #Israel has developed an unusual, and perhaps unprecedented, experiment in #colonial management in the Gaza Strip,” seeking to “isolate Palestinians there from the outside world, render them utterly dependent on external benevolence,” and at the same time “absolve Israel of responsibility toward them.”
This strategy, Li goes on to argue, is one way that Israel is working to maintain a Jewish majority in the territories it controls so that it can continue to deny equal rights for the rest of the population.
The suppression of Palestinian resistance is crucial to the success of the Israeli experiment.
(...)
The ability of a group to tell their own stories about themselves is a key aspect of their autonomous existence. Impeding the capacity of Palestinians to undertake these practices is what Israel does when it destroys the home of the poet Othman Hussein and that of the artist Raed Issa; when it kills cameraman Khaled Reyadh Hamad in Shujaiya and a driver for Gaza’s Media 24 news agency named Hamdi Shihab; when it attacks Arabic-speaking journalists at al-Jazeera and the BBC; or when it destroys the building that’s home to the Sawt al-Watan radio station.
Undermining the ability of a people to educate their young, to train them for work, and to teach them to think critically is furthermore a way of stifling their independent existence. This is the implication of the 133 schools that have been hit.
While destroying cultural and educational institutions keeps a people from symbolically re-producing itself, Israel’s mass murder of 229 Palestinian children and injuring of 1,949 others is the most grotesque, most literal impediment to the capacity of Palestinians to continue to exist as a group in Palestine going forward. That is what it means for Israel to have put 194,000 children in need of psychological support. That is what it means for maternity care to be restricted “for an estimated 45,000 pregnant women in the Gaza Strip, of whom approximately 5,000 have been displaced.”
That is what it means to obstruct family life by destroying or severely damaging the homes of 3,695 families and creating conditions that render it virtually impossible to conduct the day-to-day activities constitutive of generational continuity, such as causing 1.2 million people to have “no or very limited access to water or sanitation services due to damage to the electricity system or lack of fuel to run generators.”
That is what it means for the number of displaced people in UNRWA shelters to be “approaching 10% of the entire population of Gaza, with approximately 170,461 in 82 schools” that are “without adequate water sanitation and hygiene (WASH) infrastructure in place and without sufficient space.” That is what it means for all of Gaza’s 1.8 million people to be affected by the war.