22.05.2025

Yet another victim of Israel’s ‘plan to defeat Hamas’

Death by degrees

It is not just Netanyahu and his far right coalition government. Ethnic cleansing and genocide are built into the DNA of the Zionist project. And, of course, the British state is fully complicit, explains Eddie Ford

With Operation Gideon’s Chariots - approved unanimously, of course, by the security cabinet - the genocidal nature of the Israeli state has become obvious to most thinking people, even if most establishment politicians are reluctant to admit it. Even the name has ominous implications: ‘Gideon’ invokes the biblical warrior who led a chosen few to annihilate the Midianites - an ancient Arab people - making the operation redolent of divine vengeance and ethnic conquest, and clearly meant to frame mass slaughter as a righteous cause.

Just as obviously, the plan is a formal blueprint for permanent occupation, mass displacement and annihilatory violence against the besieged and displaced Palestinian civilian population. A second Nakba that could be far worse than the first one, which over 1947 to 1949 saw approximately 750,000 people fleeing their homes in terror from the advancing paramilitaries and then the new Israeli state’s military - there were numerous massacres, hundreds of Palestinian villages destroyed, or depopulated and repopulated, with new Hebrew names, by incoming Jewish settlers.¹ During the cabinet’s discussion of the operation’s biblical name, Benjamin Netanyahu reportedly said about the Gazans: “We want them to die alone.”

So far, information about Operation Gideon’s Chariots have come from a leak, so we do not know the exact details. But we can see the evidence in front of our eyes. There is not only talk of taking “total control” of the Gaza Strip, but also of dividing it into three civilian zones - and if you want to go from one zone to another you have to pass through a checkpoint, which obviously gives Israel the power to decide who will be let through.

This is all supposed to be part of the Zionist plan to ‘defeat Hamas’, even though Netanyahu must have been told by the generals that it is an impossibility, especially as Hamas enjoys support in the West Bank and in the Palestinian diaspora as the leading resistance force. In that sense, it is not dissimilar to the IRA in Northern Ireland: it was not a bunch of isolated fanatics, but an organisation deeply rooted in the population.

From March 2 until a few days ago all aid to the strip was cut off in a blockade, with widespread reports of people living on the edge of starvation - a conscious Israeli policy to let people die or ready them for mass expulsion.

Criminally, Israel has forbidden aid agencies from storing food and medication in warehouses, requiring that all food entering Gaza be taken directly to its final location - presumably to maintain the fiction that Hamas is ‘stealing’ the aid and hence must be frustrated. In a pure display of cynicism, Netanyahu recently issued a video statement that he had decided to allow “minimal” aid into Gaza, because “we cannot reach a point of starvation for practical and diplomatic reasons” - genocide by degrees. At least a fifth of the population is threatened with starvation. The UN’s humanitarian chief, Tom Fletcher, was interviewed on May 20 on the BBC’s Today programme about the “starvation crisis” in Gaza - he estimated that 14,000 babies could die within 48 hours if aid does not reach them.

We have expressed surprise numerous times before in this publication at the relatively low number of official deaths reported so far by the Hamas health authorities. According to them, the figure of over 53,000 has now being reached, which is being added to every day - particularly since Operation Gideon’s Chariots. But if you read reports from The Lancet, once you take into account bodies still buried under the rubble, premature deaths from injuries, and so on, the truer count is nearer 70,000-plus. Nevertheless, we seem to be on the edge of a qualitative leap in terms of deaths.

Of course, people do not die normally from actual starvation itself. Thus a doctor will not write ‘starvation’ on the death certificate - the chances are that the person would die of something else. If people are denied food, their whole body deteriorates and they become more vulnerable to diseases that they would normally be expected to shake off. Eg, diarrhea, pneumonia, and measles.

Acceptance

You cannot call it unanimity, but there is very widespread acceptance amongst judicial experts - including some on the conservative end of the political spectrum - that what is going on amounts to genocide. It is not just progressive academics or Amnesty International making such statements - though, of course, the latter has been blasted many times by Israel for its ‘anti-Semitic’ bias.²

For instance, the Dutch newspaper NRC interviewed seven renowned genocide and holocaust researchers from six countries - including Israel - all of whom described the Gazan campaign as genocidal, saying many of their peers shared this assessment.³ Israeli historian Raz Segal has declared that “there is no counterargument that takes into account all the evidence”, and describes the blockade of Gaza as a “textbook case of genocide” connected to the original Nakba. For his assessment, a job offer to Segal was cancelled by the University of Minnesota, where he was about to be appointed head of the Center for Holocaust and Genocide Studies - the result of a campaign by the pro-Israeli Jewish Community Relations Council of Minnesota and the Dakotas.

As NRC notes, even ‘cautious voices’ have changed.⁴ Shmuel Lederman of the Open University of Israel used to oppose the “genocide label” until Netanyahu flouted the International Court of Justice’s January 2024 order to prevent genocide by allowing emergency aid into Gaza. Lederman finally began to see the Israeli government as genocidal after the IDF seized control of the Rafah crossing last year, cutting off the only humanitarian aid route, as international experts warned famine was imminent and as analysts warned the true death toll in Gaza could ultimately reach 200,000 - which is more than plausible.

Genocide studies as an academic discipline does not treat the issue as a binary - an on/off light - but more like a dimmer switch. We need to grasp genocide as a phenomenon not by looking at it after the event, but during the event. The fact of the matter is that if you deny food, do not have in place proper sanitation or electricity supplies, then you are moving in the direction of genocide. Anything else is apologetics - an area where Britain is indeed complicit. It has provided diplomatic and military cover for Israel, supporting its ‘right to self-defence’ - ie, to commit genocide.

If we look at the top rung of the Israeli airforce, it is the American-designed F35 - a fifth generation fighter bomber costing between $80 million to $109 million apiece. However, F-35s rely on a complex supply chain, the second biggest source being British-based companies such as Rolls Royce, BAE and GE Aviation. In total something like 15% of F-35s - the rear fuselage, swivel nozzles, electronics, and ejection seats - are manufactured in the UK. So Britain is enabling Israel’s killing machine.

Shouting

A few MPs could be heard shouting “genocide” in the House of Commons after David Lammy, the foreign secretary, announced that the government was suspending its trade negotiations with Israel and summoned the Israeli ambassador, Tzipi Hotovely, to the foreign office.

Lammy told parliament that the Gaza blockade was “morally unjustifiable” and went on to say that Israeli finance minister Bezalel Smotrich had spoken of Israeli forces “cleansing” Gaza and “destroying what’s left” of Palestinians, who were “being relocated to third countries” - perhaps a reference to purported US plans to permanently send up to a million Palestinians to war-torn Libya.⁵ The foreign secretary thundered about this being “monstrous”, “repellent” and a form of “extremism”.

Pusillanimous as ever though, Lammy did not mention genocide, or even ethnic cleansing, even though as a graduate of Harvard Law School he must be aware of the law surrounding these issues and the thoroughly illegal nature of what Smotrich was proposing. More to the point, he totally fails to understand why Israel is a genocidal project. It is not because of Benjamin Netanyahu and his coalition, nor Donald Trump. It was Labour Zionism that oversaw the first Nakba and the Six Day War - that saw the seizure of the Gaza Strip and the West Bank, and also the Golan Heights - which has since been annexed, along with East Jerusalem. Contrary to what we are often told, what is unfolding with Operation Gideon’s Chariots is not a case of some rightwing aberrant - it is Zionism, left, right and centre: the rest is just a question of when and where.

We can read it in Theodor Herzl’s 1896 The Jewish state, which you could regard as the foundational document of modern or political Zionism.⁶ Though some Zionists now like to dress themselves up in the language of anti-colonialism and national liberation, in the late 19th century they had no such compunctions - they were quite frank and open: this was a colonisation project, and a vanguard of farmers and labourers would build a new Israel. For this an imperialist sponsor was needed, as Herzl was explicit about. Then the indigenous Arab population could be displaced by one means or another - buy them out or persuade them to leave using other means.

Revisionist Zionist Ze’ev Jabotinsky wrote a famous 1923 essay, in which he said that Zionism must “proceed regardless of the native population” and “develop only under the protection of a power that is independent of the native population - behind an iron wall, which the native population cannot breach”.⁷ And you are peddling fairy stories to believe anything else - something today’s revisionist Zionists, including Netanyahu, accuse Labor Zionism of doing.

That is why the current situation is dangerous. Yes, Israel is obviously a racist project, though just saying that can get you suspended or expelled from the Labour Party - but it is more than that. It is actually predicated on ethnic cleansing and eliminating the original people of the land being colonised. So the left must avoid deluding itself into thinking that victory is inevitable, because Israel has an apartheid system as previously in South Africa, so we should expect an equivalent outcome. The model of colonisation is different, even if certain factors are overlapping.

Israel is not an exploitation colony based on screwing the native labour, like in South Africa or under the British Raj in India - where colonial officials oversaw a vast Indian workforce. Rather, it is modelled on North America and Australia (and not least Tasmania, where they got rid of every last aboriginal). It is what Karl Kautsky called a “work colony” - although Moshé Machover has argued in these pages and elsewhere that it is more accurate to label it an exclusionary colony.⁸ Sure, you have Palestinian labour at the margins, but this is not what defines Israel’s political economy - it relies on providing Jewish jobs for Jewish workers.

That is what both Labor Zionism and revisionist Zionism advocate and defend.