From the river to the sea

This slogan is a trope for denial of the right of the modern state of Israel to exist. Its use implies support for reclaiming for Palestinian Arabs the lands extending from the River Jordan to the Mediterranean Sea, formerly occupied by them but lost at the 'Nakba' or 'Catastrophe' of 1948 that saw them displaced from their historic homeland to create the post-war state of Israel.

Israeli Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, has now renounced the so-called 'two state solution', espoused by the United States and United Nations as the answer to the problem of co-existence of the two communities in territory currently comprising Israel, the West Bank and Gaza Strip. This effectively flips the slogan in favour of the Israelis.

The beleaguered White House national security adviser, John Kirby, told reporters onboard Air Force One after Netanyahu’s controvdrsial speech "there will be a post-conflict Gaza, no reoccupation of Gaza”. But this is dangerously ambiguous. While he  clearly meant that Israeli forces will never reoccupy the territory it could be interpreted (and certainly will be by Netanyahu and his rightwing supporters) as meaning that the displaced Gazan Palestinians will never regain the Strip and that it will be Israel that claims all the land 'from the river to the sea', not the Palestinians, This was self-evidently Netanyahu's intention from the outset, as I wrote at the beginning of the conflict last October, which now seems an eternity ago.

In order to achieve his objective, however, Netanyahu will either have to exterminate the remaining Palestinian population now huddling wretchedly in the south of the Strip around the city of Khan Younis , hard against the border with Egypt, or hope that Egypt will finally relent and open the Rafah Crossing to allow the Palestinians to seek refuge in the Sinai Peninsular. At present he seems determined to carry on shelling the southern portion of the Gaza Strip regardless of the mounting civilian casualties, mainly women and children, until he takes empty possession of the Strip - empty, that is, except for the thousands of Gazan dead.

In my first piece I referred to this tactic as being like shooting fish in a barrel. That might have seemed a callous, dehumanising metaphor but it is precisely what Netanyahu is now doing - how else is one to describe it? Well, one could call it by its proper name, genocide, but we are not supposed to use such language in the context of Israel's actions, however outrageous, given the Jewish people's horrifying experience of the Holocaust. 

But, precisely because of that experience, why would the state of Israel seek to inflict such appalling treatment on others? Is it just a matter of numbers of dead? Do two monstrous wrongs really make a right? In what way, from the moral perspective, is Netanyahu's systematic destruction of a captive people substantively different from other genocides in history? No, I'm with South Africa on this one.

If the cap fits, Israel must wear it.

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