Israel's "War of Annihilation"

It's written in the scriptures / And it's not some idle claim
You want it darker / We kill the flame
They're lining up the prisoners / And the guards are taking aim
I struggled with some demons / They were middle-class and tame
I didn't know I had permission / To murder and to maim
— Leonard Cohen

Herem

by Walid Khalidi; published in April of this year. The noted author is nearly 100. I think he was the first Palestinian who was not charactured that I ever saw on TV when I was a kid. A scholar at Harvard saying what my dad had been telling me and what the major media was avoiding. But his work seemed to have no effect on policy. His books included All That Remains: The Palestinian Villages Occupied and Depopulated by Israel in 1948, From Haven to Conquest: Readings in Zionism and the Palestine Problem Until 1948, and Before Their Diaspora: A Photographic History of The Palestinians 1876-1948.This piece is republished here without edits.

The merciless pulverization of Gaza, now in its sixth month, has nothing to do with Self-Defense.

• What it has to do with is the early Hebrew concept of HEREM, a concept rooted in Biblical texts.

HEREM  is the concept of ritualistic consecration by total annihilation of a human (enemy) group.

• It is today the guiding concept in Gaza for Netanyahu’s ultra-Orthodox Haredi coalition partners, and apparently for Netanyahu himself.

• Soon after the 7 October attack, Netanyahu declared: “Our Holy Bible says you must remember what Amalek has done to us. We do remember.” 

• The Amalekites incurred God’s wrath because, at Refidim, (in the Negev) they obstructed the Israelites’ passage to the Holy Land after their escape from Egypt.

• In consequence, God pledged the annihilation of the Amalekites and the blotting out of their remembrance from generation to generation, including every man, woman, and child and  their animals  (Exodus 17: 8-16, Deuteronomy 25: 17-19).

• There are several other examples of the annihilation of whole groups of peoples in the Bible by God’s command (though not for all time) viz the Great Flood; Sodom and Gomorrah; the Plague of Egypt’s first born; the Seven Nations of Canaan.

• There are also several examples of the annihilation of entire peoples (without God’s command): The Hittites; the Amorites (King Sihon); the people of Balsham (King Og); the people of Jericho; and the priests of NOB*.

• There is thus no dearth of precedents for Netanyahu and his Haredi partners to invoke. 

Concurrently, according to the Halacha (the legal system of Classical Judaism), warfare can be classified in two broad categories:

a) Wars of Reshut (i.e., Wars of Discretion or Choice). 

These are Milhemet Kibbush, i.e., Wars of Conquest, 

b) Mitzva War, i.e., Wars of Obligation. These are Milhemet HEREM  i.e. Wars of Annihilation.

c) The 1982 invasion of Lebanon, for example, was described by Menachem Begin, then Prime Minister of Israel, as a War of Choice—Milhemet Kibbush, not a war of annihilation.

• Even so, 17,000 Palestinian and Lebanese, mostly civilians, were killed during the 1982 Lebanese war.

• The current war in Gaza is a Milhemet HEREM par excellence

Against this background the Israeli army meretriciously maintains that it adheres to what it calls “the purity of arms”.

This is about as credible as calling Genghis Khan Ghandian.

What the Israeli Army is most adept at is the terrorization of civilian populations & the devastation of their infrastructures and means of livelihood.

• The Israeli Army’s first accomplishment was the 1948 forced Exodus of 60% of the Palestinian population – the prelude to the establishment of Israel itself.

• Since then, the IDF (Israel Defence Forces) –the deception begins with the designation—have visited their neighbours with the devastation of civilian life & infrastructure on all of Israel’s borders.

-   In Lebanon, repeatedly to this day.

- In Syria, with the ethnic cleansing of the Golan in 1967.

- In the Jordan Valley until the Treaty with Jordan.

- In Sinai & the Suez region until the Treaty with Egypt.

The Israeli Army’s singular victory in 1967 was achieved not by combat but by stealth in the Pearl Harbour attack on the Egyptian Airforce parked on its runways.

The expertness of the Israeli Army in pulverizing soft civilian targets has been on display in Gaza for the past six months for the whole world to witness.

 Indeed, despite its secular leadership the Israeli Army is itself deeply imbued with the concept of HEREM.

This goes all the way back to the creation by the British of the nucleus of the Jewish  army during the Palestinian Revolt (1936-1939) against Britain.

• The person most responsible for molding the Jewish army was a British officer Orde Wingate, a fanatical evangelical.

• Wingate’s hero and model was the Biblical Gideon, son of Joash (Judges 6:11), whose God commissioned task was to deliver Israel from the Midianites and Amalekites (Judges 6:3)

• Ben Gurion writes: “….Wingate’s doctrines were taken over by the IDF established after the birth of the Jewish state”**

• Moshe Dayan corroborates: “In some sense every leader of the Israeli army is a disciple of Wingate. He gave us our technique, he was the inspiration of our tactics, he was our dynamic***

• More telling is Ben Gurion concept of the “Two Wars” fought bv the Jewish people since the Exodus

1) The First War against the Amalekites at Refidim (in the Negev) after the Exodus. (See above)

2) The Second War against Egypt in 1948 to conquer the Negev.