CounterPunch Exclusives

CounterPunch Exclusives

The Rubble of Gaza and the Ghosts of Tokyo

Image by Mohammed Ibrahim.

Amid the so-called “ceasefire,” as imperial grifters and disaster capitalists jockey to remake Gaza in their image and in accordance with their own interests, the genocide has not abated. In its current phase, while the killing continues daily, its defining feature is the deliberate infliction of conditions of life calculated to bring about the destruction of Palestinians in Gaza, in whole or in part. From the outset, Israel has pursued this objective through a policy of urbicide: the systematic annihilation of Gaza City, Khan Yunis, Rafah, Jabaliya, Beit Hanoun, Beit Lahiya, and Deir al-Balah.

Palestinians remain steadfast in their refusal to be erased. Yet Israel’s assault has rendered Gaza nearly uninhabitable. This devastation cannot be easily dismissed with antiseptic euphemisms such as “collateral damage,” a term long employed to sanitize the mass slaughter of civilians. Intent can be inferred from actions, and policy from sustained patterns of conduct.

Even setting aside the relentless stream of genocidal rhetoric, the campaign bears all the hallmarks of design. That Israel commands one of the most technologically advanced militaries in the world further erodes the pretense that those killed were unintended casualties rather than the victims of deliberate targeting, or at least a wanton indifference to civilian life.

Still, denial persists. U.S. Ambassador Mike Huckabee recently suggested that Israel has exercised extraordinary restraint. The record tells a different story. More than 81% of structures in Gaza are damaged or destroyed. Little has been spared: homes, hospitals, markets, and schools. In the first 16 months alone, Israel killed at least 75,000 Palestinians, precipitating a 34.9-year collapse in life expectancy in Gaza. This is a demographic shock rivaling or exceeding those witnessed in Bosnia and Rwanda. The true toll, with countless bodies entombed beneath the rubble, certainly surpasses the official numbers.

We have not seen such systematic urban destruction since World War II. Gaza, a captive enclave with a besieged population that is nearly half children and one of the most densely populated places on earth, has endured six times the explosive tonnage equivalent of the Hiroshima bomb. This comparison has not been lost on observers, from A-bomb survivors to Holocaust historians.

Yet Hiroshima and Nagasaki then, and Gaza today, would have been largely unimaginable without the firebombing of Tokyo that preceded it eighty-one years ago. On the night of March 9-10, 1945, American bombers turned a “paper city” into a hellish inferno, incinerating some 100,000 Japanese civilians in the single most destructive air raid in history. The attack did more than raze Tokyo; it marked the crossing of a moral Rubicon from which the U.S. has yet to return, setting the precedent for the normalization of the deliberate annihilation of urban centers as an acceptable instrument of modern warfare.

The End of the Peace and the Emergence of Air Power

The road to Tokyo began in the trenches. At the turn of the 20th century, war was largely conceived of as a conflict between conventional armies. Consequently, civilians comprised only 5 percent of the dead. The First World War marked a dramatic escalation, raising that figure to more than 15 percent of violent deaths. By World War II, civilians constituted roughly 65 percent. In Gaza today, more than 80 percent of those killed are civilians.

The initial leap in destructiveness, as the mechanized mass killing of World War I left vast swaths of the globe strewn with mutilated bodies of a lost generation, produced contradictory responses. For many, the senseless slaughter made clear that armed conflict could no longer be seen as politics by other means. Whatever rationales........

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