Since the 7 October attack, Israel has adopted genocide as a population-centric counterinsurgency strategy. While this follows Israel’s historical perpetration of ethnic cleansing during the Nakba in 1948, the objectives of these two events are distinct.
During the Nakba, ethnic cleansing was used as a tactic to displace Palestinians from their lands to make space for the new European settlers. This displacement was a fundamental part of the settler-colonial project, as without it, establishing a new colony would have been impossible.
However, what has been unfolding in Gaza in the past year, especially in the north and in Jabalia recently, is a genocide aimed at the total subjugation of Palestinians, forcing them to surrender.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has openly stated that the goal is to destabilize Gaza through war. This gruesome counterinsurgency tactic is reminiscent of the methods of classic colonialism.
During the British colonialism of Palestine, the British army committed many atrocities against Palestinians.
One of the most infamous eras was under Major Orde Wingate, who formed the Special Night Squad to terrorize Palestinians into submission during the Arab Revolt.
This squad, consisting of British soldiers and Zionist paramilitary forces from the Haganah, laid the foundation for the fighting doctrine of the Israeli occupation forces.
The Special Night Squad engaged in torture, indiscriminate killing, home raiding, and the destruction of property. These activities aimed to isolate the rebels from their communities, making it easy to eliminate the resistance to British colonialism.
During the Arab Revolt, British forces destroyed over 5,000 homes to intimidate Palestinians and punish them for resisting and not collaborating against the rebels. These criminal activities served as a model for the Israeli military to utilize against Palestinians since its formation.
Carrot or stick
The main objective of developing population-centric counterinsurgency tactics is based on the realization that colonial armies couldn’t defeat rebels in guerrilla warfare.
Whenever a rebel is killed, another rises to take their place. Recognizing the importance of local popular support in the sustainability and longevity of the insurgency against colonialism, colonial armies developed strategies to drive a wedge between insurgents and their communities. These strategies followed the carrot-and-stick approach.
After the Second World War, western colonial powers, especially the US, developed counterinsurgency policies towards the colonized subjects, utilizing the “winning hearts and minds” motto.
For example, the US Agency for International Development (USAID) was created to serve as a soft-power tool for American imperialism during the Vietnam War.
Since President John F Kennedy’s establishment of USAID, the US has drawn a clear distinction between combatants and civilians to achieve its imperialist goals to lessen the wrath of its victims.
The role of USAID was to provide healthcare, educational assistance programs, economic aid, and agricultural development programs to minimize the influence insurgents had on their populations.
This method was used in Vietnam, Afghanistan, Iraq, and Palestine.
Similarly, post 9/11, the US created a dichotomy of “good” v “bad” Muslims, based on their stance toward American imperialism. This framework was imported to Palestine after the Second Intifada as part of a counterinsurgency strategy designed to create a division between the West Bank and Gaza.
‘Good’ vs ‘bad’ Palestinians
With US General Keith Dayton’s efforts to create a “new Palestinian breed” that didn’t see Israel as their enemy, the West Bank saw an economic boom to bribe its residents against the resistance. Consequently, Palestinians in the West Bank were pushed to be “good” Palestinians since Gaza was besieged, suffocated, and bombed constantly because its residents elected to remain as “bad” Palestinians.
Despite the cruel 17-year blockade, Gaza wasn’t frazzled. On the contrary, the Palestinian resistance movements were able to continue to build their strength, war after war. Resistance movements adapted to the closure of borders and the flooding of their tunnels with Egypt, and intensified their manufacturing of weapons.
The “good” vs “bad” Palestinian framing was ineffective in getting the local communities in Gaza to reject resistance. After the Arab Spring in 2011, even Fatah tried provoking protests against Hamas to topple its regime.
Without being able to eliminate Hamas or its popular support, since 2006, Israel has used short wars on Gaza as a tool to contain Hamas and other factions. War after war, Israel felt that it was able to deter Hamas for a few years, especially when coupled with a huge death toll and massive destruction that required healing and rebuilding.
While Israel kept the blockade as tight as possible, especially after the 2013 Egyptian coup, that containment strategy guided Israel’s expectations and gave it a playbook on how to deal with any threat coming from Gaza, as all the wars between 2006 and 2022 were similar in how they started and ended.
However, following the 7 October attack, Israel found itself – beyond the initial shock – unable to repurpose this playbook to deal with this unprecedented event.
Their usual counterinsurgency methods suddenly seemed inappropriate to reduce or subdue the impact of the attack. At that moment, Israel appeared to realize that its containment strategy had also failed to prevent such attacks.
Furthermore, the 7 October attack didn’t just undermine Israeli deterrence and counterinsurgency measures – it exposed the weakness of the Israeli security apparatus in front of resistance movements. It was also considered an existential threat to Israel and its military supremacy claim, undermining American hegemony and interests in the region.
Thus, the US provided unprecedented political, financial, legal, military, and public relations support and cover to save Israel from losing its edge as a client state for the American empire.
As a result, the US and Israel were forced to revisit their counterinsurgency tactics.
Rather than isolating the resistance movements from their communities, they decided to blur the line between them. Hence, in Gaza, Israel began executing tactics similar to those used in its Plan Dalet, which orchestrated the forced expulsion of Palestinians from their homes in 1948 and imposed a huge cost on Palestinians for daring to rebel against its control and to deter them from ever thinking of repeating it.
Jabalia’s defiance
A massive attack that truly humiliated the military might of Israel required a monstrous response – carnage. Since October 2023, Israel has been using genocide as a population-centric counterinsurgency tool to completely eliminate the resistance and its popular support. This mechanism isn’t about isolating insurgents from their communities, but rather the elimination of them both.
Since the beginning of the ground invasion, Israel has tried to make northern Gaza uninhabitable by destroying all aspects of life.
Besides the non-stop bombardment of homes and infrastructure, Israel has starved and bombed hospitals and shelters to deny Gazans any sense of safety or hope of living. Nonetheless, the people of the north, especially those in the Jabalia camp, have refused to be displaced and have stood their ground.
Residents of Jabalia, who prefer to call it Mu’askar (encampment) rather than Mukhayyam (camp), to emphasize the importance of resistance rather than accepting their fate as mere refugees, didn’t only provide the spark for the First Intifada, they have been resilient against Israeli displacement attempts.
The camp’s residents have always refused to leave their homes, even when Israel threatened to bomb them. Israel bombed the house of Hamas leader Nizar Rayan in 2009, killing him, along with 15 members of his family, for refusing to desert his home.
Because of Jabalia’s legacy of resistance and resilience, Israel has always tried to break the spirit of its people. It’s not surprising that Israel is currently focusing its genocide in the camp as a new model of counterinsurgency policy against the population.
Jabalia can be considered the Deir Yassin of our time, since that massacre was used as a doctrine to force Palestinians out of their homes in 1948 so that Zionists could establish the State of Israel.
Ever since Ze’ev Jabotinsky’s 1923 essay Iron Wall (in which he wrote: “The native populations, civilized or uncivilized, have always stubbornly resisted the colonists, irrespective of whether they were civilized or savage”) Israel has been trying different methods to force Palestinians into surrender, no matter the cost.
Just as former Israeli military chief of staff, Moshe Yaalon, emphasized during the Second Intifada that Israel needed to burn into the consciousness of Palestinians that resistance would only bring them misery, Israel is now burning all of Gaza to eliminate the Palestinian cause.
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