Ariel Schalit/AP Photo
Israeli soldiers take up positions near the Gaza Strip border, in southern Israel, December 29, 2023.
“Israel Beginning to Narrow Focus of Gaza Campaign,” read the above-the-fold headline on the print edition of today’s New York Times.
This is not, however, the result of a strategic shift, nor a concession to world public opinion. It stems from a more elemental reason: Almost all of Gaza has now been reduced to depopulated rubble. And there’s no point in bombing depopulated rubble.
The necessarily rough estimates of the percentage of buildings in Gaza that have been destroyed or damaged come in at about two-thirds, but that doesn’t mean that the unscarred buildings, many of which are adjacent to rubble, are inhabitable. The less rough estimates of the percentage of Gazans who’ve been driven from their homes, or the rubble that was their homes, is 85 percent, though some estimates have it higher.
I’m reminded of the decision by the top U.S. military commanders in the waning months of World War II to leave a few Japanese cities off the target lists for our B-29 firebombings, which had already reduced most of Tokyo and other major cities to cinders. Unless there were a few Japanese cities that had remained intact, there would be no place we could roll out, with sufficient shock and awe and horror, our atomic bombs. Initially, Air Force General Curtis LeMay wasn’t pleased with that decision, wanting to make clear that his firebombings would be sufficient unto themselves to induce a Japanese surrender, but he eventually came to understand its logic. Reducing depopulated rubble to more depopulated rubble, after all, is rather pointless.
LeMay’s deepest belief was that the only way to wage war seriously was through aerial bombardment to produce depopulated rubble, which meant he was later the one member of the Joint Chiefs whom President Kennedy had particularly to restrain during the Cuban Missile Crisis. LeMay’s later counsel, for waging the Vietnam War, delivered in his 1965 autobiography, was “Bomb them back into the Stone Age.”
We dropped way more tonnage on Vietnam than we had on Germany in World War II, but the country was simply too big to realize LeMay’s hopes and dreams. Gaza, however, is spatially tiny—about 60 percent the size of Chicago (not metro Chicago, just the city proper). It can indeed be bombed, if not literally, into the Stone Age, then to a state where nearly all its structures have been disaggregated into stones and shards of glass and steel.
And that’s precisely what the Israeli government has done. Facing a similar strategic conundrum to the one we faced in Vietnam—the indistinguishable scattering of military targets (Hamas) amid the general population—Israel has gone one better than we did with our “free-fire zones” that designated whole swaths of Vietnam as suitable for bombardment. We were held back, of course, not just by the size of the country but also by the fact that we were fighting on behalf of some of the Vietnamese people, with a South Vietnamese army at our side. Israel has felt, and conducted its war with, no such constraints.
Indeed, the Israeli government’s absence of a declared day-after strategy doesn’t mean there hasn’t been one. As it’s been articulated in recent days, first by the far-right ministers in Netanyahu’s Cabinet, and then by Bibi himself, it consists of the “voluntary” migration of Gaza’s population to other Arab countries. With the great majority of that population now crammed into one very small corner of Gaza that cannot contain them in safety and health for very long (in fact, it cannot do that now), and with the rest of Gaza largely turned to dust, such emigration follows logically from the manner of war that Israel has waged. Moreover, the Hamas murder raid of October 7 so terrified and enraged the Israeli public—as it would any nation’s public that had something like that befall them—that the Israeli far right realized that the nation’s normally disputatious public wouldn’t object (at least, until after the fact) to waging the kind of war that Israel has waged. Beyond any doubt, Hamas’s barbaric attack hastened the day of “from the river to the sea,” though it appears to be Israel, not Palestine, that will expand in that manner.
While Israel’s justification for attacking Hamas was clear, and ours for going to war in Vietnam was anything but, the way those two wars were fought were comparable, and have yielded comparable backlashes. What turned Americans against our war was its nightly coverage on network newscasts, where we were treated to scenes of our boys destroying villages as women and children wept. Israel has kept the news media out of Gaza, but the social media images of the carnage in Gaza that Palestinians have recorded, seen all over the world, has produced a similar revulsion. At some point, Joe Biden must simply say: Stop!
