Sunday 19 May 2024

Gaza, Nuclear Deterrence Theory, and the Genocidal Mentality

Nuclear deterrence theory has helped to unleash the first live streamed genocide in history.

Norman Finkelstein, in his richly documented work, Gaza: An Inquest into Its Martyrdom, relates an important, and grimly revealing, 2016 citation from senior Israeli officials [1]:

“Another war with Gaza was ‘inevitable,’ senior Israeli officials ominously observed in 2016. ‘We cannot conduct a constant war of attrition. Therefore, the next conflict has to be the last conflict.’”

So, we observe the systemic destruction of Gaza not just physically, through the bombing of homes and infrastructure, but through the destruction of the very basis for a common social life and that of a distinct people occupying a clearly demarcated territory.

Does that constitute genocide? What has this to do with nuclear deterrence theory? It does, and the bearing to deterrence theory is strong.

For quite some time after October 7, 2023, I was reluctant to use the expression “genocide” to describe Israeli actions in Gaza, preferring war crimes and crimes against humanity. It was the use of food as a weapon of war, and reports of hunger and famine like conditions in regions of Gaza, that had me first thinking otherwise. A compelling case for genocide has been developed and recently published by the University Network for Human Rights, the International Human Rights Clinic at Boston University School of Law, the International Human Rights Clinic at Cornell Law School, the Centre for Human Rights at the University of Pretoria, and the Lowenstein Human Rights Project at Yale Law School. They state in the Executive Summary of their joint report [2].

“After reviewing the facts established by independent human rights monitors, journalists, and United Nations agencies, we conclude that Israel’s actions in and regarding Gaza since October 7, 2023, violate the Genocide Convention. Specifically, Israel has committed genocidal acts of killing, causing serious harm to, and inflicting conditions of life calculated to bring about the physical destruction of Palestinians in Gaza, a protected group that forms a substantial part of the Palestinian people. Between October 7, 2023, and May 1, 2024, Israel has killed at least 34,568 Palestinians and injured 77,765 other Palestinians in Gaza. These figures in total comprise more than 5 percent of Gaza’s population, with over 2 percent of Gaza’s children killed or injured. Approximately 14,500 of the Palestinians killed in Gaza have been children. Israel killed more children in the first four months of its assault than in all of the world’s conflicts in the past four years combined…

…Israel’s military operation has destroyed up to 70 percent of homes in Gaza, and has decimated civilian infrastructure, including hospitals, schools, universities, UN facilities, and cultural and religious heritage sites. A staggering 1.7 million civilians—over 75 percent of Gaza’s population—have been forcibly displaced as a result of Israel’s military offensive. Civilians in Gaza face catastrophic levels of hunger and deprivation due to Israel’s restriction on, and failure to ensure adequate access to, basic essentials of life, including food, water, medicine, and fuel.”

This level of destruction is not inconsistent with the use of a weapon of mass destruction. The facts related here and the quotation with which I began this post are intimately connected. Israel’s military operation is designed to destroy Gaza as a living entity populated by Palestinians as a distinct nation. 

This is the final solution to the Gaza question, as promised in 2016. It just so happens to be the first live streamed genocide in history, one opposed by much of the world’s population but whose opinion is not sufficient to stop the onslaught given the protection provided to the perpetrators by the world’s preeminent power which facilitates and shields the genocide. It is the first genocide in history conducted under an umbrella of deterrence provided by nuclear weapons – Israeli nuclear weapons in this case. While that nuclear aspect to the genocide in Gaza obtains, it is not my main concern here.

Israeli officials have stated that one of the key objectives of its military operation extends beyond Gaza itself. It is concerned with restoring Israeli deterrence against the wider region – to uphold the credibility of deterrence. To restore fear of Israeli military power in the Middle East. The thinking behind this comes straight out of nuclear deterrence theory.

A useful document to consider here is a 1995 study [3] by the Strategic Advisory Group of United States Strategic Command, entitled Essentials of Post Cold War Deterrence. Strategic Command is the combatant command that oversees US strategic nuclear forces. The document states.

“Fear is not the possession of the rational mind alone. Deterrence is thus a form of bargaining which exploits a capability for inflicting damage at such a level as to truly cause hurt far greater than military defeat…It should ultimately cause the fear of extinction – extinction of either the adversary’s leaders themselves or their national independence or both.”

Note the emphasis on fear and extinction.

Furthermore,

“Because of the value that comes from the ambiguity of what the US may do to an adversary if the acts we seek to deter are carried out, it hurts to portray ourselves as too fully rational and cool headed. The fact that some elements may appear ‘out of control’ can be beneficial to creating and reinforcing fears and doubts within the minds of an adversary’s decision makers. This essential sense of fear is the working force of deterrence. That the US may become irrational and vindictive if its vital interests are attacked should be a part of the national persona we project to all adversaries.”

I’ve read similar remarks made at a National Security Council meeting in the Ford Administration – by Brent Scowcroft – and the idea can be traced back to formal modelling, through rational choice theory, of the rational basis of irrational nuclear posturing done by Daniel Ellsberg during his RAND Corporation days.

There is a strong connection here to the genocide in Gaza. As Finkelstein shows in his book, such thinking has underpinned Israel’s appalling actions in Gaza during previous military operations, in the cases below Operation Cast Lead.

For example [4].

“Israel’s ‘larger concern’ in Cast Lead, New York Times Middle East correspondent Ethan Bonner reported, quoting Israeli sources, was to ‘reestablish Israeli deterrence,’ because ‘its enemies are less afraid of it than they once were, or should be.’ Preserving its deterrence capacity looms large in Israeli strategic doctrine.”

Further [5],

“For sheer brazenness and brutality, however, it would be hard to beat Deputy Prime Minister Eli Yishal: ‘it [should be] possible to destroy Gaza, so that they will understand not to mess with us…It is a great opportunity to demolish thousands of houses of all the terrorists, so they will think twice before they launch rockets…I hope the operation will come to an end with…the complete destruction of Hamas..[T]hey should be razed to the ground, so thousands of houses, tunnels and industries will be demolished.”

Then to the nitty gritty [6],

“A former Israeli defense official told the Crisis Group that “Israel decided to play the role of a mad dog for the sake of future deterrence,’ while a former senior Israeli security official gloated to the Crisis Group that Israel had regained its deterrence because it ‘has shown Hamas, Iran and the region that it can be as lunatic as any of them.”

The connection to the thinking underpinning Essentials of Post Cold War Deterrence should be evident. Incidentally, I have always felt that the US response to 9/11 also came out of the Essentials playbook.

How is this related to what I have referred to as “the genocidal mentality.” Robert Jay Lifton and Eric Markusen in a Cold War era book, The Genocidal Mentality: Nazi Holocaust and Nuclear Threat, write [7]:

“The term deterrence, central to nuclear discourse, is the basis of a fundamental confusion. Deterrence has two very specific meanings – as a word, and as a body of theory and policy specific to nuclear weapons…But deterrence as an elaborated military policy took shape mainly with nuclear weapons.”

They go on [8],

“For the ‘credibility,’ or believability, of deterrence policy, as its proponents emphasize, requires genuine willingness to use the weapons under certain conditions, such as actual or imminent enemy attack. Hence, deterrence policy gives rise not only to a genocidal system but to a ‘genocidal mentality,’ which can be defined as a mind-set that includes individual and collective willingness to produce, deploy, and, according to certain standards of necessity, use weapons hundreds of millions, of people. And that genocidal mentality can become bound up with the institutional arrangements necessary for the genocidal act.”

Israel, through the destruction of Gaza, seeks to demonstrate that it possesses the mentality to “play the role of a mad dog” needed for the restoration of deterrence. Note the important attached to credibility by Lifton and Markusen. That Israel indeed possesses the genocidal mentality. This, in turn, it is perceived, required the devastation of Gaza following Hamas’ October 7 atrocities.

I submit, then, that Israel’s destruction of Gaza through genocidal war has underpinnings in thinking about nuclear deterrence. That such thinking constitutes a genocidal mentality. It thereby follows that the first live streamed genocide in history is also one deeply connected to nuclear deterrence theory.

 

[1]. Norman G. Finkelstein, Gaza: An Inquest into Its Martyrdom, University of California Press, Oakland, C.A., 2018, p 360.

[2]. University Network for Human Rights, “Israel’s Genocide of Palestinians in Gaza,” https://www.humanrightsnetwork.org/palestine

[3]. Strategic Advisory Group United States Strategic Command, “Essentials of Post Cold War Deterrence,” released under the Freedom of Information Act by Hans Kristensen working for the Federation of American Scientists and available at  https://www.nukestrat.com/us/stratcom/SAGessentials.PDF,

[4]. Finkelstein, op.cit., p 18.

[5]. Ibid., p22.

[6]. Ibid., p66.

[7]. Robert Jay Lifton and Eric Markusen, The Genocidal Mentality: Nazi Holocaust and Nuclear Threat, Basic Books, New York, 1990, p2.

[8]. Ibid., p3.

 

 

 

 

 

 

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Gaza, Nuclear Deterrence Theory, and the Genocidal Mentality

Nuclear deterrence theory has helped to unleash the first live streamed genocide in history. Norman Finkelstein, in his richly documented ...