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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