Professor Richard Falk, in an op-ed published in Middle East Eye on Nov. 3, argued that Israel’s endgame in Gaza is much more sinister than merely restoring “security.”
“Israel reacted so angrily to (UN Secretary General Antonio) Guterres’s entirely appropriate and accurate remarks” on Oct. 25 that the Oct. 7 attack didn’t happen in a vacuum, “because they could be interpreted as implying that Israel ‘had it coming’ in view of its severe and varied abuses against people in the occupied Palestinian territories, most flagrantly in Gaza, but also in the West Bank and Jerusalem,” Falk writes. “After all, if Israel could present itself to the world as an innocent victim of the 7 October attack—an incident that was itself replete with war crimes—it could reasonably hope to gain carte blanche from its patrons in the West to retaliate as it pleased, without being bothered by the restraints of international law, UN authority, or common morality.”
Falk notes: “Guterres’s UN speech had such a dramatic impact because it punctured Israel’s balloon of artfully constructed innocence, in which the 7 October attack came out of the blue. This exclusion of context diverted attention from the devastation of Gaza and the genocidal assault on its overwhelmingly innocent, and long-victimized, population of 2.3 million.”
But it’s not just about Gaza. It’s also about the West Bank, the scene of radical Zionist settlement activity, Falk argues. “There is little reason to doubt that Israel deliberately overreacted to 7 October by immediately engaging in a genocidal response, particularly if its purpose was to divert attention from the escalation of West Bank settler violence, exacerbated by the government’s distribution of guns to ‘civilian security teams.’ The Israeli government’s ultimate plan seems to be to end once and for all UN partition fantasies, lending authority to the Zionist maximalist goal of annexation or total subjugation of West Bank Palestinians….
“Israel has seized this opportunity to fulfill Zionist territorial ambitions amid ‘the fog of war’ by inducing one last surge of Palestinian catastrophic dispossession. Whether it is called ‘ethnic cleansing’ or ‘genocide’ is of secondary importance, although it already qualifies as one of the biggest humanitarian catastrophes of the 21st century.
“In effect, the Palestinian people are being victimized by two convergent catastrophes: one political, the other humanitarian,” Falk concludes.
