The Guardian has published an analysis of the destruction in the Gaza Strip since 8 October 2023. It is an interactive map which explains the significance of the targeting practices of the Israeli Army, including before and after photos of various sites. It is safe to say that we are witnessing urban destruction comparable (if not worse) to the destruction of Dresden and Tokyo in World War II. The red areas on the map are areas that the Israeli Defense Forces have bombed or attacked.
I am not at all qualified to assess what this satellite image actually conveys. To my untrained eye, however, it seems that there are no safe places in the Gaza. Furthermore, the close-up photos in the article also indicate significant destruction of the little agricultural land, including olive orchards, available in the Strip. The Guardian summarizes its close analysis of three neighborhoods in the Strip:
“Using satellite imagery and open-source evidence, the investigation found damage to more than 250 residential buildings, 17 schools and universities, 16 mosques, three hospitals, three cemeteries and 150 agricultural greenhouses.
“Entire buildings have been levelled, fields flattened and places of worship wiped off the map in the course of Israel’s war against Hamas in Gaza, launched after the Hamas attack on Israel on 7 October.
“The destruction has not only forced 1.9 million people to leave their homes but also made it impossible for many to return. This has led some experts to describe what is happening in Gaza as “domicide”, defined as the widespread, deliberate destruction of the home to make it uninhabitable, preventing the return of displaced people. The concept is not recognised in law.”
The New York Times has a similar article, but one which focuses on “controlled demolitions”, which are explosions that do not occur in hot pursuit of the enemy but rather are planned explosions to deny the enemy access to buildings in the future. Such destruction also means that civilians will not have access to these buildings when the active military conflict ends. The World Bank estmates that almost 50% of the residential buildings in the Strip have been damaged beyond repair. The Times of Israel summarizes the damages so far:
“Some 45 percent of residential buildings in the Gaza Strip have been destroyed since war erupted between Israel and Hamas on October 7, leaving over 1 million people homeless, according to a World Bank study based on satellite images and media accounts.
“According to data collected by the international body, over 60% of residential buildings in the Gaza Strip, or 132,590 structures, have been damaged amid the war, which has seen Israel bombard the enclave from land, air and sea for over three months in a campaign to destroy the Hamas terror group and free hostages kidnapped on October 7.
“The figure includes 99,601 structures reported to have been destroyed and rendered uninhabitable, out of a projected 218,656 residential buildings in the Strip before the war, according to the World Bank’s estimates.”
It seems clear that the Gaza Strip will not be habitable for many years. The question over what the Netanyahu government foresees for the future of this territory remains unanswered. But there are growing voices within the Netanyahu government that wish to see Israel take full control of the Strip and open it up to Israeli settlements. As reported by The Washington Post:
“As Israel rains bombs down on Gaza, nearly a dozen Zionist organizations have agitated to return to the Gaza settlements from which they were expelled in 2005 as Israel moved to ‘disengage’ from the enclave. The idea has been dismissed by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu as ‘unrealistic,’ but such views are beginning to enter the Israeli mainstream.
“Since Oct. 7, settlers in the West Bank are feeling an increasing sense of impunity for attacks on Palestinians. In the past two months, armed settlers have raided 15 herding communities, destroying houses, tearing down tents and displacing more than 1,200 people. The United States and Britain have imposed visa bans on the settlers implicated in the assaults.”
That outcome cannot be allowed. The United Nations Charter outlaws wars of conquest, a stance that tried to overturn one of the most common historical justifications for war. But in both Ukraine and the Gaza Strip, it appears as if states still cling to that justification. Conquest must be categorically repudiated by the international community. And an immediate and total cease-fire should be the first step toward that objective.
“Total victory requires eliminating the terrorist leaders and destroying Hamas’s military and governing capabilities. Total victory requires returning our hostages home. Total victory requires that Gaza be demilitarized, under Israel’s full security control, with Israeli control over everything that enters Gaza. These are also the fundamental conditions for ‘the day after’.”
“The decades of Israeli-Palestinian conflict, he declared during the primetime appearance at the Kirya military base in Tel Aviv, are ‘not about the absence of a state, a Palestinian state, but rather about the existence of a state, a Jewish state.’
“’All territory we evacuate, we get terror, terrible terror against us,’ he said, citing Gaza, southern Lebanon and parts of Judea and Samaria (the West Bank). Therefore, ‘in any future arrangement, or in the absence of an arrangement,’ he said, Israel must maintain ‘security control’ of all territory west of the Jordan River — meaning, Israel, the West Bank and Gaza. ‘That is a vital condition.’
“He acknowledged that this ‘contradicts the idea of sovereignty [for the Palestinians]. What can you do? I tell this truth to our American friends.’”
That sounds an awful lot like “from the River to the Sea”. It is also in near total opposition to the possibility of a two-state solution, which remains the official US position on what should occur on the ‘day after’. I think that the Prime Minister has made it clear that he will do whatever he thinks is necessary for Israeli security, regardless of what the US or other allies think. That position is the essence of sovereignty. But it is exactly the position that Netanyahu thinks should be denied to a Palestinian state.
The US and the EU should state publicly that if Israel does not recommit to the Oslo Accords, including the 5 year limit for the creation of a Palestinian state, that they will no longer grant any more financial aid. If the Israeli government believes that its security requires the subordination of 7 million Palestinians, then it should be prepared to pay the price for that security from its own revenues.
Once again, the US is facing a budget crisis as some hard-line Republican members of the House of Representatives are threatening to block any proposal that does not address the growing deficit in the Federal budget. The Washington Post details the size of the deficit:
“From August 2022 to this July, the federal government spent roughly $6.7 trillion while bringing in roughly $4.5 trillion. That represents a total increase in spending of 16 percent relative to last year and a 7 percent decrease in revenue, according to the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget.”
These Republicans identify spending as the problem, but it more likely that revenues are declining becuase of tax cuts over the last 25 years. The Center for American Progress gives the specifics on how tax revenues have declined, even as spending as remained somewhat flat:
“Tax cuts initially enacted during Republican trifectas in the past 25 years slashed taxes disproportionately for the wealthy and profitable corporations, severely reducing federal revenues. In fact, relative to earlier projections, spending is down, not up. But revenues are down significantly more. If not for the Bush tax cuts4 and their extensions5—as well as the Trump tax cuts6—revenues would be on track to keep pace with spending indefinitely, and the debt ratio (debt as a percentage of the economy) would be declining. Instead, these tax cuts have added $10 trillion to the debt since their enactment and are responsible for 57 percent of the increase in the debt ratio since 2001, and more than 90 percent of the increase in the debt ratio if the one-time costs of bills responding to COVID-19 and the Great Recession are excluded. Eventually, the tax cuts are projected to grow to more than 100 percent of the increase.”
This insight needs to be kept in mind as the debate in Congress mindlessly repeats the same insipid mantras about how the US is living beyond its means. There is a great deal of money that escapes the attention of the Internal Revenue Service. Common Dreams, a reliable lefty think-tank, gives a rough idea of how much revenue is being lost to the IRS:
“Citing ‘alarming’ data provided by the federal government about the prevalence of tax evasion among the richest Americans, U.S. Sen. Ron Wyden on Thursday called on the Internal Revenue Service to crack down on ‘particularly brazen’ high-income tax cheats and noted that Democratic initiatives have already helped to begin addressing the problem.
“Writing to IRS Commissioner Danny Werfel, the Oregon Democrat and chair of the Senate Finance Committee cited data provided by the agency regarding taxes filed from 2017-20.
“More than 1.4 million wealthy Americans have still not filed their taxes for those years, Wyden said, with the total amount owed to the federal government reaching ‘a whopping $65.7 billion’—almost enough to fund a universal childcare program for one year or a universal school lunch program for more than two years.
“Nearly 1,000 people who earn $1 million per year or more have yet to file their tax returns, but Wyden wrote that the ‘most alarming’ revelation in the data provided to his committee by the IRS ‘was the extraordinary amount of unpaid taxes owed by a small subset of ultra-wealthy non-filers,’ with the 2,000 highest-earning tax dodgers currently owing $923 million.”
Moreover, the rich pay a substantially lower percentage of their income in taxes than do the poor. The effect is quite noticable when one looks at state and local taxes in the US. The Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy did an analysis of how wide the discrepancy actually is:
As the budget debate nears the 11th hour we should be telling Congress to take effective action to make everyone in the US pay their fair share. But do not hold your breath–the Congress is intent on bringing back feudalism.
World Politics News 