Israel's attacks on Gaza stem from its escalating ethnic cleansing in Jerusalem and growing solidarity amongst Palestinians inside Israel, Gaza and the West Bank. Ali Abunimah joins Paul Jay on theAnalysis.newsa

Transcript

Paul Jay

Hi, I'm Paul Jay. Welcome to theAnalysis.news, please don't forget the donate button and the subscribe button and the share button and all of those buttons. I'll be back in a second with our guest, Ali Abunimah. In 2018, Caroline Glick wrote a column in the Jerusalem Post titled "Mowing the Lawn in Gaza". Glick served as assistant foreign policy adviser to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu from 1997 to 1998. She writes for Israel Hayom, Breitbart News, The Jerusalem Post, and Maariv. She's the adjunct senior fellow for Middle Eastern affairs at the Washington, DC based Center for Security Policy and directs the Israeli Security Project at David Horowitz Freedom Center. She was also the deputy managing editor of the Jerusalem Post. She served as a senior columnist and senior contributing editor until 2019. In 2019 she was a candidate for the Israeli Knesset and in its Israeli Independence Day supplement in 2003, the newspaper Maariv named Glick "the most prominent woman in Israel." So why do I give her whole bio here? Well, she's just she's not just some random writer here. She's a serious player in this sphere, and here's what she wrote in 2018 when Palestinian youth were at the Israeli Gaza border demanding their right to return to their homeland and were being indiscriminately shot by Israeli soldiers: "the main strategic takeaway from Gaza and from Judea and Samaria is that there is no solution, military or otherwise to the Palestinians' never-ending war against the Jewish state. All Israel can do is secure its control over what it already controls by, among other things, applying its law to Area C, and use military force to limit Palestinians' ability to attack its civilians and its territory. The coming days and weeks may and should see a significant escalation in IDF offensive strikes against Hamas targets in Gaza. But no matter how successful they may or may not be, they shouldn't be seen as anything more than a military version of mowing the lawn." Let me repeat that. "The military version of mowing the lawn. And just as grass grows back so Hamas will rebuild its strength. Israel's challenge is not to uproot the grass, but to maintain its capability to keep it as short as possible. Who knows? Maybe one day the Palestinians will get tired of fighting and there will be peace."

Now, Glick is far from the only one in Israel making this argument. Professor Efraim Inbar on July 20th, 2014, four years earlier wrote an article titled "Mowing the Grass in Gaza". Efrem is director of Begin-Sadat Center for Strategic Studies and is a professor of political studies at Bar-Ilan University. The metaphor equating the killing of Palestinian political leadership and civilians, including children in periodic military campaigns. Comparing that to cutting grass is now common parlance among the Israeli political and military leadership. "We'll hit them like they've never dreamed possible," Netanyahu said as he announced the assassination of senior Hamas commanders earlier on Wednesday. Gaza's health ministry reported 53 Palestinians killed in Gaza since Monday, including 14 children, and more than 300 injuries.

The recent attacks on Gaza are not just the product of a politically desperate Prime Minister Netanyahu, but a strategic policy of the Israeli state. Western media continues to hide this obvious fact. Now joining us to discuss the recent events in Palestine and within Israel is Ali Abunimah. Ali is a resident of Chicago. He contributes regularly to such publication as the Chicago Tribune and Los Angeles Times.