{"id":44990,"date":"2023-12-09T08:20:01","date_gmt":"2023-12-09T16:20:01","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/?p=44990"},"modified":"2023-12-09T08:20:01","modified_gmt":"2023-12-09T16:20:01","slug":"the-devastation-of-gaza","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/2023\/12\/09\/the-devastation-of-gaza\/","title":{"rendered":"The Devastation of Gaza"},"content":{"rendered":"

The Financial Times<\/i> reports<\/a> on the scale of destruction in Gaza:<\/p>\n

Citing estimates of damage to urban areas, military analysts say <\/i>the destruction of northern Gaza in less than seven weeks has approached that caused by the years-long carpet-bombing of German cities during the second world war <\/strong>[bold mine-DL]. <\/i><\/p>\n

\u201cDresden, Hamburg, Cologne \u2013 some of the world\u2019s heaviest-ever bombings are remembered by their place names,\u201d said Robert Pape, a US military historian and author of Bombing to Win, a landmark survey of 20th century bombing campaigns. \u201cGaza will also go down as a place name denoting one of history\u2019s heaviest conventional bombing campaigns.\u201d<\/i><\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

Like the many other bombing campaigns before it, this one wreaks havoc on the civilian population without doing much to achieve the stated goals of the government doing the bombing. Pape wrote a recent article<\/a> for Foreign Affairs in which he spelled out the failure of the Israeli bombing campaign:<\/p>\n

Whatever the ultimate goal, Israel\u2019s collective devastation of Gaza raises deep moral problems. But even judged purely in strategic terms, Israel\u2019s approach is doomed to failure \u2013 and indeed, it is already failing.<\/i><\/p>\n

Like other policies of collective punishment, bombing the civilian population typically fails to weaken the regime or group that the policy is supposed to be targeting. Instead of turning the population against the regime or group, it naturally intensifies the population\u2019s hostility to those responsible for the bombing. To the extent that bombing has an effect on the population\u2019s political views, it will tend to drive them into the arms of hardliners. Even if some significant percentage of Hamas fighters are killed in this war, the IDF has been acting as the lead recruiter for militant groups with its brutal and criminal bombing campaign.<\/p>\n

The immediate consequences for the population are dire. Now that the military campaign has moved to southern Gaza, there is every reason to expect the same extent of destruction there. Palestinians in southern Gaza have said<\/a> that the pace of strikes by the Israeli military is even faster than it was before the truce. Some in our government fear that the campaign in the south could be even worse<\/a> than it was in the north:<\/p>\n

Despite repeated calls for Israeli restraint from senior figures in the Biden administration, U.S. intelligence assesses the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) are committed to \u201cbusiness as usual,\u201d with only limited concern about civilian casualties, a U.S. official said, and there are suspicions the renewed campaign is actually bloodier than the previous offensive in northern Gaza.<\/i><\/p>\n

Read the rest of the article at Eunomia<\/b><\/a><\/p>\n

Daniel Larison is a contributing editor for Antiwar.com and maintains his own site at Eunomia<\/a>. He is former senior editor at<\/i> The American Conservative. He has been published in the<\/i> New York Times Book Review, Dallas Morning News, World Politics Review, Politico Magazine, Orthodox Life, Front Porch Republic, The American Scene, and<\/i> Culture11, and was a columnist for<\/i> The Week. He holds a PhD in history from the University of Chicago, and resides in Lancaster, PA. Follow him on Twitter<\/a>.<\/i><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The Financial Times reports on the scale of destruction in Gaza: Citing estimates of damage to urban areas, military analysts say the destruction of northern Gaza in less than seven weeks has approached that caused by the years-long carpet-bombing of German cities during the second world war [bold mine-DL]. \u201cDresden, Hamburg, Cologne \u2013 some of […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":56,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_seopress_robots_primary_cat":"","_seopress_titles_title":"","_seopress_titles_desc":"","_seopress_robots_index":"","_et_pb_use_builder":"","_et_pb_old_content":"","_et_gb_content_width":"","_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[],"coauthors":[],"class_list":["post-44990","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"meta_box":{"disable_donate_message":"","custom_donate_message":"","subtitle":"Backing the war to the hilt has been an outrageous moral failure, and it is also an incredibly stupid policy because it just paves the way for more conflict and suffering in the future."},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/44990","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/56"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=44990"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/44990\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":44992,"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/44990\/revisions\/44992"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=44990"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=44990"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=44990"},{"taxonomy":"author","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/coauthors?post=44990"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}