Ten years ago today, on December 27, 2008, Israel launched Operation Cast Lead against the Gaza Strip — a twenty-two-day affair that ultimately dispensed with some 1,400 Palestinian lives, among them more than three hundred children.
The name of the operation was inspired by a Hanukkah poem by H. N. Bialik, national poet of Israel. The Daily Beast mused at the time: “It might seem strange that Israel would name a military operation after a holiday associated with gifts and dreidels, but in Israel, the Hanukkah story celebrates national liberation.”
In other words, perhaps, the slaughter of innocents was not just fun and games — it was also crucial to Israel’s “liberation” from the people it had occupied and abused for no fewer than six decades, since the violent establishment of Israel on Palestinian land in 1948.
The Israeli fatality count from Cast Lead totaled three civilians and ten soldiers (four of them from friendly fire), which put the ratio of Palestinian civilian to Israeli civilian deaths at 400:1. Predictably, however, Israel unfurled its signature brand of criminal illogic to claim the role of victim, portraying itself as under attack from Hamas rockets despite the negligible damage inflicted.
The victimhood effort got a helpful boost when the Israeli Ministry of Foreign Affairs opted to include 584 victims of “shock and anxiety syndrome” in its official Cast Lead casualty tally — although we can safely assume that shock and anxiety in Israel are often a result of the government’s obsession with air raid sirens and other forms of politically expedient fearmongering rather than any actual physical threat.
Were the Palestinians of Gaza permitted the luxury of psychological suffering, casualty figures would presumably be fairly indistinguishable from the population count itself, considering the regular Israeli bombardments, ubiquitous drones, and other perks of existence in what is frequently called the “world’s largest open-air prison.” As former Oxfam spokesman in Gaza Karl Schembri once put it: “How can you talk about post-traumatic stress interventions in Gaza when people are still in a constant state of trauma?”
Western mainstream media outlets, ever-reliable conduits for Israeli propaganda, explained Cast Lead in the same way they explain all Israeli onslaughts: as “retaliation” for some Palestinian offense. In this case, Hamas was accused of breaking a ceasefire by firing rockets into Israel — even though the rockets (which injured no one) were themselves a response to Israel’s lethal, ceasefire-violating raid into the Gaza Strip.
The media’s insistence on endowing Israel with a perennial monopoly on retaliation obscures the reality that any Palestinian action against Israel is fundamentally a reaction to Israel’s brutal usurpation of Palestinian territory, institutionalized policy of ethnic cleansing, and habitual massacres. READ MORE AT JACOBIN.