In July 2006, in the middle of Israel’s war on Lebanon that ultimately killed approximately 1,200 people – the overwhelming majority of them civilians – then-United States Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice nobly cast the onslaught as the “birth pangs of a new Middle East”.
While the metaphor was no doubt appropriately Orientalist, it did raise some questions since the objective of the birthing process is not usually to kill the baby. What role Rice and her boss, then-US president George W Bush, were meant to play in the metaphorical arrangement was also debatable, but “bloodthirsty obstetricians” was one potential option. This was particularly so, given the US decision to rush-ship bombs to the Israeli military to assist in the forging of the “new Middle East”. . . .
Summer 2006, of course, belonged to a previous era of Israeli slaughter-fests, when killing 1,200 people in 34 days was still considered extraordinarily shocking. Also belonging to this era was, for example, Operation Cast Lead in the Gaza Strip, during which Israel killed some 1,400 people over 22 days in December 2008 and January 2009. In Operation Protective Edge in Gaza in 2014, the Israeli military killed 2,251 people in 50 days.
We have now apparently transitioned into an age of obscenely intensified birth pangs; Israel’s latest assault on the Gaza Strip murdered more than 20,000 Palestinians in the first two and a half months alone, and destruction in the besieged enclave is of a scale the human mind can barely process. READ MORE AT AL JAZEERA ENGLISH.