In October, shortly after the start of Israel’s war on Gaza that killed nearly 20,000 Palestinians, Israel pledged to wipe Hamas “from the face of the earth” – a project that would require the Israeli military to ” flattens the ground” in Gaza. , as an Israeli security source told the Reuters news agency.
And they flattened it; A month after the start of the war, the army had already dropped the equivalent of two nuclear bombs on the small and densely populated Palestinian coastal enclave. Today, as Israel continues to pulverize an already completely pulverized territory, it seems that the Israelis are taking the concept of scorched earth policy to a whole new level.
According to the Oxford Reference dictionary, the term “scorched earth policy” was first used in English in 1937 in a report describing the Sino-Japanese conflict, during which the Chinese razed their own cities and burned crops in order to complicate the Japanese invasion. This strategy has since been seen in a range of armed conflicts around the world, including Guatemala’s 36-year civil war which ended in 1996 after the deaths and disappearances of more than 200,000 people, mainly Mayans. native.
In 2013, former Guatemalan dictator and friend of the United States Efraín Ríos Montt – who oversaw a particularly bloody part of the war in the early 1980s – was convicted of genocide by a Guatemalan court. And even though subsequent legal machinations and Ríos Montt’s death by heart attack saved the man from earthly atonement for his crimes, one could argue that the truth is not so easily erased “from the face of the earth “.
Indeed, scorched earth was one of the main elements of the Guatemalan army’s genocidal approach towards its adversaries, and hundreds of indigenous villages were destroyed along with water supplies, crops and everything that could ensure life. And what do you know: the savagery of the Guatemalan state was reinforced by none other than the State of Israel, which after all already had several decades of experience eradicating indigenous life in Palestine – sorry, “make the desert bloom”.
As journalist Gabriel Schivone notes in an article for the North American Congress on Latin America (NACLA), not only did Israeli advisors help ensure the success of the 1982 military coup that brought Ríos Montt to power , but Israel also “assisted all facets of the attack.” on the Guatemalan people” from the late 1970s until the following decade. For successive Guatemalan governments, Schivone writes, Israel had become the “primary provider of counterinsurgency training, light and heavy arsenals of weapons, aircraft, cutting-edge intelligence technology and infrastructure, and other vital aids.”
In keeping with the “that flourishes in the desert” type of blasphemy, Israel has also been credited with aiding Guatemala in its agricultural efforts during the civil war – since there is clearly nothing better for agriculture than, you know, scorched earth.
Meanwhile, in neighboring El Salvador, the United States’ supposedly existential struggle against communism during the Cold War also allowed right-wing regimes to massacre large numbers of peasants. And as in Guatemala, Israel was ready to offer assistance – notably in implementing the scorched earth policy.
AJ+ video draws attention to Israel helping to form ANSESAL, the Salvadoran intelligence agency that would “lay the foundation for death squads” during El Salvador’s 12-year civil war , which killed at least 75,000 people and ended in 1992. According to the video, from 1975 until the start of the civil war in 1979, Israel was the source of 83 percent of El Salvador’s military imports. The vast majority of wartime killings have been carried out by the US-backed right-wing state and associated paramilitary groups.
It goes without saying, of course, that scorched earth campaigns are deadly – and sometimes, that immortality outlasts the conflict itself. Take Vietnam, where the U.S. military’s literal burning of the earth with the toxic defoliant Agent Orange continued to cause miscarriages, birth defects, and serious illness decades after the Vietnam War officially ended in 1975 .
In Iraq, the United States’ use of depleted uranium munitions could also be seen as a kind of scorched earth policy, since saturating territory with radioactive poison does little to ensure its long-term habitability.
Speaking of poisons, the Washington Post recently confirmed that the Israeli army fired US-supplied white phosphorous shells into southern Lebanon in October, while the use of such weapons in civilian areas was ” generally prohibited by international humanitarian law. According to the Post article, residents of southern Lebanon affected by the attack “theorized that the phosphorus was intended to displace them from the village and pave the way for future Israeli military activities in the area.”
It certainly wouldn’t be the first time – in Lebanon or the Gaza Strip, which has seen its share of illegal white phosphorus bombings by Israel.
As the Israeli military continues to burn and reburn the land in Gaza and the humans there, there is a uniqueness that distinguishes Israel’s efforts from the scorched earth experiments of the past. In El Salvador, for example, the military’s goal was never to eliminate the very concept of El Salvador, while Israel appears determined to completely annihilate Gaza.
But unfortunately for Israel, resistance is something that can grow in scorched earth.
The opinions expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the editorial position of Tel Aviv Tribune.