War of Words: From the Mekong Delta to Gaza
As a young Army advisor arriving in the Mekong Delta in 1970, I soon learned the language of war. From adjoining quarters, I overheard voices: “What do you call a Viet Cong suspect?” “Any living Vietnamese.” “What do you call a Viet Cong?” “Any dead Vietnamese.”
While My Lai is the best-known example of the carnage such thinking incites, far worse was the 9th Infantry Division’s operation called “Speedy Express.” Just a few days before, John Paul Vann, the senior advisor in the Delta, had briefed me and other incoming advisors how in six months (1968/69), as many as eleven thousand Viet Cong were killed. Yet fewer than nine hundred weapons were taken.
Who were most of those killed? If you’re guessing civilians, you’d be right. Their only mistake – living among Viet Cong sympathizers and fighters. Sound familiar? Substitute the Palestinians of Gaza for the Mekong Delta’s Vietnamese. Do that and you’ll begin to comprehend how there may be as many as two hundred thousand Palestinian casualties – possibly as many as fifty thousand dead – since 7 October 2023.
Let’s be clear. What Hamas and its fighters did (and rogue sympathizers too) violated the laws of war as set forth by Geneva, particularly the taking of hostages. Yet the Israeli response also violated these same laws. This is clear regarding proportionality: the prohibition of military action that produces incidental loss of civilian life.
It's in the Numbers
If you care to look. The disproportionate casualties, Palestinian versus Israeli, point to the so-called “Israel-Hamas War,” more accurately, the “Nakba War of 2023,” as slaughter, not war. Israel’s assault on Gaza, including the systemic deprivation of food, water, and medical care has resulted in horrific civilian casualties, particularly children. An urban center for millennia, Gaza has been reduced to a wasteland. This is not a war between two armies. It is an act of violence to destroy Palestinian society and culture, efface memory, and take land.
What easier way is there to do this than to reduce the Palestinians to “human animals” or “beasts walking on two legs?” Such labels are familiar to Israelis. Onetime military chief Rafael Eitan once told Israeli parliamentarians in 1983 that “Arabs are like drugged cockroaches in a bottle.” More recently, Benjamin Netanyahu and his extremist ministers have both in words and in their Gaza policy reiterated that the Palestinians need to be removed from their ancestral homes: that they have no place in Israel where full and unrestricted citizenship is predicated on Jewish identity. What explains racial profiling like this?
Racism – What it is
Racial epithets have always come readily to Americans, from those directed at Native and Black Americans to the Vietnamese. Watch Oliver Stone’s Platoon for authentic interactions of the latter. In contrast, the Viet Cong simply called Americans “imperialists,” “invaders,” or just “My,” that is, American. Absent were the pejorative labels so richly used of them. Designating those outside your own social group emerges from typical (and age-old) human attitudes. Psychologist Eric Erickson explained this human propensity as pseudospeciation, another way of saying, “inventing the Other.”
For the last eighteen months, the Israelis have made clear how they classify Palestinians.
They are simply, but hardly simple, “human animals.” Yoav Gallant, the former Israeli Defense Minister (now a fugitive wanted by the International Criminal Court), made this assessment immediately after the Hamas October attack. Netanyahu anticipated him in 2014. Such labels were already conventional in Israeli society. Recent Israeli school graffiti complements, shouting out, “Death to Arabs:” an abbreviated trope of the “only good Arab is a dead Arab.”
You might wonder, who are these “Arabs”? They are the Gazans; they are the West Bankers who survive, for now, an oppressively (and increasingly) violent Israeli occupation; they are the naturalized second-class citizens of Israel; they are the Palestinians of the Diaspora. Collectively they are the descendants of the native population of the territory that became the State of Israel in 1948.
From its inception and rooted in Zionist ideology, Israeli success has always been based on exclusive Jewish ownership and control of Palestine. In such a zero-sum game, it should not surprise that Israeli politicians have long had a dream that the whole population would simply disappear. Hence Yitzak Rabin’s disappointed dream that Gaza had not sunk into the Mediterranean. More recently, Israeli minister Bezalel Smotrich has stated that “There is ‘no such thing’ as Palestinian people” – the words themselves implicit recognition that there is. Israeli bombing of Gaza constitutes a step in that direction. President Donald Trump’s latest plan to empty Gaza of its inhabitants amounts to a realtor’s swindle on steroids, ethnic cleansing reconfigured.
It is the Palestinian’s people’s refusal to disappear, to hang on to their land, that has led so many Israelis to deploy the racist imagery of “human animals.” Critically minded Israelis reject such language, and not just those living abroad. Journalist and filmmaker Yuval Abraham, for example, has brought this to light in his documentary No Other Land. In an interview in The New Yorker about this film and his work, he reveals the intricacies of the Israeli military’s AI program codenamed Lavender, utilized to track down Palestinian fighters. This he learned of anonymously from Lavender’s own operators, disturbed by flawed data and bureaucratic notions used to identify Hamas fighters and others (see further below).
Racism and Killing Others
Although there is widespread belief that the conflict between Israel and the Palestinians is rooted in religion, the reality is much more complex. Whereas it is true that religion has been weaponized by both sides and has taken nationalist xenophobia to higher levels, this is a nationalist conflict over land – two peoples and one – tiny – land. Moreover, the Palestinians are stateless while Israel ranks among the most militarized states on earth and a military nuclear power to boot.
Yet more destructive in leading a nation to commit mass murder is the promotion of racist discourse. The embrace of such language by Israeli leaders has resulted in untold carnage in Gaza – hostages killed – Palestinian civilians murdered. Reflect on these examples. Israeli soldiers killed their own citizens without regard to their identity. Witness the three hostages gunned down in December 2023 attempting to escape. This is a vivid demonstration of how Palestinians are treated. About the same time, a civilian bureaucrat of a Gaza-based cultural institution, was discovered in a building by Israeli soldiers with his nephew and others. The nephew, Moemen Raed al-Khaldi, recalls, “my uncle came closer and told me, put your head between my body and the wall, and May God save you, my dear son.” Then he was shot, dying immediately.
While there are additional cases of such killings, the greater slaughter of Palestinians has resulted from bombing, particularly from the building destroying two-thousand-pound bombs, gifted Israel by the U.S. Filmmaker Abraham explained the planning and execution of the Israeli bombing campaign in The New Yorker magazine article mentioned above. Hundreds, if not thousands of innocent Gazans, died because, like the Vietnamese victims of Speedy Express, they were in the wrong place at the wrong time. As Abraham tells, Israeli military planners identified members of the military wings of Hamas and Islamic Jihad then set out to kill them. He adds, “anybody in those groups, regardless of age, regardless of military importance, not only can we bomb them but we can bomb them with civilians present.” Abraham’s story reveals more of the decision-making process, how it erroneously targeted civilians (example: same name but different person), how it deemed acceptable the killing of entire families, neighbors of targets, sometimes to kill a single individual.
Since 2006, Gaza inhabitants have been assaulted by the sophisticated weaponry of Israeli forces designed for the battlefield, not a civilian environment. These have included “dumb” or unguided (or indiscriminate) bombs, white phosphorus, and two-thousand-pound bombs. Gazans have witnessed pilots of the Israeli Air Force dropping the latter on defenseless civilians, totally lacking any kind of air defense. Gazans have watched Israeli Merkava tanks and self-propelled guns blasting neighborhoods with their primary weapons, 120- and 155-mm guns respectively.
Suffice it to say that the use of battlefield weapons in areas occupied by civilians is prohibited by the Geneva Convention. This is outlined in Protocol I (1977), the focus of which is the protection of civilian populations against the effects of hostilities occurring in non-international armed conflicts. This is defined in Article 1, Point 4, which makes clear that the rules of war “include armed conflicts in which peoples are fighting against colonial domination and alien occupation and against racist regimes in the exercise of their right of self-determination.”
Israel rejects Protocol I, taking a smorgasbord approach to Geneva. Adhere to the rules you like, ignore those you don’t. Chapter II, Article 51, 2 of Protocol I further declares that “neither the civilian population as such, nor individual civilians may be the object of attacks” (italics supplied). Part III, Section 1, Article 35, 1 (of Protocol I) further stipulates the correct conduct of combatants during hostilities. The fundamental principle forming the basis of these rules is “that the right of the Parties to the conflict to choose methods or means of warfare is not unlimited” (italics supplied).
The Israeli Right to Self-Defense, but Not Palestinian
Early on, the Biden Administration justified its support of Israel against Hamas with the claim that Israel had the right to defend itself. The right of self-defense is an integral part of the international law of war. But how is it that this has not been accorded the Palestinians when Geneva’s Protocol I grants it? In effect, the Israelis have conned the world community and the transactions of the international political hierarchy, namely the United Nations, building a racist state that denies the Palestinians fundamental rights of self-determination and freedom. Yet when Palestinians resort to self-defense and attempt to secure what has been granted them, the response is brutal, enveloped in racist language and spurious claims of terrorism. As made clear in Gillo Pontecorvo’s The Battle of Algiers (1966), the oppressed fight with whatever weapons they have at hand. Those holding them down will never admit that such means, or their struggle itself, are legitimate in any way.
War’s Terror Recognized
In setting out to destroy Hamas, a faction they enabled in its creation, the Israelis have inflicted colossal harm on Gaza, its people, their society and culture. There has been only modest acknowledgement of the illegalities of what has been an all-out assault. When Moshe Yaalon, a former military chief of staff, characterized Israeli actions in Gaza as constituting war crimes and ethnic cleansing, he was condemned as “worse than our biggest enemies.”
In contrast stands the critical appraisal of the measures, and their morality, employed by American air forces against Japan in 1945. The fire-bombing raids directed and conceived by General Curtis LeMay (Tokyo’s were worse than the Hiroshima A-Bomb), persuaded him that if the U.S. lost the war, he would be prosecuted as a war criminal. Robert McNamara, privy and contemporaneous to LeMay’s reflections (and the source of them), expands on LeMay’s observation. What determines war’s morality, war’s justice, is whether you win or lose. This realization by as hard a driving combat leader you’ll ever find, clarifies Yaalon’s statement and those of his critics. The former sees reality, the latter only illusion and lies.
Conclusion
Dehumanization of Palestinians and disregard of Israeli lawbreaking is morally and intellectually reprehensible. In the 1930s and 1940s, the U.S. stood up, finally, for the oppressed: the Chinese against Japanese expansionism, the Ethiopians against Italian imperial ambitions, Europeans against the terror of Nazi Germany. Today, American policies shrink from defending the values upon which the U.S. was founded. Instead, as concerns the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, the U.S. defends, assists, and upholds aggression against the weak and vulnerable, denying what the United Nations declared and promised in 1947, a Palestinian state. President Trump’s recent plan to expel the Palestinians of Gaza, then rebuild and repopulate it with others, is just the latest example of mismanaging a tragedy of epic proportions created by racism and ignorance.
What lies behind this? Demagoguery now trumps rationality, learning, and compassion. Democracy is under attack by lobbyists, their influence and money, and insinuating elites. In short, the American sense of noblesse oblige, itself sometimes wayward, has been bastardized. One need only recall, e.g., the ethnic cleansing of Native Americans, the Chinese Exclusion Act (1882), the incarceration of Japanese Americans (1942-45). Lending support to the unjust acts of other states, no matter their history or identity, serves no one, neither policy makers in the U.S. nor elsewhere, or the citizens they serve.
Lawrence Tritle, PhD, emeritus Daum Professor of History at Loyola Marymount University, Los Angeles, is author and editor of 13 books, including From Melos to My Lai: War and Survival (2000), A New History of the Peloponnesian War (2010), and The Oxford Handbook of Warfare in the Classical World (2013, edited with Brian Campbell). He is currently at work on The Beast War. The Story of Us Humans.
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