Apropos of the latest assault on Gaza

The havoc wrought by Cast Lead might have been wanton, but method incontestably informed this madness. If Israel possessed fine “grid maps” of Gaza and an “intelligence gathering capacity” that “remained extremely effective”; and if it made extensive use of state-of-the-art precision weaponry; and if “99 percent of the firing that was carried out [by the air force] hit targets accurately”; and if it only once targeted building erroneously—indeed, if Israel itself provided most of the data just cited, then, as the Goldstone Report logically concluded, the massive destruction Israel inflicted on Gaza’s civilian infrastructure must have been premeditated. It “resulted from deliberate planning and policy decisions throughout the chain of command, down to the standard operating procedures and instructions given to the troops on the ground”.* In other words, if Israel was able to pinpoint its targets and if, by its own acknowledgment, it could and did hit these designated targets with pinpoint accuracy, then it cannot be contended that the criminal wreckage resulted from mishap or a break in the chain of command. What happened in Gaza was intended to happen, by everyone from the soldiers who executed the orders to the officers who issued them to the politicians who approved them. “The wholesale destruction was to a large extent deliberate”, Amnesty concluded, “and the integral part of a strategy at different levels of the command chain, from high-ranking officials to soldiers in the field”.**
 *Goldstone Report, paras. 54, 62, 1180, 1182, 1185-91, 1891; Cordesman, “Gaza War”, p. 18
**Amnesty International, Operation “Cast Lead”, p. 55.

Norman Finkelstein, Gaza, An Inquest Into Its Martyrdom, 2018.