What Israel Is Doing In the Gaza Strip Is Not "Defense"

Photo by mohammed al bardawil on Unsplash

The word “defend” originates from a combination of the Latin word de, meaning “from or away,” and fendere, meaning “to strike, hit, or push.” It is a word about resisting attack from others, literally pushing a force away. At some point, the need for defense ends. The attacker is repelled, and if successful, you, as the defender, have the upper hand.

A question naturally arises of when the defense ends, one that is saliently linked to the current issue in Israel and the Gaza Strip. Over the past few days, a narrative has emerged that in the wake of Hamas’s attack on Israel, which tragically killed over 1,300 civilians, Israel has every right to “defend itself.” As President Biden remarked shortly after the attack: “ISo, in this moment, we must be crystal clear: We stand with Israel….And we will make sure Israel has what it needs to take care of its citizens, defend itself, and respond to this attack.”

The Israeli government has military superiority and appears to be leveling Gaza City as we speak, but curiously, this language of defense has been front and center. Attack and defense are moral positions as much as they are definitional ones. A defender is largely considered to be in the right, while an attacker is deemed the opposite. If an attacker is killed during their attack, the defender is morally considered not to be in “the wrong” for such an action: they were merely “defending” themselves.

Therefore, parties are incentivized to label their actions as defensive. Whether we are talking about an individual or, as in the case of Israel, an entire country, those who are defending themselves generally “win” in the court of public opinion, and that’s what we are seeing with this current media campaign.

And yet, when we focus on the actual word “defend”, we find this framing is inaccurate and manipulative. Political figures are ultimately perpetuating propaganda to justify harm on a massive scale and duplicitously branding it as harm prevention, twisting the very nature of language in the process.

War is not defense

This problem is not new. There has been a type of Orwellian “doublespeak” (e.g., deliberately obscuring or distorting the meaning of words) over the last few decades where Departments and Agencies of War have been rebranded as Departments of Defense.

For example, the most prominent defensive force within the United States is the National Guard: individual militias overseen by each state and territorial governorship, though the Office of the President can also direct them. It is part of the National Guard Bureau, a venture that can feed into the Army and the Air Force Reserves, but is not technically a Branch or Department of the Department of Defense (DoD). It is one of the few security institutions, besides the Coast Guard, one could safely say is devoted to defending US citizens, though even here, these assets are also used abroad.

The Department of Defense, on the other hand, is a little different. While it does position troops in the US — there are military reserves stationed in practically every state — mostly, it is not preparing defensive efforts but is in charge of what it describes as “deterring war.” The DoD does this by engaging in acts of violence abroad. DoD assets have constantly used drones or planes to bomb other countries. We are also providing other regimes with hardware to fight for our interests more directly, including Israel.

While the DoD may frame these actions as “defensive” or related to “peacekeeping,” much of its time is spent meddling in other nations’ affairs. “Proactively defending yourself” is the same as saying you will attack someone. It is a polite way to dress up violence as peace. In other words, the Department of Defense is really a Department of War.

It’s the same language game with the Gaza Strip situation. When Hamas attacked Israel in the infamously dubbed Al-Aqsa Flood — an operation that tragically took the lives of at least 1,300 Israeli civilians — it initially defended itself against Hamas, taking back all the land they lost in the engagement. This was not surprising as Israel has one of the best militaries in the world (funded by the US, owner of an even stronger one), and except for a hundred or so hostages, its military curtailed the potential for violence at a massive scale against its citizens within that initial engagement.

None of Israel’s succeeding actions have been “defense” but rather “attack.” When you cut off the water and electricity of a territory and brace for a ground invasion, that is not “defending yourself”; it is conducting (and augmenting) a siege. Israel has already repelled or pushed away Operation Al-Aqsa Flood. It is now attacking another polity and rationalizing the harm done to its nation as a pretext to perpetuate even worse harm. Israel is the historical aggressor here, and since they have long been found subjugating civilians of the Gaza Strip, conducting an apartheid regime according to many human rights groups, and in some cases even violating International Law (see white phosphorus attack), the idea that this attack is somehow defensive is quite preposterous.

Furthermore, there was a disturbing development on October 13th when the Israeli government demanded that over one million people relocate from Northern Gaza, its most heavily populated area, to the South within 24 hours. It is onerous to relocate people, depending on your age or disability status, impossible even, and such an action condemned many to their deaths as they ran out of time and the bombing campaign intensified. Over one thousand children have died as the Israeli government bombed hospitals, schools, and other essential infrastructure in the Gaza Strip.

But even if everyone could magically relocate within that period, the forced relocation of a population might be classified as a war crime or even an act of genocide. As genocide scholar Raz Segal wrote in Jewish Currents of Israeli Minister of Defense Yoav Gallant’s orders to impose a siege: “Israel’s goal is to destroy the Palestinians of Gaza. And those of us watching around the world are derelict in our responsibility to prevent them from doing so.”

A sobering conclusion

It’s tragic that so many Israeli civilians died in the initial operation. I want to stress that the violence committed against those Israeli civilians during Operation Al-Aqsa Flood was horrific, and I am heartbroken over it. I do not think we should blame a country’s citizens for the harm their country commits, harms they may disagree with and have even resisted. I do not take glee in the fact that many people were mowed down during a music festival.

Yet we cannot let that heartbreak close our souls to the innocent people on the other side of this conflict, people who also had no say in Operation Al-Aqsa Flood because the Gaza Strip has not had an election since 2006, and about half of whom are inside it are 18 years old or younger. We are being told it’s OK that this predominantly young population, trapped inside an open-air prison for their entire lives, is being bombed into oblivion because Israel has “a right to defend itself.”

I find this justification abhorrent. Words mean something, and to call what Israel is doing now “defense” warps that word so far away from its original meaning that it genuinely becomes Orwellian. You might as well call the bombs dropping on Gaza “love droplets” and the lives lost to them “voluntary transfers.” If we are making up things for the sake of our comfort, why acknowledge the conflict at all? Just say no one lives there and never did.

At this moment, the government of Israel is not a shield defending its people from harm but a hammer crashing down on others for the sake of its own comfort, and it is calling itself a savior for doing so — if anything is farthest from the word defense, it is this.