The Rubble of Gaza and the Ghosts of Tokyo |
Amid the so-called “ceasefire,” as imperial grifters and disaster capitalists jockey to remake Gaza in their image and in accordance with their own interests, the genocide has not abated. In its current phase, while the killing continues daily, its defining feature is the deliberate infliction of conditions of life calculated to bring about the destruction of Palestinians in Gaza, in whole or in part. From the outset, Israel has pursued this objective through a policy of urbicide: the systematic annihilation of Gaza City, Khan Younis, Rafah, Jabaliya, Beit Hanoun, Beit Lahiya, and Deir al-Balah.
Palestinians remain steadfast in their refusal to be erased. Yet Israel’s assault has rendered Gaza nearly uninhabitable. This devastation cannot be easily dismissed with antiseptic euphemisms such as “collateral damage,” a term long employed to sanitize the mass slaughter of civilians. Intent can be inferred from actions, and policy from sustained patterns of conduct.
Even setting aside the relentless stream of genocidal rhetoric, the campaign bears all the hallmarks of design. That Israel commands one of the most technologically advanced militaries in the world further erodes the pretense that those killed were unintended casualties rather than the victims of deliberate targeting, or at least a wanton indifference to civilian life.
Still, denial persists. US Ambassador Mike Huckabee recently suggested that Israel has exercised extraordinary restraint. The record tells a different story. More than 81% of structures in Gaza are damaged or destroyed. Little has been spared: homes, hospitals, markets, and schools. In the first 16 months alone, Israel killed at least 75,000 Palestinians, precipitating a 34.9-year collapse in life expectancy in Gaza. This is a demographic shock rivaling or exceeding those witnessed in Bosnia and Rwanda. The true toll, with countless bodies entombed beneath the rubble, certainly surpasses the official numbers.
The early architects of aerial Armageddon sought not only the obliteration of cities but also the erosion of the longstanding principle of civilian immunity.
We have not seen such systematic urban destruction since World War II. Gaza, a captive enclave with a besieged population that is nearly half children and one of the most densely populated places on Earth, has endured six times the explosive tonnage equivalent of the Hiroshima bomb. This comparison has not been lost on observers, from A-bomb survivors to Holocaust historians.
Yet Hiroshima and Nagasaki then, and Gaza today, would have been largely unimaginable without the firebombing of Tokyo that preceded it 81 years ago. On the night of March 9-10, 1945, American bombers turned a “paper city” into a hellish inferno, incinerating some 100,000 Japanese civilians in the single most destructive air raid in history. The attack did more than raze Tokyo; it marked the crossing of a moral Rubicon from which the US has yet to return, setting the precedent for the normalization of the deliberate annihilation of urban centers as an acceptable instrument of modern warfare.
The End of the Peace and the Emergence of Air Power
The road to Tokyo began in the trenches. At the turn of the 20th century, war was largely conceived of as a conflict between conventional armies. Consequently, civilians comprised only 5% of the dead. The First World War marked a dramatic escalation, raising that figure to more than 15% of violent deaths. By World War II, civilians constituted roughly 65%. In Gaza today, more than 80% of those killed are civilians.
The initial leap in destructiveness, as the mechanized mass killing of World War I left vast swaths of the globe strewn with mutilated bodies of a lost generation, produced contradictory responses. For many, the senseless slaughter made clear that armed conflict could no longer be seen as politics by other means. Whatever rationales states historically invoked to sanctify organized violence collapsed, as war waged with modern technology revealed itself to all parties as little more than industrialized murder-suicide.
In the aftermath of this carnage arose a wave of internationalist political utopianism. The nascent League of Nations promised a forum in which states could resolve conflicts through diplomacy. The 1925 Geneva Protocol sought to ban the worst excesses of the recent war, prohibiting chemical and biological weapons. The 1928 Kellogg-Briand Pact went further, renouncing war altogether. To many, it seemed conceivable that it truly had been the war to end all wars.
Collective punishment against civilians succeeds only in making war more horrific and criminal while failing to render it significantly shorter.
Yet such sentiments soon yielded to geopolitical realities and to a mounting conviction that future wars could not be prevented, only won. For a new generation of military strategists, the stalemate of the trenches was less a cautionary tale than a technical problem to be solved. As Italian General Giulio Douhet insisted, the answer was air power. Bombers could fly over the front lines, shatter societies from above, and deliver decisive victory.
The early architects of aerial Armageddon sought not only the obliteration of cities but also the erosion of the longstanding principle of civilian immunity. If noncombatants could not be targeted outright, then the definition of “civilian” had to be stretched to the point of incoherence. Military planners justified this shift with a perverse claim that targeting civilians was the humanitarian path, since swift, concentrated destruction would supposedly end wars more quickly.
As US Army Air Forces General Curtis LeMay later put it, in war “you’ve got to kill people, and when you’ve killed enough they stop fighting.” Others insisted that in a total war there were in effect no civilians. If workers contributed to the war effort, willingly or not, directly or indirectly, they could legitimately be struck in their factories or “dehoused” in their homes.
In less crude terms, with the veneer of scientific theory to legitimize the practice, a cadre of defense intellectuals advanced the idea that “morale,” or the collective will to fight, could itself be treated as a target. Yet as historian Ran Zwigenberg makes plain, morale was an imprecise and nebulous concept, and merely served as “another abstraction that allowed for the indiscriminate killing of civilians.” The “psychological science” behind it, the claim that societies possess a breaking point, rested on little empirical evidence.
This conclusion was not borne out in Britain, where Nazi bombing during the Blitz failed to break resistance. Its validity was further undermined after the war by the findings of the US Strategic Bombing Survey. Ultimately, as Robert Pape concluded in Bombing to Win, bombing civilians has rarely, if ever, proved decisive in compelling governments to concede or collapse and, if anything it stiffens resolve. In short, collective punishment against civilians succeeds only in making war more horrific and criminal while failing to render it significantly shorter.
The Shattering of the Bombing Taboo
Washington was slow to embrace this descent into unrestrained aerial warfare. This was a practice that in the 1920s and 1930s, became increasingly commonplace: Britain in Iraq, Italy in Abyssinia and Spain alongside Nazi Germany, and Japan in China. Such campaigns were widely condemned for what they were, a fundamental breach of the laws of war.
Some prescient observers recognized where this trajectory would inevitably lead. Leo Szilard, who would soon serve as a central catalyst in the development of the atomic bomb, warned even before such a weapon was feasible that the logic of aerial bombardment........