There’s going to be nothing for the Palestinians to return to. From Ted Rall at unz.com:
Supporters of Israel, who are mostly on the Right, believe the Israeli government’s official story, which is that the Jewish state’s bombing campaign and ground invasion of Gaza has one objective: deposing Hamas so its fighters and government no longer pose a threat. According to this narrative, Palestinian civilian deaths are unavoidable collateral damage in a densely populated urban environment.
Those who are not siloed into Team Politics on the conflict, like human rights groups, are convinced that the bombing is indiscriminate — that Israel is bombing willy-nilly because they’re reacting with blind rage to Hamas’ Oct. 7 attack.
Supporters of Palestine, mostly on the Left, think that Israel is actively targeting civilians in a gleeful bloodthirsty campaign of genocide, trying to massacre as many innocents as possible.
They are all wrong.
Israel isn’t trying to kill people.
It’s trying to kill buildings.
People die when buildings get bombed. But killing people is not the Israelis’ goal. They’re out to flatten Gaza. Flattening some Gazans is a side effect of flattening buildings.
Most species don’t go extinct after being hunted to death. Their habitat is destroyed.
Israel’s war aim in Gaza, I believe, is to destroy so many apartment buildings and shops and schools and hospitals and other infrastructure that the territory becomes uninhabitable.
The Israel Defense Forces may already have accomplished that. According to the United Nations, 45% of the housing stock in the Gaza Strip has been destroyed. Over 1.5 million out of a total population of 2.3 million are “internally displaced,” i.e., homeless and living on the streets. Only one out of the 18 hospitals in northern Gaza, until six weeks ago the Strip’s most populous area, is still functioning. Four weeks into the war, 61% of all employment in Gaza was gone — this in a previously impoverished place with sky-high unemployment.
