The U.S.-Israeli Alliance Has Sowed Disaster For Israel

Without U.S. support Israel’s leaders could have been compelled to seek a just resolution of the Israel-Palestine conflict instead of pursuing a Greater Israel

[Source: radiohc.cu]

Originally published at CovertAction Magazine

In his 1983 book The Fateful Triangle: The United States, Israel & the Palestinians, Noam Chomsky argued against the grain that the Israelis had compromised their country’s security in choosing to ally with the U.S. and were sowing the seeds of their own destruction.

According to Chomsky, Israeli leaders felt invincible because of U.S. weapons supplies and pursued a rejectionist course toward the Palestinians when a durable peace was needed to guarantee Israel’s security.

As Israeli politics shifted more to the right, messianic proponents of a Greater Israel took over the government and carried out repeated military aggression that antagonized Israel’s neighbors and made its people more vulnerable to attack.

[Source: abebooks.com]

Chomsky was a Zionist in his youth who had worked on a Kibbutz in the late 1940s but became disillusioned by the racism toward Palestinians that he saw as pervasive in Israeli society.

Chomsky felt that the Zionist project could have been successful if it adhered to the vision of Ahad Ha’am, Martin Buber and Albert Einstein of a bi-national state where Arabs and Jews learned to live together peacefully and with mutual respect.

Chomsky did not believe that the Israeli lobby had manipulated U.S. leaders into supporting Israel—rather he believed that the U.S. executive branch supported Israel because it functioned as a strategic proxy that helped the U.S. in its goal of trying to dominate the Middle East and exploit its oil resources.

Over the years, Israel performed much of the dirty work for the U.S.—as when it humiliated U.S. nemesis Gamal Abdel Nasser in the 1967 Six-Day War; helped undermine the Assad dynasty in Syria, and assisted in U.S. regime-change operations directed against Iran, which had escaped the clutches of U.S. neo-colonial control under the Shah following the 1979 Islamic Revolution.^[1]

Chomsky was attacked for years by neo-conservative intellectuals and other academics for being supposedly a closet anti-Semite and far-left extremist (Chomsky identified with anarchism and libertarian strains of socialism).

But today it seems even more clear that Chomsky was correct in his analysis and that the U.S.-Israeli alliance—by which the U.S. poured (and continues to pour) billions of dollars in weaponry each year and assisted Israel in developing into a military technological powerhouse—has been a catastrophic one, not only for the Palestinians, but also for Israelis and Jews the world over.

Noam Chomsky [Source: counterpunch.org]

The Fall of Israel

Dr. Dan Steinbock is an internationally renowned expert on world geopolitics who has published a new book with Clarity Press called The Fall of Israel: The Degradation of Israel’s Politics, Economy & Military.

The book affirms many insights that Chomsky made in Fateful Triangle while tracing Israel’s moral degradation under the leadership of Benjamin Netanyahu.

Steinbock starts The Fall of Israel by juxtaposing the brutality of Israeli attacks in Gaza with the mass protests directed against widening social inequality, political corruption and the attempt by Netanyahu’s government to impose judicial reforms designed to eviscerate what was left of Israel’s democracy.

Steinbock writes that “the common denominator of the destruction of the Gaza Strip and the mass protests against Jewish autocracy is the fall of Israel.”^[2]

That fall is reflected in increasing suppression of dissent, historical revisionism in education, routinization of torture, and widespread anti-Arab settler pogroms. It is further epitomized by a halt in Israel’s tourism industry as a result of the Gaza War, the downgrading of Israel’s credit rating, and an increased brain drain.

Hamas and Hezbollah shelling in response to Israeli attacks has displaced an estimated 200,000 Israelis from their homes; foreign laborers are exiting the country and the cancelation of 150,000 Palestinian work permits in the West Bank has brought construction to a standstill.

In the fourth quarter of 2023, Israel’s economy shrank by 20% on an annualized basis, a figure that may grow worse if countries like Turkey sustain boycotts on imported goods that Israel depends on.^[3]

[Source: vox.com]

Like Chomsky, Steinbock links Israel’s degradation to its alliance with the U.S., emphasizing that Israel’s militarization has been “enabled by the symbiotic bilateral ties with Washington and massive U.S. military aid.”^[4]

U.S. neo-conservatives and Jewish donors have hastened the empowerment of right-wing proponents of a Greater Israel atop Israel’s government who hold a racist contempt for Palestinians and support the construction of illegal settlements in the Occupied Territories to drive Palestinians further off their land.^[5]

Yeshayahu Leibowitz [Source: jewishvirtuallibrary.org]

Steinbock quotes a prescient 1968 essay by Yeshayahu Leibowitz, an Israeli orthodox Jew and public intellectual called “The Territories,” which envioned Israel’s supposedly glorious triumph in the 1967 Six-Day War over Egypt and Nasser—when it acquired the West Bank and Gaza—as a “dark prelude to endless colonial wars that could turn Israel into a police state, subvert democratic institutions, foster corruption, transform Palestinians into an exploited underclass and the Israeli military into suffering from the kind of colonial demoralization seen previously in Algeria and Vietnam (and more recently in Iraq and Afghanistan).”^[6]

Leibowitz proved to be prophetic, though Steinbock notes that the seeds of self-destruction started even earlier with the 1948 Nakba, or ethnic expulsions, of about 700,000 Palestinians during Israel’s independence war, which set the groundwork for today’s calamities.

The Nakba and Origins of Likud

The Nakba was rooted in a colonial mentality among Jewish settlers in historic Palestine that went back to Theodor Herzl, the father of the Zionist movement, who envisioned himself as a Jewish “Cecil Rhodes” and the Israeli state as a “rampart of Europe against Asia, an outpost of civilization as opposed to barbarism [represented by the Arabs].”^[7]

Theodor Herzl [Source: israeled.org]

The Israeli government claims that the 1948 ethnic expulsions were triggered by Arab leaders who told the Palestinians to flee, whereas the Jewish forces tried to prevent the flight. However, primary source documents confirm an aggressive Israeli plan for the military conquest of Palestine known as Plan Dalet after a Haganah commander.

Israel’s first Prime Minister, David Ben-Gurion, convened a group of a dozen senior military and security figures—including Moshe Dayan and future Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin—who prepared the plans for ethnic cleansing and supervised its execution.^[8]

A key figure in the operation was Menachem Begin, Israel’s prime minister from 1977 to 1983, who was the founder of Netanyahu’s right-wing Likud Party (originally called Herut).

Begin traced his lineage to the revisionist Zionism of Ze’ev Jabotinsky which emphasized the importance of armed struggle and saw Italy and its fascist leader Benito Mussolini as an ideological soulmate.

In 1948, Begin was head of the paramilitary arm of the Haganah, the Irgun, which carried out the Deir Yassin massacre when more than 100 Palestinians were murdered and another 650 were driven from their homes.

The New York Times published a letter in December 1948 signed by Albert Einstein, Hannah Arendt and other prominent Jewish intellectuals that characterized Begin’s Herut Party, the forerunner of Likud, with being a political party “closely akin in its organization, methods, political philosophy and social appeal to the Nazi and Fascist parties.”^[9]

Scene of ethnic cleansing in Deir Yassin. [Source: britannica.com]

Likud has always sustained the vision of a Jewish state from the Mediterranean Sea to the Jordan River and has been hostile to the peace process and the idea of a Palestinian state. This is in contrast to Israel’s Labor Party, which has been willing to at least consider Palestinian statehood.

[Source: jewishvoiceforlabour.org]

Punitive Doctrine and More Ethnic Cleansing

Steinbock emphasizes that dominant figures in Israel’s military apparatus—notably Ariel Sharon and Moshe Dayan—lay the foundation for Israel’s punitive military doctrine by which brutal reprisals and disproportionate retaliation were adopted in response to terrorist attacks.^[10]

Moshe Dayan, with his customary eye patch, and Ariel Sharon, during the 1973 Yom Kippur War. [Source: albawaba.com]

After the Nakba, Palestinian fedayeen mounted raids into Israel from Gaza and other border regions. This triggered brutal reprisals by Israeli commando units like those led by Sharon in Qibya in the West Bank in October 1953 where nearly 70 villagers were killed, two-thirds of whom were women and children, and 50 houses were demolished, with some inhabitants still inside.^[11]

Burying the dead in Qibya. [Source: aljazeera.com]

A missed opportunity occurred in the mid 1950s during the prime ministership of Moshe Sharett, the Henry Wallace of Israel,^[12] whose yearning for peace was undermined by right-wing elements in his Cabinet who carried out undercover terrorist attacks in Egypt designed to undermine Sharett’s peace overtures to Egyptian leader Gamal Abdel Nasser.

Moshe Sharett [Source: en.wikipedia.org]

Continuing from the pattern of the Nakba, large-scale ethnic cleansing was carried out after the 1967 Six-Day War.

Some 245,000 Palestinians were forced to flee from the West Bank and Gaza Strip into Jordan; 116,000 from the Golan Heights to Syria; and 11,000 from Gaza to Egypt, with many becoming dependent on UNRWA (UN Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees).

Steinbock writes that, to the Palestinians, the Six-Day War was “the second catastrophe in a single generation.”^[13]

Netanyahu Clan’s Extremism

Benjamin Netanyahu’s father Benzion, a professor of Judaic Studies at Cornell University, worked for a period as an assistant to Ze’ev Jabotinsky’s personal secretary and shared his insistence on the creation of an “Iron Wall” to separate Jews in Israel from the Palestinians.^[14]

As an old man in the 1990s, Benzion denounced the Oslo peace agreement as representing the potential ruin of Israel, and supported the invasion of Gaza “even if it brings us years of war.” Benzion sustained throughout his life an Orientalist bias characteristic of the neo-conservatives, stating that “the tendency to conflict is the essence of the Arab. He is an enemy by essence…his existence is one of perpetual war.^[15]

Like father, like son. Benzion Netanyahu with his son Benjamin. [Source: nytimes.com]

Benjamin’s views that have now landed him at The Hague are very reminiscent of his father’s and also those of his grandfather Nathan Mileikowsky, a Russian-born rabbi and early Zionist champion known for his advocacy against socialist Zionism and anti-Zionists.^[16]

After migration to Israel, Mileikowsky raised funds for the pre-state Yishuv and collaborated with Rabbi Abraham Isaac Kook, the founding father of religious Zionism whose son, Rabbi Zvi Yehuda Kook, is the revered spiritual father of Israel’s settlers and the messianic far right.^[17]

As a young man Benjamin served in an elite reconnaissance unit of the Israeli military and, after studying at MIT, became connected to powerful neo-conservatives in the U.S. through Rabbi Menachem Schneerson, head of the Chabad-Lubavitch movement who tried to link the fate of Israel, world Jewry and the United States.

Well-trained in American-style communication, Netanyahu came to be seen as the person to succeed Menachem Begin and Likud’s old guard.

From the start, his career has been overshadowed by dark-money controversies and, in 1997, police recommended his indictment on corruption charges for influence-peddling, foreshadowing the more recent criminal cases against him.^[18]

Netanyahu’s commitment to neo-liberal economic policies have resulted in the development of exceptionally high inequality in Israel compared to other Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) countries, a key factor triggering protests against him on the eve of the Gaza War.^[19]

Prioritization of military spending and campaigns of repression in the Occupied Territories have furthered Israel’s transformation away from a welfare state with a value placed on social justice.^[20]

[Source: yalibnan.com]

Netanyahu’s aversion to a two-state solution, ironically, led his government to funnel money to Hamas, which was viewed as an instrument to undermine the secular Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) and divide the Palestinian people so they could be conquered.^[21]

Netanyahu’s power base has been preserved in part because of his connection to the late Sheldon Adelson, a billionaire casino owner tied to organized crime, and other U.S. billionaire neo-conservatives like Irving Moskowitz who has financed the settler movement in Israel.

Adelson publicly stated his belief that the Palestinians were an “invented people” and that “the purpose of the existence of Palestinians was to destroy Israel,” which necessitated “rejection of the idea of a two-state solution even if that would undermine Israeli democracy,” which it has.^[22]

Benjamin Netanyahu and Sheldon Adelson, left. [Source: imeu.org]

Extremists in the Cabinet

Netanyahu’s ruling coalition includes representatives of previously marginalized religious parties in Israel that want to turn the country into a theocracy along with free market ideologues, settler zealots and the messianic far right who openly espouse Jewish supremacy.

Israel’s Minister of National Security, Itamar Ben-Gvir, is a devotee of Rabbi Meir Kahane (1932-1990), an FBI informant who founded the ultra-right wing Jewish Defense League, and was filled with hatred toward Arabs.^[23]

Rabbi Meir Kahane [Source: jweekly.com]

Advocating for the expulsion of Arab citizens of Israel, Ben-Gvir first gained notoriety in 1995 by brandishing a Cadillac hood ornament that had been stolen from Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin—“we got his car and we’ll get him too,” Ben-Gvir said, weeks before Rabin’s actual assassination.^[24]

Itamar Ben-Gvir [Source: independent.co.uk]

Netanyahu’s Energy Minister, Israel Katz, has promoted plans to expand the number of Jewish settlers in the occupied Golan Heights and pushed for blocking humanitarian aid into Gaza as part of a strategy of trying to impose mass starvation on its people.^[25]

Israel Katz [Source: timesofisrael.com]

Steinbock calls Netanyahu’s Minister of Defense, Bezalel Smotrich, “a vehement opponent of a Palestinian state and self-proclaimed fascist, racist and homophobe who lives in an illegally built West Bank settlement.” In 2021, he declared that David Ben-Gurion should have “finished the job” and kicked all Palestinians out when Israel was founded.

Judea and Samaria (the West Bank) are, in Smotrich’s view, God’s gift to the Jewish people, so when Netanyahu entrusted him with the administration of the occupied West Bank, “it was a signal to Palestinian Arabs: Leave!”^[26]

Bezalel Smotrich [Source: middleeastmonitor.com]

The dominance of the right in Israel has resulted from the fragmentation of left-wing parties, which still believe in a two-state solution and do not embrace the same racist attitudes toward the Palestinians as Likud does. However, the left-wing Meretz Party won only 3.2% of the vote in Israel’s 2022 election while the Labor Party received only 3.7% of the vote.^[27]

Yair Golan, head of Israel’s left-wing Meretz Party. [Source: timesofisrael.com]

Resource War and Jared Kushner’s Dream

Steinbock suggests that an underlying motive for the Gaza War was the Netanyahu government’s desire to tap into Gaza’s oil and natural gas resources and to enable construction of the Ben-Gurion Canal that would connect Israel to the Mediterranean Sea by getting around the Gaza Strip. Steinbock writes that, “Before October 7, the only thing that stood between the Netanyahu government and the massive canal project was Gaza and Hamas.”^[28]

[Source: youtube.com]

The Israeli occupation has long prevented the Palestinian people from seeing any benefits from their natural resources or from using them to finance socio-economic development, with accumulated losses estimated to be in the billions of dollars.

The U.S. Geological Survey has estimated that there are 122 million cubic feet of natural gas and 1.7 billion barrels of recoverable oil in the occupied territory.

Gaza under the Israeli embargo, however, was among the most impoverished places on Earth, with Israel going so far as to regulate and limit caloric intake as part of its regime of control.^[29]

After October 7, Israel’s intelligence ministry prepared a secret memorandum that called for the transfer of Gaza’s population “outside the combat zone” to Egypt, which was an overt demand for ethnic cleansing. Wealthy U.S. investors like Jared Kushner were salivating at the prospect of developing high-end condominiums and resorts on Gaza’s beach-front property.^[30]

[Source: thetruthseeker.co.uk]

Comparisons with Imperial Britain and the Vietcong

Steinbock compares Israeli policies in Gaza with imperial Britain’s deliberate imposition of famines in Bengal and other parts of India in the 19^th century and again in 1943.

Scene from 1943 Bengal famine. [Source: owlcation.com]

The Israeli blockade was augmented by physical destruction in military campaigns carried out by the Israelis in 2008-2009 and 2014 that set the groundwork for 2023-2024.

Hamas’s successful resistance has been enabled by development of a network of underground tunnels twice the size of the 75-mile-long complexes of the Cu Chi tunnels built by the Vietcong during the Vietnam War. They have helped offset Israeli military-technological superiority.^[31]

Hamas underground tunnel. [Source: washingtonpost.com]

October 7 Deception and Conspiracy

Steinbock casts doubt on the official narrative of October 7, noting that the IDF and not Hamas killed some of the hostages under the Hannibal Directive, which is meant to prevent the capture of Israeli soldiers by enemy forces.

Recent investigations have confirmed the failure of the IDF to defend the residents of Kibbutz Bee’ri on October 7 and its failure to adequately respond to the Hamas attacks.

These attacks were known at least three weeks in advance by Israeli military intelligence Unit 8200, and months in advance by other elements of the Israeli government.

Warnings included those from female intelligence units stationed on the border that were wiped out on October 7.^[32]

Drone footage shows hundreds of burned vehicles that had been moved from the Tribe of Nova music festival for unknown reasons. Hamas was shown coming into Israel on hand gliders and had only rudimentary weaponry. The vehicles were burned by Apache helicopters, which only Israel had.

[Source: smh.com.au]

Ha’aretz reported, based on Israeli police investigations, that Israeli Apache helicopters killed numerous Israeli citizens at and around the Nova music festival.^[33]

The implication is that October 7 had elements of a false-flag operation by which Israel’s extremist government wanted to maximize civilian casualties and public shock in order to engender public support for its plan to ethnically cleanse Gaza and then attack Lebanon and probably—ultimately—Iran.

Israel’s modus operandi has been borrowed from the United States, which has engineered repeated false-flag incidents to justify the expansion of the American empire dating back to the mid-19^th century U.S.-Mexican War.

Crucial U.S. Military Support

Steinbock points out that, in just the first six weeks of the war, the Biden administration sent more than 15,000 bombs and 50,000 artillery shells to Israel.

During the first five months of the war, the Biden administration approved more than 100 military sales to Israel, yet publicly disclosed only two.^[34]

Since most of those arms were purchased with U.S. taxpayer money through the U.S. Foreign Military Sales (FMS) program, American citizens effectively funded most of the carnage in Gaza. The financial flows that made possible the destruction comprised the annual $3.8 billion in U.S. military aid, plus an additional $1.4 billion to buy more weapons.^[35]

[Source: politico.eu]

Boeing was among the companies most complicit in the Gaza slaughter as the manufacturer of F-15 fighter jets and Apache attack helicopters, which were used in the bombing of the Jabalia refugee camp where hundreds of Palestinians perished.

Caterpillar’s D9 armored bulldozers were continuously deployed to demolish Palestinian homes and General Dynamics manufactured the massive 2,000-pound bombs, which caused more than 500 impact craters in Gaza and meant instant death to anyone within 100 feet of their blast zone.^[36]

[Source: economictimes.indiatimes.com]

Where Is Israel Headed?

Through April 2024, Israel dropped more than 70,000 tons of bombs onto Gaza, surpassing the bombing of Dresden, Hamburg and London combined during World War II.^[37]

By the end of the summer, Gaza had been reduced to an estimated 24 million tons of rubble, which will cost more than $700 million to clear and $80 billion to rebuild over time.^[38]

The number of Palestinian casualties, mostly women and children, outweighs the total cumulative casualties in all prior conflicts involving Israel and the Palestinians during the past 75 years.^[39]

Demonstration outside The Watergate Hotel in Washington, D.C., when Netanyahu was staying there on July 22, 2024. [Source: consortiumnews.com]

For all the carnage meted out with U.S. firepower, Israel had not achieved its war aim of defeating Hamas or in any way strengthened Israeli security.

Steinbock lays out a series of scenarios at the end of the book by which the Netanyahu government’s aggression escalates into a wider war with Iran whose outcome would be the unleashing of nuclear weapons and devastation in both countries.^[40]

[Source: yalibnan.com]

In the meantime, Israel has become more of a pariah state internationally and even an embarrassment to many Jews who have joined protests across the U.S.

Former UN weapons inspector and political commentator Scott Ritter has suggested that Israel’s moral decline may ultimately lead the U.S. to seek alternative alliances in the Middle East and abandon it.

However, the latter is unlikely because the U.S. has supported many autocratic governments historically if it is in its interests.

The incoming Trump administration is stocked with right-wing zealots whose views on Israel correlate with those of the Israeli far right.

Most significantly, Israel continues to provide the U.S. with military bases in the Middle East and intelligence sharing and will use its powerful military to continuously help do America’s bidding.

Consequently, the only way that the U.S. will stop funding Israel is if the U.S. economy collapses and the U.S. government is forced to dismantle its overseas empire.

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1. Mossad founder Isser Harel stated: “Now the U.S. was interested in toppling Nasser and his regime but could not yet take the same steps they had taken in Guatemala and Persia [the CIA’s orchestrating the fall of Jacobo Árbenz’s left-leaning government in Guatemala in 1954 and Mohammad Mosaddegh’s left-leaning government in Tehran in 1953]. It was also possible that the U.S. did not possess the means to do the job in Egypt, so it would be in their interests to let Israel do the job for them.” Quoted in Dan Steinbock, The Fall of Israel: The Degradation of Israel’s Politics, Economy & Military(Atlanta: Clarity Press, 2024), 382. ↑

2. Steinbock, The Fall of Israel. ↑

3. Steinbock, The Fall of Israel, 238. ↑

4. Steinbock, The Fall of Israel, vi. ↑

5. Steinbock points out that the first Israeli settlements in the Occupied Territories were constructed right after the Six-Day War under the direction of Prime Minister Levi Eshkol who was a member of the Labor Party. Throughout the 1970s, Steinbock writes, the confiscation of land from Palestinian villages was carried out by secret military orders, with the land given to Jewish settlers to establish civilian settlements. Golda Meir’s government sanctioned the spraying of Palestinian land with toxic chemicals as part of the effort to drive the Palestinians away. ↑

6. Steinbock, The Fall of Israel, vii. ↑

7. Steinbock, The Fall of Israel, 152. ↑

8. Steinbock, The Fall of Israel, 13. ↑

9. Steinbock, The Fall of Israel, 7. Members of Irgun Zvi Leumi, known also as the Stern gang, assassinated Count Folke Bernadotte who proposed a partition plan influenced by a prominent reform Rabbi, Judah Magnes, that offered Palestinians the right to return to their homes and could have potentially resolved the Arab-Israeli conflict. ↑

10. Steinbock, The Fall of Israel, 376. ↑

11. Steinbock, The Fall of Israel, 377. Sharon also oversaw brutal raids in Gaza in late February 1955 after Arab infiltrators killed an Israeli civilian in Rehhovot. Operation Black Arrow resulted in the deaths of 42 Egyptian soldiers and the wounding of 36 more. ↑

12. Wallace was FDR’s vice president during his third term (1941-1945); he wanted to sustain peaceful diplomatic relations between the U.S. and Soviet Union after World War II, which would have avoided a Cold War. He was poised to be the next president but was removed by Democratic Party power brokers at the 1944 Democratic Party convention and replaced with Harry S. Truman. ↑

13. Steinbock, The Fall of Israel, 17. ↑

14. Bin Zion Netanyahu, who died in 2012 at the age of 102, was also a professor at Dropsie College (1957-1968) whose successor, the Annenberg Research Institute, became the Center for Judaic Studies at the University of Pennsylvania; and University of Denver (1968-1971). He served for approximately 8 years as executive director of the New Zionist Organization of America, “the political rival of the more moderate Zionist Organization of America.” ↑

15. Steinbock, The Fall of Israel, 158, 191. Benzion was a Jewish historian and Semitic language expert who wrote a 1,300 page book on the persecution of Jews during the Spanish Inquisition. According to his New York Times obituary, he adopted the view of Jewish history as a “history of holocausts” which led him to adopt hard-line views. He believed that Jews were endangered in the Middle East and that the vast majority of Israeli Arabs would choose to exterminate Jews if they had a chance to do so. Arabs were an enemy to Jews by essence, and could not compromise and would “only respond to force.” ↑

16. Steinbock, The Fall of Israel, 190. ↑

17. Idem. ↑

18. Idem. ↑

19. Steinbock, The Fall of Israel, 218. The top 10% in Israel owns almost two-thirds of national wealth, the middle class nearly one-third and the working labor just a fraction (4%). ↑

20. Steinbock notes that Israel’s welfare state was a major budget priority until the aftermath of the Six-Day War and Likud’s 1977 election triumph. Many of the founding-era Zionists were socialists who embraced the concept of the Kibbutz, but they would not recognize the right-wing Israel of today. ↑

21. Steinbock, The Fall of Israel, 260. ↑

22. Steinbock, The Fall of Israel, 197. ↑

23. Steinbock, The Fall of Israel, 19, 203. Kahane supported U.S. involvement in the Vietnam War. ↑

24. Steinbock, The Fall of Israel, 205. A son of Iraqi Jewish immigrants, Ben-Gvir’s mother was active in the Irgun terrorist organization during the period of Israel’s independence war. ↑

25. Steinbock, The Fall of Israel, 205. Katz pressed for measures that implied the kind of Palestinian expulsions in the West Bank that had already devastated the Gaza Strip. ↑

26. Steinbock, The Fall of Israel, 205, 206. ↑

27. Steinbock, The Fall of Israel, 208. ↑

28. Steinbock, The Fall of Israel, 28. In 2019, the UN Trade and Development (UNCTAD) reported that the Occupied Territories lay above sizeable reserves of oil and natural gas wealth (in Area C of the occupied West Bank and the Mediterranean Coast off the Gaza Strip). ↑

29. A WikiLeaks cable specified that Israel’s intent was to push Gaza’s economy “to the brink of collapse.” ↑

30. Kushner though was reliant on Saudi funding when the Saudis opposed the Gaza population transfer. ↑

31. Steinbock, The Fall of Israel, 267. ↑

32. Steinbock, The Fall of Israel, 139. ↑

33. Steinbock, The Fall of Israel, 139. ↑

34. Steinbock, The Fall of Israel, 232, 233. ↑

35. Steinbock, The Fall of Israel, 235. ↑

36. Idem. ↑

37. Steinbock, The Fall of Israel, 352. ↑

38. Steinbock, The Fall of Israel, 390. According to Steinbock, the debris was an environmental catastrophe as it was laced with unexploded bombs which could take up to 15 years of extensive work to remove, assuming the availability of 100 trucks on a daily basis. Huge de-mining teams would be warranted for years. ↑

39. Steinbock, The Fall of Israel, 384. It will be difficult to measure the full total as many Gazans have been impacted by an epidemiological crisis resulting from a combination of food shortages, crumbling infrastructure, a failed medical system, flowing sewage, waste build-up and summer heat which caused a polio outbreak and feared outbreaks of hepatitis A, infectious diseases, intestinal disease and respiratory diseases like measles and whooping cough. ↑

40. Steinbock, The Fall of Israel, 354. ↑