Eternal Borders and the Territory of the Gaza Strip

Calling the current conflict a religious war is staggeringly incorrect, because it suggests continuity in collective memory that ignores how the boundary barrier around Gaza and surveillance of the region has remapped the relation of Israel to its enemies, and the role of the IDF to contain the local autonomy of Gaza’s residents. When unprepared troops on the Suez Canal led to an unprecedented attack against Israel’s front lines in 1972, as Jews observed the most Holy Day of the year, and a reclaiming of the boundaries of the Israeli state that were cast in almost prophetic terms. But the response of violence against Gazans only threaten to harden future opposition across the region. That war had been about boundaries, of course, and about the existence of Israel, in ways this war uneasily channels and evokes, if in ways not easily mapped as easily as in retrospect. Territorial battles that led to the prayer’s insertion had begun about the central site of Gaza, a historical node of conflict, back in 1956, and had led to a redrawing of the Even as the boundaries of “Egypt” and “Israel” had shifted from the time “Gaza” was an Egyptian outpost to a retreat of Israeli sovereignty and the transformation of the Sinai from Israeli territory to a transitional zone as the border of military control migrated eastward since it was occupied in 1956 or even since 1967–

Shifting line from Cease fire in 1967 (Violent) to Muhammed Line, 1980-82 (Green) to Current National Boundary (Black); Zones Where Egypt is Permitted Infantry, Security Battalions; Civil Police

–in which Gaza became something of a remainder, removed from Egyptian sovereignty, a buffer of limited military presence, but fostering meddlesome and troublesome terrorist incursions into Israeli territory.

This level of aggression is hardly, pace Netanyahu, a beginning of anything good for Israel. If Israel was attacked by October 7, creating a backlash of trying to obliterate the terrorist cells who coordinated the invasion over future weeks, the expanding violence of the bombardment of territories that were granted to Palestinian sovereignty in the Oslo Accords is staggering, as is the loss of innocent life. For the problem of securitization has only grown as settler communities have expanded by over 3,000 since the peace accords were signed–shifting what was never meant to be understood or seen as a boundary that demanded defense, but has become a securitized edge, designed for the security of settlers, as much as of Israel as a state, and designed to protect or preempt Palestinian claims for sovereignty.  The spatial imaginary of a modern security state, more than a sacred imaginary have provided the basis for the IDF’s current logic, if the IDF prayer recalls how distinct the military is tasked with security.

The IDF prayer conveys no sense of the deep ethical conflicts in wars far more complicated than state-on-state wars. The bombarding Palestinians in Gaza tests the notion of protecting boundaries Goren devised to preserve the newly redrawn limits of the Israeli state, imprecating “[Hashem] cause our enemies to submit before our soldiers,/and grant them salvation and crown them with victory” from Deuteronomy. If the prayers were tired to be emended in 2012, to distance soldiers from justifying killing the righteous with the wicked, lest unjustified killings occur under the name of divine justice. Yet if Rabbi Goren served in three wars as an IDF General, and initiated repeated Messianic projects to reconsecrate Temple Mount as a synagogue, seeking the temple be rebuilt after alleging he had seen the Ark of Covenant beneath Temple Moun, Goren’s hopeful marking of the historic recuperation of Jerusalem’s sacred geography after leading Israeli troops to liberate the Wall was a spectacle on television, delivering a blast from his shofar while cradling the Torah in his arms–an ecstatic moment of expanding the state–his triumphant moment is removed from the problematic role of defending the expansive settlements of Israeli enclaves that have grown in Palestinian lands.

For Goren, the moment of liberation was a joyous event, akin to the announcing of a New Year, as the shofar blown on Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur, a moment of world historical change Goren must have felt himself to be both embedded and conjoined as a witness and ritual celebrant. The Talmudic Wunderkind had blown the shofar to celebrate the retaking of the Wall as marking the entrance into a new historical era, or a return to one, allowing the wall to become part of Israel as a state, that allowed the affective ties to the ancient wall believed to be of the western retaining wall of Temple Mount, a site of prayer and reverence that has been long contested by different faiths–a dual fact that embodied the dual map of the Middle East and of Israeli lands, to be sure, and also condensed it at one specific site. Was the joyous resonant blow from Goren’s shofar, a moment that has been widely commemorated, a far cry from the securitized defense walls that are brokered form military contractors who specialize in perimeter security, first honed for prison construction?

There is not only far less Talmudic learning in the precision of where these lines are drawn, but they seem to model a new idea of defense. The depth of Goren’s Zionist evocation of Israel’s sacred geography, encoded in the prayer that was provided in the military Makhzor as a commandment of ritual memory. But the ritual memory is exceedingly difficult to balance with the unremitting violence of the invasion of Gaza, as military tools allowed Israel’s IDF to pummel Gaza City. If the walled perimeter form an outline of sorts for aiming precision bombs directed by homing devices that make them akin to bunker blasters and GPS-guided homing missiles suggest a new regime of mapping, as if the border barrier that was so strongly vaunted by both Benny Gantz and Netanyahu as an impenetrable protection. Over the coming days, I studied the history of the prayer’s inclusion in the liturgy, struck by the imprecation of an affective tie to the defense of collective borders, and the Zionist origins of the affective ties Goren worked to forge.  Unhappy to be made uncomfortable, my discomfort endorsing the prayers grew as they integrated stories from distant places with present-day commandments, as if weaving a form of collective religious memory–Zakhor, zakhor, zakhor–and belonging, around imprecations as “May the Almighty cause the enemies who rise up against us to be struck down before them.” 

But the boundaries that these new enemies were rising up from were distinctly different, and prayers of divine assistance seemed to bode a bad future indeed.  Gaza’s perimeter wall, or barrier, assumed an increased proportion of the Israeli military budged, as a mental affordance for the nation. It has become, as much as a wall, a blocking out of future dialogue–as a mythic “Iron Wall” committing to negotiate with Palestinians only from a position of strength, concretizing the right-wing Zionist demand of Jabotinsky for an “Iron Wall” doctrine. This was a deeply disturbing echo of what became a disturbing preoccupation or lamentation tic of earlier blogposts on the cultivation by Donald Trump of “The Wall” not only as a structure but a mental mapping of the nation, without precedent, and a branding part of the global geography as a hallmark of his presidency, in response to escalating xenophobia to end anxiety about unauthorized immigration to the United States. As Trump boasted of building an impassible wall able to “close the border,” as a national mandate that would resolve the economy, national security, and employment at one master stroke, the barrier has provided a securitization of future settlements and Israelis, as much as a border, and indeed provided a performative spectacle of the state’s sovereignty. 

As Trump created “The Wall” as fixed place he had created, even if he “grew” its structure by fewer than seventy miles–just over the forty mile perimeter boundary of the Gaza Strip, unveiled in 2021. Less than twice times the size of the perimeter of Gaza, but the perimeter of Gaza, the boundary perimeter built to prevent infiltration of Southern Israel has become a form of mental affordance in very dangerous ways, to which the US-Mexico Border Wall only still aspires.  It became an edge of the nation, beyond which exists a region of danger and otherness, that is deeply destabilizing to national consciousness in ways that Mexico has never fully come to be, despite the rhetoric that mapped it as a the site of criminality, drugs, violent gangs, and low-wage workers able to undercut Americans’ safety and security. The affordance of the Gaza boundary wall boasted to be a model of state-of-the-art perimeter security honed at institutions of incarceration equipped with its own radar systems, remotely controlled weapons systems and motion-sensors. But these protections that boasted to establish normalcy and security were exposed as a flimsy measure of security, if it was a mental affordance for the nation, and serving–as a mythic “Iron Wall”–negotiate with Palestinians only from a position of strength.

Was the notion of the perimeter as a boundary accentuated in the Trump era, when the notion of walls as protections, and as protective barriers, expanded off the map, leading to the trust of walls as obstructive boundaries and in traversable barrier safety?  The “entrepreneurial” investing of border walls as a part of the performative discourse and repertory of a state celebrated a protective device, deeply tied to his own role as a developer of brands and identity, as if the wall as a brand for the nation, that Israel eagerly emulated, coopted and adopted.

16. The boundaries of Gaza are cannot be defended in sacred ways, but troops were mobilized on their borders after the gruesome bloody invasion of October 7, 2023 with a sense of Deuteronomic vengeance of an almost biblical scale, if it was not so closely tied to and dependent on the military stock of destructive mapping that have been invested in nominally defensive technologies of destruction. After the blood-curdling use of sophisticated arms to stage a bloodiest invasion ever experienced by Israel, a violent rite of making a nation feel vulnerable seemed designed to set the stage for a retributive violence against a similar existential threat. The infiltration of Israeli territory started with the firing of 300 rockets against the border barrier billed as an impenetrable national defense as a flood that was designed to retrace the silver-domed early Islamic Al-Aqsa mosque described by Persian and Arabic tenth- and twelfth-century geographers as its target and inspiration, perhaps effectively mobilized a counter-geography, if the terms of doing so were directed primarily, one must remember, against the wall that was promised to prevent attacks.

If shooting live ammunition at Palestinian protesters raised ethical questions, bombing civilians even to root out and demolish underground tunnels where the attacks suggested a desire to obliterate Gaza by a Babylonian lex talionis far above international law–sweeping aside civil law codes and ethics in the Deuteronomic response to such premeditated violence. Civil law traditions died as armored vehicles and troops cross into the small semi-autonomous region of the Gaza Strip, as if in response to the arrows of Hamas attackers who crossed the border. The arrows of military advances, as in old military maps of strategy, ae repurposed in a satellite view of the positions of military forces and vehicles, eliding questions of the fate of civilian residents of those abandoned or flattened structures of the urban footprint as the military crossed into Gaza’s confines.

The addition of an underground border barrier on the Israeli side of the wall single-mindedly designed to prevent militants from ever crossing, and not speaking or interacting with the citizens who lived there. The invasion of Israel’s boundary was cast, of course, as a retributive strike to retake the mosque, arguing that the invasion known as the Al-Aqsa Flod was provoked by Israeli aggression, but the war was fought about the boundaries of a barrier wall, boundaries distinct from the protection of the state evoked in the sabbath liturgy or indeed of a sacralized the state, so much as a state dedicated to security, defined by “crossing points” and the restriction of movement.

The threat that Gaza poses to the nation’s security is however different from military invasions of fifty years past. The focus on enclosing Gaza, and technologically contain the Palestinian presence from Israel as a state, has led to a logic of containment, deeply troublesome on humanitarian grounds, and seemingly without ethical grounds. Bracketing an enclave with intentions to splinter Palestinian Authority is hardly an enclave on strong legs. Yet from 2019, before the pandemic, before the Ukraine War, the blocking out of Gaza’s plight as a non-state was clear. The cascading possibilities of cross-border attacks charged to have begun from Lebanon on the IDF, as over 6,000 Israeli bombs on Gaza within a week after the October 7 attacks,–flattening large swaths of the city’s neighborhoods as wasteland, targeting neighborhoods where the deadly attacks on Israel were directed abut displacing over a million as IDF troops massed on the border with the Gaza Strip, as airplane bombing reduced many of the cities and urban infrastructure to rubble.

The question of what factions of Palestinians had proposed the invasion of Israel was bracketed, in the appearance of a truly divine justice continued to mask the brutality of air strikes, activated by the living traumatic memories of what a strong state might have done in response to nineteenth- century pogroms. The collective blanketing that began as targets in a crowded urban enclaves of Gaza City hit mosques, refugee camps, Christian churches and ancient towers, creating horrific images of bombardment that the Israeli commanders had not considered would be widely diffused, and amidst the current plague of Fake News even recycling outdated clips to show targeted houses reduced to clouds of smoke and dust, activating a war of images and counter-images that tugged on the media outlets of global audiences in predictable and unpredictable ways.

There was something eery in mapping a military mission in sacred terms, but the cross-border attach was an attack on Jewish identity–itself adding to the list of Jewish martyrs. If the concerted plans for border-crossing can only be described as “pure evil,”the urgency of vociferous demands to obliterate Gaza reveal a terrifying closing of a needed window on humanitarian resolutions. As we are stalled in a discussion of what is a “proportionate response” and what is “disproportionate shelling” to the extreme cross-border violence, maps are both not the point and the point. They are not the point because the demand is to obliterate a territory tied to terrorism, and as the creation of a restrictive cordon sanitaire has removed any space for hopes of a future solution and a space of peace, and the point as without creating a map for safe transit, or indeed maps between Gaza and Egypt, for wartime refugees and hostages to escape–or be exchanged–lest we all consign ourselves to the beginning of living on the edge. The hopes for allowing food, uncontaminated water, fuel and medicine on safe corridors from Egypt have grown since water and power were cut off in response to the violent attack on settlements around Gaza that broke through the boundary celebrated as an Iron Wall who had been “preparing to in silence for the campaign to liberate Palestine.”

The Palestinian offers to release the up to 250 hostages it claims to have captured in the border raid in exchange for the 6,000 Palestinians who are in Israeli jails suggest how much this is cast in terms, on the ground, of a logic of incarceration, as much as a war of combat. But the safe passage that might open the hopes for a conclusion of the war The irony was, if it can be called an irony, that Protocols for Safe Passage promised in Oslo Accords thirty years ago, in 1993-4, long predate the barrier that set a global precedent in impeding safe passage or movement. And the idea of safe passage–either passage of Palestinians or, now, of the captives that Hamas is holding in Gaza, and not allowing safe passage of return, suggest the sclerotic nature of a debate that foreclosed even the possibility of safe passage that might link occupied territories. (When one of the architects of the two-state solutions agreed upon in Oslo, which began from the historic handshake of Yasser Arafat and Yitzhak Rabin, was murdered, having a clear premonition that the Accords were effectively derailed, my father downed a bottle of vodka in ways that seemed to suggest his ties to the political body of Israel, which I still can’t help but tie to his own later physical decline.). If the Peace Process that was begun at Oslo were argued to be fully “scrapped” as the past thirty years proved they had ‘failed’ in mid-September, the October invasion of Israel received the incommensurate response that seemed to suggest that they were indeed fully off-track.

17. The Gaza Border barrier was based not on scriptures, but “smart” tools that have become the new tools of border drawing and border construction in a globalized world. The unprecedented scale of its costly construction set a precedent for the scope and scale of projects of wall-building described as “permitter protection” that have spread globally since before 2016, when the US-Mexico Border Wall became a platform of a political campaign. Even after the revelation of Ismael Haniye that “thousands of fighters underground [in Gaza’s network of tunnels] have been preparing to in silence for the campaign to liberate Palestine ” provoked the heaviest aerial bombardment the IDF had ever made deep into the heart of the Gazan territory in 2014, targeting the territory’s sole power plant to plunge it into darkness by aerial assault, the claims to guarantee safe passage had eroded. Indeed, the possibility of acting on the promises made at Oslo faded after mortar attacks across the border and soldiers entered Israel through a maze of tunnels–

Aerial Bombardment of Gaza’s Sole Power Plant, July 29, 2014/Ashraf Amra/AFP

The current bombardment of the territory strikes at the expansion of Israeli settlements and increased encroachment on the boundaries of Palestinian territory by border walls, with the past encouragement of the Trump administration ready to tolerate the assertion of national identity as it was boasting of building its own “border wall,” a sixty-five km boundary begun in October, 2015, with a hundred meter border barrier, that redefined the Gaza Strip not as a sovereign territory, than as a region policed by Israel, if ostensibly existing only to protect Israelis’ security. The bombardments of Gaza that have continued seek to quell and subdue the city–or, rather, the groups posing a threat to Israelis, from ever infiltrating the space of the nation-state, in which the Gaza Strip was always defined in negative relation to.

The deadly attacks launched across the border wall were designed to trigger collective memories as traumatic as a break in the long vaunted boundary, but the sudden breaches of these confining boundaries were also exposing multiple populations in the region to death as they breached the border with exultant rage. If the spate of online opining passing as public statements suggests little familiarity with the apparent back-sliding of a level of barbaric slaughter that seem to reflect the cut-throat throat cutting of the invasion of Ukraine, perhaps not been really processed as a new level in the violence of cross-boundary aggression, and an all too ready rationalization of placing at risk untold a density of lives, here rendered by white dots on the MapBox estimated population density map of the actually quite small confines that make up the Gaza Strip: the truly “dark” map of the populations of Palestine may register the dark future of all residents after the border breach.

Border Breach by Hamas on October 7, 2023 against Vulnerable Populations it Placed at Risk

But the conflict of mapping Gaza by a fence–indeed of denying it any sovereignty or bracketing the fate of its populations, has been encouraged by the geography of the wall, rather than a sacred geography. As steel bollards of the planned Donald Trump Border Wall rusting in the Guadalupe Canyon in the border state of Arizona, wall-building and border construction intensified on the Gaza Strip. The reinforced border boundary faultily created the sense of a secure border to which the nation extended that has definitely undermined the possibility of a peace process by bracketing the need to negotiate with Palestinians in Gaza or to imagine any new future for the Gaza Strip. The newly enclosed space in which Gazans are confined offered something more like target practice than a civil or juridical space, and the new border is increasingly impossible to have any affective relation even in the purely partisan manner that Rabbi Goren hoped: the enclosure whose residents are cut off from needed humanitarian aid and basic supplies of food, water, or energy is a taunt that the Rabbi would not have easily sat, and difficult to reconcile with ethical precepts of the Talmud on assisting and meeting the needs of strangers that formed groups for immigration aid.

Hamas soldiers crossed the border as they incapacitated and broke through the border barrier, rather than the underground infrastructure of tunnels Israel is determined to destroy. The equating of military entrance into Gaza and its aerial bombardment with holding steadfast in “our duty to protect the citizens of Israel” against any incursion after the widely condemned invasion should make one reflect on the security that possibility in the future, and what this is indeed the beginning of–lest wall-building be seen as and accepted as a consequence of globalization, the sudden escalation of airstrikes in Palestine has shot up to an unprecedented level that have commanded global attention as they have sharply escalated to an intensity commensurable only to Syria, beyond Yemen, and like no previous bombing campaigns in the previous four years.

Even if Israel’s Defense Minister, Yoav Gallant, vouched to the Knesset that Israel has chosen to relinquish all “responsibility for life in the Gaza Strip,” the sustained bombing campaign has dwarfed all other assaults in the area. If he or Netanyahu believe Israel can isolate, bracket, and separate Gaza from Middle East politics and the minds of Israelis, the focus on a “new security reality” was upended by thee fears bared in the horrifically devastating invasion of border villages near the Gaza Strip, seeking only to eliminate the presence of Hamas before they “disconnect the umbilical cord” that has tied Israel to the region, the haunting images of the border boundary that will continue after the violent incursion planned and orchestrated by Hamas traumatized the nation by leaving over 1,400 people dead and more than 3,500 injured, numbers that spiraled rapidly into a retributive bombing campaigns killing 8,000. The umbilical cords that tie Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza will continue, and are not to be fully addressed, nor are, it seems, the corridors of safe passage that residents of Gaza have long deserved.

So what is the place of western humanism? If one worries that writing anything opens space for acrimonious charges of complicity, the problem of containing intentional violence on such a scale, after the building of a monumental border wall that was supposed to ensure an end to cross-border terrorist attacks, has reminded us how much we are living on the edge, and allowed the most tenuous forms of living on the edge, even if the massive wall-building that was planned in the wake of the military invasion of “Operation Protective Edge” was celebrated as conclusive containment of terrorism in 2014. But the intensive militarization of the territorial “edge” of Gaza helped create a new chapter by ratcheting up of the pronounced violence of cross-border attacks on October 7. The scale of violence is horrific, but the logic of securitizing the border has prevented any negotiation or consideration of the rights of Gaza’s residents, viewing their population as a site of danger demanding containment and policing from soon after the withdrawal of IDF troops.

If Moshe Dayan felt racked by guilt as the war progressed, the military engineers of the border barrier, the engineers of the Iron Wall around Gaza Strip must be racked by guilt and consumed by anger. It is no surprise that Uzi Dayan, his nephew, a former General in the Israel Defense Forces who headed the National Security Council, 2000-2002, is so concerned about the defensible borders of Israel to invite we consider the rockets and missiles fired from the West Bank as an imminent threat to Israel’s ability to protect or defend its sovereignty–by flipping the toleration of missiles in Gaza to the nightmare of the sudden vulnerability of Israel’s population and industrial centers.

Ability of Firing Rockets and Mortars from West Bank/JCPA

18. My Yom Kippur visit predated the flooding of he internet with “dumb shit” of reflexive tweets on the unspeakable violence of a similarly well-coordinated offensive drive on settlers. If before false information spewed up on social media that seemed to serve to magnify the conflict, the memory served to remind one that this is wrongly cast as a religious war, and wrongly treated as if it is a local war. Even if it is easy to cast it as a religious as it involves Israel, in the overly suggestive geography of the Middle East, and about the symbolic center of Jerusalem, the sacred city that occupied such centrality in a medieval map.

Beinicke Library/Yale University (Detail. f. 74v, Beinecke MS 358, circa 1400-1235)

Jerusalem is a point of bearing for the Wave that Hamas proclaimed, and the defense of Jerusalem was the epicenter for the spate of wall-building that has increased Israeli military contracting of perimeter walls. But the war being fought ardently with a fervent sense of right was a nightmare of border crossing, however, one far more barbaric and immediate than in the past, waged through a supposedly “Iron” wall of border barricades monitored by surveillance 24-7, believed to be far more impregnable than the bored frontiers of the Suez Canal or Golan Heights ever were before that traumatic war fifty years ago.

This fight was a global war, however, if it was not apparently centered at Jerusalem, fought about man-made boundaries and edges, of a symbolic prominence and depth as sharp as th imagined divides of three continents–Europe, Asia, and Africa, read clockwise around the navel of Jerusalem. Rather than consign fears of invasion and vulnerability to the past, the incursion divided global media between strong condemnation and assertions of the rights of Israel to defend its people (USA; Germany; Ukraine) and calls for mutual restraint cast as rather tepid non-involvement (Saudi Arabia; Spain; Russia; China) and ardent congratulations and commitment to “stand by the Palestinian fighters until the liberation of Palestine and Jerusalem” (Iran). Global division about the war matched fears of a conflict cascading across borders and out of control in numerous incidents of global violence, reenacting violent disputes with a bloodiness that reflected existential struggle motivated by deepest fears, and led to a spiking of fears of global vulnerability among many–Jews, Muslims, Arabs–in the multiplication of revenge strikes.

This was a world motivated suddenly, as in the Middle East, by a lex talionis in place of international law, in other countries. The outbreaks of knife attacksg in Detroit and a Chicago suburb, as the war seemed to “go global” despite broadly united fronts of the condemnations of such seemingly wanton violence against victims of unrestrained rage. The fear of multiplying attacks across regional borders grew, far beyond Israel’s own borders, as a local conflict became a grounds to prompt fears of a regional, or even a broad trans-national war, involving transnational terrorist groups as Hezbollah, as well as Hamas, and retributive violence not only on a personal or individual scale but as a concerted response to the continued Israeli bombardment and invasion of Gaza, where news has been blanketed, escalated in the two weeks Israeli troops congregated menacingly and hesitantly along the Gazas border, raising hopes that the invasion could be forestalled, as we focussed attention on mapping the sites of cross-border hostilities of Hamas rocket attacks that had helped launch the invasion, and the reprisals of aerial bombing of the Gaza Strip, hoping the clash cast as a lex talioinis more than international law would not spill over into more borders.

Graphic News

The immediate existential reaction to the surprise Yom Kippur invasion one tried to comprehend by looking at maps sent a shudder through the New York Congregation and many more across the wold was weirdly echoed at fifty years distance by the horror of the dismantling of any effectiveness as the fiction of the so-called “Iron Wall” faded with its failure to guarantee security to those living outside Gaza’s borders. Thousands of launched missiles set the stage to recapture what were being re-mapped as Palestinian territory, as bulldozers and wire-cutters removed the massive monumental border barriers constructed at great cost by Israeli governments to engineer “normalcy” by containing the Palestinian presence in the walled off enclave.

As it was walled off, the Gaza Strip had become a tightly packed redoubt of Hamas, where munition seem to have been stockpiled in underground warren of tunnels unseen, planned violent attack of “soldiers,” armed to the hilt, who flooded breached fences of the “Iron Wall” that crumbled and incredibly fell before bulldozers, setting in course cascading events that sought to destabilize governmental rule–and may indeed be a blow eroding trust in the current government–has become a call for bombing raids to ready Gaza’s terrain for a multi-pronged invasion by Israeli armored vehicles, tanks with mounted missiles, and ground troops.

hostThe rejection of any cease fire–or any routes of safe passage for refugees–was rebuffed by an Israeli government that proclaimed “a time for war” three weeks after the October 7 invasion, after routes to enter the territory were cleared. As rocket attacks continued to resist the attacks, and to taunt Israeli troops to enter the strip, the massive scale of injuries and deaths could not be ignored as entering tanks were met by clashes in the northern Gaza, now mapped as an evacuation zone.

Graphic News

The Deuteronomic scope and scale of a sense of “justice” and righteousness that lies in retribution and the meting out of vengeance have little place in international law but appear echoed in the unprecedented bombardment of the Gaza Strip that have recently struck over three hundred and twenty “targets” in the region, perhaps in anticipation for the invasion of the troops and tanks massed on Gaza’s border for days. If Deutronomic, is this a usurpation of the judgement of God in its elevation of the protection of Israel, and lack of compassion for those vulnerable? Even by talion, the retributive principle of the lex talionis, penalties are not liable on behalf of another (Deut 24:16) nor are children penalized by reciprocal justice–nor, one assumes, vulnerable refugees.

Destroyed Buildings in Gaza Since Start of Bombardment/Mariano Zafra, Prasanta Kumar Dutta, Aditi Bandar/Reuters

Refugee Camps (Outlined) within Buildings and Structures Destroyed by Aerial Bombardment