Book. In the fall of 2023, after the October 7 massacre perpetrated by Hamas, General Giora Eiland, former head of Israel’s National Security Council, exposed in the columns of the newspaper Yediot Aharonot What should be, according to him, the response of the Jewish State. “Israel has no choice but to make Gaza a place where it will be temporarily or permanently impossible to live”wrote.
The instructions were followed to the letter by Benjamin Netanyahu’s government. In a year of bombings on Gaza, the Israeli army pulverized everything that allowed the inhabitants of this coastal strip to form society: homes, administrations, schools, universities, places of worship, cultural centers, sports fields, factories, warehouses, fields. , roads, roundabouts, etc.
This enterprise of annihilation, which has led to the deaths, to date, of more than 41,000 Palestinians, mostly civilians, is at the center of the Gaza Black Bookcollective work directed by Agnès Levallois, vice president of the Institute for Mediterranean Research and Studies on the Middle East. It brings together around sixty texts dedicated to Gaza, mainly NGO reports and journalistic investigations, organized by themes (humanitarian blockade, attacks on the health system, attacked civilians, etc.) and presented by a specialist in the field.
“Ethnic cleansing”
At the origin of this work is the desire to document, to establish the facts, to fight against“invisibilization” of the inhabitants of Gaza and their suffering. This process, without which the destruction of the coastal territory could not have reached the heights it did, was driven by several concrete actions by the Israeli authorities: the prohibition of the entry of foreign media to the enclave, the closure of the Canal offices Al-Jazeera in Israel and the West Bank and attacks against journalists in Gaza.
But this blackout also involved more insidious measures to control public discourse in Western countries, particularly “The rhetoric of intimidation through attribution to anti-Semitism”which Rony Brauman, former president of Doctors Without Borders, bravely points out in the book’s preface. “This war has killed people of flesh and blood as if they were just shadows”writes Peter Harling, director of Synaps, a Beirut-based research center, in the introduction to one of the chapters.
In the section dedicated to weapons of war, Guillaume Ancel, former French army officer, questions the use by the Israeli air force of 500 kilo bombs – and even 1,000 – against the immense refugee camp in the Gaza Strip . Accumulating figures, facts and testimonies, The Black Book of Gaza highlights the objective tacitly pursued by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu: “Ethnic cleansing, says Agnès Levallois, with the objective, if not of physically eliminating the inhabitants of Gaza, at least of causing, and this time definitively, their departure from their land. »
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