Today marks one year since Israel’s military incursion into the Gaza Strip, known officially as “Operation Cast Lead.” On December 27th of ’08, Israel began a week of targeted air-strikes which included, according to the Palestinian Center for Human Rights, “37 houses; 67 security and training sites; 20 workshops; 25 public and private institutions; seven mosques; and three educational institutions” in the Hamas-governed territory. This was followed on January 3rd by an air-land phase which lasted until Israel withdrew all combat forces on January 17th. At the end of the offensive, somewhere between 1150 and 1450 Palestinians had been killed — three different pro-Palestinian human rights sources estimated 1444, 1409, and 1387, respectively, while the Israel Defense Forces counted 1166; thirteen total Israelis had died at the end of operations.

The number of non-combatants killed during the attacks has been a particular focus of various investigations, including the controversial Goldstone Report. According to the IDF, 295 of the Palestinians killed were civilians; according to the three pro-Palestinian human rights organizations the total came to 773, 926, and 1172, respectively. Goldstone analyzes the discrepancy between IDF and pro-Palestinian totals and explains it as a result of the IDF considering Gazan policemen to be combatants; the report also notes that the IDF “has not published a list of victims or other data supporting its assertions.”

Of course, relying on pro-Palestinian data and the analysis of the Goldstone Report is not optimal. The fact is that despite Judge Richard Goldstone having an impeccable reputation as an international law expert, the United Nations Human Rights Council, which mandated Goldstone’s report, has shown a certain preoccupation with condemning Israel since its inception in 2006. And pro-Palestinian human rights groups could have the (perfectly natural) inclination to skew data to present a more damning picture of the IDF than is actually true. The same is true on the other side, with regard to the IDF’s internal findings quite possibly being skewed to present a less damning picture (but as I noted above, these findings were less transparent and rigorous than Goldstone’s or those of the various human rights groups). This does not invalidate their data or arguments, of course. It just creates an urge to find more independent information.

The problem there is that Israel strictly banned media access to Gaza during the incursion, and repeatedly denied Goldstone’s requests this year for help and contribution to his report. Goldstone wanted to visit the Israel town of Sderot, which has been particularly brutally battered by Palestinian rockets this decade, but Israel told him no. I can’t help but think Israel’s reason for not complying was so they could later reject the report as biased, as they and the US have done. Such rejections are not really intellectually fair. But that doesn’t matter — both parties have strategic interests in silencing the report’s findings.

Even if the actual substance of the report has issues — a judgment which I have yet to find a convincing argument for — some of its claims are difficult to account for without ascribing punitive intent to Israel. The most difficult one, for me, is that Israel engaged in “attacks on the foundations of civilian life in Gaza… industrial infrastructure, food production, water installations, sewage treatment and housing.” Take the Al Bader flour mill, for example. Says Goldstone:

The flour mill was hit by a series of air strikes on 9 January 2009 after several false warnings had been issued on previous days. The Mission finds that its destruction had no military justification. The nature of the strikes, in particular the precise targeting of crucial machinery, suggests that the intention was to disable the factory in terms of its productive capacity.

The IDF has not offered any response to this and similar accusations of deliberate, precise infrastructure destruction. Say what you want about Palestinian terrorists lobbing bombs from behind civilians; such explanations — which have not even been independently verified — cannot justify attacks on essential life-sustaining infrastructure. These attacks seem to be punishment against the Gazan people, perhaps for electing Hamas in the free and fair Palestinian Authority legislative elections in 2006.

I think many in the United States either favored or were indifferent to Israel’s incursion last year because the pro-Israel side’s rhetoric — which focused on Hamas as being only a terrorist organization and the incursion as being only a response to Palestinian terror — worked. I wrote a research paper last year on this rhetorical technique, which is “ideographic” in nature. An ideograph is a highly simplified political term or slogan which engenders public assent to policy — in this case, war. One source I found extremely helpful for explaining the way the ideograph “terror” simplifies things was the Council on Foreign Relations’ info page on Hamas. CFR clears away the propaganda and points out, among other things, that Hamas is 90% civilian and is extremely popular with Gazans because it keeps them alive with its social services, despite the Israeli-Egyptian blockade which keeps most humanitarian aid from making it to the territory. But almost every quote from an Israeli official at the time of the incursion used some variation of the word “terror” to describe Hamas and explain the necessity of the incursion. Nowadays, this is the way that we — the United States and Israel — justify massive civilian destruction and foreign occupation.

From the perspective of freedom, it is hard for me not to sympathize with the Palestinians. And I think as Americans we ought to stand up and demand their freedom, particularly the Gazans’. Israel has no right to control Gaza from without, just as the US has no right to control Iraq and Afghanistan from without. Let’s realize that, given the US’s overwhelming military aid bias toward Israel, the blitz on Gaza a year ago is part of an ongoing pattern of US military-imperial sprawl since 9/11. And let’s understand that, as Americans, we’re creating the impetus for more hostility and terrorism against us by failing to think about what our tax dollars are funding in Gaza, East Jerusalem, and the West Bank.

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