[POST] Squid Game -- the Israeli edition
The humiliation, terror, and death are purposeful Israeli means
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Readers sometimes balk at my use of the term “ethnic cleansing” to describe what Israel is doing in Gaza right now, but it is entirely apt.
The Oxford dictionary offers this concise definition:
the mass expulsion or killing of members of an unwanted ethnic or religious group in a society.
I summarize simply as: You and your people must leave this place, which is ours now. If you don’t, we will engineer situations that force your resistance and our use of overwhelmingforce. If need be, we’ll even starve you out. We don’t necessarily want to kill you but we’re okay with that outcome — however achieved. This is a fight you cannot possibly win, so your best route is to self-deport immediately. Just go and never come back, because, if you don’t, you will likely die at our hands. Understand: God is on our side, so there is no sin in anything we end up doing to you.
What Israel is doing in Gaza approximates ethnic cleansing while carefully skirting the actual charge:
Israel is engineering the systematic, forced displacement of nearly the entire population of the Strip.
The IDF is deliberately destroying civilian infrastructure and homes to make life unlivable within the Strip, thus encouraging displacment both internally (90 percent of Gaza residents have been forced to leave their homes) and externally (roughly five percent have fled the Strip entirely — one assumes, for good).
Israel’s use of starvation and blockade as weapons is stunningly cruel — by clear design.
The IDF is engaging in mass killings and the clear targeting of civilians.
Those still inside Gaza are suffering widespread detention and abuse at the hands of the IDF and Israeli authorities.
The Netanyahu government employs thoroughly dehumanizing rhetoric in explaining its actions, which are explicitly described in policy plans as a demographic makeover of the Strip.
Hard-right Israeli elements openly call for annexation and settlement of the entire Strip, and there is every reason to believe this is the end-goal of the Netanyahu government.
Anybody BUT Israel does all that and Washington (at least non-Trump Washington) would have no trouble describing and condemning it as ethnic cleansing.
[SIDENOTE: And yes, I fully realize the pot-calling-the-kettle-black on this one. America’s westward expansion from its original 13 colonies to 48 states was — on many levels — a continental campaign of ethnic cleansing of Native American tribes. To pretend otherwise is just self-delusion.]
No, what’s happening is not genocide because Israel doesn’t want them all dead — just gone, and it’s willing to kill a lot of them to make that permanent displacement happen.
Then again, you could have leveled the same basic charges on Nazi Germany’s treatment of the Jews in Europe right up until the Wannsee Conference (January 1942), when the regime basically abandoned all dreams of shipping out all the Jews and decided to kill the remaining populations. If the British Navy hadn’t come to exert serious sea control over the Mediterranean, then Berlin’s Madagascar Plan (proposed in 1940) would have been attempted: deporting up to a million Jews per year for four years to the French colony of Madagascar, which the Nazis hoped to take control of as part of their conquest of France.
We’ve all heard the reports of Israel and the US trying to shop around the idea of mass deportations of Gaza Palestinians to any number of states both close (e.g., Syria) and more distant (Sudan, Libya, Morocco, Puntland, Somaliland). Weirdly enough, those efforts compete with Trump’s own effort to dump US deportees around the world in the worst possible locations.
Old dog, old tricks.
None of this is to say that Israel hasn’t made magnificent efforts to avoid civilian casualties, because it has. It’s just that the whole project has been gamed by Israel for maximum displacement effect.
And that’s where the comparisons to the fictional Squid Game resonate, not just as a metaphor used by outside observers (like me) but as an internally embraced mindset among the Strip’s residents and even Israeli soldiers operating there.
This whole thing is set up to maximize collateral damage of all sorts with an eye to forcing self-deportation (i.e., Palestinians giving up and leaving).
How else to describe the bizarre cruelty of Israel’s distribution of aid — a dynamic that seems designed to be lethally dangerous? Multiple reports confirm that Israeli troops are under direct orders to open fire on unarmed Palestinian civilians as they attempt to access food at aid centers. These centers, operated by the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation (GHF), open for only one hour per day for a population of over two million. Anyone approaching outside this window risks being shot. Since late May, over 500 people have been killed while trying to obtain food, with thousands more wounded.
HAARETZ: 'It's a Killing Field': IDF Soldiers Ordered to Shoot Deliberately at Unarmed Gazans Waiting for Humanitarian Aid
THE TELEGRAPH: Israeli soldiers ordered to fire on Palestinians queuing for aid, say whistleblowers
The widely replicated portion of Haaretz’s explosive coverage:
The people seeking aid are “treated like a hostile force,” one soldier said. “No crowd-control measures, no tear gas, just live fire with everything imaginable: heavy machine guns, grenade launchers, mortars. Then, once the center opens, the shooting stops, and they know they can approach. Our form of communication is gunfire.”
The same soldier continued, “We open fire early in the morning if someone tries to get in line from a few hundred meters away, and sometimes we just charge at them from close range. But there’s no danger to the forces.” They added, “I’m not aware of a single instance of return fire. There’s no enemy, no weapons.”
Firsthand civilian accounts explicitly echo the "Squid Game" analogy. Palestinians seeking the food aid describe the experience as a "death race"—the fastest and luckiest may survive to get food, while others are shot or trampled. One survivor recounted crawling through darkness to avoid snipers, witnessing people shot for using a flashlight, and seeing bodies left where they fell, all while simply trying to reach food for their families.
MIDDLE EAST EYE: ‘My journey to get aid in Gaza was like Squid Game’
A firsthand account from a former taxi driver still in Gaza with his wife and daughter:
I decided I would go to the American-backed Gaza Humanitarian Foundation aid distribution centre on Salah al-Din Road, near the Netzarim corridor.
I heard that it’s dangerous and people were getting killed and injured, but I made the decision to go anyway.
Someone told me that if you go once every seven days, you might get enough supplies to feed your family for that week …
The journey was extremely difficult - and dark. We couldn’t use any flashlights, or else we would attract the attention of Israeli snipers or military vehicles.
There were some exposed, open areas, which we crossed by crawling across the ground.
As I crawled, I looked over, and to my surprise, saw several women and elderly people taking the same treacherous route as us.
At one point, there was a barrage of live gunfire all around me. We hid behind a destroyed building.
Anyone who moved or made a noticeable motion was immediately shot by snipers.
Next to me was a tall, light-haired young man using the flashlight on his phone to guide him.
The others yelled at him to turn it off. Seconds later, he was shot.
He collapsed to the ground and lay there bleeding, but no one could help or move him. He died within minutes.
Some nearby men eventually covered the man’s body with the empty bag he had brought to fill up with canned goods. I saw at least six other martyrs lying on the ground …
I was terrified, but there was no turning back. I’d already passed the most dangerous areas, and now the aid centre was within sight.
We were all afraid. But we were there to feed our hungry children.
It was coming up to 2am, which is when I was told access to the aid centre is granted.
Sure enough, moments later, a large green light lit up the centre in the distance, signalling that it was open.
People started running towards it from every direction. I ran as fast as I could.
I was shocked by the massive crowd. I’d risked my life to get closer to the front, and yet, thousands had somehow arrived before me …
I tried to push forward, but I couldn’t. The centre was no longer visible because of the size of the crowds.
People were pushing and shoving, but I decided I had to make it through - for my children. I took my shoes off, put them in my bag, and began forcing my way through.
There were people on top of me, and I was on top of others.
I noticed a girl being suffocated under the feet of the crowds. I grabbed her hand and pushed her out.
I started feeling around for the aid boxes and grabbed a bag that felt like rice. But just as I did, someone else snatched it from my hands.
I tried to hold on, but he threatened to stab me with his knife. Most people there were carrying knives, either to defend themselves or to steal from others.
Eventually, I managed to grab four cans of beans, a kilogram of bulgur, and half a kilogram of pasta.
Within moments, the boxes were empty. Most of the people there, including women, children and the elderly, got nothing.
Some begged others to share. But no one could afford to give up what they managed to get.
Even the empty cartons and wooden pallets were taken, to be used as firewood for cooking.
Those who got nothing started picking up spilled flour and grains from the ground, trying to salvage what had fallen during the chaos.
I turned my head and saw soldiers, maybe 10 or 20 metres away.
They were talking to each other, using their phones, and filming us. Some were aiming weapons at us.
I remembered a scene from the South Korean TV show Squid Game, in which killing was entertainment - a game.
We were being killed not only by their weapons but also by hunger and humiliation, while they watched us and laughed.
I started wondering: were they still filming us? Were they watching this madness, seeing how some people overpowered others, while the weakest got nothing?
We left the area just as the boxes had emptied.
Minutes later, red smoke grenades were thrown into the air. Someone told me that it was the signal to evacuate the area. After that, heavy gunfire began.
Understand: Israel has pushed aside the UN and traditional humanitarian organizations, instead outsourcing aid to the GHF (Gaza Humanitarian Foundation), a private contractor with cloudy ties to the Israeli government and funded by US sources — to include our State Department. The chaotic and militarized distribution system, which employs local armed gangs to control crowds, has resulted in widespread violence and death. This is basically the weaponization of food—using starvation and lethal force to control, displace, or clear out the Palestinian population.
And that’s where the term “war crimes” inevitably pops up, and with good reason.
The United Nations and human rights groups have warned of imminent famine and described the aid system as an entrapment mechanism that predictably exposes desperate civilians to indiscriminate gunfire.
Desperate contestants (i.e., starving Palestinian civilians) in a life or death struggle for food that is engineered by a distant, unseen authority but executed on the spot by faceless security forces.
The analogy to Squid Game is not hyperbole but a reflection of the documented, systematic use of deadly force and deprivation against civilians seeking food in Gaza. The process is described by survivors, journalists, and even Israeli soldiers as a real-life version of the show’s lethal contests, with food and survival as the prize and death as the penalty for failure.
I have stated my opinion and analysis here multiple times: I understand completely why Israel is eradicating the Strip as a threat-vector source. Hamas triggered this decision, as did Iran, and now the Palestinians there are suffering that outcome, which is ethnic cleansing gamified in the most cruel manner.
The abused has become the abuser. That’s how it gets passed down over the decades. The historical analogies haunt, but they are legitimately cited.
That’s how Israel came to this point. That’s how Hamas and Iran forced this point.
Everybody on the executing end of this dynamic thinks they’re doing the world a favor and that this outcome is entirely justified based on their own past suffering and the historical crimes of those now slated for removal and — barring that — execution.
We all hear the phrase never again. We just none of us believe in it.
The realist in me still says, speed the killing, speed the plow.
Why should any of us pretend it’s going down any other way?
Pro-natalism = Pro-deathism
Self-inflicted, inflicted by external forces; it doesn't matter... I'm saying it very, very, very rudimentary and I wouldn't hold it against anyone to call it beyond callous, sadocynical, and reductive...
For more than 20 years anyway, overall Western legitimate(!) concerns (military, psyops, asymmetry etc.) all boils down to vast populations of people that are "hardcoded" blocked, between the fundamentalist mantra of procreating because of a commandment on one hand, and, refusal to use contraceptives on the other hand, in a world that is over 8 billions.
Which also enters in conflict with the Geneva Convention, Universal Human Rights etc.
This doesn't look at all – if we excuse climate change – as anything to do with frontier integration (or refusal of it) than a declaration of force of "we either force you to kill all of us or we'll continue this limbo for eternity – you have the clocks but we have the time".
Something I thought would never happen: the glass slipper of vile National Socialists comparison actually starting at times to fit an Israeli administration. Like America, Israel is being run by its worst. Like America, the tail wags the dog. The rest of us - 🙈🙉🙊.