Former CIA Official: “Israel is Carrying Out a Flatout Ethnic Cleansing Campaign That’s Being Supported by the Full Weight of the West. It’s Extraordinary.”

A retired intelligence official disentangles Netanyahu’s post-October 7 military strategy, shows how it’s the norm rather than the exception for Israel, and explains why it’s doomed to fail.

“A state ruling a hostile population of 1.5 to 2 million foreigners would necessarily become a secret-police state, with all that this implies for education, free speech and democratic institutions. The corruption characteristic of every colonial regime would also prevail in the State of Israel. The administration would suppress Arab insurgency on the one hand and acquire Arab Quislings on the other.” – Yeshayahu Leibowitz, "The Territories," 1968. 

Last Friday night, I was scrolling through TV options after a long day of work searching for a bit of mindless entertainment when I saw a chyron on Fox News and learned Israeli warplanes were bombing Tehran and other sites in Iran. It wasn’t the type of mindless entertainment I had in mind but the few minutes I watched before turning the TV off and hurling the remote across the room certainly were mindless, though brainless would probably be a better way of putting it. 

Needless to say, Fox described the attacks ordered by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s government as “retaliation” for Iran firing missiles into Israel on October 1. Indeed, to judge from the network’s reporting, Iranian leaders had fired the missiles for fun, the way normal people enjoy a Fourth of July BBQ and fireworks, and was unrelated to Israeli bombing runs in Beirut, including one that killed Hezbollah’s leader Hassan Nasrallah, the Mossad’s assassination of other top figures in the “terrorist group” by remotely detonating pagers they used, or any of the numerous actions taken by Israel in the period leading directly up to October 1 — or going back a little further the assassination in Tehran in July of Ismail Haniyeh, chairman of the Hamas Political Bureau, let alone Netanyahu’s murderous rampage across Gaza for the past year – that obviously factored in to Tehran’s decision to finally retaliate against Israel.

In fact, what was most noteworthy in the opinion of one of Fox News’ ace on-air correspondents covering events on Friday was that the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) always did its utmost to reduce civilian casualties by alerting the local population in areas it was about to target so they could evacuate ahead of the attacks. Hence, residents of Tehran would have had plenty of time to seek safe shelter.

Taking such steps was quite unusual and extraordinary in modern warfare, marveled the correspondent, and it explained why the IDF had such a successful track record in making sure its operations didn’t harm innocent bystanders, as had been seen during its pinpoint attacks in Beirut weeks before. The message to be drawn from the correspondent’s account – which was patently false and flies in the face of a mammoth amount of low-hanging evidence that’s piled up over the past year, but putting that aside for the moment – was clear: when civilians are killed or injured during IDF operations, it is despite the noble efforts of the Israeli government, not its intention.

That’s the last thing I remember before throwing the remote across the room, but if the Fox News segment was more starkly biased than most mainstream coverage about the Middle East, it’s broadly similar. In the last year, the IDF has killed an estimated 42,000 civilians, mostly women and children, razed much of Gaza, including its hospitals and schools, killed and wounded thousands of civilians and displaced 500,000 more in Lebanon, and also targeted Iran, Syria, and the Houthis in Yemen. This incredible crime spree and bloodbath has taken place before the world’s open eyes and been boasted about by Netanyahu, his ministers, and members of the IDF in the lunatic videos they regularly post on Tik Tok documenting their raping and pillaging of Gaza, which of course they would never do unless they were absolute certain they would never be held accountable for their actions because their government approved of the war crimes they were documenting and celebrating.

Yet Israel’s actions are still painted as justified because of the Hamas attack of October 7, 2023, and no major media would dare call it a “rogue state,” a label reserved for countries hostile to Washington, let alone describe Netanyahu as a “terrorist” or “war criminal,” which are precisely what he is by any reasonable definition of those words, but they too are only employed to casually, and often falsely, depict political and military leaders of Iran, Hamas, Hezbollah, and other official enemies of the US and Israel.

So it was refreshing, albeit depressing, to interview a former CIA officer last week who – in contrast to the US media, which is trying to tell us that what we’re seeing with our own eyes isn’t happening – stated very clearly what Israel is doing in Gaza. That is, implementing a willful, calculated scorched earth campaign whose central feature is deliberately target civilians and civilian infrastructure in order to drive out the local population in sections of Gaza Israel wants to annex for economic or security reasons.

The source, who is extremely familiar with Israel and the prevailing views of its political and military leadership regarding the country’s national security interests, tactics, and goals, also succinctly put Israeli actions in a historical context, which is never done by US officials and very rarely by reporters. What that makes apparent – and this is my interpretation, you can draw your own conclusions after seeing what he has to say – is that Israel’s post-October 7 assault in Gaza and the IDF’s routine, steeped up brutality in the West Bank isn’t aberrant conduct that emerged now because of Netanyahu’s particularly rabid blend of unhinged nationalism, rage, and bloodlust, though he possesses all of those in abundance. Instead, it reflects a long term, logically consistent Israeli military strategy dating back to the Nakba of 1948, the year the country was founded, whose most cherished goal is to colonize Palestine with Jewish settlers and eventually incorporate it into “Greater Israel.” 

“Israel, the country that’s been bringing you war crimes and ethnic cleansing for more than 75 years.” Arab residents of Haifa being forced to leave their homes by members of the Haganah, the main Zionist paramilitary organization, in April of 1948. Photo credit: Haaretz/Public Domain.

Hence, the ouster of Netanyahu and his replacement by a “reform” government won’t fix the problem, because Israeli violence against Palestinians and a propaganda system that dehumanizes them as subhuman didn’t come in response to Arab aggression and “terrorism.” It was baked into Israel’s DNA and might in some improbable best case scenario have been successfully treated had an Israeli government ever seriously wanted to strike a fair peace agreement with Palestinians that paved the way for a two-state solution, but none ever did and it’s far too late to fix that now.

It gives me no pleasure to say this and I resisted coming to this conclusion for a long time, in particular because a large share of my family was killed by the Nazis and hearing about The Holocaust from my parents profoundly marked me as a child and continues to haunt me. However, unlike the vast majority of Israel’s current citizens who have become the equivalent of Good Germans, and many American Jews who clearly will gladly serve as apologists for the Israeli government no matter what appalling war crimes it commits, I don’t include an addendum at the end of the words “Never Again” that says “Terms Apply.”

Furthermore, it’s impossible to dispute – other than for the Israeli government and its apologists, who are impervious to facts or evidence, which if unfavorable to their argument are dismissed because the source is biased or anti-Semitic or otherwise tainted – that from the Arab perspective, the creation of the state of Israel in the Middle East is very understandably seen as an act of aggression imposed on them by outside powers that can’t be made right by pointing to Adolf Hitler. As I wrote in Harper’s in 2009:

If an Eskimo state had been created in Palestine in 1948, one suspects that anti-Eskimo feeling would have increased markedly in the Arab world. When I asked Nawaf Musawi, the head of Hezbollah’s foreign affairs department, about the Holocaust denial that has been espoused by some Arab leaders, and suggested it reflected an unwillingness to acknowledge Jewish suffering, he replied, “We are not denying that European racists persecuted an entire people or belittling the suffering of the Jewish people, and we say this with utter frankness and without compliment. But Europeans committed those crimes, and then we were made to pay for them with our land.” 

One final point about the former CIA official I spoke to before turning to his account, which I’m adding because the Netanyahu fan club will tar him as a Nazi, but I want to characterize him for readers whose brains have the capacity for nuanced thinking. I’ve known the source for many years and he’s not markedly ideological but I’d describe his political views as centrist: not a far-rightist, as those on the left often assume about anyone who ever worked for the CIA, but not remotely where I stand on the leftward side of the political spectrum. More importantly in the present context, he’s never been entirely unsympathetic to the Israeli perspective or a card-carrying member of the Palestinian camp, but – like most people who’ve been following political events over the past year – he’s become much more critical of Israel as of late, as I discovered with some surprise during our recent conversation. 

With that, the source’s account begins below. I’ve presented it largely as he told it to me but lightly edited and organized his words for length and clarity. 

The world’s most moral army strikes again: Victims of the Al-Tabieen school massacre, carried out by the IDF in Gaza on August 10, 2024. Photo via Wikimedia Commons.

What Israel has been trying to accomplish since October 7 in the Occupied Territories is the same thing it had been trying to do before October 7, which was forcing Palestinians to leave by making their lives so miserable they feel they have no other choice. Before October 7, Israeli governments had been trying to do that slowly and steadily, with roadblocks and checkpoints that force workers to wake up at 2 am to get to jobs that start at 8 am, preventing parents from educating their children, routine violence, cutting access to water in Gaza, encouraging pogroms by settlers in the West Bank, and many other steps that negatively impacted every aspect of daily life for Palestinians, from the political to the economic to the social. 

Then came October 7, which Netanyahu’s government and the military immediately saw as a golden opportunity, and probably a unique one that would never come around again, to speed the process up by taking out a sledgehammer and using it hard and fast. That’s what Israel would have preferred to do all along but it had been impossible before because it didn’t have enough international support to get away with it. They were especially eager to take the sledgehammer approach after October 7 because it was a humiliation for the government and the IDF, and when you’re humiliated you want to extract revenge for whatever caused it plus gain something you wanted to compensate for it.

So Netanyahu and his closest allies had always dreamed of being able to take a harder line in the Occupied Territories and October 7 gave them the opening they wanted, and they grabbed it and exploited it, and had no intention of letting it go. That’s why Israel acted to undermine and crush all efforts to negotiate a ceasefire with Hamas even though it publicly agreed to join the talks promoted by the Biden administration, and then blamed Hamas when they failed. Netanyahu never had any intention of negotiating a ceasefire, because his government’s ultimate goal from October 7 going forward was a final solution for the Palestinian problem – that’s the only way to put it, though I don’t mean to say with a literal Nazi solution – and the only thing that changed after October 7 was the strategy, not the goal. 

Israel’s goal in the Occupied Territories has been clear for a long time, and it didn’t begin with Netanyahu. Major defense contractors in Israel such as Rafael Advanced Defense Systems and Israel Aerospace Industries have strategic planning wings that are similar to think tanks in the US, but they are closed and private and have particularly close relationships to the government and military. 

Those units produce classified reports that closely reflect official thinking, which aren’t publicly available but I’ve read a number of studies, some that were written many years ago, that openly argue Israel should use a strategy of slow strangulation to depopulate Gaza and the West Bank 

Israel can’t completely clear Gaza, there are several million people who live there, but that’s what it wants to do, and is doing now, in northern Gaza. It’s an extermination. 

When Israeli officials talk about having full targeting decks, it’s bullshit; their targeting decks were exhausted a long time ago. They may still find targets of opportunity, a drone spots some guy from Hamas outside of a home in Gaza and they kill him, but the massive bombing of Gaza – and now in Beirut and south Lebanon, which Israel has always wanted to turn into No Man’s Land in order to create a security corridor – aren’t primarily targeting Hamas or Hezbollah leaders, they’re targeting civilians because it’s an ethnic cleansing campaign. Israel doesn’t care about civilian casualties, all the talk about Hamas and Hezbollah using civilians as human shields, is purely designed to allow them to get away with killing civilians. 

Their snipers aren’t using iron sights, they’re all equipped with the best scopes and have tripods. I’ve seen videos that show women holding a child’s hand and they get shot by a sniper. They know exactly what they’re doing and who they’re killing. Israel is carrying out a flatout ethnic cleansing campaign that the West is supporting with its full weight. It’s extraordinary. 

Israel is conducting a version of that in Lebanon, it’s the Dahiya Doctrine 2.0, but when they used it the first time in 2006 they applied it in Beirut and parts of the south, and mines and other unexploded ordinance covered vast areas, but the scale is being extended this time and entire villages will be wiped out. The goal is to make the cost for civilians so high that they’ll have to abandon the region, especially the part closest to the Israeli border, and, according to the Dahiya Doctrine, punishing civilian supporters of Hezbollah will lead them to blame Hezbollah for bringing the problem upon them and turn against it, and that will force Hezbollah to promise Israel it will never again fire rockets into northern Israel and give Israel the right to monitor the skies over south Lebanon. 

The remains of a home in Beirut destroyed by an Israeli airstrike during the 34-day war between the IDF and Hezbollah in 2006, the year then-Prime Minister Ehud Olmert took the Dahiya Doctrine out for its inaugural test run.After his years of government service, Olmert was sentenced to prison for bribery, which after committing war crimes is the No. 2 tradition of Israeli leaders, including Netanyahu, whose long delayed corruption trial has been pushed back further so he can stay focused on his chief responsibility as the nation’s leader of manufacturing widows and orphans. Photo via Wikimedia Commons.

Netanyahu thinks he’ll be able to deal Hezbollah a death blow and his military victories, such as killing Nasrallah, are being celebrated in Israel and among conservative Lebanese Christian groups, and  is also seen by the US government as an opportunity to eliminate Hezbollah’s political influence and install a government in Beirut that will become a close partner, as the US has been hoping to do for years. It’s not going to happen.The poor Shia farming class that rose up due to Hezbollah’s political influence is not going to turn against it and agree to be represented by a Lebanese government where Hezbollah has been effectively eliminated and that’s friendly to Israel and the US. 

Israel decapitated Hezbollah by killing its leadership, but – and I was told this recently by someone in Lebanon who is very well informed – there are thousands of younger, highly capable, Hezbollah militants who have been coming up through the ranks that Israel knows little about, and they want vengeance against Israel. That group was involved in the strike on Netanyahu’s house, which Israel had downplayed but it’s not a small thing.

So Hezbollah has been hurt but it is already being reconstituted. Israel can make it very difficult for Hezbollah’s leaders to appear in public without fear they’re going to be killed and prevent it from holding huge military parades in south Beirut as it used to do. At the same time, Israel doesn’t fully control its airspace anymore and gone are the days that it could keep northern Israel free of attacks by Hezbollah, as was seen with the hit on Netanyahu’s home. It’s also going to have to worry about the possibility of getting whacked by Iran or the Houthis. 

So October 7 was a dream come true for Netanyahu and the Israeli leadership, they were thinking “Now we can finally clear them out,” but it’s also turning into a nightmare. The Israeli military is built for short-term campaigns with massive fire power that rapidly escalates so it can get wars over fast. It’s now been over a year since October 7 and there are reservists who’ve been called up again and again. Some of them served in Gaza and are now being called up to go to Lebanon, where there are daily casualties, and some are refusing to report.

The Israeli military is brilliant at scoring victories, but they’re often Pyrrhic. In the long run, what Israel is doing isn’t going to accomplish what it wanted to and will create significant blowback in ways we’re already beginning to see. Taking October 7 as permission to to carry out the scale of violence the IDF has committed since then has squandered Israel’s legitimacy as a nation and the Occupation had already become a toxic poison eating away at Israeli society – in some cases, you have families that have directly perpetrated violence for generations, going back to the Nakba – and massive violence of the last year is going to accelerate that. 

CNN recently had a story about a soldier who drove an armored bulldozer in Gaza over bodies of groups of people, some who were buried alive, and he committed suicide after returning home. Israel’s mental health services are already overwhelmed and in a year or two the situation will be worse. There are going to be thousands of cases like the bulldozer driver, it’s unavoidable with the enormous violence the IDF has been committing.

That’s the end of the source’s account, which I want to briefly add to, beginning with the CNN article he cited, which ran on October 21 and I provided a link to above. The  story’s headline, “‘He got out of Gaza, but Gaza did not get out of him’: Israeli soldiers returning from war struggle with trauma and suicide,” referred to Eliran Mizrahi, who was assigned the job of driving a 62-ton armored bulldozer in Gaza and returned home with post-traumatic stress disorder, which led to his suicide earlier this year. Guy Zaken, a friend of Mizrahi’s and fellow bulldozer drive interviewed by CNN, said in testimony in June before the Knesset, Israel’s parliament, that soldiers often ran over “terrorists” – by which he meant all Palestinians in Gaza – “dead and alive, in the hundreds.”

That’s an example of Israel’s routinization of violence and dehumanization of Arabs, Palestinians in particular, dating back to the Nakba that the source noted in his account. He also mentioned the Dahiya Doctrine, which is worth discussing further because it illustrates how Israel officially incorporated war crimes and murdering civilians into its military strategy long ago. 

The Dahiya Doctrine – the link is to the Wikipedia entry about it, which I’m about to liberally plagiarize – is an Israeli military strategy that was rolled out in 2006, during a 34-day war in Lebanon with Hezbollah, which fought the IDF to a draw. The doctrine — which is named after a predominantly Shia area of Beirut’s southern suburbs known as the Dahiyah that Israel bombed when inaugurating it and was first publicly acknowledged by General Gadi Eizenkot, who led Israeli military forces in Lebanon during the fighting and became a minister without portfolio and adviser to Netanyahu’s war cabinet last October — explicitly calls for extreme punishment of civilian supporters of Israel’s enemies.

The basis behind the strategy is that the knowledge that the Israeli military feels no compunction about targeting innocent bystanders will restrain the behavior of enemy states. Additionally, goes the theory, when the IDF inflicts extreme punishment on – will lead them to turn against the “terrorists” and that in turn will force them to sue for peace. Since debuting the Dahiyah Doctrine against Hezbollah’s supporters 18 years ago, the IDF has employed it during its current military campaign against Hamas and four previous ones, in particular in 2014, when it attacked Gaza’s main power station and left nearly 1 million people short of water and power and living in areas where raw sewage flooded the streets. Treating civilian infrastructure “as permissible military targets…is not only an overt violation of the most elementary norms of the law of war and of universal morality, but an avowal of a doctrine of violence that needs to be called by its proper name: state terrorism,” the late-Richard Falk wrote in 2011. 

All this, along with vast amounts of other easily accessible evidence, including what we’ve all seen with our own eyes in Gaza since last October, puts the lie to the preposterous assertions by Israeli government and military officials that the IDF is “the world’s most moral army.” It also makes anyone who accepts their words, or pretends to, and recycles them as fact – such as Matt Miller, John Kirby, and other junior Joseph Goebbels employed by the US government, and many US journalists – is either a useful idiot or willing tool of the Israeli government, and an accomplice to war crimes.