Peter Harling is the founder and director of Synaps, a research center specializing in economic, environmental and technological issues, based in Beirut. He has lived in the Middle East for twenty-five years, where he has worked, among other things, as a researcher and advisor to the United Nations.
With approximately 800,000 inhabitants, Gaza was the largest city in Palestine. Satellite photos suggest that 70% to 80% of the buildings were destroyed or damaged by the Israeli offensive launched after the Hamas attacks on October 7, 2023. What do you think of this destruction?
The process is far from complete! In addition to the upcoming bombings, there will be controlled demolitions, the restructuring of the territory in a security logic and a reconstruction, each modality of which will be fiercely negotiated. Historically, the complete destruction of a city is an unusual phenomenon in times of war. We can think of the sack of Rome by the Visigoths in 410, the pillage of Constantinople by the crusaders in 1204 or, more recently, the “rape of Nanking” [en Chine] by the Japanese, between December 1937 and February 1938. It was then a question of destroying the opposing civilization. Culturally, this notion is associated with the idea of barbarism: conquest aims to destroy and not to reign.
The destruction of cities became part of the ordinary repertoire of war from the 1940s. Nazi Germany bombed English cities to undermine enemy morale [lors du Blitz, du 7 septembre 1940 au 21 mai 1941]. The Allies annihilate Caen by surprise [l’été 1944], sacrificing civilians to military objectives. German cities like Dresden [en février 1945] undergo a deluge of fire to maximize the suffering of the people. In Hiroshima [le 6 août 1945], the United States could have simply revealed its nuclear capability: but it set the bomb to explode at the altitude that would create the most damage possible. The war against Gaza is part of this line of wars where the city is no longer a battlefield, but a target.
Gaza is not the first city in the Middle East to suffer this treatment in the 21ste century…
Before Gaza, there was Fallujah, in Iraq, ravaged by the American army in November 2004; Aleppo, Syria, crushed under regime bombs [de Bachar Al-Assad], between 2012 and 2016; and then [les villes irakienne et syrienne de] Mosul and Rakka, largely destroyed during the war against[organisation] Islamic State, between 2016 and 2017. There are other examples, such as the Palestinian camp of Nahr El-Bared, in Lebanon, also almost completely destroyed in 2007. The destruction of Gaza is part of a process urbicides in the Middle East.
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