When Israeli officials claim that every single building destroyed in Gaza contained “terror infrastructure,” the assertion is not just implausible; it is a radical redefinition of reality. No functioning city is composed entirely of military targets.
Thomas Milo
When Israeli officials claim that every single building destroyed in Gaza contained “terror infrastructure,” the assertion is not just implausible; it is a radical redefinition of reality. No functioning city is composed entirely of military targets. What this rhetoric reveals is not mere exaggeration but a worldview: Palestinians do not exist as human beings entitled to anything.
This erasure has deep historical roots. From its inception, Zionism treated Palestine as territory rather than as the home of a people. Theodor Herzl in his diaries described the “transfer” of the Arab population as a practical matter to be done “discreetly and circumspectly.”¹ David Ben-Gurion in 1937 wrote that “we must expel Arabs and take their places.”² Ze’ev Jabotinsky in The Iron Wall (1923) conceded that Palestinians would never consent to Zionism, and therefore had to be overpowered until resistance was futile.³ Chaim Weizmann, speaking to a British commission in 1919, dismissed the Arabs of Palestine as “a few hundred thousand Negroes” who should not obstruct a Jewish homeland.⁴ In each case, Palestinians were denied recognition as a people with rights.
The continuity is evident in Gaza today. Hospitals, schools, mosques, universities, and homes are systematically destroyed, each reclassified as “terrorist infrastructure.” Under international humanitarian law, civilians and civilian objects are presumed protected, and doubt must be resolved in their favor (Geneva Convention IV, 1949; Additional Protocol I, 1977, Article 50). Israel’s official discourse erases this category in advance. If no civilian exists, then no war crime is possible.
This linguistic manoeuvre extends to people themselves. Civilian status, presumed in law, is inverted: every casualty is retroactively described as a combatant, human shield, or accomplice. The principle of distinction collapses, and with it the protection that international law was designed to secure.
The erasure is not incidental but strategic. From the late 1970s onward, Israel consistently weakened secular nationalist organisations such as the PLO, while tolerating or even encouraging the growth of Islamist associations in Gaza.⁵ Islamic charities and mosques were allowed to flourish where secular unions and student groups were suppressed.⁶ This created the conditions in which Hamas, originally an offshoot of the Muslim Brotherhood, could emerge as a dominant force. By hollowing out secular Palestinian politics, Israel helped recast what had been an essentially national and secular struggle into one that appeared Islamist and absolutist.
This transformation proved invaluable. Once Hamas became the most visible Palestinian actor, Israel gained its ideal enemy: a movement that could be portrayed internationally as fanatical, irrational, and indistinguishable from global jihadism. The political effect was to collapse Palestinian identity into Hamas itself. In this framework, the destruction of Palestinian society could be reframed as counter-terrorism. Homes became command centres, schools indoctrination hubs, hospitals bunkers. To destroy the fabric of civilian life was not to destroy a people, but merely to dismantle “terror infrastructure.”
Thus the IDF spokesperson’s claim that every building is a military site is more than exaggeration. It is the culmination of a long strategy: to erase Palestinians as a people, to cultivate Hamas as their supposed essence, and to annihilate them under the guise of eliminating terrorism. The logic becomes circular: genocide cannot exist, because only Hamas exists, and Hamas is by definition a legitimate target.
In this way, international law is not just violated but linguistically neutralised. The categories of civilian and combatant, protected and targetable, are dissolved in advance. The law depends on the recognition of a people whose very existence is denied. The crime disappears because the victim disappears. The claim that the IDF is “the most moral army in the world” is thus not a factual statement but a definitional one: an army that refuses to acknowledge civilians cannot, by its own logic, ever commit a crime against them.
Notes
Theodor Herzl, The Complete Diaries of Theodor Herzl, ed. Raphael Patai, trans. Harry Zohn (New York: Herzl Press, 1960), vol. I, p. 88. Herzl writes of “spiriting away the poor population across the border” (unauffällig und vorsichtig).
David Ben-Gurion, letter to his son Amos, 5 October 1937, quoted in Ben-Gurion, Rebirth and Destiny of Israel(New York: Philosophical Library, 1954), p. 210.
Ze’ev Jabotinsky, “The Iron Wall (We and the Arabs),” Rassvyet, 4 November 1923; English translation in Walter Laqueur, ed., The Israel-Arab Reader: A Documentary History of the Middle East Conflict (New York: Penguin, 1970), pp. 29–36.
Chaim Weizmann’s remark is recorded in the British Government’s report of the Palin Commission, 1920; also cited in Tom Segev, One Palestine, Complete: Jews and Arabs under the British Mandate (New York: Metropolitan Books, 2000), p. 102.
Beverley Milton-Edwards and Stephen Farrell, Hamas: The Islamic Resistance Movement (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2010), pp. 59–65.
Shaul Mishal and Avraham Sela, The Palestinian Hamas: Vision, Violence, and Coexistence (New York: Columbia University Press, 2006), pp. 31–35.
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Remark
This article was originally published by https://thomasmilo.substack.com/ on September 1st, 2025.
