In the final days of the 1967 "6-Day War", Israeli forces advanced on Damascus. At the centre of the Golan Heights stood the city of Quneitra, the capital of the province of the same name, and home to around 20,000 people. With the Israeli army advancing and with conflicting messages from the Syrian military high command, the city was abandoned by the Syrian army on the final day of the war.
This was a war of aggression, waged by Israel against its Arab neighbours, with the explicit purposes of territorial expansion and the destruction of the military capabilities of those who would oppose the Zionist state.
Quneitra was not returned to Syrian control until June 1974, when a destroyed shell was returned. Following the 6-Day War, Israel stripped Quneitra of anything of value, shipping it to Israel to be auctioned off. The contents of the hospital were shipped to Israeli hospitals, and the building was used for assault training. The bullet holes merged around windows, turning formerly square openings into curved corners and almost round forms. The stairs inside the building were also pockmarked and were no longer safe to walk on, for fear they would collapse.
Throughout the city, over 4,000 structures, mostly houses and shops, were demolished in the months leading up to the handover. While Israel claimed that the damage was due to shelling and combat during the October/Yom Kippur War, the post-war investigation by engineers appointed by the UN discounted that claim. The damage came from the systematic destruction of buildings, with supports pulled out by tractors or dynamited.
The intent was clear: to make Quneitra uninhabitable and therefore unable to serve as any kind of administrative or market centre for the Golan, paving the way to claim the Golan is unpopulated and therefore available for settlement by Israel.
When I went to Quneitra as a teen in the late 1970s, the grass was growing around the demolished buildings, and trees were beginning to grow through destroyed roofs, obscuring the remaining doorframes and garden walls.
At the time, there wasn't an expression for what they did. We learned a new expression during the Yugoslavian civil war: Ethnic Cleansing. The removal of entire populations and by so doing attempting to demographically, and permanently, erase a population from an area. Is it genocide? Maybe a sub-genocide, or genocide-lite.
The ongoing Liquidation of the Gaza Ghetto is a form of genocide, of that there can be no doubt. Entire families killed, almost every school destroyed, libraries, museums, hospitals, mosques and churches, administrative buildings, tens of thousands of homes. All destroyed.
Every family photo, gone. Every memento, from parents and grandparents, every keepsake, almost all documentation proving who anyone is and their relationship to each other and to places, destroyed. That favourite serving dish. The carpet from the living room. The posters from the children's walls. Destroyed. The plants on the balcony, the trees in the garden and parks, destroyed. A people, defined by their culture and their documented heritage, erased.
That is genocide.
Israel, as I write, is now doing the same thing in South Lebanon. BBC today reports that over 1400 buildings have been destroyed, probably many more.
Towns and villages in southern Lebanon are being levelled by Israeli demolitions, satellite images and videos obtained by BBC Verify reveal.
BBC Verify analysis found more than 1,400 buildings had been destroyed since 2 March based on verified visual evidence.
This is just a snapshot of the overall damage caused by Israeli air strikes and demolitions, because of limited access on the ground and available satellite imagery. The true scale is likely to be much higher.
In 1974 and 1975, the UN voted to condemn the Israeli destruction of Quneitra. The US voted against both resolutions. Israeli learned then that not only could they carry out Ethnic Cleansing, but refined their techniques for doing so.
My visit to Quneitra was disturbing then. The fact that Israel continues to follow this model is more than disturbing; it is an indictment of the Zionist state. Human rights violations are part of the DNA of the Zionist state, and there is nothing that will change that.
On a hopeful note: there may come a time when no person who has served in the IDF for the past three years will be able to leave Israel for fear of an international arrest warrant waiting for them, for crimes against humanity at worst, and as an accessory and material witness to crimes against humanity. I look forward to that day.
Sources:
1. Personal memories
2. The Gun and the Olive Branch, David Hirsh, 1978
3. Six Days of War, Michael B. Oren, 2002
4. The Yom Kippur War, Abraham Rabinovich, 2004
5. BBC (https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cdxkk1vnp57o accessed today)
6. Who can do anything without a little Wikipedia?
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