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One watches with a certain weary incredulity as the United States, that great arbiter of other people's responsibilities, now insists that Israel should pick up the tab, both literal and figurative, for clearing away the 68 million tons of rubble that currently entomb Gaza.
A senior Israeli official, speaking with the resigned air of a man who has heard this tune before, confirms that Washington has tied the launching of Gaza’s reconstruction (that much-vaunted "Phase Two" of the ceasefire) to a thorough cleanup operation, with Rafah designated as the model zone. Israel, ever the reliable party in these arrangements, has agreed in principle to shoulder the physical and financial burden of the task, even though the debris in question was created, in no small part, by Israeli airstrikes and the relentless advance of D9 bulldozers.
The Wall Street Journal this week described Gaza as "blanketed by an estimated 68 million tons of rubble," with most structures in the enclave destroyed or damaged. The UN Development Programme, which has appointed itself overseer of the eventual clearing operation, helpfully informs us that this tonnage is "roughly equivalent to 186 Empire State Buildings." One is almost tempted to ask whether the United Nations will be supplying the hard hats and the invoices, or whether that too will fall to the Jewish state.
Clearing the ruins, we are told, is a "basic prerequisite" for any reconstruction. Quite so. Though one cannot help noticing the exquisite irony: the same international community that spent two years denouncing Israel's military operations as disproportionate now quietly insists that Israel alone must foot the bill for the consequences, consequences that arose, lest we forget, from a war launched against Israel on October 7, 2023, by the same Hamas regime that the bien-pensants still affect to regard as legitimate "resistance."
Thus does the world arrange its moral ledger: Hamas may fire rockets from hospitals and store munitions in schools, but when the inevitable reply comes, it is Israel that must sweep up the pieces and pay the contractors. One struggles to imagine a find a historical parallel for such a division of labour, but perhaps that is the point: there has never been anything quite like the expectations placed upon the world’s only Jewish state, and there likely never will be again.
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