Is Israel Following Stalin's Playbook?
Gaza's living hell has eery parallels with Chechnya. The outcome will likely be the same.
Life in Gaza is living hell. If you want to know more about what living hell is like, you can read the late journalist Anna Politkovskaya’s book, A Small Corner of Hell: Dispatches from Chechnya, about life in Chechnya during Russia’s brutal invasion and attempt to quell independence movement there, including destruction of hospitals and infrastructure. If you want to know what it was like to be a health care provider in a living hell, read Khassan Baiev’s The Oath: A Surgeon Under Fire, describing how he continued to give care to all who requested it, in Chechnya, in keeping with the Geneva Conventions, while under fire, with supplies diminishing to non-existent, his staff disappearing, and the hospital itself under fire.
Politkovskaya was brutally murdered in 2006, a murder believed to be contracted, likely due to her social activism and opposition to Putin. Prior attempts to kill Politkovskaya had failed, though one had sickened her. Even those who spoke to her were at risk of being killed.
Baiev survived, traumatized, came to the US, but now lives in Chechnya again. He has received awards for his courageous work under fire. I strongly suggest reading his book if you want to know about what Gazan doctors are going through.
But beyond disaster, murder, and extraordinary courage under fire, the story of Chechnya should be a lesson for us in assessing the likely success of Israel in attempts to crush Hamas and especially to crush the spirit of independence in Palestine.
In 1944, all Chechens were deported, by freight train, to remote areas of Russia. Chechnya and Ingushetia were emptied-over a million people were displaced. The reason I know this piece of history is that among those deported was the grandfather of the Boston Marathon bombers, Dzhokhar and Tamerlan Tsarnaev.1 He was a child at the time. Given what we know about generational trauma, it seems likely that the suffering of the people of the grandfather’s generation played a role in the eventual recruitment of the Tsarnaev brothers to terrorist actions.
Another deportee, Djhokhar Dudayev, became a military leader in the Chechen struggles for independence 50 years later, and the first president of the independent Chechen republic, independence not recognized by Russia.
The notorious Tsarnaev brothers who became rebels engaged in terrorist activities, and the military leader and first president of the Chechen republic were not the only deportees, nor the only descendants of deportees, who became part of a rebellion. Indeed, one might argue that the rebellion was the grandchild of Stalin’s dehumanizing efforts. When, thirteen or so years after deportation, the Chechens were allowed to return, their homes and villages were occupied. There was no actual return to life as it was before the deportation.
It now looks increasingly like the long game plan that Israel is trying to implement in Gaza, with the blessing of the US government, is parallel to that of Stalin—ship everyone far away from their homes, killing as many as necessary, making conditions so harsh that many die from the effects of those conditions, and destroy the best of the civilization in the process. Then occupy the land so when they return, they cannot resume life as it was.
Does Israel really think that by doing so they are creating a lasting peace? Of course not. They know history. But they count on many in the world not making connections. And apparently they are partially successful in getting many to believe the absurdity that their children and grandchildren will be safer after genocidal mass murder and deportation of Gaza’s citizens. There is not a chance that that is true.
What they are doing, and they are doing it knowingly, is kicking the can down the road. Netanyahu and the other madmen running the country believe it will be a long while before anyone has to face the consequences of the actions they take today, and that they will be long dead before that happens. Evidently they don’t care about their own children or grandchildren as much as they care about their own careers.
I studied their family history and the history of Chechnya while writing a book about them.