Democracy Now ! / July 5, 2023
FRAGMENT
AMY GOODMAN: I want to […] bring in Amjad Iraqi, senior editor at +972 Magazine. He’s speaking to us from Haifa. Amjad, you have said the Jenin operation, the Jenin assault, is being carried out in the context of Israel’s, quote, “mowing the lawn” doctrine as a means of maintaining its apartheid regime. Can you explain? And talk about who exactly is behind it and the significance of, the day before the attack, the U.S. approving more weapon sales to Israel, bringing their total of planes to — I think it was 75 attack planes.
AMJAD IRAQI: Thank you, Amy, and to Democracy Now!, for having me.
So, in a nutshell, the idea of mowing the lawn is a doctrine that has been promoted by the Israeli military for quite a while and is mostly associated with Israeli army policy vis-à-vis the Gaza Strip, particularly targeting the political group Hamas and Islamic Jihad and other militants.
And the idea of mowing the lawn or mowing the grass is essentially this idea that the Israelis have that if there is no permanent solution to really eradicate these Palestinian militant groups, then the idea is that you’re in a constant cycle to basically undercut their capacity temporarily until the next round. And this is what we’ve been seeing put in full force, especially since the beginning of the blockade of Gaza in 2007.
Now, you’ve seen variations of this military policy practiced in many respects, but what we’ve been seeing in the past few days in Jenin is that doctrine being played out in full force. I mean, this operation itself is not happening in a vacuum. For the past year and a half, the Israeli army has been focusing on cities like Jenin and Nablus in the northern West Bank, where it’s been actively targeting Palestinian militants and their weapons.
But, of course, […], this has come at the complete punishment of the populations over there, especially the refugee camps, very much in the same kind of methodology as what we’re seeing in the Gaza Strip. And as those confrontations have escalated between militants both against the army and against settlements, and sometimes against cities inside Israel, that the army is coming under more and more pressure to actually go in as a ground invasion.
And even two weeks ago, we saw, as you described, the first time that they returned to air power through Apache helicopters, which I believe were supplied by the United States, and then, two days later, through a drone strike, and, basically, these being the first airstrikes in the West Bank for the first time since the Second Intifada, even though they have of course been very much the modus operandi in the Gaza Strip.
So, this is that manifestation that we’re seeing. This is the philosophy that’s playing out basically as the maintenance of an apartheid regime, that includes Gaza and the West Bank, and that this is the solution that the Israeli authorities are seeing, from the political echelon to the military establishment.
