A rough transcript of Norman's contribution below:
Well there is a, as historians like to say, there's continuity and there's change with what preceded it. I think if one uses the metaphors of, that Israel has invoked, if you use their metaphors, what you can say is up until October 7th Israel periodically launched these high-tech killing sprees, what they call operations. And the main purpose of these killing sprees, as they they said it not me, their metaphor was to mow the lawn in Gaza. And that basically meant, well it had several different features to it, but it didn't mean total annihilation.
Come October 7th, there was a new goal set by Israel, namely this time we're not going to mow the lawn in Gaza we're going to extirpate, pull out by the roots, every blade of grass in Gaza and that took basically three forms.
Originally, and I should point out these are overlapping forms they're not discreet, entirely discreet, the first form was an attempted mass ethnic cleansing of Gaza, namely forcing all the people to the south and then hopefully the gates of Rafa would be opened and they would flood into the Sinai desert. That didn't happen because the president of Egypt said no and it seems that the US deferred to president Sisi's decision and the ethnic cleansing didn't in total occur, but I think it's not widely known it has in large regards, it has succeeded.
The estimates are somewhere between 300 and 500,000 Gazans are no longer in Gaza, they by hook or by crook they were in Egypt. It seems Egypt doesn't allow more than 60,000 Gazans to stay at any one given time. So you could say 300, we'll take the low estimate, 300,000 have been expelled, they will certainly never return and they are finding a way, finding a way to get past Egypt, that is Egypt is a transit point to some other corner of the world.
So if you take the low estimate that would mean one seventh of Gaza's population has been successfully, and one might add surreptitiously expelled, if you take the higher estimate of 500,000 that would be about one quarter of the population. So even though the kind of ethnic cleansing that was conceived in the early days has not succeeded it must be said that in part it has succeeded.
The second possibility, leaving aside the ethnic cleansing, the second possibility was to make Gaza unlivable, and that goal has succeeded. There's a lot of nonsense in my opinion and I have to emphasize in my opinion because I don't make any claims to infallibility, there's a lot of nonsense being said about what has happened and continues to happen in Gaza.
Number one as you know every headline has to have as its subhead the Israel-Hamas War. There has not been any meaningful substantive Israel-Hamas war, there has been an Israel-Gaza war and the aim of the Israel-Gaza war is to make Gaza unlivable, uninhabitable. I'm using the language of the Israelis, this is not my embroidery or embellishment, that's what they say. As the former head of the National Security Council Giora Eiland, and he's not the only one, he's one of the defense ministries advisors, defense minister Gallant's advisors, he has said we're going to leave the people of Gaza with two choices, one to stay and starve or two to leave. And that goal which in my opinion was the main goal, that goal has been achieved.
I don't like to be a bearer of bad news on the other hand if we're speaking to adults, we should treat them respectfully as adults, Gaza is no more, Gaza is gone.
About the estimates are, if you take the whole of Gaza, one half of the infrastructure in Gaza has been destroyed. That means for somebody who doesn't quite grasp that, if you're saying a major thoroughfare, let's say in New York City where I happen to reside, and you're walking down 6th Avenue, just imagine every second building is gone. Or just imagine your walking down 6th Avenue, one side of the street is there the other side of the street is no longer there, that's Gaza. There are no universities left in Gaza, there are no schools or university hospitals, there are barely any hospitals left in Gaza at this point.
And so you might say well what about rebuilding. There can't be any rebuilding of Gaza that's just not true. First of all the estimates are by now they about 45 million tons of rubble in Gaza. It's estimated it'll take 10 to 15 years to just remove the rubble, the rubbles mixed with a lot of unexploded ordinance, toxic substances and also a lot of dead bodies.
And even if you manage to remove the rubble there's no question in my mind what's going to happen. Israel is going to say we're not letting cement into Gaza. It already did that after Cast Lead, it said that Hamas will use the cement to build tunnels, we're not going to let cement in. And nobody in the International Community is going to quarrel with that. Hamas they say build 430 miles of, 450 miles of tunnels which I consider completely nonsense complete nonsense.
All these numbers that everybody repeats moronically from the state of Israel. If they had built 450 miles of tunnels that would be more, since Glenn I know you lived for a while in New York City, that would be larger than the tunnel system of the New York Subway system. New York Subway system has 430 miles of tunnels. Are you're going to tell me that Hamas built 450 miles in Gaza, 26 miles long and three and five miles wide, no. But that's the excuse that Israel is going to use and everybody will accept it.
So between the 45 million tons of rubble and the fact that Israel won't let cement in there is no Gaza anymore.
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