Peter Harling is the founder and director of Synaps, a Beirut-based research center specializing in economic, environmental and technological issues. He has lived in the Middle East for 25 years, where he has worked, among other things, as a researcher and adviser to the United Nations.
The process is far from over. In addition to the bombings to come, there will be controlled demolitions, the restructuring of the territory according to a security rationale and a reconstruction process in which every detail will be bitterly negotiated. Historically, the complete destruction of a city is an unusual phenomenon in wartime. Think of the sack of Rome by the Visigoths in 410, the sacking of Constantinople by the Crusaders in 1204 or, more recently, the "Rape of Nanjing" [in China] by the Japanese, between December 1937 and February 1938. The aim is to destroy the opposing civilization. Culturally, this notion is associated with the idea of barbarism: Conquest aims to destroy, not to rule.
The destruction of cities became part of the ordinary repertoire of warfare from the 1940s onward. Nazi Germany bombed English cities to undermine enemy morale [during the Blitz, from September 7, 1940 to May 21, 1941]. The Allies annihilated Caen by surprise [in summer 1], sacrificing civilians for military objectives. German cities like Dresden [in February 1945] were subjected to a deluge of fire to maximize the people's suffering. At Hiroshima [on August 6, 1945], the United States could have been content to unveil its nuclear capability, but instead, it set the bomb to explode at the altitude that would create the most damage. The war against Gaza is part of this line of wars where the city is no longer a battlefield, but a target.
Before Gaza, there was Fallujah, in Iraq, ravaged by the American army in November 2004; Aleppo, in Syria, crushed under the bombs of [Bashar al-Assad's] regime between 2012 and 2016; and then [the Iraqi and Syrian cities of] Mosul and Raqqa, largely destroyed during the war against the Islamic State [group] between 2016 and 2017. There are still other examples, such as the Palestinian camp of Nahr al-Bared, in Lebanon, almost completely destroyed, too, in 2007. The destruction of Gaza is part of an urbicidal process in the Middle East.
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