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19-12-2023
JERUSALEM/ GAZA CITY: In October, shortly after the start of the Israeli war on Gaza that has now killed nearly 20,000 Palestinians, Israel pledged to wipe Hamas “off the face of the earth”, a project that would require Israel’s military “to flatten the ground” in Gaza, as an Israeli security source told the Reuters news agency and flatten they did; one month into the war, the military had already dropped the equivalent of two nuclear bombs on the 
diminutive and densely populated Palestinian coastal enclave. Now, as Israel continues to pulverize an already thoroughly pulverized territory, it seems the Israelis may be taking the concept of scorched earth policy to a whole new level.
According to the Oxford Reference dictionary, the term “scorched earth policy” was first utilized in English in 1937 in a report describing the Sino-Japanese conflict, in which the Chinese levelled their own cities and burned crops in order to complicate the Japanese invasion. The strategy has since been seen in an array of armed conflicts worldwide, including the 36-year civil war in Guatemala that ended in 1996 after killing and disappearing more than 200,000 people, primarily Indigenous Mayans.
In 2013, former Guatemalan dictator and United States buddy Efraín Rios Montt who oversaw a particularly bloody segment of the war in the early 1980s was found guilty of genocide in a Guatemalan court and while subsequent judicial machinations and Ríos Montt’s own death by heart attack saved the man from earthly atonement for his crimes, you might say the truth is not so easily wiped “off the face of the earth”.
Indeed, scorched earth was a primary component of the Guatemalan army’s genocidal approach to its adversaries, 
and hundreds of Indigenous villages were destroyed along with water supplies, crops, and anything else that might sustain life. And what do you know: Guatemalan state savagery was boosted by none other than the state of Israel, which after all already had several decades of experience in eradicating Indigenous life in Palestine pardon, “making the desert bloom”.
As journalist Gabriel Schivone notes in an article for the North American Congress on Latin America (NACLA), not only did Israeli advisers help ensure the success of the 1982 military coup that brought Ríos Montt to power, but Israel also “assisted every facet of attack on the Guatemalan people” from the late 1970s into the next decade. For successive Guatemalan governments, Schivone writes, Israel had become the “main provider of counterinsurgency training, light and heavy arsenals of weaponry, aircraft, state-of-the-art intelligence technology and infrastructure, and other vital assistance”.
In keeping with the “desert-blooming” variety of blasphemy, Israel was also credited with assisting Guatemala in agricultural endeavours during the civil war era since there’s clearly nothing better for agriculture than, you know, scorched earth. (Int’l News Desk)
