Once again, Israel is carrying out a brutal counter-insurgency campaign against the Gaza Strip and its people. This is according to the government’s description of its own actions. In the words of Minister of Home Front Defense Avi Dichter, “there is no other choice, Israel must carry out a formatting action in Gaza, actually format the system and clean it out.”

Dichter continues, writing that the current IOF operation in the Gaza Strip ought to echo “the way we did in Judea and Samaria during Operation Defensive Shield.”

During Defensive Shield, hundreds of resistance fighters and civilians were murdered by Israel in the process of “formatting the system” in the West Bank. Palestinian Authority version 2.0, the neoliberal autocratic elite to which Israel subcontracts domestic repression, is more pliable than PA version 1.0. With the system “formatted” properly in the West Bank with the capitulation of the PA to Israeli colonialism, over the last half-decade Israeli social engineers have been turning their attention to the Gaza Strip.