Seeking bulldozer drivers to demolish Gaza: how a genocide is being outsourced

Omer Bartov is an Israeli-American historian and one of the foremost scholars on genocide in the world. He has spent over 25 years teaching a class on the subject. He deals with atrocities for a living, analyzing some of the very worst things that human beings are capable of. And yet even Bartov has said he can’t bear looking at some of the excruciating images coming out of Gaza any more.

What’s happening, Bartov says, is unprecedented in the 21st century. “I don’t know of any comparable situation. Recent estimates show that about 70% of the structures in Gaza are either completely destroyed or severely damaged,” Bartov says. “The argument that the IDF [Israel Defense Forces] is conducting a war in Gaza is simply cynical, there is no war in Gaza. What the IDF is doing in Gaza is demolishing it. Hundreds of buildings are being bulldozed every week. This is not a secret, but mainstream media coverage has been insufficient.”

Part of the reason that mainstream coverage has been insufficient is because reporting about what’s happening in Gaza is difficult: foreign reporters are still not allowed into Gaza to see what is happening for themselves and Israel is slaughtering Palestinian journalists on the ground. I feel like I’m screaming into the void every time I repeat some version of that sentence and yet there still seems to be apathy about this assault on press freedom from some of my colleagues in the mainstream media.

As Bartov said, despite the lack of coverage, the systematic destruction of Gaza is hardly a secret. Indeed, the Israeli military is so desperate for extra bulldozers that, over the last couple of months, there have been ads for bulldozer drivers to help demolish Gaza posted on Facebook – some apparently offering as much as 3,000 shekels ($882) a day for the work. I found around a dozen of these ads on Meta since the end of May, many of them on a public Facebook page for bulldozer operators. Meanwhile a Haaretz article from this week looking into the outsourcing of bulldozer drivers found that they are paid per building: 2,500 shekels for the demolition of a small building, 5,000 shekels for a large building.

“The idea that the bulldozer has become a major article of genocide and warfare is quite new,” says Neve Gordon, a professor of international law and human rights at Queen Mary University of London. “What is happening in Gaza is not a building here or there being demolished; it’s the destruction of whole villages and towns.”

Also new is the outsourcing of bulldozer drivers. “The Israeli military usually does not work in this way,” says Gordon. “It can sequester bulldozers and draft the drivers as reserve soldiers.” Reports from Israeli outlets show that the IDF is facing a shortage of drivers and is recruiting civilians for military operations in Gaza, Syria and Lebanon. “I would consider this as a form of ‘outsourcing demolitions’ used to advance a genocidal project,” Gordon says.

International law doesn’t seem to hold much weight any more, but is the wholesale bulldozing of villages and neighbourhoods in Gaza legal? Gordon says it isn’t. “If military necessity requires bulldozing a civilian house, you might find arguments for bulldozing. But if a village or neighbourhood is bulldozed, as we see throughout Gaza, then it is a flagrant violation.

“The problem is that the law doesn’t look at the whole picture, it looks at the event and whether that’s illegal or not.” If during hostilities a sniper is on the roof of a civilian’s home, for example, you can target that house, provided you abide by legal principles such as proportionality and precaution. But you can only target it at that moment; you can’t target it because there’s a possibility that a sniper might use it in the future.”

Gordon notes that Israel’s argument for the extensive bulldozing is that any civilian home is potentially an entrance or shield for military tunnels underneath the strip. However, says Gordon: “the international community doesn’t rate these arguments”. Particularly as Israel has been caught lying about certain things multiple times now: “They told us for months that Hamas’s headquarters were under al-Shifa hospital [which was once Gaza’s biggest medical complex].” No such headquarters was ever found.

And here’s the crucial thing, Gordon says: “In order to determine if Israel’s claims have any basis, you need an independent investigation. You need to let in an investigative team. Israel isn’t allowing that.” You can draw your own conclusions as to why that is.

Meta isn’t just hosting posts looking for bulldozer drivers. Gordon notes it’s also been platforming videos by a bulldozer driver, Rabbi Avraham Zarbiv, who promotes what Gordon describes as “illegal military operations and violence involving the destruction of civilian homes and infrastructure in Gaza”. Zarbiv glorifies the destruction of Gaza with bulldozers as a new way of fighting which saves Israeli lives, says Gordon.

After I flagged one of Zarbiv’s videos to Meta, it was taken down. However, the ads (which are Facebook posts rather than paid advertisements) looking for bulldozer operators in Gaza are still up. Meta declined to provide any specific comments on these but directed me to their various policies about what sort of content is allowed on their platform. One presumes this means they are allowed.

While that may be Meta’s interpretation, they seem to be on somewhat shaky ground with these posts. “Ads that seek to employ people for jobs that require them to participate in and/or support acts that can constitute incitement to violence and may contribute to the commission of international crimes would be unlawful,” Gordon says.

Dr John Reynolds, associate professor at the School of Law and Criminology at Maynooth University in Ireland, similarly notes that “there’s grounds to say this could be a form of aiding/facilitating war crimes in violation of international humanitarian law, a form of propaganda for war in violation of human rights law, and potentially also in conflict with the duty to prevent genocide, which is primarily a responsibility of states but can also be applied to corporations”.

All this bulldozing comes with a very clear end goal. “Israeli government officials and media have made [their plans] fairly public,” says Bartov, who, like many other respected scholars, characterises what is happening in Gaza as a genocide. “What they appear to be aiming for – and are in the process of implementing – is for the IDF to take over roughly 75% of the Gaza Strip and demolish it entirely, with bombs and bulldozers, many of which are massive D9s recently imported from the US. The goal seems to be to concentrate the entire Gazan population into the remaining 25% of the territory, in the al-Mawasi area, and to debilitate them to the extent that they either flee, are permitted to leave or simply wither away.”

I had this conversation with Bartov a few weeks ago. Now lawmakers are being even more brazen about their plans: defence minister Israel Katz has said they plan to concentrate people in Gaza into an internment camp on the rubble of Rafah.

Meanwhile, western governments and big tech companies like Meta seem happy to not just let all this happen, but to facilitate it. The revolution may not be televised, but genocide is certainly getting privatized.

• Arwa Mahdawi is a Guardian columnist

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