Chartbook 405 Bulldozing Gaza: (Thanatocene mini-series #4)

In the week that has passed since I began working on this story – until the time you are reading it – hundreds of pieces of heavy engineering equipment from Israel have demolished hundreds, if not thousands, of homes in the Gaza Strip, with the Defense Ministry spending millions of shekels for this work. Never in Israeli history have so many homes and buildings been demolished consecutively, in what is also one of the most expensive engineering projects the country has ever took on.

Journalist Hagai Amit published these lines in Haaretz on August 19th and they stopped me in my tracks. We all have moments of awakening. Flashes that trigger us. Amit’s reframing of the Gaza invasion as civil engineering, did it for me.

The excavators, bulldozers and huge D9 Caterpillar tractors in Gaza never stop working, even for a moment – and this is not expected to change. The security cabinet's approval for taking over Gaza City promises Israeli forces many more months in which they can destroy thousands of homes and other buildings …. In practice, some ministers in the security cabinet explicitly said they did not understand why Gaza City was not already in ruins like other cities in Gaza. This is an unprecedented engineering project ….

The mundane details of the “unprecedented engineering project” being undertaken by Israeli forces in Gaza, sucked me in:

A small number of dominant Israeli infrastructure firms provide services to the Defense Ministry. These include the Talor Karadi Group, owned by Lior Karadi; Asia Construction; the Olenik group; Farm Earthworks and Development (Meshek Afar Vetashtiot), owned by Alon Elgali; and Eran Y.D., owned by Eran and David Yifrach.

Each of these companies rents out dozens of pieces of heavy construction equipment to the Defense Ministry. … A client will pay about 3,500 shekels ($1035) a day to use a piece of heavy equipment within Israel, while the Defense Ministry today pays 5,000 shekels ($1,479) a day to use the equipment inside Gaza. About 1,200 shekels ($355) of that goes to the equipment operator, who would earn only half to two-thirds of that amount for doing the same work inside Israel. …

Along with large firms, smaller contractors also work in Gaza, renting out two or three pieces of equipment directly to the Defense Ministry, and hundreds of IDF reservists operate heavy equipment that belongs to the army. "The reservists who operate what the army calls mechanical engineering equipment for the IDF are sometimes less skilled in demolition work. That's why they bring in special teams from companies like ours," said Lior Karadi, the owner of the Talor Karadi group. Every team has at least five pieces of heavy equipment. "For example, we go in with eight to 12 pieces of equipment. Such a team demolishes almost 100 buildings in a day. And they work all the time. We have an operational branch for Gaza, with foremen and skilled workers. All the teams enter with IDF security."

"The demand means that importers currently have no heavy equipment in stock. If you order a piece of heavy equipment from a company like Volvo, you'll wait six to seven months for it to be delivered. That's why last week we were in China to look into importing a large amount of equipment here," said Karadi. (AT: the Biden administration temporarily halted a large delivery of D9s to Israel. The Trump administration gave the green light.)

… Apart from the 150,000 shekels ($44,341) a month the Defense Ministry pays to rent a piece of equipment, the Defense Ministry also covers the cost of the diesel fuel. The cost of operating 500 pieces of heavy construction equipment is almost 100 million shekels ($29.56 million) a month, for example. But the demand for this heavy equipment doesn't end with Gaza.

Along with the work of the heavy construction equipment, the infrastructure industry has also seen demand from the Defense Ministry in other areas. "Our concrete plants are working a lot more," said Karadi. "In addition to building and selling shelters and safe rooms, our trucks and cement mixers have been enlisted for sealing tunnels. The amount of concrete the army needs is crazy. We're talking about thousands of cubic meters of concrete."

"The war's influence is also felt, for example, in the quarry industry. It's an industry that seemingly shouldn't be impacted by it. But in practice, so far, the army has brought into Gaza almost 250,000 tons of substrate, mostly for paving roads," said Karadi. "We're trying to advance a pilot project with the Defense Ministry so it can be done with recycled materials. For now, they won't give us approval for that – not to use the recycled material from the demolitions in the Gaza Strip and not material from the demolitions here in Israel." "If they would provide approval for it, we would save tens, if not hundreds, of millions of shekels. At a time when inside Israel there is use of recycled materials in large quantities, it is actually in Gaza where they don't approve of it. On the day when we will have to give the Gaza Strip back to them, a day I hope never comes, they will use this substrate to rebuild."

The operations of the infrastructure and construction companies in Gaza lack a major part of the work they do inside Israel: Removing the debris they create. This is a component that, on the day it happens, will raise the cost of carrying out the demolition. The United Nations' official estimate talks about over 50 million tons of debris, which would cost about $1 billion to remove. "Today, the estimates are that there are 60 to 70 (million) tons of debris," said Karadi. "The estimate from professionals and mine is that it will take eight to 12 years to deal with all this debris. … There is a huge amount of iron, and transporting it over the sandy ground of Gaza is complicated." … If they want to treat this waste one day, 90 percent of this material will serve as substrate layers for the infrastructure they'll need in Gaza," Karadi added. … "Do you know how much scrap metal there is in the Gaza Strip? If someone wanted to collect it one day and sell it – these are quantities that are worth a fortune."

The Haaretz article is not a singleton. The Guardian has a piece by Arwa Mahdawi about facebook adverts for bulldozer drivers to work on the demolition in Gaza. Referencing Amit’s piece, she reported that:

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

Of course, bulldozers are not news. In 2024 Volume 56 of The Funambulist edited by Léopold Lambert was devoted to “bulldozer politics”. As Lambert has covered in his work, it is a long-standing practice of the Israeli military to use bulldozers both in war and in support of settlement.

The case that drew international attention to the practice, was the crushing to death of American activist Rachel Corrie in March 2003 as she protested an Israel demolition. Both Caterpillar and Hyundai as major heavy machinery manufacturers have found themselves in the dock. Not for nothing, Ariel Sharon’s nickname was “Arik the Bulldozer.”

But clearly something about the scale and intensity of their use in Gaza, preoccupies Israeli observers.

The question of the Haaretz report is one of motivation: “This is an unprecedented engineering project, taking place”, Amit insists:

despite neither the military having an official policy on the matter, nor the political leadership having made an official decision to demolish all of the homes in Gaza. In fact, this policy is coming from the forces on the ground, from company and battalion commanders, who are concerned that the buildings left standing endanger the lives of their troops. Officers who were asked about this said: "No one is demolishing buildings for the fun of it." In reality, inside Gaza, every building that still stands is a threat, every house is a structure that can be booby-trapped. Every building can conceal a sniper or an entrance to a tunnel, and a Hamas terrorist can shoot at Israeli troops from any of them. From the perspective of the forces, it is safest to leave any area where they operate leveled to the ground. … The IDF said, in response to this report: "The IDF is in the midst of a complex and intense fight against terrorist organizations in the Gaza Strip, including the Hamas terrorist organization, which uses civilian buildings and exploits them in a cruel and cynical manner for terrorist purposes. …. The IDF is required to maneuver through these complex areas in order to locate and dismantle Hamas infrastructure in accordance with the objectives of the war, and it is required to destroy buildings based on a clear military need and threats posed to IDF forces in the area. According to army orders, property destruction is only carried out when there is an operational basis that requires it, and the IDF has never had a policy that allows for the deliberate destruction of civilian property." It added, "The IDF is taking various measures to minimize damage to civilian structures as much as possible, while Hamas is deliberately dragging the fighting into these areas, and is requiring the IDF to operate in them. The IDF will not elaborate on the content of operational procedures that are applied during the fighting."

You can imagine the Israeli spokesperson’s talking points: “NOT for fun! No broader orders for wholesale destruction! Hamas cynically sucks us in. The protection of our troops against dastardly terrorist ambushes is paramount.”

And yet, as the rich detail in the Haaretz report makes clear, the efforts by the Israeli military to contain the reality of what they are doing, is subverted by the testimony of the Israelis involved.

In fact, Gaza is at the intersection of three motives for destruction/construction/reconstruction.

The Haaretz report itself cites Israeli Ministers wondering why Gaza City is not already erased. The construction manager casually remarks that he hopes the territory will never be returned and speculates about future infrastructure.

There is something very telling in the indignant denials from the IDF: "No one is demolishing buildings for the fun of it." Of course not! ;) None of us have ever imagined doing that! The internet isn’t full of videos of Israeli soldiers living out precisely that fantasy … is it!?

The fact is that many of us will know the force of these three motives for destruction/erasure/reconstruction not just through inspection of the evidence since October 2023, but through introspection and reflection on our own history.

If you pause to think for a minute it is clear that Israel’s practices of war are not from some alien planet. It is not just that Americans and Europeans supply them with weapons and moral support. The Israeli mode of warfare, bulldozers and all, is “ours”. The “WE” I am invoking here is the West and specifically the Anglosphere.

I had first imagined writing about Bulldozers as part of the fitful Thanatocene mini-series I started in 2024 on the occasion of the D-Day anniversary. I had been thinking about Urbicide in Ukraine. In 2024 Gaza was on my mind, but the connection had not fully formed until I read the Haaretz report.

It was during World War II that the bulldozer left its original home in the US and spread around the world,

The US company Caterpillar that supplies the Israeli military was founded in 1925. The earliest version of the D9 Caterpillar, which in up-armored form is doing so much work in Gaza, was launched in 1954. Yet another case of the shock of the old (David Edgerton).

Tellingly, in its origins in the 19th century, the term “bulldozer” and “bulldoze”, did not at first refer to machinery. Bulldozing referred to the action of applying brunt force to an opposing obstacle, to move it out of the way and to dominate it. But its original context of use was political: As Ralph Harrington explains to us in a remarkable article “Landscape with bulldozer: machines, modernity and environment in post-war Britain” (2018)

The first published uses of the word (bulldozer) are from the United States in the 1870s and refer to organised racist violence in the politics of the post- Civil War era, particularly in the South.4 ‘ “Bulldozing” is the term by which all forms of this oppression are known,’ explained one writer of 1879, describing ‘the violent methods which have been employed to disfranchise the negroes, or compel them to vote under white dictation, in many parts of Louisiana and Mississippi’.5 The notoriety of the ‘bulldozers’ of the American South evidently brought the word and its associations into more general usage during the last quarter of the nineteenth century. By circa 1900 ‘bulldozers’ could be found in agriculture, mining and metalworking activities that involved the application of force to aspects of the physical environment that needed to be reshaped, exploited

As machines, bulldozers are specifically designed for the efficient, mechanized, high-speed occupation and functional appropriation of terrain. As they were delivered to Britain en masse from 1940 onwards, their principal function was in the construction of landing strips for the giant bomber fleets that Britain and the US would deploy against the Nazi Empire in Europe. For this purpose the US and British military occupied and repurposed huge stretches of land. Around the world, fields, forests and homes were cleared to make way for landing strips. In the island-hopping of the Pacific war, the engineering teams of the Seabees were constantly to the fore.

As the Picture Post reported in September 1943:

The most important new factor in our air policy (i.e. the strategic bombing campaign) is not a flying machine but a land machine – the bulldozer. This powerful caterpillar tractor, armed with a long steel blade, which digs into the ground, tears out boulders and tree stumps, and can even be turned on walls and small buildings, is the central machine in the whole American armoury … The Americans, in fact, are teaching us how to mass- produce aerodromes.15

What struck smart contemporaries at the time was precisely that here was a conspicuous instance of a civilian tool of huge power being turned to explicitly military purposes. As the writer D.W. Brogan put it, the bulldozer was a civilian mode of waging war.

The bulldozer is politically mightier than the tank, for in the bulldozer Europe has seen an instrument of power made directly by American civil society, serving indeed a military purpose, but bringing the Old World a flavour of the New, of that world of repeated mechanical novelty in which wars are not quite episodes, but are no more than great but manageable crises of American production.16

In the aftermath of World War II, the bulldozer would be applied worldwide, as were other machines and gadgets from the tractor, the truck, to the outboard motor, chainsaw, and walkie talkie. Together they provided the armory that enabled the comprehensive transformation and incorporation of nature, which environmental historians know as the “great acceleration”.

Source: Hyperallergic from Ammon.

Bulldozers were heroes of this narrative. From the start they clearly spoke not just to industrial power in all its manifestations but also to more atavistic impulses. The abundance of children’s literature on the topic of bulldozers speaks volumes.

Anyone who has been a boy or raised boy-children knows the profound fascination that earthmoving machinery exercises. When that impulse is compounded by rage and the desire for vengeance, it can be utterly overwhelming. “Fun” doesn’t even come close to describing it.

Together - the desire to remake the world (settlement logic), to defend yourself and erase the enemy (operational logic), and the playful/vengeful/restorative exercise of blunt force, shape a powerful trifecta. They are also extremely generic impulses. Mechanized settler colonialism could be found in the second half of the 20th century from Palestine, to the interior of Brazil, to the Chinese Northeast (Beidaguan). As Francesca Russello Ammon shows us in Bulldozer: Demolition and Clearance of the Postwar Landscape large parts of America’s own cities became a new frontier of clearance and redevelopment. And this inner frontier was always selective in its impact. As Allison Meier writes, reviewing Ammon:

citing a US Census of Housing statistic that from 1950 to 1980 around 7.5 million dwelling units were torn down. Along with that, the rise of the American interstates meant the moving of 42 billion cubic yards of earth. Through this excavation, there were incredible numbers of people displaced, particularly minorities. She writes that “60 percent of residents relocated by urban renewal were non-white,” and in some areas that percentage was even higher. For instance, in Atlanta, 95 percent of residents displaced by highway and urban renewal projects were black, “despite making up only about a third to one-half of the total population.”

And this was in “peacetime”. It is when we consider the broader political context of war, that the lines of continuity with Israel’s campaign in Gaza became even more powerful. This is what I’ve elsewhere called the liberal way of war.

This has four essential components: Normative, Historical, Tactical, Political.

In normative terms, the enemy is the bad guy - uncivilized, the aggressor, standing in the way of progress. They must be erased. “Exterminate the brutes” is the battlecry.

Though the particular forms of stigmatization are distinctive, this general structure is not particular to liberal conceptions of war. It is the combination of this normative denunciation with the other three elements that makes the liberal mode.

The second key point is that in a classic liberal war, the odds are stacked spectacularly in “our” favor and against “them”. We are rich and powerful. Our enemies are poor and weak. Nor is this by accident. The asymmetry of the conflict, is not a bug, but a feature. It is not something to be ashamed of, or shy about. It is evidence of the fact that history has already spoken its verdict, in our favor.

This also means that the final outcome, at least on the battlefield, is not in doubt.

But rather than breeding a confident and measured response, this asymmetry unleashes a kind of rage. Given how obvious the outcome is, the enemy’s continued defiance indicates that they are not just bad, but mad. And this necessitates a particular type of tactics.

The sensible thing to do with “mad dogs” is to shoot them, preferably at a safe distance. We apply massive asymmetric force to achieve a decisive outcome. To wrestle with a mad dog, on equal terms - to run the risk of it biting us - would make us mad too. In military terms, for the Israelis to engage in combat with Hamas on symmetrical terms would be a dereliction of duty.

Duty to whom? This is the fourth, political, point.

The Israelis, like us, claim to be a liberal democracy. I use liberal here in the restricted sense that those acknowledged as full citizens of the state have an absolute right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. Ideally, that would mean that they would have a professional army to protect them against all possible threats. But, if a regime of this type has to rely on citizen soldiers - as the Israelis do and as the British and Americans did in World War II - those soldiers have a right to the absolute maximum of possible protection. In the liberal mode of war, manpower is precious, not expendable. Every single casualty, is one too many. Any force, however spectacular or expensive, is justified to minimize our own casualties - all the more so when the enemy meets criteria 1. and 2. above. And since we are rich, it would, again, be a dereliction of duty not to go for overkill.

Furthermore, the leaders of liberal wars must expect that if this basic logic is not respected, it will be enforced at the ballot box. This is where the democratic component comes in. It is what the great UCLA sociologist Michael Mann once called the “dark side of democracy”.

If, in formulaic terms, this is the Israeli logic of war, then one thing is for sure. As Mann shows, they did not invent it. “We”, the “West”, did.

This mode of warfare emerged from the increasingly asymmetrical colonial wars of the late 19th century - until the industrial revolution began to transform war deeply such encounters were far more balanced and uncertain in their outcome. It reached its modern form through the harsh politico-industrial-military learning process that extended across the 20th century, from the preludes to World War I via the great conflagrations of 1914-1945, to Korea, Malaya, Vietnam, the Falklands, Afghanistan and Iraq.

As I’ve argued in several of these newsletters, there are several other major conflicts ongoing around the world at present which are having devastating consequences for tens of millions of people. “We”, the West and other outside powers, are implicated in all of them in various ways - raw materials, allies, supply of weapons etc. None of them exists in isolation. All are connected to their broader regional and global context.

The singularity of the Israeli campaign in Gaza lies in the asymmetry of power, its intensity, its enclosure, its direct connection to a settler colonial project. All this leads us back to the 1940s and Raphael Lemkin’s definition of genocide, which he modeled on Nazi-occupied Poland. That line of thought should not be dodged, or silenced by protestations about anti-semitism, or accusations of the application of double standards. It is precisely the global comparison that leads you to this conclusion.

But nor should that particular coupling of histories be allowed to become wrapped up in itself and thus self-defeating. After all, the whole point of having a concept of genocide is to capture a wider array of different projects of massive modern violence. As I argued in Chartbook 258, there were plenty of those in the mid-century. The peculiarity of the Israeli settler colonial project is that for want of superior force in 1948 it was unfinished and so continues to be pursued into the 21st century. The historical setting is anomalous. One is tempted to say anachronistic or belated. But that effort at distancing, betrays itself. The horrifying thing about Israel’s bulldozers is that they remind the West that as Faulkner put it: “The past is never dead. It's not even past.”

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