In leaked audio, ex-Israeli military intel chief justifies killing tens of thousands in Gaza -‘they need a Nakba once in a while’

In leaked comments that were aired on Channel 12, Israel’s most-watched mainstream news channel, Israel’s former head of the Military Intelligence Directorate, Maj. Gen. (res.) Aharon Haliva has become the latest member of the Israeli establishment to make the case that it is necessary that Israel carry out a genocide in Gaza. 

“The fact that there are already 50,000 killed in Gaza is necessary and required for future generations. OK, you humiliated, slaughtered, murdered – all of that is true. The price, as I already said before the war, for everything that happened on the 7^th of October [is that] for every one [Israeli killed] on October 7, 50 Palestinians need to die,” Haliva says in the leak. “It doesn’t matter now [whether it’s] children, I’m not speaking from revenge, I’m speaking about it as a message for the coming generations, there is no choice – they need a Nakba once in a while in order to feel the price. There is no choice, in this crazy neighborhood”. 

Although it is not dated, the leak is presumably from late March this year, since Haliva refers to “the fact that there are already 50,000 killed in Gaza”. Haliva had held the second highest rank in the Israeli military in a unit that works alongside the Shin Bet and is responsible for making future risk assessments. Haliva resigned from his role a year ago, in response to the monumental intelligence failure on October 7, 2023. He was the first senior leader to resign, and others would follow.  

There is much to unpack in this brief paragraph from his longer conversation with an unnamed interlocutor. In it, Haliva not only admits to the policy which demonstrates the intent of Israel’s ongoing genocide in Gaza, but also reflects the deeply racist mindset widely held in Israeli society which justifies it. 

Genocidal doctrine

In the leak, Haliva argues that the 50:1 kill ratio that he claims is “necessary,” is something that he had already previously believed before the war, in other words it’s his general idea of deterrence. That concept already has a name – the Dahiya doctrine, and I have previously written about how this policy set the stage for the current genocide. The doctrine, developed in 2008 by Israeli generals and the Institute for National Security Studies (INSS, a military-security organ connected to Tel Aviv University), takes its name from the destruction of the Dahiya quarter of Beirut in 2006 (the ‘2^nd Lebanon war’), where many families of Hezbollah members lived. 

Haliva in fact refers to the Dahiya “lesson” in his talk, saying that Hassan Nasrallah, the late murdered leader of Hezbollah understood the message, but Hamas’s Yahiya Sinwar did not.

Haliva: 

“[Nasrallah] understood the price of war. He understood that he’s not ready for it, and he understood that [Hamas military leader Yahya] Sinwar made a big mistake. Nasrallah lost a son and was in Dahiya in 2006. He remembers the price. Sinwar did not see the price.”

It is really odd to hear Haliva say “I’m not speaking from revenge” as he advocates for the mass killing of children and a Nakba. Of course, this is seeking revenge, and it is completely genocidal. But Haliva’s tone and his composure on the matter demonstrate that this is not a momentary outburst – it is an articulation of a doctrine of genocide. 

Haliva does not explicitly mention the Amalek biblical decree, which calls for eradicating an enemy tribe down to babies and cattle – but his message suggests that idea. The Amalek analogy has been repeated countless times by Israeli leaders, including Prime Minister Netanyahu, and a recent poll shows that two out of three Israelis see Palestinians as its current incarnation, with nearly all of those holding that view also insisting on the phrase “eradicating its memory” as applying to Palestinians today. 

Haliva does, however, mention the Bible once in the discussion, in reference to October 7: “In such a tragic event—biblical—and such a catastrophic national disaster, there is enough responsibility to go around.”  

Haliva’s suggestion of a repeated Nakba as a doctrine not only echoes the Dahiya doctrine but also the Israeli maxim of  “mowing the lawn” in Gaza. The idea of “mowing the lawn” in Gaza has been Israeli jargon for repeated onslaughts, a crass description of deadly ongoing military domination. But the Gaza genocide has also introduced another term – ungrounding. If “mowing the lawn” was the idea in the past, the genocide’s practice has been to decimate the lawn altogether and render it unlivable.   

‘Crazy neighborhood’

Haliva’s statement that “there is no choice, in this crazy neighborhood” repeats a very widely accepted Israeli belief, one that has actually been voiced for decades by Israel’s former Prime Minister Ehud Barak, who has referred to this same idea as Israel as a “villa in the jungle.” Barak, who is often thought of a representative of the Israeli left, used this deeply colonialist, and thus racist, belief becomes a justification for maintaining violent control.

Once in a while, the thinking goes, Israel needs to “go crazy”, to show who is the master – but not because it is crazy, it is because the natives are. Israeli Defense Minister Moshe Dayan once said that “Israel must be like a mad dog, too dangerous to bother.” Variations on this idea have been repeated by Israeli officials time and again. Former Defense Minister Pinhas Lavon, the initiator of the false-flag terror attack on Cairo in 1954, advocated “going crazy” if ever Israel were crossed. During the 2006 war with Lebanon, Prime Minister Ehud Olmert said Palestinians need to understand that “the master of the house has gone mad,” while promising “James Bond type operations, bim bam!”

Again, these were not “right-wingers,” but centrist, even left-wing, Zionist leaders.

The ongoing Nakba

In response to the leak, Haliva provided Channel 12 with a statement saying among else: 

“The leaked recordings were publicized from matters that were discussed in a closed forum, and I can only regret this. Obviously, shrapnels of partial matters, brought forth in this matter, cannot convey the full picture – certainly when we are speaking about complex issues which contain multiple details and are mostly highly classified.”

Partial and complex as they may be, Haliva’s candid statements about the collective punishment of Gaza join into a growing record of similar statements demonstrating genocidal intent. 

Haliva’s belief that a Nakba needs to be repeated “once in a while” indeed shows how the Nakba of 1948 is an ongoing, engineered catastrophe, one which Israeli leaders seem to be poised to continue in perpetuity. The Gaza genocide is part of that continuum. 

Haliva may have resigned for his intelligence failures and may have acknowledged his technical shortcomings, but it seems that the genocidal vein in Israeli society is too centrally rooted for most people to come to terms with. Thus, the Nakba perpetrators only change names, titles and roles, while the Nakba itself continues.