What Exactly does Opening the Gates of Hell Mean?
On an abuse of language that's slips too easily through the news media's eager fingers.
The following quote is from an Associated Press report on the Israeli night bombing of Gaza that unilaterally ended the ten week ceasefire:
Israel’s Defense Minister, Israel Katz, said the “gates of hell will open in Gaza” if the hostages aren’t released.
Since the October 7 Hamas attack on Israeli civilians, and on the poorly armed, mostly women soldiers whose warnings of Hamas activity were dismissed by their male superiors, the ensuing Israeli response was executed alongside a massive and ongoing campaign of PR spin. October 7 was presented to the American President, and to the international community, as an isolated act of pure evil. A fair characterization based on the violence of that day, yet purposefully misleading in relation to the seventy year history behind it.
Of particular note in the DM’s statement is the use of supernatural imagery. Like the word evil, the implication of hell’s gates opening suggests something final, uncompromising, and apocalyptic. It denies those aspects of human nature that render us all susceptible to anger, hate and a depraved attitude toward perceived enemies. References to evil, or hell are typically cited to slander an enemy as feral and deserving of annihilation.
Any individual or group of individuals who commit acts so wickedly cold blooded and violent that it beggars explanation, or resists the attachment of an immediately convincing motive, is sometimes accepted as proving the evil character of the perpetrators and their cause. They, and in most cases the million plus innocent souls living among them, are by that characterization effectively reduced to sub-human status.
However, the Israeli Defense Minister’s words convey something more sinister than mere demonization. They convey a sense of inevitability. The phrase, “the gates of hell will open in Gaza” is notably composed in a passive voice. The DM is not saying Israel will resume their murderous bombing of a defenseless, homeless, and starved population. He prophesizes that violence will rain down like hail from the sky entirely of its own accord, as if his government could not control it.
What’s more astounding is that after making this pseudo-biblical pronouncement, the DM gives the real game away.
“We will not stop fighting until all of our hostages are home and we have achieved all of the war goals.”
And yet again, the passive voice. Our hostages reads unambiguously. The (anonymous) war goals, not our war goals, is composed to mask the other goal—ethnic cleansing.
The level of destruction the Israeli bombing campaign wreaked on Gaza, though excused for months by President Biden as collateral damage, was designed to affect a specific outcome. Gaza may look like Stalingrad in February of 1943, but that destruction was the result of two armies of equal strength fighting for months in an urban battlefield. The devastation of Gaza was achieved entirely by one side.
The tactics of October 7 were barbaric and criminal. But when compared to over a year of willfully targeting homes, businesses, hospitals, schools, open encampments, water treatment plants, electric facilities, sewer systems, libraries, mosques, cemeteries, ambulances, vehicles marked as Press, or UN, all accompanied by a systematic choking of humanitarian supplies by official military units and by fanatical civilian mobs, evil shows itself to be a common currency in an endless exchange of revenge fantasies.
The casual observer may be forgiven for thinking this violence has, as we sometimes say, taken on a life of its own, or understood as an unfortunate event resistant to human control. But it’s not true. It’s never true. And yet the DM’s passive tone of inevitability is carefully composed to promote that nonsense.
Daniel Levy, a former peace negotiator for Israel during Olso 2, in an address to the Security Council at the United Nations last week, called the DM’s proposal BS:
One must not forget the names of the Bibas children. Ariel and Kfir. The circumstances of their death, nor the name of Leila Al-Khatib, a two year old Palestinian killed in her home in the occupied West Bank just days ago while eating dinner with her family. Or five year old Hind Rajab, bombed and denied medical attention. Dead with her family. Those lost in the turned-off incubators of Al-Shifa hospital. A minute of silence for each of the Bibas children would be appropriate, as would be a moment of silence for each of the more than 18,000 Palestinian children murdered in Israel’s devastation of Gaza. That silence would extend to over 300 hours […] Our task is to prevent that human suffering. [Suffering that] results from political conflict, preventable tragedies, and the many more tragedies that await if steps are not taken.
Levy’s testimony echoes what is now obvious to the greater part of humanity. That evil events perpetrated by human beings are not the equivalent of tidal waves, earthquakes, tornados, or anything inevitable. We already know that what the Israeli Defense Minister warns might happen is already happening. And that it is not a force spilling out through the invented gates of an imaginary realm. It is a force the Netanyahu government has applied willingly, no less so than the force applied by Hamas on Oct 7, but forty times more devastating. The difference now is that Netanyahu and his war cabinet ministers insist on its continuation.