Several people have been writing recently about the use the Israeli military has been making of Bulldozers of Mass Destruction (BMDs) in its erasure campaign in Gaza. On Tuesday, Haaretz published a wide-reaching investigation into the topic by Hagai Amit. It starts like this:
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. The excavators, bulldozers and huge D9 Caterpillar tractors in Gaza never stop working, even for a moment – and this is not expected to change.
Amit provides many details about the costs, the logistics, and the environmental impact of the Israeli BMD program. He also interviews Lior Karadi, owner of the Talor Karadi group, one of the key Israeli companies carrying out the program on a contract basis. “Every team has at least five pieces of heavy equipment,” Amit reports.
He quotes Karadi as saying,
“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…”
The Columbia U historian Adam Tooze also recently published a lengthy reflection on the history and cultural “meaning” of Israel’s current strong reliance on BMDs. He cited a recent work in which British historian Ralph Harrington noted that the term “bulldozing” was first used, in or before the 1870s, to describe “the violent methods… employed to disfranchise the negroes, or compel them to vote under white dictation, in many parts of Louisiana and Mississippi.”
