Is Gaza a US proxy war?

The eerie parallels from El Salvador’s death squad days provide perspective on our current course

I recently revisited the Civil War in El Salvador, and the U.S. role in it, through a two-part series on the subject by Danieli Bolelli’s History on Fire podcast (I highly recommend the series and the podcast).

I feel close to this topic, as El Salvador was my entry point to human rights. My first intern research project was to create a database of human rights cases and connect them with military commanders. The result was a report that found that 14 out of 15 of the Central American country's senior military officers commanded troops who committed brutal human rights abuses. Eleven had been trained by the United States. This revelation helped lead to the first House vote to cut military aid to the Salvadoran government.

As I listened, my mind made disturbing parallels with war in Gaza today. I flush out some comparisons:

Economic and social stratification -> polizarization -> political extremism

El Salvador in the 20^th century was a stratified society with a small elite owning almost all the wealth and land, and the vast majority of the population living in abject poverty. By the 1970s, as Bolelli put it, the peasants were faced with a dire choice of starving or resisting. The more the oligarchs rejected peasants’ demands for land, the more peasants joined communist-allied rebels, which led to greater repression by the anti-communist -- and U.S.-backed -- military dictatorship. This vicious cycle became the Salvadoran civil war that killed more than 75,000 between 1979 and 1992.

The land governed and occupied by the Government of Israel is stratified. Israel enjoys a high standard of living. Its per capita GDP, ranked 20^th in world, is 16 times larger than that in the West Bank and Gaza. Even before October 7, Gaza had one of the highest employment rates in the world. The West Bank consists of well-groomed Israeli Jewish settlements, connected to electricity, water and elegant highways, interspersed among much poorer Palestinian communities separated from Israeli areas by barbed wire-topped walls and other barriers. Within Israel, the government passed a constitutional change that left Palestinians and other non-Jews with something less than the full citizenship granted to Jews.

Every [peasant/Palestinian] is a [communist/terrorist]

In its determination to succeed in eliminating what it saw as a communist threat, the Salvadoran military and associated death squads took the approach that everyone not like them was a likely communist, based on nothing more than where they lived or how they looked. This is how the El Mozote massacre happened, when an elite, U.S.-trained counter-insurgency battalion came through a village (known as being neutral in the conflict) and murdered nearly 1,000 people, many women and children, merely because they could become recruits for the communists.

In Gaza, Israel officials have justified the breadth of their military operations on the grounds that every Palestinian is a terrorist, a potential terrorist or an accessory to terrorism. Some 35,000 Gazans have died, including 14,500 children. The rationale that every person in Gaza is complicit in Hamas’ horrible terrorist attack on October 7 even extends to the killing of babies born after October 7.

Unconditional U.S. military and political support

The United States justified its support for the Salvadoran military, the military-run government, and its associated para-miliary death squads, as anti-communism. This support crossed bipartisan lines through the Carter and Reagan Administrations and within Congress. The U.S. government provided military assistance and trained Salvadoran offices at the School of the Americas, many of whom ran units that committed human rights abuses.

The basis for U.S. military aid to Israel is rather different, designed to bolster Israel’s defense following the 1967 and 1973 wars, and later from Hezbollah and Hamas attacks, and as a political inducement for the peace deal with Egypt. This aid has had broad bipartisan support. Before, and especially since October 7, the aid is justified as anti-terrorism.

Military aid increased despite human rights violations  

U.S. military aid to El Salvador increased even as the recipients committed human rights violations with the U.S.-provided weapons, including the assignation of Archbishop Romero, the rape and murder of three American nuns and a lawwoman, and the El Mozote massacre. The U.S. Members of Congress who sought to condition military aid on human rights were called pro-communist.

U.S. military aid to Israel accelerated after October 7 even as the recipients violated international humanitarian law obligations regarding civilian protection and committed human rights violations with the U.S.-provided weapons. Despite the fact that U.S. laws conditioning arms sales on human rights behavior are much more robust today than during the Salvadoran civil war, they have not been invoked until very recently (however minimally). U.S. Members of Congress who have sought to condition military aid on human rights are called pro-terrorist.

Scorched earth campaigns

With American-made weapons in hands of soldiers trained by U.S. officers steeped in U.S. counterinsurgency doctrine from the Vietnam War, the Salvadoran military conducted a scorched earth campaign in areas it considered sympathetic to communists and insurgents, which swept up any civilians in its path, leading to countless extrajudicial killings. Because everyone is a communist.

The Israeli Defense Force (whose “Dahiya doctrine” is synonymous with scorched earth) has followed a course of near total destruction of infrastructure in Gaza, including hospitals, schools and universities, and massive deaths of civilians, including extrajudicial killings. Because everyone is a terrorist.

U.S. officials deflect, deny and lie about human rights impact

Truth commissions and documentary evidence have shown that American officials consistently downplayed human rights concerns or outright lied. Secretary of State Alexander Haig made up a story that the murdered nuns had run a roadblock. UN Ambassador Jeane Kirkpatrick falsely claimed they were communist sympathizers. The Congressional researcher for whom I did the project referenced at the top returned from an investigative trip to El Salvador in 1990 and showed me pictures: “Here’s a photo of an embassy official lying to us.”

U.S. officials’ reactions to events in Gaza, happening in an age of social media and video clips, merit instant challenging to their veracity. Officials’ evasive if not untruthful responses to questions about whether Israel is violating its obligations under international law, or whether the U.S. government is complying with its own laws about how military aid is used, would have made Haig and Kirkpatrick proud.

Elliott Abrams!

As an Assistant Secretary of State during the Reagan Administration, Abrams testified that the death count on the El Mozote massacre was “not credible” and claimed the atrocity was communist propaganda. Human rights organizations accused him of redefining human rights to mean merely “anti-communist.”

In an interview about Gaza, Abrams said that reports about the casualties and the Israeli military blocking humanitarian aid are “misleading, if not false” and that the death toll is a “Hamas figure.” When asked about human rights concerns Abrams did not answer.

So, is Gaza a U.S. proxy war?

Depends on your lens. A proxy war is when a third-party state funds a non-state belligerent as a proxy in a conflict with another state; both belligerents can be proxies. We are most familiar with the Cold War context: El Salvador, Nicaragua, Vietnam, Afghanistan. Setting aside the debate over whether the proxy rationale for U.S. involvement in these conflicts was pretextual or complete bullshit, let’s accept that policymakers portrayed them as settings of ideological and major power competition.

In that sense, there are many who eagerly portray Gaza as a proxy war, where Israel and Hamas are the proxies for the U.S. and Iran. Think Abrams, John Bolton and FDD. We can also see Gaza as a proxy war as an extension of the U.S.’s Global War Against Terror, for which there remain plenty of nostalgists.

And there is another, less evident, way to see Gaza as a proxy war, and that is through the lens of Christian Zionism, the belief that the creation of the Jewish State of Israel is prophesized as a prerequisite step for the coming Kingdom of Christ which, once established, would have no place for uncoverted Jews. This movement has become influential in Republican politics. The Israeli Prime Minister told the leading Christian Zionist advocacy group that they are “his best friends.” Through this lens, the U.S. is fighting a proxy war against forces who would deny Israel its prophesized role as a Jewish waystation until Christ seizes the deed to the place for Christians only.

Lessons of a proxy war

The point of drawing this parallel is to think of the lessons we can draw from the El Salvador experience. From the vantage point of four decades, can Americans today be proud of what our nation did in El Salvador in the 1970s and 1980s? Were the 75,000 civilian deaths an acceptable cost for our involvement? Was funding and training the death squads the only way to achieve our goal? Oh, and what was our goal anyway?  What is the long-terms reputational impact on the Unites States in the region? Is Salvadoran society still bearing the wounds of the policy choices the United States made?

So jump ahead 45 years. Imagine asking these same questions regarding the U.S. military support for the Israeli military campaign in Gaza. How would you answer these questions?