By Andrew Klein 

Introduction: The Legacy of Operation Cast Thy Bread

In the annals of modern conflict, historical atrocities that escape accountability inevitably sow the seeds for future violations. This is a recurring, ugly side of humanity, not confined to any single nation or people. Nowhere does this tragic pattern manifest more clearly than in Palestine, where documented wartime conduct continues a cycle of violence with minimal consequence. The recently revealed details of Operation Cast Thy Bread—a 1948 biological warfare campaign—provides critical historical context for understanding current violence in Gaza. This operation, which involved the deliberate contamination of water wells with typhoid bacteria in Arab communities, was personally authorized by Israel’s first Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion and implemented by the Haganah, the precursor to the Israel Defense Forces (IDF).

The systematic nature of this campaign, targeting both Palestinian civilians and allied Arab armies, resulted in typhoid epidemics in areas including Acre and contributed to the depopulation of multiple Palestinian villages. When confronted, contemporary Israeli officials denied the operations and attempted to block investigations. This historical precedent exemplifies how unchecked violations create enduring patterns of conduct. The only significant change today is that social media and on-the-ground reporting have ripped away the veil of secrecy, making the consequences of such impunity visible to the world in real-time.

Operation Cast Thy Bread: A Historical Case Study in Biological Warfare

The Mechanics of a Covert Campaign

Operation Cast Thy Bread represented a systematic approach to biological warfare during the 1948 Arab-Israeli conflict. Historical documentation reveals that the Haganah’s chief operations officer Yigael Yadin dispatched personnel to establish a unit dedicated to developing chemical and biological weapons capabilities.

The operation’s implementation was both strategic and comprehensive, extending beyond Acre to include depopulated villages and water sources in Palestinian neighbourhoods of Jerusalem. By the final months of the 1948 war, Israel had developed orders to expand the biological warfare campaign into neighbouring Arab states including Egypt, Lebanon, and Syria, though these plans were never executed. As early as July 1948, the Palestinian Arab Higher Committee submitted formal complaints to the United Nations regarding “bacteriological warfare” by Zionist forces, though these reports were largely dismissed at the time.

The Historical Continuum of Land Seizure Tactics

The methods documented in Operation Cast Thy Bread were neither isolated nor anomalous within the broader context of historical land clearance campaigns. Across different continents and centuries, a similar pattern emerges when groups seek to displace populations and assert territorial control.

This pattern is starkly visible in the Scottish Highland Clearances (1750-1860), where landlords systematically evicted tenants from traditional clan territories to make way for more profitable sheep farming, fundamentally transforming the social and demographic landscape through what was euphemistically termed “agricultural improvement”. Similarly, during the Irish Land War beginning in 1879, widespread agrarian agitation emerged in response to absentee landlordism and exploitative rental practices, eventually leading to the 1920 land seizures where estates and cattle farms were forcibly taken.

In the modern context, we see this same pattern in West Bank Settlement Expansion (1967-present), implemented through settlement construction, land confiscation, resource control, and administrative restrictions. This recurring playbook demonstrates that the tactics of displacement are a grim, repeatable feature of human conflict, not an invention of any single state.

Contemporary Manifestations: Settlements and Violence in the West Bank

Systematic Land Appropriation

The historical patterns of land clearance identified in earlier periods find their contemporary expression in Israel’s settlement policies in the occupied West Bank. Since the 1967 war, Israel has pursued a deliberate strategy of settlement expansion that continues to this day, with approximately 600,000-750,000 Israeli settlers now living in at least 160 settlements and outposts across occupied territory.

This infrastructure represents a modern manifestation of historical land clearance techniques, implemented through legal manipulation, where Israel’s declaration of West Bank land as “state land” has resulted in the appropriation of over 100,000 hectares of Palestinian territory since 1967. This is complemented by resource control, with Israel’s restrictive allocation of water creating stark disparities, and forced displacement, where over the past 50 years, approximately 50,000 Palestinian homes and structures have been demolished by Israeli authorities.

The ideological underpinnings of this project have been explicitly stated by government officials like Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich, who has openly advocated for de facto annexation and stated his goal to “change the DNA” of the system to make settlement expansion irreversible.

Escalating Violence and Enforcement Impunity

The environment created by systematic land appropriation has facilitated increasing violence against Palestinian civilians, particularly since the outbreak of war in Gaza in October 2023. Recent documentation reveals a surge in attacks, with the UN documenting approximately 1,270 settler attacks against Palestinians in the first ten months of the war.

This violence has led to forced displacement, with the Israeli human rights organization B’Tselem reporting that settler violence has forced Palestinians to abandon at least 18 villages in the West Bank during this period. The human cost has been lethal: between October 2023 and August 2024, at least 589 Palestinians were killed in the West Bank.

This violence occurs within a culture of impunity, where findings indicate that just 3% of official investigations into settler violence between 2005-2023 resulted in conviction. Israel’s domestic intelligence chief explicitly warned ministers that Jewish extremists were carrying out acts of “terror” against Palestinians while benefiting from “light-handed law enforcement”.

From Sabra and Shatila to Modern Atrocities: The Pattern of Delegated Violence

The Israeli state’s relationship with paramilitary violence extends beyond its own forces to include allied militias, following a historical pattern where deniability is prioritized. The 1982 Sabra and Shatila massacre in Beirut stands as a chilling example. While carried out by the Phalange, a Lebanese Christian militia, the killings occurred in an area fully under the control of the Israeli Defence Forces (IDF), which facilitated the militia’s entry and provided illumination throughout the night of the killings. The Israeli Kahan Commission later found that Israeli military personnel were aware of the atrocities unfolding but failed to take action to stop them, concluding that indirect responsibility lay with several Israeli officials, including then-Defence Minister Ariel Sharon.

This model of using allied proxies to create a buffer of deniability is not unique, but its repeated use points to a systemic approach. More recent examples include the 2014 assault on Shuja’iyya in Gaza, where UN reports concluded that the IDF’s bombardment was so extensive and disproportionate that it “may have constituted a war crime,” and the 2018 Great March of Return protests, where UN investigators found that Israeli snipers killed 189 demonstrators, including 35 children, in a manner that likely constituted war crimes. These events, now captured and disseminated through social media, have removed the historical ambiguity that often surrounded such actions.

The Architecture of Impunity: From Historical Crimes to Contemporary Violations

The Failure of Accountability Mechanisms

The historical disregard for accountability established during operations like Cast Thy Bread has evolved into a sophisticated architecture of impunity that protects perpetrators of contemporary violations. This pattern mirrors what human rights organizations documented in other contexts, where both de facto and de jure impunity created environments where “abusive behaviour by security forces and armed groups spreads when perpetrators are not held accountable for their actions”.

In the Israeli context, this impunity manifests through investigation failures, where internal military investigations rarely lead to prosecutions for actions against Palestinians, creating what one UN Special Rapporteur termed a “culture of impunity”. This is compounded by political protection, where senior government figures have openly supported violent actions, and legal exceptionalism, where Israel’s rejection of the Fourth Geneva Convention’s application to occupied territories, contrary to the consensus position of the international community, represents a form of de jure impunity.

The Historical Roots of Contemporary Leadership

The cultural acceptance of violence against Palestinian civilians extends to the highest levels of Israeli leadership, with several prime ministers having personal histories in organizations implicated in terrorism and ethnic cleansing. Menachem Begin was the former commander of the Irgun, designated as a terrorist organization by British authorities and responsible for the 1948 Deir Yassin massacre that killed 107-120 Palestinian villagers. Yitzhak Shamir was a former leader of the Lehi militant group (known as the “Stern Gang”) that conducted assassinations and terrorist attacks, including the 1948 assassination of UN mediator Folke Bernadotte.

This historical continuity between pre-state militant groups and subsequent government leadership has created what can accurately be identified as a “cultural problem that has deep historic roots,” where tactics once condemned as terrorism became normalized within the framework of state power.

Conclusion: Breaking the Cycle in the Age of Social Media

The trajectory from Operation Cast Thy Bread to contemporary violence in Gaza and the West Bank reveals the dangerous consequences of unaddressed historical violations. When biological warfare in 1948 escapes meaningful international condemnation, when land clearance tactics continue for decades without consequence, and when political leaders with histories of violence against civilians assume positions of authority, the foundation is laid for repeated cycles of atrocity.

The current situation in Gaza—with widespread destruction, mass civilian casualties, and systematic displacement—represents the logical culmination of this historical pattern. Without meaningful international accountability that addresses both historical and contemporary violations, the cycle will inevitably continue. The evidence from Scotland, Ireland, and Palestine itself demonstrates that impunity not only permits recurrence but actively encourages escalation.

However, a crucial variable has changed: the omnipresence of social media and citizen journalism. The crimes that were once hidden in classified archives or obscured by official denials are now broadcast to the world as they happen. This unprecedented transparency does not, in itself, create accountability, but it makes the historical patterns undeniable to a global public. Breaking this centuries-old cycle now requires that this newfound public awareness be translated into concrete political and legal action, finally confronting not only contemporary violence but the unpunished historical precedents that made it possible.