In October, shortly after the start of Israel’s war on Gaza, in which nearly 20,000 Palestinians have now been killed, Israel pledged to “expel Hamas from the face of the earth” – a project that would require Israel’s military to “wipe the ground out of Gaza.” to equalize.” , an Israeli security source told Reuters.

And they made it flat; A month after the start of the war, the military had already withdrawn the equivalent of two atomic bombs on the tiny and densely populated Palestinian coastal enclave. As Israel now continues to pulverize an already thoroughly pulverized territory, it appears that the Israelis are taking the concept of scorched earth policy to a whole new level.

According to the Oxford Reference Dictionary, the term “scorched earth policy” was first used in English in 1937 in a report describing the Sino-Japanese conflict, in which the Chinese razed their own cities and burned crops to stop the Japanese invasion complicate. The strategy has since been seen in a number of armed conflicts around the world, including Guatemala’s 36-year civil war, which ended in 1996 after more than 200,000 people, mostly indigenous Maya, were killed and disappeared.

In 2013, former Guatemalan dictator and US friend Efraín Ríos Montt was found, who led a particularly bloody part of the war in the early 1980s guilty of genocide in a Guatemalan court. And while later legal machinations and Ríos Montt’s own death from a heart attack saved the man from earthly atonement for his crimes, it could be said that the truth cannot so easily “disappear from the face of the earth.”

In fact, scorched earth was a major component of the Guatemalan army’s genocidal crackdown on its opponents, and hundreds of indigenous villages were destroyed along with water supplies, crops, and anything else that could support life. And what do you know: the cruelty of the Guatemalan state was encouraged by none other than the State of Israel, which, after all, already had several decades of experience exterminating indigenous life in Palestine – sorry, “making the desert bloom”.

As journalist Gabriel Schivone notes in an article for the North American Congress for Latin America (NACLA), Israeli advisers not only helped ensure the success of the 1982 military coup that brought Ríos Montt to power, but Israel also supported “every facet of the attack”. about the Guatemalan people” from the late 1970s into the next decade. For successive Guatemalan governments, Schivone writes, Israel has become the “primary provider of counterinsurgency training, light and heavy arsenals of weapons, aircraft, state-of-the-art intelligence technology and infrastructure, and other vital assistance.”

In keeping with the “desert blooming” form of blasphemy, Israel has also been credited with assisting Guatemala in agricultural ventures during the period of civil war – because there is clearly nothing better for agriculture than, you know, scorched earth.

Meanwhile, in neighboring El Salvador, the United States’ supposedly existential struggle against communism during the Cold War enabled right-wing regimes to slaughter scores of farmers. And as in Guatemala, Israel stood ready to help – including in implementing the scorched earth policy.

A AJ+ video points out that Israel helped train ANSESAL, the Salvadoran intelligence agency that would “lay the foundation for death squads” during El Salvador’s 12-year civil war that killed at least 75,000 people and ended in 1992, the video says From 1975 to the start of the civil war in 1979, a full 83 percent of El Salvador’s military imports came from Israel. The vast majority of killings during the war were carried out by the US-backed right-wing state and affiliated paramilitary groups.

It goes without saying that scorched earth campaigns are deadly—and sometimes that lethality outlasts the conflict itself. Take Vietnam, where the U.S. military is literally scorching the earth with the toxic defoliant Agent Orange continued to cause miscarriages, birth defects and serious illnesses decades after the Vietnam War officially ended in 1975.

In IraqThe US use of depleted uranium munitions could also be considered a kind of scorched earth policy, since saturating a territory with radioactive poison does not do much to ensure its long-term habitability.

Speaking of poisons, the Washington Post recently confirmed that the Israeli military fired U.S.-supplied white phosphorus bullets into southern Lebanon in October, even though the use of such weapons in civilian areas is “generally prohibited under international humanitarian law.” According to the Post’s report, southern Lebanese residents affected by the attack speculated “that the phosphorus was intended to drive them from the village and clear the way for future Israeli military activity in the area.”

It certainly wouldn’t be the first time – in Lebanon or the Gaza Strip, where there have already been numerous illegal bombings with white phosphorus by Israel.

As the Israeli military now continues to scorch the earth in Gaza, and with it the people within it, there is something different that distinguishes Israel’s efforts from the scorched earth experiments of the past. In El Salvador, for example, the army’s goal was never to eliminate the very concept of El Salvador, whereas Israel appears intent on completely destroying Gaza.

But unfortunately for Israel, resistance is a thing that can grow in scorched earth.

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect the editorial stance of Al Jazeera.