GAZA: ALL WAR CRIMES ARE EQUAL
Responding to a war crime by committing one doesn’t bring justice, it creates equals. Aiding, abetting or condoning one side merely adds another guilty party. All but the most ardently naïve know that Israel’s vengeance on Gaza will be ferocious. Unless those with the power to make changes start thinking about the aftermath now, it will also be pointless.
Vowing to turn parts of Gaza “into rubble” in revenge for a “black day”, Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu told his countrymen: “This will change the Middle East.”
The question for Israel’s friends and allies to ask and demand an answer for, is “How?”.
The concept, threat if you will, of “Mutually Assured Destruction”, fingers close to but not hovering perilously over, nuclear buttons, is credited with having kept the Cold war cold.
Creating “Mutually Assured Hatred”, however, will have the opposite effect. In perpetuity.
The 2.3‑million beleaguered civilians imprisoned in Gaza, an area roughly twice the size of Washington DC, have little to no reason to love Hamas, but have no way to do anything about it. Street protests, like the ones against the Netanyahu government before the latest round of atrocities, are impossible at the best of times in the impoverished enclave.
Using collective punishment in the form of cutting off vital supplies of water, power, food and medicine to civilians who’ve endured degrees of imposed deprivation for 16 years as a weapon is not – to use a term the military loves – “a force multiplier” for Israel, but for whoever pops up once Hamas has been reduced to military insignificance.
And anyone who thinks killing Hamas’ leadership and decimating its military capabilities will be the end of it, hasn’t been paying attention.
Terrorists, jihadis, call them what you will, are Hydras.
Shoving al-Qaeda off the stage and blowing away the ISIS’ “caliphate” in territorial terms hasn’t eliminated the influence of their ideology. It’s made them more of a problem by spawning offshoots.
Hamas may be humbled, weakened or forced to change its name, but it will be there as long as there is no peace to which both Israelis and Palestinians can claim a share of authorship and ownership, in both psychological and territorial terms.
So far, each successive war has only managed to abet the rise of increasingly recalcitrant zealots, on both sides.
What’s the difference between a Hamas official who denies Israel’s right to exist, and Israeli Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich, who told an audience in Paris: “There is no such thing as a Palestinian nation. There is no Palestinian history. There is no Palestinian language.”?
Naturally, both sides claim God is their co-pilot. The battle cry of Hamas gunmen is “Allah hu Akbar” (God is Great).
Israeli settlers cite the biblical belief that God promised Palestine to the Jews as justification for seizing land in the occupied West Bank.
GUT REACTIONS AREN”T HELPFUL
As the estimable journalist Mort Rosenblum put it in a column this week: “Across the world, people are befuddled by contradictory sources, mistaken impressions and unshakeable bias at opposing extremes.”
Yet President Joe Biden was willing to parrot unsubstantiated claims that Hamas beheaded Israeli children.
The documented atrocities committed by Hamas forces who poured into Israel are enough for charges and convictions of war crimes and crimes against humanity. Unproven accusations only detract from that.
The White House “walking back” the beheading misstatement is irrelevant. Biden of all people ought to know that a quote on social media is truth eternal for any and all who want to twist it for their own ends.
On a more immediate level, did Biden’s vow of “rock solid and unwavering” support for Israel, including more military aid, take history into account?
According to Israeli intelligence, in 1982 between 700 and 800 people mainly women, children and old people, were murdered in the Sabra and Chatila Palestinian refugee camps outside Beirut. To quote the Jewish Virtual Library: “The Lebanese Christian Phalangist militia was responsible for the massacres that occurred at the two Beirut-area refugee camps on September 16–17, 1982. Israeli troops allowed the Phalangists to enter Sabra and Shatila to root out terrorist cells believed located there.”
The “terrorists” were neither rooted out nor deterred. Israel gained more enemies and no friends. Instead, Israel’s invasion of Lebanon in 1982 sowed the seeds for Hezbollah on the northern border.
Hamas is their cat’s paw.
The terrible similarity between Israeli and Gazan civilians is that all-out war brings solidarity that overrides political persuasions.
For Israelis it’s the historical knowledge of what it takes for Jews to survive as a nation. Palestinians are united by their desire to have a nation. Smashing their lives will only build more hatred for Israel, leaving whatever collection of zealots succeed Hamas as the only alternative.
Israel and its allies need to heed that when the reckoning comes at the end of this latest and most horrific – to date — round of senseless carnage.
No matter how much those of good will try to make the outcome a sensible and viable scenario, it will be totally dependent on thinking about it now.
Will the lesson be learned?
Don’t count on it.
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2 thoughts on “GAZA: ALL WAR CRIMES ARE EQUAL”
Your heading says it all, these tragedies are equally inconceivable and horrifying. There can be no winners, there will be nothing of value in the rubble remains. And the impotence of the west, too scared to be honest with or about Israel — are as bad as the perpetrators on both sides. It’s unbearably sad.
Very thought provoking piece Allen. At times like these ‑and it seems we are always in times like these, it is difficult to find magnificence in the achievements of human kind. It feels like for every rainbow of achievement there is a hurricane of horrid behaviour.
And yet we soldier on ( perhaps a poor metaphor), with hopes to find cures and happiness and harmony and answers.
To bring it home, it is alarming to see opposing protestors among our citizenry. New comers do not always place their ideologies with the lost luggage when they file through immigration. Seems to simmer for at least a generation and get loud when tragedy and or terror strikes. I’m thinking Air India and a Sikh murder to name just one. And now both Israeli and Palestinian sympathizers. The temptation to tell shouters on both sides of the street: “Settle down. Be courteous, you are on Canada now!” Is both naive and callous. All sides as you indicate have historically just cause.
Was it Mark Twain who said: “The more I know people the better I like dogs. “