The wake of mass atrocities and terrorist violence is the very hardest time to call for restraint in response. It was hard vis a vis U.S. actions after 9/11, and it is hard to demand of Israel today. But such moments are also the most important possible time to issue such a call; for it is in precisely such times that restraint is otherwise least likely to be observed—and when fundamental human rights violations that would not ordinarily be countenanced may be committed with impunity.
There is no doubt in my mind, to be sure, that Israel is now waging a just military operation in the Gaza Strip. Hamas, by its actions, made itself a legitimate military target, and Israel has the right if not duty to intervene to topple them—just as any other state would be justified in removing a political entity from power in a neighboring territory that had engaged in massive unprovoked aggression against its civilian population (and nota bene that all attacks on civilians are by definition "unprovoked").
But it is precisely because of the obvious moral legitimacy of Israel's self-defense—evident to all but the most depraved segments of opinion—that the world is at risk of creating a window of ethical blindness as to how that struggle is waged. No matter how plainly international law insists that retribution can never be exacted upon civilians, the world may choose not to see, not to condemn it, when it is happening so quickly on the heels of a no less appalling attack on Israel's own civilian population.
Yet it is hard to interpret what has happened in Gaza over the last several days as anything other than reprisals against civilians. Israel has doubled down on the preexisting blockade, cutting off power and freezing the flow of water, food, and other essential humanitarian supplies. IDF airstrikes have leveled whole city blocks. And the Israeli military's orders for noncombatants to evacuate the whole north of the Strip may amount to the war crime of forcible population transfer.
I can understand that waging a war under such crowded urban conditions, where Hamas is still holding innocent hostages and does indeed seek to benefit from unleashing civilian carnage, may be difficult to accomplish by any other means. Telling a civilian population to evacuate, moreover, must surely be preferable to invading the same territory without such an order, and simply allowing them to be swept up in the house-to-house street fighting.
But the danger of such a wholesale relocation—under implied threat of death—is (as humanitarian groups point out): a) that it becomes quasi-permanent. If Gaza's residents are not guaranteed safe return to their homes at the end of the conflict, then it would be hard to interpret the Israeli government's actions as anything short of a second ethnic cleansing of Palestinians. And b) that having given the order to relocate, any civilians left stranded behind in the north become targets.
As the Norwegian Refugee Council warned yesterday: "We fear that Israel may claim that Palestinians who could not flee northern Gaza can be erroneously held as directly participating in hostilities, and targeted."
This is essentially the strategy the U.S. pursued in Vietnam, in its creation of so-called "free fire zones." As I understand it, once the U.S. military had given orders to Vietnamese civilians in a designated area to relocate to a displaced persons camp, then any people left behind were presumed to be enemy fighters. U.S. planes, troops, and helicopters could therefore fire with impunity on anyone still moving in the proscribed area, whether man, woman, or child—or the elderly or disabled who were unable to relocate.
In short, it is a military tactic so ghoulish that it should not even be seriously debated, let alone condoned and implemented. "The concept of a 'free fire zone,'" as the philosopher Brian Barry once wrote, in a notoriously scathing book review, "could appropriately be the subject of black comedy or bitter invective but not dispassionate analysis." Yet the specter of such "zones" is unavoidably evoked by the rhetoric of the present combatants.
The U.S. leadership, for instance, has reportedly urged the Israeli military to set up "safe zones" for Palestinian civilians to flee to within the Strip, ahead of the military incursion. And that, surely, is better than the alternative. Yet, one fears the implication is that everything outside these dedicated camps will be treated as an "unsafe zone," in which no care is taken to avoid or minimize civilian casualties, and anyone left standing is considered a fair target—in short, a "free fire zone."
The creation of designated safe areas for noncombatants to congregate, therefore—however necessary to save lives—cannot be interpreted to give carte blanche to ignore humanitarian obligations outside this terrain; nor can these be allowed to become permanent encampments. Palestinians have experienced more than enough exile, displacement, and forced removal throughout modern history, and many still live in refugee camps created decades ago. Let us not create still more.
This month has seen enough twentieth century horrors repeating themselves already—the deliberate killing of Jewish people in antisemitic violence, in what is likely the deadliest mass murder of Jews since the Holocaust; not so far away, in an unrelated conflict, the massive exodus of an ethnic Armenian population from Azerbaijan, in events that eerily recapitulate and stir memories of another twentieth century genocide. Let not the previous century's ethnic cleansing of Palestinians be repeated as well.
I get that asking for Israel to take care and choose to value the lives of innocents over military objectives, in the instances when the two are mutually exclusive, may seem like a tall order—especially given the towering immediacy and urgency of self-defense, in the wake of last weekend's attacks. Plus, one can always make the tu quoque: would you expect the U.S. government to have exercised "restraint" and been especially cautious in the days right after 9/11? Would you have spoken out then?
Well, of course, a lot of people didn't speak out after 9/11, for precisely analogous reasons. The attack the U.S. had suffered was too traumatic and horrifying–people felt it would therefore be in poor taste to ask for Americans to be disciplined in their response. Yet, what was the result of this collective silence and acquiescence? The U.S. government launched a torture program, detained and disappeared people to secret "black sites," and established a "forever prison" at Guantanamo that is still operating today.
This is why I say that it is precisely in the wake of terrorist atrocities that it is most, not least, timely to call for restraint and respect for human rights—because it is at just these times that such calls are toughest to make, and therefore the time at which human rights violations are likeliest to occur. Hard as it may be, we have to double down on the sort of universalism and humanism that recognizes the transcendent rights of all civilians to protection, even in the context of an otherwise justified struggle of self-defense.
In the wake of 9/11 and the commencement of the U.S./U.K.-led retaliatory wars in the Middle East, there were precious few voices speaking out in favor of the rights of noncombatants. But those who did are the ones we look back on now with respect, whereas those who were silent fill us with shame.
I'll never forget the power of the impression that Harold Pinter's collection of poems and stage pieces, Death, Etc., for instance, made upon me as a teenager—or the stirring words of his Nobel Prize lecture, which quoted from the collection's title poem. Decades later, having read and written voluminous additional prose of protest and human rights advocacy, I can no longer be moved so easily. But at the time, these poems were revelatory for the simple moral universalism of their message.
Maybe it seems obvious now. Maybe it should have been obvious all along. But back then (the collection was published in 2005, and I must have discovered them at my local Barnes and Noble shortly thereafter), Pinter seemed to me a voice in the wilderness: the only person writing with the moral urgency and indignation the situation demanded, the only one calling for human rights in the prosecution of the war, at a time when any criticism of U.S. actions still felt strangely verboten.
And among all the poems in the book, the eponymous one is the least possible to forget. It came back to mind again for me this week, in thinking about the situation in Israel and Palestine. Pinter contemplates "a dead and abandoned body" and asks us whether we cared for it, whether we "closed both its eyes." The identity or nationality of "the body" is never given. It is stripped of context and history, reduced to its bare humanity.
And this is precisely the power of the poem (which Pinter appears to have written in the '90s but which he quoted pointedly in his Nobel lecture as a commentary on civilian casualties in the U.S. War on Terror). It doesn't matter where the body is or to whom it belonged, Pinter implies. It was human and deserving of respect.
This is all that must be remembered in the conflict now raging in Israel and Gaza once more, or in Azerbaijan, or in Ukraine, or anywhere else where people are killing one another and turning innocents into bodies. Our obligations to one another remain unchanged. Pinter writes:
Who was the father or daughter or brother
Or uncle or sister or mother or son
Of the dead and abandoned body? [...]
Did you wash the dead body
Did you close both its eyes
Did you bury the body
Did you leave it abandoned
Did you kiss the dead body
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