Sacred Trust

 Even by the standards of the always-horrendous war in the Middle East, which has consumed the region for the past year, there was something particularly gruesome—that sticks in the memory—about the attack using exploding pagers and walkie-talkies this week in Lebanon. Imagine these micro-explosions suddenly going off around you, all over the country, and having no idea what was causing them or how to avoid them. My heart broke upon reading the stories of people unplugging TVs and computers from their walls, because they simply had no idea what might go up in flames next. 

I get that Hezbollah officials are a legitimate military target. They are engaged in active hostilities against Israel, launching frequent attacks that have internally displaced thousands of civilians from the country's north. But the "exploding pager" tactic was almost certain to sweep in countless innocent people who had nothing to do with the militant group and its activities. It is the essence of an indiscriminate and disproportionate attack, taking insufficient care to protect noncombatants. The New York Times tells one story of a nine-year-old girl who picked up her father's pager when it beeped, in order to bring it to him. It exploded in her hand, killing her. 

She is far from the first innocent to die in this past year's war, of course. There are the 1,200 Israeli civilians butchered on October 7 by Hamas, and the hundreds of others taken hostage and held captive in underground cages. There are the thousands of Gazan children and other noncombatants who have perished in Israeli bombardment since. There are the people displaced in northern Israel by Hezbollah rockets. This is a conflict in which no party involved has made a practice of protecting civilian life from harm.

But they ought to start. For all the ink that has been spilled over who's right and who's wrong in this conflict, after all—for all people's desire to lay exclusive blame on one side or the other—the tragic fact remains that no party to this war has managed to live up to the one moral test that actually counts. And that is the one that Stephen Spender enunciated in a 1953 poem. I've quoted it before in this context; but it bears repeating: "No cause is just unless it guards the innocent/ As sacred trust[.]" 

Every party to the fighting in the Middle East right now seems convinced that its cause is just. Most wish to prove themselves just in the eyes of the world. But no one seems to be remembering to abide by this one most crucial test of justice. None is keeping its sacred trust to guard the innocent.