Excuses

No sooner did the firing commence in the latest escalation of the Hamas-Israel confrontation than the familiar excuses on both sides started to rain down. There is of course no sound way to justify any party's violations of the laws of war: neither Hamas' indiscriminate rocket launches into Israeli territory, endangering civilian lives, nor the Israeli Defense Forces' disproportionate air strikes frequently seeming to target—or at the very least, foreseeably jeopardize—civilian infrastructure and the lives of innocent people. But the very impossibility of the task of making excuses for such things seems to have incited some to make the attempt. Perhaps they are just eager for a challenge.

Indeed, the contortions they have come up with are often quite ingenious. First, the apologists of each side urge us to note the "provocations" that allegedly forced their favored party's hand. Israel's comprehensive blockade of Gaza, we are told, and ethnic cleansing in Jerusalem, left Hamas no choice but to fire its rockets. So too, we are informed, the IDF has no alternative but to retaliate in the face of Hamas' attacks, and the densely-populated areas where their militants operate will inevitably become military targets, leading to the collateral loss of civilian life. 

Of course, neither appeal is a sound argument. There is no "provocation" that can justify violating the laws of war. Because the laws of war are designed precisely to protect those who are innocent of any provocation. 

A child, to take the most obvious example of an illegitimate military target, is born into a political context they did nothing to create or choose. They are at the mercy of governments whose actions they have no role in shaping. And children have been killed by both IDF airstrikes and Hamas rockets in the latest round of violence. 

It is true that this is a dramatically asymmetric conflict. Israel's military has vastly more power and capacity to inflict suffering, as is reflected in the massively greater civilian death toll in Gaza. But, as a Human Rights Watch researcher recently put it, that makes no difference if you are one of the unlucky ones in Israel. Israeli citizen children too perished under Hamas' fire, including a little boy and a teenage girl (who was, incidentally, an Arab/Palestinian citizen of Israel). None of these deaths can be excused, defended, minimized, justified. 

Having reached this point, the apologists have a few other avenues open to them. They can shift gears, and tell us that we may not be wrong, but we have no right to draw so much attention to this issue in the first place. They will say that the world is full of horrors; they will point to any number of other awful and far more deadly things happening on the earth's surface than the violence in Israel-Palestine, but that garners so much less notice in our media (conflicts in Ethiopia and Burma, say). 

And indeed, it is true that, for whatever reason, Israel-Palestine receives a disproportionate share of interest in U.S. media and political circles. There's any number of reasons why this might be the case; Susan Sontag offers a list of plausible candidates on p. 36 of her book, Regarding the Pain of Others, which we'll be returning to below. I won't try to add other hypotheses to the mix. I will simply note that it is a truism of every moral judgement that, so soon as it is made, one could point to other and worse things that also happen in human societies; but that doesn't diminish the validity of the judgment in question. This is what we happen to be talking about now, and so, since we are on the topic, what do we have to say about it? What can be said about the moral right and wrong of the matter? 

I will add that, as with every other polarized and partisan issue, the disproportionate degree of interest in this topic is found on both sides of the question, at least in U.S. politics. Anti-imperialist leftists are not the only people in our country who feel called upon to form some opinion on this issue in the course of developing their political conscience. Conservatives too, and really just about anyone running for national office, will be asked about this at some point in their careers and will have to take a position (whereas, for whatever reason, many will never be asked one way or the other about the Burmese military's decades-long civil war against the country's ethnic minorities.) 

And if one is sincere in asking people to care less about this issue and focus on other problems of global humanitarian interest, then the request has to go both ways. Defenders of Israel's military actions must be urged to keep the same degree of silence as the critics.

Finally, I will add that, if one has reached the point in an argument at which one no longer can think of a ground to dispute the validity of a negative moral judgment, and has been reduced to urging one's opponent to simply think about something else, to change the topic, to focus on other even more dreadful calamities happening in the course of human affairs—then one has in effect already lost the argument. 

But enough of that. Not all of the apologists are defeated so easily. Not all will so readily resort to the impoverished strategy of Tu quoque. Some are still ready to fight on the terrain of the underlying moral question itself. 

But how are those who would defend the IDF's retaliatory airstrikes to hold their position in the face of the horrific images that bombarded us, during the fighting, of Palestinian women, men, and children killed by these attacks; by the reports of entire generations of Palestinian families wiped out in a single day; by the death of Palestinian medical personnel responsible for overseeing the territory's COVID-19 response; by the destruction of clinics and a tower-block housing the Associated Press's office in Gaza; by the video of a tearful ten-year-old girl gesturing to the rubble of her family's home behind her and asking, "What do you expect me to do? How can I fix it?" Can anyone see these images, read these stories, watch these videos, and conclude from them that all of this is just, proportionate, legitimate, wise? 

Of course not; but one can try to flip the script on who is responsible for these atrocities. This indeed is what defenders of the IDF swiftly sought to do; just as they did during the last round of violence in 2014. Almost as soon as the reports of hundreds of Palestinian civilian deaths in the rubble of Gaza were announced, IDF spokespeople and their sympathizers in the commentariat began to assert that the deaths had not actually been caused by the Israeli airstrikes, but by Hamas rockets that misfired and fell back into populous zones, killing their own civilians. 

Or, if they do not go quite so far as to claim that all the civilian dead in Gaza were killed by Hamas rockets, they asserted a less direct form of Hamas culpability. Hamas' military strategy, they claim, involves using civilians as "human shields." They fire their rockets, it is asserted, from locations that will force Israel to bomb children and other innocents. Why? Because, this narrative goes, Hamas is deliberately trying to generate horrendous images of civilian suffering that will stoke resentment against Israel, rile the earth's conscience, and erode sympathy for the occupying power—in short, sacrificing children's lives for the sake of their own political ends. 

We have heard this argument before, as I say. Perhaps one of the most bizarre and unsettling instances of it came in the summer of 2014, after a quite similar flare-up of violence, including a cycle of rocket attacks followed by retaliatory airstrikes. In this case, Nobel laureate Elie Wiesel took out a full-page ad in multiple newspapers comparing Hamas' alleged use of "human shields" to "the Canaanite practices of child sacrifice to Moloch," and portraying the extremist party in Gaza as bearing exclusive blame for the deaths of children that resulted from Israeli airstrikes. 

The pseudo-historical resonances of this comparison are disturbing, given the Bible's accounts of the ancient Israelites' perennial war against the Philistines (whose name shares the same root as "Palestine"), the ideology of the Deuteronomistic author that attributes a history of child sacrifice exclusively to the Israelites' enemies and claims an absolute right to exterminate them from the land of Canaan, and the fact that the Philistines were specifically associated with the territory in question (recall that Samson was "eyeless in Gaza," in Milton's poetic phrase). 

Trying to associate a contemporary people with the grotesque crimes and barbaric practices attributed to an ancient and remote society, specifically an ancient cult of child sacrifice that has long fascinated writers with a taste for the morbid and exotic (Flaubert's Salammbo being perhaps the most famous literary depiction of the cult of Moloch) is a dangerous and irresponsible slander, no matter how reputable and esteemed the source from which it comes.

These troubling resonances are not, of course, enough to answer the factual question of whether the accusations are actually true in this case, of course. Does Hamas in fact use human shields?

Maybe. But one doesn't have to hold any brief for Hamas—indeed, one can gladly grant the point that their launching of indiscriminate rocket attacks foreseeably puts the people of Gaza at risk of bloody retaliation (in addition to unlawfully endangering innocent people in Israel) and is totally unacceptable as either morality or strategy—without leaping to the absurd opposite conclusion that the IDF bears no responsibility whatsoever for the effects of its airstrikes on the lives, property, and wellbeing of the hundreds of innocent people (if not more) they put at risk in Gaza. 

But what about the assertion in this latest round of fighting (which was new, by the way, to this episode, as far as I can recall) that most of the people killed in Gaza died as a result of Hamas rockets that went awry, rather than as a result of Israeli airstrikes? 

As much as such a claim will strike many of us as inherently improbable—as mere special pleading from official IDF propagandists—it is also maddeningly impossible to falsify with the information we have available to us. Not a single person opining on this topic from the safety of oceans' distance, whether via blog or Twitter, has the ability to conduct a war crimes investigation themselves and imminently to determine exactly who bears direct culpability for each civilian death. 

We can say, however, that the IDF's claim is not a particularly original argumentative move. Governments and militaries that stand accused of inflicting mass suffering on civilians have frequently wished to disclaim responsibility. In the face of the apparent deaths of children, non-combatants, the elderly and the innocent, in a spate of bloody war-making, they have asserted that these people brought it on themselves, or maybe even that their restive leaders willed their deaths in order to play the victim. 

As Susan Sontag observes, in Regarding the Pain of Others: "To photographic confirmation of atrocities committed by one's own side, the standard response is that [...] it was the other side who did it, to themselves. Thus the chief of propaganda for Franco's Nationalist rebellion maintained that it was the Basques who had destroyed their own ancient town and former capital, Guernica, on April 26, 1937, by placing dynamite in the sewers (in a later version, by dropping bombs manufactured in Basque territory) in order to inspire indignation abroad and reinforce the Republican resistance. 

"And thus a majority of Serbs [...] maintained right to the end of the Serb siege of Sarajevo [...] that the Bosnians themselves perpetrated the horrific 'breadline massacre' [...] lobbing high-caliber shells into the center of their capital or planting mines in order to create some exceptionally gruesome sights for the foreign journalists' cameras and rally more international support for the Bosnian side." One thinks, still more recently, of how Burmese nationalists accused the persecuted Rohingya of engineering their own mass exodus from the country, purely in order to generate sympathy. 

Are we to regard the IDF's claims about Palestinian deaths as any more plausible than these blatant propagandistic falsehoods? Are we to assume that, while the canard of one side killing their own civilians in order to generate international sympathy has been true of no other conflict—not the Spanish Civil War, not Bosnia, not Burma—it happens to be true for the first time in Gaza? Or are we in the face yet again of an attempt to excuse the inexcusable: in this case, the blatant violation of the laws of war that can and should protect children and non-combatants from harm?