Inhuman Agonies

 I was reading the New York Times's reporting today on the hunger crisis in Gaza. You'd need to have a heart of stone and a stomach of steel not to be upset by the images of malnourished children with vertebrae jutting from their emaciated forms—or crying as they beg for a meal in a press of desperate people waving buckets to collect the meagre calories they need to survive. 

What hurts most about reading these stories and seeing these photos is the knowledge that the food they need to live is all there—just a few miles—in some cases, mere feet—away. There is no natural reason why that eighteen-month-old child in the photo should resemble a withered skeleton. The milk and nourishment he needs to live exists—there are multiple global humanitarian agencies standing by to deliver it—just give it to him!

So why doesn't he have it? Israel claims the onus is on Hamas for deliberately exacerbating starvation, in order to generate international sympathy. 

And indeed, there's nothing you could accuse Hamas of that I wouldn't believe them capable of. It may well be that they are doing their part to worsen the hunger crisis in order to cling to power. But Israel has provided no evidence to support these allegations. And meanwhile—we know that Israel is blocking aid convoys that seek to offer food and medicine outside their unilateral control. 

So yes, blame Hamas as much as you want. I hold no brief for anything they do. But no one can erase the Israeli government's guilt in this either—for deliberately withholding food from people who are literally starving to death. It's there, waiting on aid trucks! They just need to let the aid organizations in! I think of the lines Hugh MacDiarmid wrote about the Spanish Civil War: 

... one segment of humanity
Was passing through inhuman agonies of hunger and fear
While decent people the world over were prevented
From keeping that thinning stream of food flowing
To maintain life and proclaim
The continuity of simple human charity.

But the Israeli government says they have their own process for dispensing aid. In the short time it's been in effect—though—there have been almost daily shootings of the defenseless people who have massed with arms outstretched to receive food. More than 600 people have died so far as a result of these killings. 

Every time it happens, the Israeli government responds in the same vague manner. They say the causes of the shootings are being investigated. They say their troops do not intend to kill civilians. But an Israeli newspaper reported that the killings during aid distribution have been deliberate. And Netanyahu's officials have never provided a coherent alternative account of why they keep happening. 

What we're really dealing with, then, is a kind of daily Peterloo—a massacre of the unarmed and desperate and hungry. As Shelley wrote—of the suffering of the unarmed people who were shot to death that day by ranked soldiers—who—just like Netanyahu's troops—never explained why they needed to butcher helpless unarmed people on a theory of "self-defense"—

'Tis to see your children weak

With their mothers pine and peak,

When the winter winds are bleak, -

They are dying whilst I speak.'

I was pretty contemptuous of the people early in the Gaza war who claimed Israel was committing genocide. The early acts of the government seemed probable war crimes—but it seemed irresponsible to level broader accusations until they could be substantiated. I also found it repulsive the way many of the same people refused to condemn Hamas for its even more blatantly-stated genocidal intent. 

But now—more than a year and a half into the war—with all of Gaza in ruins and children reduced to skeletons—I care less and less about policing what specific words people use to condemn what they see. I still don't know if Israel's actions in Gaza amount to a genocide. But whatever it is, it's plainly a crime against humanity of some sort—and I'm not going to get too hung up on formalistic definitions of the terms. 

It's a crime against humanity—in the literal, regardless of the legal, sense—to fire on unarmed people while they approach the very places they were told to gather for food. It's a crime against humanity to allow children to starve when the milk to feed them is just a few feet away—or to tell an international aid agency that they can't provide that food, when they have it crated up and ready to deliver. 

It's a crime, as MacDiarmid put it—if nothing else—to prevent "decent people the world over [...] From keeping that thinning stream of food flowing / To maintain life and proclaim / the continuity of simple human charity." And if we no longer have that, what do we have left? 

Of course, it's a war—a war against an actual terrorist group that massacred innocent people and took civilian hostages. But—as my sister pointed out to me—"there's a way you respond to terrorists when you care about the lives of the innocent people around them. When the Boston Marathon bombing happened, the government didn't start flattening homes and businesses in urban New England, just to get the perpetrators." 

I found I had no good response to that. I still don't. And then I was reading an old essay by Gore Vidal—from a 2003 collection—and I find he makes the same irrefutable point—in this case, about the military atrocities the United States committed in the wake of 9/11: 

Every nation knows how—if it has the means and will—to protect itself from thugs of the sort that brought us 9/11 ... You put a price on their heads and hunt them down. In recent years, Italy has been doing that with the Sicilian Mafia; and no-one has suggested bombing Palermo.

The same is true here. Hamas is plainly a group of thugs and criminals and terrorists. So—hunt them down individually as a police action—just as you would if they were embedded in a civilian population you cared the least bit about defending. So—why doesn't Israel take that approach? Why have they instead destroyed most habitable structures in Gaza and left tens of thousands of children dead? 

We all know the answer. I wonder if anyone would even have the temerity to deny it outright. The answer is that they don't care over-much about the lives of Gaza's civilians. They may not be setting out to kill them for its own sake—that is where the questions about genocide still seem unsettled. But they certainly don't seem to mind killing them for the sake of some other war objective. 

But if they don't care about the lives and safety of Gaza's civilians—then they cannot possibly be fighting a justifiable war. Why do I say that? Because I still agree with Stephen Spender's words—which I've quoted many times before in this regard, but which still need repeating today: "No cause is just," he wrote, "unless it guards the innocent / as sacred trust." 

I see again the New York Times story today, with the faces of the crying children—contorted into the living images of Siqueiros's Echoes of a Scream. And I remember the next line of Spender's poem: 

—No truth/  But that which reckons this child's tears an argument.