A Thousand Eyes

 According to the Wall Street Journal, Israel's far-right security minister Itamar Ben-Gvir had this to say on social media yesterday about the country's ongoing military operations in Lebanon (which now threaten to derail talks with Iran yet again):

"For every tear of an Israeli mother, a thousand Lebanese mothers must weep. All of Lebanon must burn!"

Um, excuse me, but—what??

I get that Ben-Gvir is at the extreme lunatic end of the Israeli political spectrum. He does not speak for the whole country—or even for the whole of Netanyahu's government, who have tried to distance themselves from some of his remarks in the past. 

But still—this is a high-ranking member of the Israeli government responsible in some measure for setting policy. And here he is declaring a sort of inverse–Blackstone's ratio for the value of Lebanese life. 

I guess I spoke imprecisely yesterday when I said too many governments around the world (including our own) were stuck in the principle of an eye for an eye. What we're dealing with here is apparently a thousand eyes for an eye. 

Israel's military has been accused of waging a sort of sectarian ethnocide against Shias in its operation in southern Lebanon—treating whole neighborhoods and civilian structures occupied by Shias as implicitly guilty by association with Hezbollah. 

And here is the country's security minister not only doing nothing to refute such claims—but actually going a step further and declaring that "all of Lebanon must burn"—presumably Christian and Sunni and Shia alike. 

That reference to "a thousand Lebanese mothers" who "must" be made to "weep" presumably means a thousand Lebanese children of mothers must be killed. 

And, judging from the estimates so far of casualties in the conflict, the IDF may have actually achieved something close to Ben-Gvir's ratio. 

I am reminded again irresistibly of Stephen Spender's indelible depiction of an air war waged against civilians by means of bombing, in his poem "Nocturne": the dark is filled with means which are / Men’s plots to murder children.

And since Ben-Gvir brought up "tears" and "weeping," we note that Spender had something to say about that as well: 

No cause is just unless it guards the innocent 

As sacred trust: no truth but that

Which reckons this child’s tears an argument.