How short the human memory.
A country goes to war to protect its civilians from terrorist attack. The lines of the guerrilla army committed to liberation for a long-persecuted people are broken, and its notoriously ruthless fighters withdraw into a sea of civilians. Besieging government forces steadily tighten the noose around an enclave of human misery being pressed to and fro’ by the vicissitudes of battle. Pockets of terrified families are bombarded as advancing troops make whack-a-mole with guerrillas whose guerrilla tactics – the feints and thrusts for the militarily weak – includes their own people as human shields.
The rape of the Sabine Women - Rubens
Israel and Palestine? No, Sri Lanka and the Tamil Tigers a little more than a decade ago. So this remark from leading humanitarian chiefs in an op-ed in the New York Times this week is surprising: “In no other war we can think of in this century have civilians been so trapped, without any avenue or option to escape to save themselves and their children.”
Seriously? Leaving aside the histrionic tone from such seasoned leaders, the op-ed ignores such obvious recent conflicts as the Ethiopian government’s 2020 closed siege of the rebellious province of Tigray, which may have killed, conservatively, somewhere between 500-800,000 people. Let’s not start on Mariupol or Syria or Yemen or the genocidal upswing now afoot in Darfur (yes, poverty and desert also ‘traps’ people because they are unable to move). Where is memory, or are we all hopeless victims of a telegenic age? Perhaps their media teams were blinded by the overwhelming asymmetrical advantage of the Hamas propaganda and media machine.
Let's – just for a moment – leave aside the sheer scale of the Hamas crime. Very few people can bring themselves to watch the visual material from the slaughter, and an exceptionally small number have seen the 47 minute video compiled by the Israeli government from first responders. When they do, Chris Cuomo provides a good sense of how it affects the viewer.
Many of the features of the Sri Lankan government’s 2009 prosecution of a final siege which destroyed the forces of the ingenious Tamil Tigers resistance movement, hold striking similarities with Israel’s current siege of Gaza. In the case of Sri Lanka, from a besieged population of perhaps 300,000 people, the death toll on civilian life might have been as high as 40,000 in just the last few months of that country’s war. No war is the same as any other, and yet the Sri Lankan government’s successful elimination of an armed threat which at times came close to destroying the state’s ability to protect its citizens, bears comparison with Israel’s battle with Hamas.
Aftermath: The Supanova festival
In my book I compared the final battles of the Government of Sri Lanka with the Tamil Tigers, with a brief war fought simultaneously between Israel and Hamas in late 2008 and early 2009:
“In both instances, one side was significantly stronger militarily than the other, with the stronger wielding a mytho-historical document that purports to trump the claims of the weaker to the land under contest. Both the Gaza Invasion and Eelam War IV were fought between two distinct ethnic groups who heatedly argue their differences, but who are umbilically joined by claims to the same land, by proximity, by strong cultural affinities, by the assertion of religious righteousness, and by the shared blind bitterness of their struggle. These are harrowing identity wars that numb men to their own instincts for empathy and propel them irresistibly to infanticide.”
And so to infanticide. The concept of a just war is an ancient one, as is the notion of a justly fought war. Antecedents spread back to most ancient empires, where rulers recognised that rulers had to restrain ourselves from ourselves. In the 7th century, apart from forbidding the destruction of precious date and fruit trees, Abu Bakr, the caliph and friend of the Prophet Muhammad, instructed his troops to forgo, “treachery or mutilation. Do not kill a young child, an old man, or a woman.” As the Islamic empire expanded, its jurisprudence and associated injunctions were concerned with the moral conduct of military leaders. Were they wise, merciful, just and proportionate? Or were they merely homicidal, with the consequent rot on the moral core of the Ummah, that transcendent bond between Muslims of different colour, sex, and place so necessary as the Islamic empires expanded?
They didn't wait for a moment: before the bodies of slaughtered and raped Israeli children and women were cold, they "stood" with Hamas.
The slaughter of 1200 Israelis on October 7 is the casus bello for the current war. Through infanticide and rape that Abu Bakr would have abhorred - and which ranks of feminists have preferenced as anti-colonial acts - it set the tone for the Israeli whole-of-society reply. Yet oddly for our telegenic age, October 7 and Israel’s just cause did not achieve the public international traction it instantly warranted, and which should have underwritten Israel’s right to defend its people.
Partly this was because of the sense of jubilation or ill-informed solidarity that immediately swept many neighbourhoods globally in the hours and days following, even before the first Israeli bomb of this current bloodletting fell too quickly in Gaza. Partly it’s because although we have some sense of the proportion of the berserk barbarities committed that day, Israel did not parade its dead like stigmata, and we do not have a full, forensic accounting of what happened to each man, woman, child, and infant. That will come only when the history of this war is written.
Romans carrying off Jewish loot after the A.D. siege of Jerusalem
In his magisterial book, Just and Unjust Wars, the American political philosopher Michael Walzer, wrote that, “the revolutionary reveals his freedom in the same way as he earns it, by directly confronting his enemies and refraining from attacks on anybody else.” A fanatic’s reading of that sentence would extend the meaning of its first clause to all Israelis (or Jews) as the eternal enemies of the Palestinians. A morally intact reading (paradoxically supported by strenuous Hamas denials that any atrocities were committed by its forces that day) would acknowledge that October 7 plumbed the very depths of human depravity, and that the Israeli response was conceptually a just one.
Assuming, for argument’s sake, that 18,000 Palestinian fighters, women, children, and elderly have indeed been killed thus far. Has the Israeli government and its army gone too far?
That’s an appalling question on face value. Yet, because war is an awful fact of human history, the crude laws of war we have managed to institute to regulate conflict at some level means that lawyers are deployed on battlefields to weigh the merits of a relative military advantage gained in pursuit of the destruction of the enemy, versus the cost to innocent human life. In the glare of cameras, governments are more inclined to weigh those costs prudently, but in the absence of journalists, mobile connectivity, and satellites, as was the case in Ethiopia and certainly in Sri Lanka, those restraining bonds are readily let slip.
The fabulous Wilhelm Ritter von Leeb, who forced the starvation of a million people to death
Sieges are as old as the fires of war, and civilians their kindling. Machiavelli lauded Alexander’s driving of civilians into the besieged city of Leucadia in order to stoke starvation. At the Nuremburg trials, the German Field Marshall who had executed the siege of Leningrad was tried for war crimes. Wilhelm Ritter von Leeb’s defence successfully argued that there was no positive prohibition in treaty or customary law against von Leeb creating a military disadvantage for his army by allowing civilians to leave the city (he drove them back inside with bombardment, and a million people starved to death).
As a UN officer, I was in Gaza and the West Bank during the Second Intifada. I sat with the family of a 10-year-old Palestinian girl shot dead by the IDF (I still carry her photo in my wallet). I flicked through Palestinian school books extolling martyrdom. I comprehend why suffering breaches the shores of childhood in societies at war, and children are bred for warfare in revolutionary contexts. My father survived the Holocaust (although 57 members of his family did not). Although right-wing he, like former Israeli Prime Minister and war hero Ehud Barak empathised with Palestinian stone-throwers in the face of the rabid right-wing takeover of the Israeli government, and the throttling of the twins of a tolerant Zionist dream and the two-state solution.
My partially-informed guess (because we can only ever know a small part of a battlefield through the fog of war) is that the government of Israel has leveraged the political advantage of a just war and, in keeping with their ham-fisted and religiously motivated fanaticism has forced at some point that just casus bello across a line into a chasm of injustice. Prime Minister Netanyahu, busy saving his political bacon from charges of corruption and his failure to protect the state, is squandering Israel’s political capital.
Abu Bakr wouldn't have approved.
Meantime, his ministers are using the cloak of war to accelerate ethnic cleansing in the West Bank. They continue to betray the original Zionist ethos, the state of Israel, and the only just and workable solution for Palestinian dignity and Israeli peace and security, which is a two-state solution. Similarly, Sri Lanka’s military slipped over to an unjustly fought war driven by political expedience (and a battlefield closed to media and humanitarian inquiry). The result of tens of thousands of dead civilians.
As for the blind contempt shown by too many for the barbarism of October 7, the wilful ignoring of the targeted rape and killing by Palestinian forces of Israeli women and children, and the whooping jubilation exhibited by the telegenically excitable youths of our social media age, one can only hope that they will draw breath, read a book, and grow up. Their comprehension of what is means to have your women, children, and elderly survivors of the greatest crime in human history tortured (is there a word when your captors force you to watch the killing of the your loved ones?, raped, butchered, and then burned in an orgy of delighted cruelty lies beyond the human imagination.
Who knows what motivated those celebrations around the world? Antisemitism, that European psychological and spiritual disorder? One-dimensional jejune activist virtue-signalling? Or just pure ignorance and naivete in a generation no longer studying history? Only when the dust has settled, and the books have been written, and the courts convened, will we be able to judge our fellow human beings in this exceptional chapter of bestial murder, and weigh the rights and wrongs of both sides, equally.