Israel has made the first, rather tentative, moves of its ground operation against Hamas – but there’s nothing tentative about its aerial bombing. Here’s a report of one incident: at 4.30 p.m. on 10 October, an explosion collapsed a six-storey building in Sheikh Radwan, a district of Gaza City, killing, it was said, at least 40 civilians. One man, Mahmoud Ashour, had to dig through the rubble with his bare hands to find his family. Buried there were his daughter and her four children, a girl aged eight and three boys of six, two, and six months. They had fled there thinking it would be safer than other parts of Gaza. But, he said: ‘I couldn’t protect them. I have no trace left of my daughter.’
Israel’s aim should be ‘the defeat of Hamas and nothing more’. This should not be ‘a war of vengeance’
This account is from Amnesty International, and they have no doubts this was an air strike, not a misfired Hamas or Islamic Jihad rocket. They discovered that a member of Hamas was living in the building, though he wasn’t there at the time. Anyway, Amnesty’s report says, ‘membership in a political group’ shouldn’t be enough to kill someone. And if this was a Hamas fighter or commander, that didn’t justify destroying the whole building: ‘This was an indiscriminate attack… and must be investigated as a war crime.’ The Israel Defence Forces (IDF) told me that Amnesty’s accusation rested on ‘the assumption that intelligence regarding the military use of a particular structure does not exist unless revealed’. Their statement gave no hint as to why they targeted the apartment block – if this was an Israeli airstrike – but it accused Hamas of routinely putting military assets in densely populated areas. ‘The IDF regrets any harm caused to civilians.’
Whatever the facts of this one terrible incident, Israel is killing large numbers of unarmed men, women and children as it tries to destroy Hamas once and for all. This is because Hamas is a guerrilla army, fighting from among the people, and is not going to oblige the Israeli air force by gathering out in the open to be vaporised cleanly.
The question of what constitutes a proportionate response in any given Israeli bombing is acutely difficult to answer: one Hamas fighter for one civilian? For ten? A hundred? Professor Michael Walzer shies away from a numerical formula. He wrote perhaps the most influential modern work on the morality of armed conflict, Just and Unjust Wars. On the phone from Princeton, he cites the example of Bomber Command attacking a German tank factory, knowing 100 civilians nearby would die. The tank factory is only one of 33 – is it worth killing all those non-combatants to stop a fraction of German tank production? But if those tanks improve the chances of Nazi victory even slightly, you might think you could kill a thousand civilians: ‘You can play with the numbers and come to any resolution you want.’
Instead, Walzer prefers an emphasis on ‘taking the time to aim carefully’. If there were a bomb factory under the Sheikh Radwan apartment block, that could justify a strike, even at the cost of many innocent lives. And, he says: ‘Hamas has never shown any concern for the wellbeing of the Gaza people. Never. Hamas deliberately puts civilians at risk because the more civilians Israel kills, the more likely Israel will lose the political war, which is as important as the military war.’ Unexpectedly, perhaps, Walzer also argues that it would be morally wrong to bomb a tower block to kill a Hamas commander living there. You can attack soldiers in battle, he says; you can attack them if they’re resting at their base, but you can’t when they’re at home. That applies to the Hamas military leadership. ‘When they’re with their families, they are civilian at that moment.’
Walzer has been asked to pronounce on the morality of pretty much every war fought since he published his book in the 1970s. In Gaza, he wants to see ‘a war fought within the moral rules’ and, from a purely moral point of view, it’s better to use infantry rather than airstrikes: the targeting can be more careful, though of course you risk more losses of your own. He does not think the ‘awfulness’ of the Hamas attack on 7 October should lead the IDF to blur the line between combatants and non-combatants. He is worried about the angry rhetoric used by the Israeli Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, and others. Israel’s aim should be ‘the defeat of Hamas and nothing more’. Gaza should be ‘a war of justice… not a war of vengeance’.
Professor Alan Dershowitz, one of Israel’s most notable defenders, agrees that Israel’s military should ‘never, ever, under any circumstances, target a civilian’ – but he also talks of a ‘continuum of civilianality’. At one end is a Palestinian baby, at the other a Hamas ‘terrorist’; in between, those using their homes to store rockets; or who helped in the coup to overthrow the Palestinian Authority; even ‘people who voted for Hamas’.
I tell him I once interviewed an 18-year-old woman in Gaza who had volunteered to be an Islamic Jihad suicide bomber. As she showed me the belt packed with plastic explosive and ball bearings, I asked if she would have difficulty killing children as well as soldiers. Eyes shining with hatred, she replied that the distinction wasn’t important: ‘All of them have violated our land. Children grow up to become soldiers… Palestine is only for Palestinians. We must kick them all out in any way we can.’ Dershowitz denies there’s any comparison between this and his ‘continuum’: a Palestinian toddler who will grow up to carry a gun is still ‘completely a civilian’. But he also accuses Hamas of using child soldiers, and says a 15-year-old ‘terrorist’ is an adult. ‘If you’re old enough to kill a Jew, you’re old enough to be killed by a Jew.’
To Dershowitz it’s ‘nonsense’ to say – as that suicide bomber did – that ‘every Jew is a settler’. There are refugees in Gaza, he says, because Arab countries invaded Israel in 1948, a ‘war of destruction against the Jews’. There was a transfer of populations, with Jews from the Arab world coming to Israel. Refugee ‘camps’ remain in Gaza today ‘just to breed resentment, so that people can look across the border and say: “That was my grandmother’s house.” 1948? There has to be a statute of limitations. We’re talking 75 years. Get over it!’
A commentator in an Israeli newspaper has called for another transfer of population, everyone in Gaza to be ‘relocated’ to live ‘under a different sovereignty and a different national narrative’. A senior retired general has spoken of making Gaza ‘a place where no human being can exist…The entire population will move to Egypt or the Gulf’.
That is not Israel’s declared policy, which is to break Hamas. It might succeed – but for how long? As Britain and the US found in Afghanistan, every insurgent or civilian killed has a son or a brother. The next generation of ‘terrorists’ is being created with every bomb that falls on a Gaza apartment block.
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