Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu says this is a war between the forces of civilisation and the forces of barbarism, and he is right – though not in the sense he intended. There are many reasons for the West’s seemingly endless tolerance for Israeli violence in the West Bank and Gaza of which the most important is the belief that Israel is basically a European country that ended up in a bad neighbourhood.
This sort of thinking is not just the province of rightwing zealots. Writing for The Spectator in 2014, British columnist Hugo Rifkind lamented that Israel’s drift to the right was damaging its image in the West: “When was it, do you think, that Israel stopped being regarded as fundamentally a bit like Spain? Early 1990s? Then they shot Yitzhak Rabin, and Oslo didn’t happen, and it set off, perhaps via a sort of listless Greek interim, towards the Orientalish bafflingness of somewhere like Turkey.”
The short history of this war shows us that in the eyes of the West, Israel may have drifted, but not nearly as far as the baffling Orient. In response to Hamas’s mass murder of its citizens, Israel’s allies forcefully asserted its untrammelled right to self-defence. In the days that followed, in pursuit of its stated aim to destroy Hamas, Israel besieged Gaza and then began bombing it. Soon after, the rapidly mounting civilian death toll and the acute humanitarian crisis caused by shortages of medicine, water and electricity led to calls for Israel to abide by international law.
International humanitarian law seeks to limit the harm wars inflict upon civilians in two ways. It requires belligerents to distinguish between civilians and combatants; and while it permits the incidental loss of civilian life, this loss must not be excessive relative to the “military advantage anticipated.” These are the principles of distinction and proportionality. Gaza is one of the densely populated parts of the world. This was always going to be a bloody war. But the images coming out of Gaza made Israel’s conduct appear both indiscriminate and disproportionate. Israel had just cause to go to war, but its conduct in that war still required justification.
We saw these justifications evolve in real time. In an interview with Sky News, Naftali Bennett compared Hamas to the Nazis, and the bombing of Gaza to the carpet bombing of Dresden, a German town that was heavily bombed by the Allied forces in February 1945 during the second world war.
It is important to grasp the logic of this: the greater the evil they could point to, the more urgent their stated aims became, which carved out more space for acceptable civilian death. But the comparison did not quite work. Hamas’s terrorism is not equivalent to Nazi deathcamps and the bombing of Dresden is now considered too gratuitous to render the Israeli bombing of Gaza uncontroversial.
The analogy since settled upon is with the US-led bombing campaign in the war against ISIS – the Islamic State. The Islamic State and Hamas are both proscribed Islamist terror groups which makes it a better fit. It also forces home the key message: many civilians were killed by American bombs in the fight against the Islamic State, but such was the enormity of its crimes, that defeating it justified their deaths. Mutatis mutandis, civilian casualties caused by the bombing of Gaza are regrettable but justified in Israel’s pursuit of Hamas. This analogy is now commonplace in discussions of the war and since it is used to justify the enormous casualties mounting in Gaza, it is worth examining.
On the face of it there are good reasons to be sceptical about the analogy. At the peak of its power in 2014, the Islamic State controlled over 100,000 square kilometres of territory and ruled over a population of nearly 12 million people across Iraq and Syria. By extorting those people and capturing the wealth of major Iraqi cities and oil fields, it amassed $2 billion in assets. At a conservative estimate, the Islamic State killed over 20,000 Iraqi civilians, including the attempted genocide of the Yazidis, a religious minority group. The group operated at a different scale to Hamas.
The closest comparison for the military situation Israel is faced with in Gaza is the battle of Mosul in northern Iraq. Eight thousand Islamic State fighters were in the city along with its civilian population. The Iraqi forces ranged against them could call down American airstrikes in support. The Associated Press reports between 9,000 and 11,000 civilians were killed in the battle to free Mosul from ISIS, over a period of nine months from October 2016 to July 2017. It attributes a third of these to American air strikes, a third to Islamic State and was not able to say with any confidence who killed the rest.
In Pulitzer-Prize-winning reporting on the human cost of America’s air strikes, Azmat Khan describes the system of bureaucratic checks the US military used to try to minimise civilian casualties. Targets were watched to determine whether civilians might be killed in the strike and assessments were made to determine if these deaths would be justified. These strictures were loosened in Mosul as the fighting grew more intense. So as the fighting grew fiercer, the civilian toll increased. In the worst week for civilian casualties at the end of June in 2017, 303 civilians were killed.
Between Hamas and Islamic Jihad, the Israeli Defense Forces can expect to face up to 55,000 militants in Gaza. A cold extrapolation from the ratio of fighters to civilian dead in Mosul would allow approximately 60,000 civilian deaths in Gaza. Would this constitute a proportionate response? There is no legal threshold to be met here. The enforcement of international law is a political question, a function of will and power. Israel’s alliance with America protects it from any violations being seriously pursued. As English philosopher Thomas Hobbes wrote over 350 years ago, “Covenants, without the Sword, are but Words.” But words matter.
Daniel Hagari, an Israeli Defense Forces spokesman, said of the bombing of Gaza, “the emphasis is on damage and not on accuracy”. The Israeli defence minister Yoav Gallant said, “We are dealing with human animals, we will act accordingly.” Their president Isaac Herzog said, “It’s an entire nation out there that is responsible… this rhetoric about civilians were not aware, not involved, it’s absolutely not true.” Ahead of its planned ground invasion Israeli planes dropped leaflets into northern Gaza which read, “Anyone who chooses not to evacuate from the North of the Gaza Strip to the South of the Gaza Strip may be identified as a partner in a terrorist organisation.”
The comparison with the Islamic State was intended to provide Netanyahu’s government rhetorical cover to take civilian lives in Gaza with impunity. But the analogy does not do what it is meant to. The bureaucratic checks the Americans operated under in Mosul were far from perfect but they represented an attempt to preserve civilian life. In three weeks of bombing, Israel’s armed forces have reportedly killed over 7,000 Palestinians in Gaza, including nearly 3,000 children. The Israeli state, through the words of its highest-ranking officials, appears to have dispensed with the distinction between civilian and combatant altogether.
Given the scale of the atrocity visited upon Israelis by Hamas, it is natural many of them might consider their government’s response proportionate. The fact that it appears so to Western liberals is revealing. The truth is Rifkind did not intend to produce a civilizational hierarchy, it was just a clumsy turn of phrase. But would liberals in the West ever accept the deaths of thousands or tens of thousands of their fellow citizens as collateral damage? Would they accept it in Ukraine? Why, then, do they accept it in Gaza?
As European victims of a European Holocaust, the suffering of Jews presses upon the West. The provenance and scale of that genocide makes it world-historical in a way the Palestinian experience of displacement and death cannot be. The Nakba, the displacement of Palestinians in 1948, is tragic – but it is a parochial tragedy. As Palestinian suffering is diminished, so are Palestinian lives. Theirs are the lives of others. For liberals in the West, Israel is one of their own. The status of European Jews as victims of unequalled evil gives Israel the moral capital to run a ruthless, supremacist occupation, the end of which can be indefinitely, if ruefully, postponed.
Beleaguered liberals in India and elsewhere look to the West in the way that Communist parties in Europe once looked to the Soviet Union. When historians look back on this moment, perhaps the pictures of Gaza razed to the ground will take their place alongside the image of Soviet tanks rolling through Hungary, both symbols of permanent disillusionment.
But liberalism has always contained within itself justifications for colonial inequality. John Stuart Mill, at once an employee of the East India Company and patron saint of Western liberalism, declared that representative government was unsuitable for societies which, “in order to advance in civilization, have some lesson to learn”. When civilised Western democracies stand by, willing Israel on as it teaches Palestinians a lesson, they illustrate philosopher Walter Benjamin’s grim maxim: “There is no document of civilisation which is not at the same time a document of barbarism.”
Raghu Kesavan writes about politics, sport and culture. His X handle is @raghukesavan1.