Israel’s continuing destruction of Gaza is the moral emergency of our time. Writing this or that article about its aspects and features, which will continue, should not be allowed to distract from stating the clear facts of the matter, and keeping a moral clarity about what is occurring. The government of Israel has no reasonable cause of war and no threat to its security that can even begin to justify the large-scale bombing of civilians, the area-by-area destruction of cities, and the use of hunger, thirst and denied medical supplies as lethal weapons against a civilian population. It is targeting a population with nowhere to escape to, and it has bombed the areas where it told them to flee.
The deliberately atrocious and horrifying attack by Hamas and others on Israeli citizens, Jews and Bedouin Arabs, guest workers and tourists, is almost impossible to contemplate. They stir a rage in the blood from a distance; God knows what it feels like closer to it. Who, from that proximity, would not want to lay waste to the kin of its perpetrators? But it does not rise to the level of a military security threat that morally justifies a military response of open-ended civilian deaths.
In the realpolitik terms of the current sequestration of Gaza, the Hamas attack was utterly preventable, and any future occurrence can now be prevented. That it was possible at all remains unexplained and must be investigated. The Israeli military (IDF) is now defending its bombing attacks on Gazan civilians by claiming that it can pinpoint the presence of specific military commanders in hospitals, bakeries and refugee camps. Yet it was somehow unable to detect the mass movement of the Hamas force on the 50th anniversary of Israel’s greatest military setback from a surprise attack since 1948. This seems hard to square, to say the least.
The Hamas attack continued for several hours, with incidents of stomach-churning sadism. Israel’s massacre of Gazan civilians has now continued for 26 days. The Hamas raid incurred a death toll of 1,300. The toll in Gaza has now passed 8,000 and will pass 10,000. Where the Hamas mutilations and beheadings were conducted with knives and rifles, Israel’s mutilations and beheadings of Gazan civilians are occurring through the sheer force of bombs and flying rubble. These are house-to-house massacres from the air, reported in real-time on X/Twitter as a horrified world watches.
The moral case being applied by the Israeli government and its supporters in defending its actions relies on a key, unargued claim: that the form of atrocity makes an absolute moral distinction. The Hamas massacre was conducted with direct, intimate, bodily sadism by its on-the-ground operatives (and planned coolly by its commanders). The continuing administration of death on Gazan civilians, which has the same bodily impact, is being done through the mediation of high-tech distancing, to separate oneself from the consequences of one’s actions.
To be honest, the Hamas massacre really tests one’s capacity to make that judgment. But on the other side, there is the cold technobarbarism of the hi-tech West; presented as more moral because it’s exercised without the cruelty of direct presence. This is a sleight of hand, one which always excuses the more powerful. To ceaselessly recall that Israel was founded through such a terror campaign makes one sound like a broken record. But how can it be avoided when it is so wilfully forgotten?
Israel’s insistence that Hamas is now a terminal threat that must be removed is a sudden reversal of the support that has been extended to it by successive Israeli governments. Despite its exterminatory anti-Semitic charter, Hamas has been supported as a way of blocking the legitimacy of the Palestinian Authority, whose secular political orientation had at one stage made a two-state solution of some sort possible. Hamas’ tunnel networks and missile arsenal might, if sufficiently lethally armed, have provided some sort of war justification. But its limited conventional rockets are dealt with by Israel’s “iron dome” defence systems. Once again, one can understand the civilian mood about it. But state action faces a higher test of justification.
The rapidly heightened clash has created tension around the world, with hostility and attacks on both Jews and Muslims. The visceral anger arising from Israel’s response has unquestionably set a chilling fear through Jewish communities worldwide. Yet the Israeli government has attempted to co-opt this, attaching the entire state to victimhood status. Hamas’ attack with motorbikes and guns was on a nuclear high-tech state, yet it was described as an existential threat. It was labelled as a “pogrom”, evoking attacks on defenceless communities by the Tsarist Empire. Suggestions that the IDF air force, while bombing Gaza, dropped a bomb on the Al-Ahli hospital, were, because disputed, portrayed as a “blood libel” — the ancient charge that rabbis murder Christian children. The appearance of the country’s UN representatives wearing cardboard yellow stars-of-David was jarring when their planes were simultaneously blowing neighbourhoods to pieces.
Such strategic victimhood is in contradiction to the ideology that has become dominant in the Israeli government, which combines Old Testament, early Judaic notions of unlimited destruction of one’s enemies with modern Nietzschean worship of power, celebrating the triumph of the “children of the light”. This follows a bizarre pronouncement in 2018 by Prime Minister Netanyahu:
The weak crumble, are slaughtered and are erased from history while the strong, for good or for ill, survive. The strong are respected, and alliances are made with the strong, and in the end peace is made with the strong.
Such worship of strength and will connects to some darker strands of the Zionism of the ’30s and ’40s, explicitly connected to fascism, now reappearing as settler triumphalism in the West Bank. As the logic of the attacks unfolds day by day, it is the cold relentlessness of the process that takes over, along with the casual racist indifference of so many in the West to the fate of a people they are given every assistance not to identify with. If there’s nothing much new in this piece, it’s because there are times when the demand for anything other than a restatement of what must be looked at straight is simply a way of avoiding a moral challenge that we must face, more than a single time.
