Hamas’s appalling attack on Israeli civilians has been widely described as the country’s “9/11 moment”. It is an appropriate description of such wanton cruelty. But the analogy carries a cautionary note as well.
The US government lost the world’s sympathy, and the moral high ground, when its response to 9/11 degenerated into a highly abusive war in Iraq, systematic torture, and endless detention without trial in Guantánamo. The Israeli government should be careful not to replicate this path to opprobrium. Indeed, such an abusive response may be exactly what Hamas wanted to provoke.
Whose heart could not go out to the young people who gathered for an all-night music festival in the desert, only to have the revelry broken at dawn by Hamas militants shooting people at random and killing a reported 260? That massacre was compounded by Hamas’s slaughter in various Israeli communities bordering Gaza, its abduction of what appears to be 100 or more civilian hostages, and its indiscriminate rocket attacks into civilian neighborhoods.
Yes, Palestinians were understandably frustrated as Benjamin Netanyahu’s far-right government kept expanding the illegal settlements in the occupied West Bank and East Jerusalem, boxing in the people of Gaza with a punitive blockade, and imposing an discriminatory and oppressive rule on millions of Palestinians under occupation that has been widely described as apartheid. To make matters worse, one Arab government after another has been normalizing relations with Israel after at most token concessions to the Palestinians that did nothing to change their persecution. Still, none of that justifies resort to war crimes, as Hamas has done.
It is a basic premise of international humanitarian law that war crimes by one side do not justify war crimes by the other. Of necessity, given the passions, charges and counter-charges of most wars, the duty to comply with the rules designed to spare civilians as much as possible the hazards of war is absolute, not contingent on the behavior of opponents.
The Israeli government already seems to be flouting those rules. The declared siege of Gaza, blocking food, water and electricity, violates the duty to allow humanitarian aid to civilians in need, as the people of Gaza certainly are as they suffer massive Israeli bombardment. In the first day of those airstrikes, the Israeli military targeted four large apartment towers. In the past, Israel has purported to justify such attacks because of an ostensible Hamas office somewhere in the complex, but the civilian cost of rendering hundreds of Palestinians homeless is wholly disproportionate. One attack hit a market, reportedly killing dozens. The UN says two hospitals have been hit.
Though apparently less frequently than in the past, the Israeli military has at times been issuing warnings to Palestinian civilians, which it is required to do whenever feasible, but that does not provide carte blanche to attack. In the 2006 war against Hezbollah in southern Lebanon, the Israeli military issued similar warnings and then attacked anyone who remained as if they were all Hezbollah fighters, even though many civilians were unable or unwilling to flee. In Gaza, the Israeli military is reportedly flattening neighborhoods after such warnings – attacks that not only endanger any civilians who remain but also seem more designed to punish the civilian population than to target Hamas fighters who impose their will on the people of Gaza by force.
There is also something cruel and otherworldly about the Israeli government’s warning to the people of Gaza to flee. Where? From one densely populated Gaza neighborhood to another as they are pummeled in turn? To Egypt, which has helped Israel reinforce the blockade and has shown no inclination to welcome the 2.2 million residents of the territory? After the warning, the Israeli military bombed the crossing to Egypt. And if people escaped Gaza, would Israel ever let them return, or would this be another one-way flight as in 1948?
Already we are hearing the usual refrain – that Hamas is responsible for the loss of civilian life because it is using civilians as “human shields”. But “shielding” refers to purposefully using the presence of civilians to prevent an attack, not mere fighting from urban areas, especially when that is what so much of Gaza is. Sometimes Hamas undoubtedly violates that rule, but the duty to protect civilians from harm lies foremost with the attacker.
Civilian deaths in Gaza are climbing rapidly and will undoubtedly soon far surpass the toll from Hamas’s initial attacks. Things will only get worse if Israel proceeds as expected with a ground invasion. The government will try to exculpate itself by saying that it is not deliberately killing civilians, as Joe Biden stressed in his remarks on Tuesday. But it makes little difference to the dead whether they were purposefully targeted or killed because of the Israeli government’s desultory compliance with international humanitarian law.
Israel had every reason to respond militarily to the atrocious Hamas assault on its civilians. But a good reason to fight is no reason to violate the rules governing that fight. If the Israeli government responds to its 9/11 moment with George W Bush-like indifference to those rules, it will soon follow the route of his government from global sympathy to global outrage. I only hope that the prospect of such a trajectory gives it pause.
Kenneth Roth, former executive director of Human Rights Watch (1993-2022), is a visiting professor at Princeton’s School of Public and International Affairs. On Twitter he is @KenRoth
