This post is an update to the one I posted two weeks ago, at the six month (plus one week) mark of this wretched war. I received several comments on it, mainly from friends and which were positive, though did get one that was critical, by André Bauer, posted on a comments thread on the Middle East 101 tab on Claire Berlinski’s substack site, The Cosmopolitan Globalist, and to which I responded yesterday at some length. As the comments thread is subscriber-only and hard to find in the forest of other threads on the site, I am reposting the exchange here. First, André’s comment:
[Arun, you say] that “whatever one’s sympathies in this conflict, there can be no dispute over what Hamas did on October 7th—and for which it must pay the maximum price. To be precise, I had in mind that it would be just Hamas who would/should pay that price, not the people of Gaza.”
I hear you Arun, but Hamas has other plans. Whenever they need money, recruits and international outrage, they start yet another war.
I also am puzzled about why so many people don’t treat Palestinian Arabs like adult people. They are human beings with agency. They are responsible for their and their elected government‘s actions. What happened on Oct. 7th? The crowds in Gaza cheered Hamas. Handing out sweets, as they did to ‚celebrate’ Al Quaida and Osama bin Laden on 9/11.
The rule is quite simple: If you can’t stomach the response, do not start a war! When did Israel and Egypt initiate the blockade of Gaza? After Israel left and handed the territory over to the PA, which promptly lost it to Hamas.
There is no magic wand to make Hamas disappear.
Insofar as the great majority of the countless millions of those who have a decided POV on the conflict are in one camp or the other, most of Claire’s fans and readers—not to mention Claire herself—are resolutely pro-Israel or skew in that direction. My reply to André (lightly edited and with links inserted) was composed with that in mind.
André: On Hamas—and the Palestinians more generally—and human agency, I did mention this in the AWAV post if you caught it, and have done so on numerous occasions over the years. But however the Gaza electorate voted eighteen years ago—or eight months ago—and however many ordinary Gazawis celebrated the October 7th massacres—whether it was 2,000 or 200,000—they are, as civilians, protected by the laws of war. Which is to say, if Israel bombs densely populated urban areas with wanton disregard for the lives of non-combatants—which is what it has been doing—then it is committing war crimes. Period.
And then there’s the destruction of civilian infrastructure, of hospitals, farmland, the water supply, waste treatment, roads, schools, universities, and you name it, so as to render life in Gaza impossible for the foreseeable future (one reads in Le Monde this weekend that it will take at least 14 years to clear the rubble and unexploded munitions in the Gaza strip). And insofar as there is nowhere for Gazawis to go, the conditions for famine on a massive scale are all there. It is increasingly difficult to escape the conclusion that Israel is using hunger, if not outright starvation, as a weapon of war; that Israel, in its trauma and rage over October 7th, has decided to settle its Gaza problem once and for all, to dramatically reduce Gaza’s population, preferably pushing it into the Sinai, where it would be dispersed to third countries, but failing that, to take more drastic measures. The sheer scale and gratuitousness of the destruction—of institutions, cultural patrimony, and everything cited above—in fact goes beyond wanton disregard for human life. As I mentioned in the AWAV post, Israel decided that it was going to kick the shit out of Gaza; not just Hamas but Gaza and its inhabitants. Insofar as Israel considers this war to be existential—that Hamas/Gaza threatens the very existence of the state of the Jewish people—it is going to take extreme measures to eradicate that existential threat. And if the rest of the world has a problem with that, then Israelis will, along with Judith Levy, reply to the rest of the world with a loud Fuck You! In the AWAV post I said that I was staying away from polemics over the G-word—genocide—but if famine sets in in the coming months and the civilian death toll heads into the six figures—and please don’t dismiss these as “Hamas numbers,” as there is no reason to doubt their accuracy—then I’m going to have to get off the fence on this one. And Israel is going to be in deep trouble at the ICJ, ICC, UNSC, et j’en passe.
On the assertion by Israel’s partisans (which includes some of my best friends) and hasbara operatives (Michael Oren et al) that it’s Hamas that bears responsibility for the death and destruction in Gaza, because Human Shields! and Tunnels!, a couple of points. First, on the human shields, there is a gap between the common understanding of this term and its legal definition, so far as I understand it, which refers to compelling people to serve as protection from a possible enemy attack. If Hamas invites people to their rooftops, or to stay in their homes, and they obey voluntarily, that’s not shielding. Second, on the tunnels. If Hamas operates these under residential areas, that’s co-locating, which, so I am informed, is a violation of the laws of war only if Hamas has militarily feasible alternatives, which it doesn’t in Gaza. If the laws of war required that Hamas conduct its “resistance” only from open fields more than one kilometer from the nearest house, those laws of war would be laughed out of town. And if Hamas ever obeyed them, Israel would turn its fighters into hummus (as I put it in my prediction in Cosmopolitan Globalist on October 7th).
Returning to the question of human agency, if the Palestinians do indeed have it, well, Israel has it too. Israel is insisting that this war was imposed on it by Hamas, that Israel was attacked on October 7th, and that the scale of the atrocities committed by Hamas were such that Israel had No Choice but to start the saturation bombing of Gaza before the day was out—and after the invading terrorists had been liquidated or fled back to the strip—and to wage the war in the way it has done so: as an offensive operation with the aim of eradicating Hamas, killing its leaders and as many of its fighters and cadres as possible. And whatever the collateral damage, so be it. However laudable the objective of eliminating Hamas, the war Israel is waging to that end is, in fact, one of CHOICE. It was not imposed on Israel.
An anecdote: In Tel Aviv in April 2009, I met with a former student of mine, a secular Israeli in her mid-20s, not a leftist; we talked about Operation Cast Lead, which had happened a few months earlier and that she supported at the outset, but, so she said, when the death toll among Gazawis hit 1,500, she declared Enough! Stop! and that others in her social world felt likewise. And the guns indeed fell silent when the (relative) carnage became increasingly intolerable. So if 1,500 was the limit of how many civilian Palestinians killed by IDF bombs liberally-minded Israelis were willing to accept fifteen years ago, what is the limit today? Israelis are clearly good with 40K and counting (even if one subtracts Hamas fighters from the total; Michael Oren tossed out the round figure of 10K, or was it 12K? Wherever he got his number, who knows?). If it takes, say, half a million dead Gaza Palestinians to definitively destroy Hamas, will Israel and its supporters accept this? What is the threshold? The bottom line: Israel, exercising agency, chose this war—and bears responsibility for the death, destruction, and suffering that have ensued. This is on Israel.
And the (simple and obvious) conclusion that I left hanging in the AWAV post: Israel had to respond to Hamas but not in the way it has. There is no justification whatever for even a fraction of what Israel has done in Gaza—and for a goal that can only be attained at the cost of a lasting international isolation such that Israel has never before experienced (and which I do think would be too bad; N.B. I am not a BDSer). Israel could have chosen another way to deal with Hamas and to make it pay for October 7th. As for what that way should have been, that’s above my pay grade. Go ask Thomas Friedman. Seriously: he has some good ideas. And what should happen now? Immediate cease-fire, exchange of all the hostages for Palestinian prisoners in Israel (the number to be negotiated), and safe passage of Hamas leaders and fighters to Qatar. For starters. Just do it.
Le Monde (April 5) has a breathtaking visual enquête on the scale of the destruction in Gaza.
On Israel’s growing international isolation—and which is sure to be lasting—Haaretz (April 25) has this lengthy report: “‘We’re Persona Non Grata. Almost Satan’: Global Boycott of Israeli Culture Ratchets Up.” The lede says it all: “Israeli filmmakers, publishers, producers, artists, curators and musicians all have the same message: We and our creative work are unwanted internationally.”
This is terrible. I will personally never boycott Israeli culture or academia—I am hostile to the BDS campaign in these domains—but it is alas inevitable that others will jump on that bandwagon.
As for academia, this from Haaretz (April 12): “‘I Won’t Work With You. You’re Committing Genocide’: Israeli Academia Faces an Unprecedented Global Boycott.” Again, the lede says it all: “Canceled invitations to conferences, a freeze on hiring Israelis at overseas institutions, rejection of scientific articles on political grounds, disruption of lectures abroad – Israeli scholars from various disciplines paint a painful picture of the foreign boycott that has afflicted them since the war broke out in Gaza.”
The Haaretz articles equate the isolation of Israeli culture and academia with that of Russia since February 2022. They happily do not blame it on anti-Semitism. Whew!
I am presently in the US and am very closely following the campus protests (N.B. MSNBC’s coverage has been exceptional over the past week), on which I have much to say. Bientôt.
In the meantime, the protesting students—some of them, at least—would do well to read the article in Jacobin (April 28), “The Palestinian Resistance Isn’t a Monolith,” by Bashir Abu-Manneh, who is head of classics, English, and history at the University of Kent and a Jacobin contributing editor.
And then there’s this tweet by the well-known Republican pollster, to which all I can say is: Wow!
Arun, kudos, I admire the calm and collected way you handle this steaming matter. I don’t have time to comment, I hope we may have the occasion to discuss this subject in the near future.
One key element concerning the rise of antisemitism in the future will also be how Israel will – or won’t – put Netanyahu and the other criminals on trial and sentence them heavily for their crimes. If they can get away with what they have done, there is not the faintest chance for a possible peace.
Two comments.