Horror in Gaza

Don’t worry. Starmer is “pushing for a ceasefire”

This is the acting director of UNRWA speaking:

Speaking on the recent killings at GHF-run aid distribution points, the acting director of UNRWA in Gaza has described the situation in the coastal enclave as “horrific”.

“What’s happened over the last couple of days in a war … that we thought couldn’t plumb to new depths and things couldn’t get any worse, we’re seeing a new side of that,” Sam Rose told Al Jazeera from Oxford, the UK.

“This is what people have been reduced to, literally to herded animals in pens,” he said.

Rose warned that if “these scenes” did not prompt action from those “that have the influence to take action, then we’re lost”.

“We cannot comprehend anymore what’s going on, what people are being put through in Gaza. It’s completely unimaginable and completely unacceptable,” he added. [1]

Of course, UNRWA, the UN agency responsible for taking care of Palestinians has been kicked out of Gaza and replaced with a psy-ops Israeli-US operation, aimed at demoralising Palestinians by making them beg for food from their conquerors. (By multiple reports Israeli forces are shooting them up as they approach the “feeding points”. All 4 of them).

But, don’t worry. Starmer is still “pushing for a ceasefire”. [2]

(They were pushing for the previous ceasefire, and then Israel broke it. It isn’t clear why anyone thinks Israel won’t do the same again. The idea that Israel is going to negotiate a long-term ceasefire in “good faith” as the US negotiator, Witkoff, said recently is phantasy land; Netanyahu is already loudly proclaiming that they still intend to finish Hamas).

Philosophy of war

As this site has stated before. As long as Hamas does not accept the State of Israel, Israeli leaders can legitimately claim that “support for Hamas is support for the destruction of the State of Israel.” This is then used to legitimise their policy of total containment and/or destruction of Hamas. It is not quite that simple, of course. The 2017 Hamas Charter accepts the two-state solution as a “formula of national consensus” [3]. But, at the same time the charter asserts that the goal is the elimination of the “Zionist entity” and the creation of a “fully sovereign Palestinian state” in Palestine. It appears that Hamas envisages a single state solution, which is a Palestinian state, which will allow “the followers of other creeds and religions who can practice their beliefs in security and safety”. [3] Nonetheless; as long as Hamas is committed to replacing the state of Israel, “the Zionist entity”, with a fully sovereign Palestinian state, that does mean the end of the state of Israel. At a tactical level I don’t know if it would be a good idea for Hamas to support the two state solution so as to deprive Israel of the excuse for war; but, on the other hand, given that Israel, openly now, states that they have no interest in a two-state solution, Hamas may feel vindicated in their hardline position.

As far as fighting wars go, historically, states accept limits in war. These limits are enshrined in various international documents, such as the Geneva Conventions, the founding document of the ICC, and the UN Genocide convention. The main idea is to limit harm to civilians. One could produce countless examples of how states do accept these limits. For example; the British government decided that a military solution against the IRA was not possible, presumably without large-scale killing of and oppression of the civilian population. This was because the IRA “hid amongst civilians”. That is, like Hamas in Gaza, they did not line up on the beach/in a field to be shot. Sickening though it must have been for many, the government engaged with the IRA. In the Ukraine-Russia war neither side is engaging in mass deliberate attacks on civilians of the other side. There are, of course plenty of precedents for deliberately attacking civilians to alter the course of a war. The US nuclear attacks on Japan. Britain’s bombing of Dresden. Both of those, it seems to me, would have been “illegal” under the conventions mentioned above, which came into being after WWII. It is difficult to excuse those actions. All we can say is that according to all the internationally agreed limits, which, since WWII have been observed to some extent, Israel is now rolling the clock back. Furthermore; Israel may not simply be targeting civilians in order to pressure a political-military leadership. They may be targeting civilians as an end in itself; i.e. they may well be starving and killing Palestinian civilians so as to remove them from the scene. This is a crime of genocide [4], and goes further than the egregious actions of the US and UK in WWII which were aimed at forcing submission from the political leadership of Japan and Germany.

What the current Israeli leadership demonstrates, time and time again, by statements made by leaders at the highest level, is that they do not accept any limits. They do not accept any of the limits of the “international community” which touch on not directly attacking civilians, and, indeed protecting them from harm. This should be an issue for the International Community.

Despite the position of Hamas which does not accept the State of Israel, Israel’s actions still go too far, in terms of both international law, and any kind of sense of humanity. Hamas, with its 30,000 men (?) and hotchpotch arsenal of small arms and improvised explosives, is not an existential threat to the State of Israel, and the Palestinian civilian population, even if many of them share the political vision of Hamas, still deserve to live. In other words; what would have been a legitimate response to the Hamas attacks of 7 October would have been a standard anti-terrorist operation, targeting Hamas leadership and military infrastructure; not this war against the Palestinian people, mass killings of civilians, targeting of hospitals, multiple massacres including ambulance workers, starvation of children, displacement, and so on.

One other point. Israel’s horrifying and morally degenerate actions are unlikely to be successful. If continued it looks like they will end up with either a set of refuge camps within ‘Greater Israel’, which will be a constant thorn in their sides, or, if they are successful in expelling the Palestinians, an international terrorist movement, (like the PLO before the OSLO Accords).

Notes

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