On Sunday evening, a four-story house in Gaza was decimated by an Israeli missile. At the moment of impact, 25 people belonging to four families, including 19 children, were gathered together to break the day’s Ramadan fast. All of them were killed.
Also eating with the families was, according to relatives, a guest who was likely a Hamas militant, ostensibly the strike’s target. (Israel’s military has refused to comment.) He died as well, buried the the rubble of a collapsed building along with the 19 children and six adults with whom he was eating.
What happened on Sunday isn’t an isolated incident. To date, over 3,000 Palestinians have been injured and over 600 killed in Israeli strikes, 75 percent of whom the U.N. estimates have been innocent people unconnected in any way to the violence. And many of these civilians have been killed in strikes which have either completely or nearly destroyed entire families.
According to Israel, such strikes are considered to be both necessary and unfortunate, given the unspeakable loss of innocent Palestinian lives. However, Israel claims it is not to blame for such tragic deaths, instead insisting that Hamas is responsible, not its own missiles.
It’s true that Hamas has used schools to house weapons, fires rockets from urban areas and clearly places civilians at risk with the ongoing violence. Here’s the rub, though: there is no safe space in Gaza for people to flee. Indeed, many have been killed by missile attacks in areas Israel told residents would be safe. These are not “human shields.” They are human tragedies.
The New Republic’s Yishai Schwartz agrees with Israel that, despite all this, such strikes are necessary and must continue. However, he also performs some moral gymnastics to stunningly argue that such strikes are an absolute moral imperative. That the killing of innocent Palestinians, including children, is necessary to protect a just world.
No, I’m not joking.
After recognizing Israel’s disproportionate use of force, and the shocking number of innocents dying (despite efforts to minimize the carnage), Schwartz twists himself into knots to explain why killing innocent Palestinians is a good thing. Why, you might wonder, would he posit such a thing? Because if a grotesque number of civilian deaths cause a moral, good army such as Israel’s to stop fighting evil, our ‘just world’ will collapse. Witness his concluding paragraph:
Civilians cannot be used to make just wars impossible and morality will not be used as a tool to disarm. And once we have that principle, the proportionality calculation changes. The deaths of innocents are not simply outweighed by Israelis’ right to live without daily rockets and terrorists tunneling into a kibbutz playground; but by the defense of a world in which terrorists cannot use morality to achieve victory over those who try to fight morally. It is the protection of that world, one in which moral soldiers still have a fighting chance, that justifies Israel’s operations against Hamas today. And it is that greater cause that decisively outweighs the terrible toll in innocent life.
As disgusting or absurd as his moral assessment may be, more important is the narrative Schwartz constructs to arrive at his conclusion – a narrative Israel Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu has continuously fed to American media the past three weeks. It’s a narrative most American journalists have accepted, despite Netanyahu’s known history of dishonestly. But it’s inaccurate, and shields Israel from the shared blame it deserves in starting this Gaza conflict.
Netanyahu and Schwartz’s story goes like this:
1) Hamas (who I find abhorrent) started firing rockets at Israel without incitement.
2) Israel restrained itself like no other country, until finally it had to act.
3) Israel wants to stop and sign a ceasefire, but Hamas won’t do it.
The truth is much more complicated, and nefarious. See, what nobody talks about is how, minutes after Hamas and the Palestinian Authority signed a unity agreement on the evening of April 23, the initial phase of a long-sought reconciliation amongst Palestinians, Israel bombed Gaza, wounding 12 civilians. Israel claimed to have missed its target, a Hamas militant. However, most observers in Israel saw it for what it likely was: an effort to elicit rockets from Gaza and immediately imperil Palestinian reconciliation, which Netanyahu greatly fears.
From that moment, Netanyahu has made every effort to incite Hamas to violence. Tragically, he found such an opportunity when three Israeli teens were kidnapped in the West Bank on June 12. Despite denials by Hamas that it was involved and evidence it was perpetrated by rogue criminals, Netanyahu placed the blame squarely on Hamas, saying it would “pay a heavy price.” For the next three weeks, despite evidence which now suggests Israeli authorities knew the teens had been killed immediately, Israel pummeled and ransacked West Bank communities, killing a number of Palestinians while arresting many more connected to Hamas. Israel’s military was supposed to be looking for the teens. What it did, to nobody’s surprise, was finally provoke Hamas to act, making Hamas equally culpable in the ongoing violence.
And now, here we are today, with Israel pummeling Gaza, killing innocent civilians while also destroying tunnels and weapons caches, claiming that the goal is to achieve quiet for Israel’s citizens, who have been dodging Hamas rockets for weeks. Nevermind that this goal cannot be attained by the current military operation, something history has repeatedly shown over the last seven years. Stopping rockets from being fired on a civilian population is a legitimate reason to be engaged in military actions.
Such a goal I wouldn’t question, and if Israel had no hand in sparking the current violence, I would be much more reticent to critique its actions, as I too want the rocket fire to end. However, the problem is that this entire Gaza operation has not been about restoring quiet so much as destroying Palestinian reconciliation and the potential for an elected government which includes Hamas officials.
For if Israel truly wanted quiet, rather than more time to strike at Hamas, which continues to say Palestinian reconciliation will not be thwarted by Israel’s missiles, Israel would have already engaged in serious ceasefire negotiations.
Despite what Israel claims, that has never happened. Sure, Israel and Egypt (whose ruling elite hates Hamas more than Israel) secretly negotiated a ceasefire plan and announced it to the world as the fruit of tough negotiations. However, Hamas was not included in such negotiations, and claims only to have heard about it through the media.
This ceasefire effort was not a sincere attempt to stop the violence. For if it was, negotiations would have been made with Hamas, since the basic math of ceasefire agreements dictates that it’s agreed upon by both parties. If Netanyahu had been sincere about wanting a ceasefire, he wouldn’t have said “No thanks” when President Obama offered to help broker it. No, it was an attempt to corner Hamas with demands everyone knew it would never accept. Indeed, an Israeli minister said as much, stating, “We made a ceasefire agreement with ourselves.”
Which brings us back to Schwartz, who argues that Israel must continue striking at Hamas. According to him, Israel has the moral authority to not just represent a just world, but a duty to protect it. How? By not allowing the deaths of Palestinian children to deter it from attacking Hamas. To not legitimize the use of “human shields.”
But moral authority cannot be so clearly granted, nor claimed. Hamas certainly can’t claim it, as an organization which celebrates the targeting of civilians and chose to fire a constant volley of rockets into Israel. But neither can Israel, which is using disproportionate force in Gaza, obliterating residential blocks and killing scores of innocent people after inciting Hamas.
Israel says it wants the rockets to stop. This is legitimate. Hamas wants the blockade (or siege) to end, a collective punishment which has created an impoverished enclave of despair in Gaza. This too is legitimate.
Perhaps both parties could begin serious ceasefire negotiations, and an end to the ongoing violence, at these two places.
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David Harris-Gershon is author of the memoir What Do You Buy the Children of the Terrorist Who Tried to Kill Your Wife?, published recently by Oneworld Publications.
Follow him on Twitter @David_EHG.
I’m watching a Hamas spokesman talk to Wolf Blitzer…..from the safety of Doha, Qatar. Hamas is serving no one other then themselves and they are intent to kill anyone around them to achieve victory, Gazans and Israelis. They’re holding Gazans hostage and Israelis under the constant threat of rocket fire and cross border raids. Hamas would be quite satisfied scoring a good hit on an Israeli city at the expense of thousands of Gazans. That would be their so called victory. It has been made quite clear to the world, even to the UN, that Gazans are being used as human shields by Hamas. The UN found a cache of rockets hidden in one of their schools. They invest their resources on bunkers, tunnels and rockets rather than infrastructure (housing, hospitals and schools). The Arab works is getting tired of them and even Fatah is not towing their line with great enthusiasm. Egypt wants no part of them. That said, Israel cannot remove Hamas altogether, only cripple their ability to launch rockets and cross border raids. The only ones who can dislodge Hamas are Gazans and Fatah. Think of Hamas as being a very lethal drug cartel holding your city hostage. Nothing good comes from that
I have great idea, Davd. Go on a mission to Gaza and meet with Hamas leaders. Tell them to take their rockets away form civilian areas. tell the to stop shooting rockets. Tel them to make Gaza into a land of peace. That would take courage and I would hold you up as a hero. i.
Thanks, David, for an excellent and well-argued article. As to the argument that they are using civilians as human shields, it cuts both ways. Israel’s army is composed of civilians as well, hundreds of thousands of them who are part of the Israeli reserve forces. Hamas might argue that in targeting Israeli cities it is trying to attack those combatants, but unfortunately Israel has put its combatants inside cities and towns where many civilians live and who are being used by Israel as human shields, so Hamas’ actions are really not acts of terror after all. I reject that kind of argument if it comes from Hamas or if it comes from Israel. International law and human rights agreements preclude attacking civilian dwellings or hospitals or schools or anywhere else where it is reasonable to believe that civilians will be killed. That the US systematically ignores this in its drone attacks around the world is no excuse for Israel to similarly ignore these human rights. Israel’s disproportionate use of force and against civilians is a huge blight on the history of Israel, and to the extent that Israel gets support from most major Jewish communities and institutions, a blight on the history of the Jewish people.
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Thanks for your comment, Rabbi Lerner. I would add that Hamas rockets are both vile and illegal in that they target civilians by default, since they cannot accurately determine where they will land. And those rockets are fired with every intention of hitting urban areas.
Both parties are culpable for this escalation, and here in this piece I’ve tried to demonstrate how Israel shares equal blame for beginning the current violence.
A rabbi has the intellectual dishonesty to create moral equivalency. I don’t see rocket being fired from any Israeli population center. That would be moral equivalency. Civilians only become soldiers when they get into a uniform, They only become combatants when they actively engage in combat. Perhaps you need a guide to international law.
Rabbi, you have the right idea. Using civilians and schools and hospitals as targets is a major
war crime.
An eye for an eye – leaves two blind people; the contemporary story of the middle east!
This kind of of logic, Mr Schwartz logic, unfortunately , the Jewish people have to carry the burden for such logic. I know not all Jews share with him such a twisted sense of murdering people, but those who don’t agree need to speak up, like the author has done here. Those who subscribe to such mentality are not any better than all who kill innocent people from both sides, nor can they have the right to criticize the Palestinians for what they do in there attempt to defend themselves, even if that mean hurting and killing Israelis. the whole cycle is sick! The blame for sure is to be shared but to be fair ,realistis and logical, there is no proportion balance what so ever between the Palestinians and Israel, and the balm should fall into the same equation ! Palestinian lives are not any less nor more than a Jewish lives. Any one who feel and say such a thing is simply a racist individual .
Try the out:
http://www.tabletmag.com/jewish-news-and-politics/180007/concrete-facts-about-hamas
Some Concrete Facts About Hamas
Guess how many skyscrapers the terror organization could’ve built instead of tunnels
Israeli troops entering Gaza last week have so far uncovered 18 tunnels used by Hamas to send armed terrorists into Israel and built using an estimated 800,000 tons of concrete.
What else might that much concrete build? Erecting Dubai’s Burj Khalifa, the world’s tallest tower, required 110,000 tons of concrete. Hamas, then, could’ve treated itself to seven such monstrosities and still had a few tens of thousands of tons to spare. If it wanted to build kindergartens equipped with bomb shelters, like Israel has built for the besieged citizens of Sderot, for example – after all, noted military strategists like Jon Stewart have spent last week proclaiming that Gaza’s citizens had nowhere to hide from Israel’s artillery – Hamas could have used its leftovers to whip up about two that were each as big as Giants Stadium. And that’s just 18 tunnels. Egypt, on its end, recently claimed to have destroyed an additional 1,370. That’s a lot of concrete.
You may find such calculations callous. They certainly pale in comparison to heart-wrenching photos of dead children on the beach. But they matter a whole lot: If you’ve ever read Robert Caro’s The Power Broker, or played Sim City, or just looked out your window and paid attention to your city’s changing skyline, you know that urban leaders are measured not by what they say but what they build. And Hamas, almost exclusively, chose to build tunnels, bunkers, and launching pads for missiles.
Now, from purely military point of view, there is something brilliant about transforming a strip of coastal farmland into a giant concrete aircraft carrier that’s impossible for your enemy to sink. But the idea that Hamas’ tunnels are intended to promote the welfare of Gaza’s 1.8 million civilians, who are forced to live on deck as rockets are fired, is bunk. If the tunnels were truly lifelines for Gazans, as Western apologists occasionally argue, one might expect any reasonably responsible leadership to avoid firing barrages of rockets at civilians inside Israel.
The intention behind Hamas’ tunnels is clear from where the exits are located: inside Israel. The terror organization packed its subterranean networks of tunnels and bunkers with explosives, weapons, and murderers, some disguised as IDF soldiers. Their gallant plan was to send the killers through the tunnels, so they could emerge from the ground in the middle of Israeli kibbutzim and start throwing grenades and shooting indiscriminately, with the goal of killing as many Israelis as possible. That’s not very neighborly.
So, where did Hamas get all that concrete? Most of it came from you and your government. Hamas got its hands on the supplies it needed to build the tunnels after it pleaded with the international community last year to help redeem Gaza from the throes of a humanitarian crisis, caused by the fact that both Israel and Egypt closed their borders to Gaza, because both countries grew tired of having their soldiers and citizens murdered by terrorists. Needless to say, Israel’s concerns about how the concrete would be used were universally derided in the West as inflicting cruel and needless suffering on the people of Gaza – who, needless to say, didn’t receive any of the concrete for their own use. The priorities of Ismail Haniyeh’s government were crystal clear – to use all resources at their disposal to launch another war with Israel.
And if you are among the tens of thousands of political idiots who spent last weekend demonstrating in support of Hamas – now that the Khmer Rouge isn’t fashionable – it may also be useful for you to know that while Gazans languish in in poverty, Hamas’ bosses are living large; Haniyeh, for example, bought 27,000 square feet of beach-side property a few years ago for $4 million, pays for his children to study in Europe, and sends his family members to hospitals inside Israel – all good choices, which he ensures are not available to anyone in Gaza who isn’t a high-level member of his fundamentalist political cult.
What all this adds up to is that Hamas is not seriously interested in governing Gaza, which is why all the honorable attempts at resolving this current round of bloodletting will fall flat. New elections won’t help. Giving Hamas more concrete won’t help either.
Earlier this month, Israel’s former chief of staff and Minister of Defense Shaul Mofaz proposed a dollars-for-demilitarization deal; it called for a ceasefire, followed by a payment of a whopping $50 billion designated for welfare and infrastructure in return for a promise to cleanse Gaza of rockets and to destroy the tunnels. It’s an interesting idea, which rests on the assumption that the cash will make its way to Gaza’s tired, poor, and huddled masses. It won’t.
We are left with a harsh realization that makes so many of us, good liberal Jews reared on the principle that nothing stands outside the realm of reason, deeply uncomfortable: There’s no negotiating with Hamas. Not because of some lofty and abstract principle – we don’t negotiate with terrorists! – but because Hamas isn’t here to talk or build or heal the wounded people of Gaza. The organization’s raison d’etre is killing people in order to bring about the rule of its fundamentalist and radically intolerant brand of Islam – they shoot Jews, and they also shoot anyone else the organizations doesn’t like, including Egyptian soldiers, gays, and political opponents from other Palestinian factions.
Anyone with a genuine commitment to human rights – not to mention sympathy for the Palestinian cause – should join Israel in its efforts to rid the world of such sheer evil and topple Hamas. To leave Hamas in power is not a moderate solution to anything. It is to become complicit in the agenda and the actions of a terrorist organization in inflicting terrible and continuing pain not only on its neighbors but also on its own peop
Thank you :-(! To both of You: Mr. Lerner and Thank you so much indeed :-(! So much hate out there these days. So much vilification and denial of jewish empathy, so much effort in social media to depict all of Israel as radical extreme Zionists (ultra-nationalist) or worse, that us Goyim that see the Israeli state as a historical fait accompli and a legitimate home for Jews from wherever, have a hard time pointing out that there is a genuine Buberish tikkun spirit out there in Israel. I’m bookmarking this page. Your current leaders are making life for your people hard 🙁 as a fellow human being born into an ethnic minority which is very particularistic in its culture itself, it hurts me very much to see how the materialized radicalism of Jabotinsky and Bibi’s father has is turning world opinion against “Jews”. Please find a larger pulpit than this hidden website. Show the world your view! Show the world, that the ultranationalists in charge in Israel are the saviors of the jewish people righfully, but do not have a monopoly on the world stage for speaking for jewish people everywhere. They are harming your family enormously. I write to you as a human to another human (you) whether chosen or not, with sadness and love as the violence keeps pouring out and fuelling the hatred on site and beyond. Be well. May Hamas stop their idiotic escalation of violence towards your people which ends up fuelling the massive assassination of their own people. Idiotic world.
Sorry fo repost. I have corrected some parts. Thank you :-(! To both of You: Mr. Lerner and Mr. Gershon. Thank you so much indeed :-(! So much hate out there these days. So much vilification and denial of jewish empathy, so much effort in social media to depict all of Israel as radical extreme Zionists (ultra-nationalist) or worse, that us Goyim that see the Israeli state as a historical fait accompli and a legitimate home for Jews from wherever, have a hard time pointing out that there is a genuine Buberish tikkun spirit out there in Israel. I’m bookmarking this page. Your current leaders are making life for your people hard 🙁 as a fellow human being born into an ethnic minority which is very particularistic in its culture, it hurts me very much to see how the materialized radicalism of Jabotinsky and Bibi’s father is turning world opinion against “Jews”. Please find a larger pulpit than this hidden website. Show the world your view! Show the world, that the ultranationalists in charge in Israel are the saviors of the jewish people rightfully, for building them a home away from the sites of their demise, but show us others in the human family, that your worriers caste does not have a monopoly on the world stage for speaking for jewish people everywhere at every time. They are harming your family’s reputation on the world stage enormously. I write to you as a human to another human (you) whether chosen or not, with sadness and love as the violence keeps pouring out and fuelling the hatred on site in Israel and beyond. Be well. Find a solution to this territorial and population issue and may Hamas stop their idiotic escalation of violence towards your people which ends up fuelling the massive assassination of their own people. Idiotic world where people do things that make everything worse by producing totally contrary results to those they pursue.
Sorry for re-repost. This time, I corrected spelling mistakes. So: Thank you :-(! To both of You: Mr. Lerner and Mr. Gershon. Thank you so much indeed :-(! So much hate out there these days. So much vilification and denial of jewish empathy, so much effort in social media to depict all of Israel as radical extreme Zionists (ultra-nationalist) or worse, that us Goyim that see the Israeli state as a historical fait accompli and a legitimate home for Jews from wherever, have a hard time pointing out that there is a genuine Buberish tikkun spirit out there in Israel. I’m bookmarking this page. Your current leaders are making life for your people hard 🙁 as a fellow human being born into an ethnic minority which is very particularistic in its culture, it hurts me very much to see how the materialized radicalism of Jabotinsky and Bibi’s father is turning world opinion against “Jews”. Please find a larger pulpit than this hidden website. Show the world your view! Show the world, that the ultranationalists in charge in Israel are the saviors of the jewish people rightfully, for building them a home away from the sites of their demise, but show us others in the human family, that your warrior-caste does not have a monopoly on the world stage for speaking for jewish people everywhere at every time. They are harming your family’s reputation on the world stage enormously. I write to you as a human to another human (you) whether chosen or not, with sadness and love as the violence keeps pouring out and fuelling the hatred on site in Israel and beyond. Be well. Find a solution to this territorial and population issue and may Hamas stop their idiotic escalation of violence towards your people which ends up fuelling the massive assassination of their own people. Idiotic world where people do things that make everything worse by producing totally contrary results to those they genuinly pursue.
Shawn,
You sound sencer in your wishes, but unfortunately misguided in your views toward the balance of responsibility in this tragedy. You sound like you are OK with all that Israel has and still is doing to the Palestinians for the last 66 years if not more, from occupations, to displacement of 700,000 Palestinians in1947-48, to destruction of 500 Palestinians towns and villages, to the dispossion of their homes and over 90% of the land that they have lived on for at least 1500 years continuously if not longer, as most of them belong to the region and did not come from Russia, Poland, Germany, Brooklyn , nor Queens. You are Ok with them1.8 human beings living under illigal harsh reality of a siege of the last 8 years in Gaza, with closed borders ,no air, nosea, no land free access? Yet, you seem to sympathize with the Jewish people and blame the Palestinians ,Hamas or not ,for shooting unguided,home made rockets as a last resort of their rebelling about all of the above and more under brutal occupation for 47 years? You think they just should lay down and play dead to satisfy you like it seems Israel wishes them to do? Dear and all others who think like that, I don’t don’t your kindness and humanity in taken the time to express empathy with Israel, or the Jewish people, but you should check your sense of morality and empathy for all humans!
And please don’t forget the repeated massacres, from Dier Yassin toGaza massacres of 2008-9 over 1400 murdered,and five thousand injured or maimed, 2012 about 400 murdered and I don’t remember how many injured and now2014 ,700 + murdered and hundreds of homes ,schools, mosques, and hospitals are totally destroyed . Even cemeteries were bombed ! You do need more? Off course the frustrated fighters and suicide bombers in the past have killed some innocent people and their actions are judges, but its just they don’t posses the F 15 and 16 , tanks and missiles that the Israelis have, other wise this tragedy might have finished along time ago, there is no balance in power and the victimes are accused of the crimes of their victimizer !
Shawn,
Its very noble of you to be concern and give advice to your beloved Jewish friends, but how about extending your nobility and express some dismay and sympathy with the murder of innocent Palestinians for 66 years? Do you think you have the capacity for understanding the injustice that is committed against the Palestinians in general and the massacres against Gazans in particular ? That might also be a good sharing and show your true humanity with the victimes not just the victimizers!