Israel's intense three-week assault on Gaza halted with the calling of successive (if yet far from comprehensive or stable) ceasefires by Israel and Hamas on 17-18 January 2009. What happened is routinely referred to as a "war", though the label (if sometimes in practice unavoidable) is questionable insofar as a war requires two sides and this conflict - as can be seen from the imbalance of destruction - was overwhelmingly one-sided.
True, Hamas's rocket-fire from within Gaza both kills and terrorises civilians in those parts of Israel within its range; but its purpose is political rather than military; it serves principally to demonstrate symbolic "resistance" and Israeli vulnerability. Hamas's resistance on the streets of Gaza was by available evidence scarcely more effective.
Martin Shaw is professor of international
relations and politics at the University of Sussex. A historical sociologist of
war and global politics, his books include War and Genocide (Polity, 2003), The New Western Way of War (Polity, 2005), and What is Genocide?
(Polity, 2007). He is
editor of the global site
Also by Martin Shaw in openDemocracy:
"The myth of progressive war" (11 October 2006)
"Genocide: rethinking the concept" (1 February 2007)
"The International Court of
Justice: Serbia, Bosnia, and genocide" (28 February 2007)
"The genocide file: reply
to Anthony Dworkin" (6 March 2007)
"My Lai to Haditha: war,
massacre and justice" (16 March 2008)It is often said that such methods
are weapons of the (militarily) weak; but it might also be said that they are
weapons of the morally impoverished, politically unimaginative, and, in this
case at least, hugely irresponsible.
The latter is unquestionably true in the sense that in this conflict Hamas has exposed those who are really weak - Gaza's civilian population of 1.5 million - to sustained Israeli attack that inflicted a terrible toll: over 1,100 killed and 5,100 wounded, huge damage to the civilian infrastructure and society, and a state of terror in which civilians, including hundreds of thousands of children, have been trapped without even the possibility of flight. Moreover, all this has been for and for minimal political advantage: any gains from Hamas's rocket-campaign are far outweighed by the opportunity that it handed to Israel to crush Hamas and degrade further a Gazan population already severely pressed by an economic blockade.
The real target
The harm to civilians is the most striking feature of this conflict, but it also says something about the overall nature of Israel's campaign against Hamas. Its stated aims and in part its practice concerned legitimate military goals: attacking the sites of Hamas rocket-launchers, destroying tunnels through which weapons were smuggled. But the campaign went far wider.
Israel claims to have killed more than 500 Hamas militants: but unless it regards every adult male in Gaza as a militant (which is emphatically not true), then this figure is almost certainly inflated, since it appears that little more than 600 men have been killed altogether (with around 410 children and 104 women, according to Palestinian medical figures).
What is more revealing about the claim, however, is that it is invoked by Israel as the major index of its "success" against Hamas: as though killing Hamas men was what its attack was about. This itself is troubling, in that it raises the question: is Israel taking care to distinguish between Hamas fighters (who can indeed be regarded as enemy combatants) and political activists, supporters and their family members (who cannot)?
Some of Israel's targeting, for example the massacre of policemen, suggests that Israel is defining "Hamas" very broadly indeed (police are not combatants). Moreover, Israel's assassinations and its persistent bombing of houses in which Hamas men are believed to be based - knowing that their extended families (as well as other civilians) are almost certain to be killed alongside them - suggests that militants' families, including children, are regarded too as "Hamas".
The anecdotal evidence of some Palestinian males who have been arrested by the Israelis suggests that anyone identified as Hamas is at risk of his life. This evidence suggests an ominous element of targeted mass killing of those associated with Hamas as a political organisation.
The underlying logic can be regarded as a kind of "politicide" - that is, genocide of a political group. True, the United Nations genocide convention does not recognise such a category or protect "political" groups; but many scholars and experts would consider that the simultaneous targeting of any civilian group - such as the members and supporters and families of Hamas's political organisation - would come within the general scope of genocide.
The opposition Israeli leader Binyamin Netanyahu has given voice to this logic in his euphemistic reference to "removing" Hamas. This is followed through would entail a more extended, direct reoccupation of Gaza - one that Israel's government, with an eye to both domestic and American political timetables, will be reluctant soon to pursue. But it may have made a start.
The civilian issue
Among openDemocracy's
articles on the Gaza conflict of 2008-09:
Paul Rogers, "Gaza: hope after attack" (1 January 2009)
Avi Shlaim, "Israel and Gaza: rhetoric and
reality" (7 January 2009)
Paul Rogers, "Gaza: the Israel-United States
connection"
(7 January 2009)
Tarek Osman, "Egypt's dilemma: Gaza and beyond" (12 January 2009)
Mary Robinson, "A crisis of dignity in Gaza" (13 January 2009)
Paul Rogers, "Gaza: the wider war" (13 January 2009)
Menachem Kellner, "Israel's Gaza war: five
asymmetries"
(14 January 2009)
Khaled Hroub, "Hamas after the Gaza war" (15 January 2009)
Paul Rogers, "After Gaza: Israel's last chance" (17 January 2009)The questions raised by the relationship
between Israel's military campaign and the civilian population raise disturbing echoes. Israel claims
to be doing its utmost to avoid civilian harm; but by its air, sea and ground assault on Gaza - one of
the most densely populated places on earth - it knew that (as in its assault on Lebanon in July-August 2006) it would cause
substantial civilian casualties.
The fact that Hamas militants live within packed urban populations means that it was not possible to attack Hamas without also causing massive civilian harm: and so it has proved. Yet several incidents of civilian deaths suggest that in these circumstances, care for civilians has been minimal: both the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) and United Nations agencies have called for investigation with a view to charges of war crimes.
The question such incidents raise is how to evaluate the huge civilian harm in Gaza. Is this just (another nasty euphemism) "collateral damage"? Does it involve the kind of hypocritical concern for civilians practiced by the United States, Britain and other western countries, which exposes civilians to harm so as to enable the military to "fight" without serious risk to itself (what I have called "risk-transfer" war)? Or is it something worse?
Jonathan Freedland has made the case for assimilating Israeli policies to the general western model: "Britons and Americans have no cause for self-righteousness. The scale of the Israeli offensive is shocking, and yet the killing is not of a greater order than that of the two wars, in Iraq and Afghanistan, in which our very own British troops are taking part. I spoke yesterday with one foreign diplomat based in Jerusalem who recalled how, during an earlier posting in Afghanistan, he had seen the remains of an entire village razed to the ground by American fighter jets in pursuit of a couple of Taliban commanders. ‘All that was left was rubble and body parts,' he says now. Seen in the context of the last seven years, the grim truth is that Israelis are not guilty of a unique crime in Gaza" (see "Gaza after a Hamas rout will be an even greater threat to Israel", Guardian, 7 January 2009).
There is much in this. But Israel's violence goes beyond the "risk-transfers" of the new western way of war practiced in particular by the United States and Britain. These western powers certainly attack their armed enemies in such a way as to cause "accidental" civilian harm, exposing civilians to greater risk than soldiers; but Israel now has a substantial record of targeting civilian populations as such, both by economic and military means. In 2006, it was clear that Israel's campaign in Lebanon was directed at more than Hizbollah: the extensive damage caused to Lebanon's infrastructure and the massive displacement of civilians were directed at the Lebanese population, punishing them for "hosting" Hizbollah and aimed at pressurising them to marginalise the armed group.
In Gaza too, Israel imposed a harsh blockade as punishment in response to the victory of Hamas in the Palestinian elections of January 2006. This restricted the entry and exit of Gaza residents as well as of food, medical supplies and other goods essential to the territory's economic and social life. Richard Falk, the United Nations rapporteur for the Palestinian territories, says: "There is a consensus among independent legal experts that Israel is an occupying power and is therefore bound by the duties set out in the fourth Geneva convention. The arguments that Israel's blockade is a form of prohibited collective punishment, and that it is in breach of its duty to ensure the population has sufficient food and healthcare as the occupying power, are very strong."
A global answer
In this context, Israel's extensive harm to civilians in Gaza looks less the accidental fallout from its attack on Hamas and more the extension of a consistent policy of collective punishment. Israel appears to have decided that since economic punishment did not stop many Gazans from supporting Hamas, military punishment is necessary to complete the job. The dead children, the fearful populations, the overflowing hospitals: all are part of Israel's strategy to subdue the Palestinians of Gaza and compel them to withdraw their consent from Hamas.
This kind of "war", taken as a whole, is worse even than the air-war conducted by Britain and the United States in Afghanistan. In military terms it more resembles the pulverising of the cities of Germany and Japan in the second world war that was intended to shatter the morale of the civilian population and destroy the political basis of the regime. But the lesson of the period is that such violence - utterly immoral and outside the laws of war - "works" in political terms only when it is used without limit and with a view to unconditional surrender. These circumstances cannot be made to apply in Gaza.
This is in part because Israel today is subject to extensive global surveillance - by other large powers, international organisations and global media - in a way impossible in earlier eras. Israel cannot turn Gaza into a smoking ruin away from the eyes of the world. Israel is expert in conducting short, brutal campaigns: its government cannot afford a long-drawn-out war, which would strain further the already weakening tolerance of its allies and dampen the enthusiasm of the electorate. So this "war" carries at most only the most limited, short-term benefit for its architects. It has not destroyed Hamas, and it has not increased Israel's security.
Comments
I think your last paragraph is too optimistic:Isreal is being watched from the world, but the world doesn't react. People protest and governments might vote for a symbolic UN General Assembly resolution, but nothing is actually done. The world's persistent silence has made Isreal feel it can act with total impunity, as we have seen Isreal's actions get increasingly violent and disproportionate throughout the decades. Israel actually can 'turn Gaza into a smoking ruin', right in front of the eyes of the world, as it has been doing. If only all our talk would make our governments actually act to find real and lasting solutions. Otherwise, a fortified Hamas and other increasingly enraged non-governmental agents will take their own action.
Hamas is an embarrassment should be regarded as an embarrassment to all sympathizers of the Palestinian cause. The unequal battles in Gaza not only expose Hamas' inability to give battle, but the empty posturing that is its substantive contribution to the anti-Israeli struggle. Nothing is more exposed than the reality that its popularity with the Palestinian people is largely by default - arising from the corruptibility of Fatah - and partly by the evident love of symbolic gestures among the Palestinians. What Israel has done should come as a wake-up call to them: it is time to jettison both Fatah and Hamas and build a leadership less given to postures and capable of addressing the ground reality. What Israel has done is monstrous, but neither surprising nor unprecedented. Repeating its atrocities ad infinitum does no favour to the Palestinian cause.
How strange that none of the spokespersons for Israel's military operations against Hamas is ever asked if they have any idea of why the Palestinians behave as they do and support those who's resistance is violent although militarily completely futile.
Labelling the most active resistance as "terrorists" implies that they are lawless crazies. People to be wiped out. Collateral damage is justified as part of what it takes to make the Palestinian's reject and expunge Hamas.
These military actions and the continuation of a most repressive occupation only serve to intensify hatred of not only their oppressors, but also the western powers that do nothing to enforce implementation of the Road Map. The support by default of Israel's actions will only increase the call to Jihad and the threat of real terrorists.
The exclusion of foreign reporters from Gaza is also symptomatic of policies which ignore international norms of conflict and occupation and have close similarities to South Africa's apartheid, overthrown with the courageous support of Jewish South Africans.
I agree with a lot of this, but I wonder if you underplay how much Israel's action is 'political' (another way of putting it might be 'theatrical') too. Israel feels increasingly under threat because it lost face in the war against Hizbollah, and because Iran has stepped up its funding of that organisation and Hamas. So all-out war against Hamas, irrespective of civilian casualties, was by and large a means of deterring Iran and Hizbollah.
This, in itself, is shocking, and it shows how tough Livni and Barak are. If one of them becomes prime minister, which seems likely, there may be more conflicts of this nature.
I think mr. Shaw is right that Israel wants to hit Hamas by hitting the population. There are two facts that show that stopping the rockets was only a minor war goal:
- Israel could have stopped the rockets by opening the Gaza-border for civilian traffic; it wanted to keep the border closed though, in order to keep Hamas under pressure; evidently, this had a higher priority than stopping the rockets
- Israel started the escalation leading to the war with an attack on 4 November; The risk that the rockets would start falling again after this attack were huge. Yet Israel took the risk. (note that the time frame of the first attack on 4 Nov. to the withdrawal on 20 Jan. is precisely the time frame of Bush as a president about to retire)
Furthermore, in Lebanon Israel also hit Hezbolah by hitting the population. Chief of Staff Dan Halutz declared that Israel would destroy 10 apartments in Bayrut for every Hezbollah rocket on Haifa.
This article is wrong-headed. Many statements wringing their hands about civilian deaths are merely ways for those making the statements to feel good about themselves and their "humanity." It's feel good politics, not realistic appreciation of the problems.
When a terrorist group intentionally uses a civilian population as human shields from behind which they shoot 6,000 rockets at another civilian population, then they--and ONLY they--are responsible for causalties resulting from the counterfire.
Hamas in fact glories in the use of human shields, including women and children. Simply google fathi hamad + human shields and see what you come up with. (Hamad is a major Hamas spokesman.)
Hamas broke the truce and went to war with Israel, now they complain because they got more than they bargained for.
There's a reason for the complaining. Hamas was not only defeated, but humiliated: they failed to kill a lot of Jews, and didn't knock out a single tank. Meanwhile hundreds of Hamas fighters (and hundreds of fighters of other terrorist groups too) were killed. We will never know the exact numbers because at the start of the fighting (acc to the NY Times) Hamas told its fights to shed their uniforms and appear as civilians. And much suffering, as in any war, was imposed upon the civilians.
Hamas failed to act in a responsible manner in taking on a power much stronger than itself, but it acted that way in fulfillment of its genocidal rhetoric. a genocidal vision in which it truly believes. Read the Hamas Charter.
Hamas is continuing to act irresponsibly after the fighting, and may call down more retribution. Israel will defend itself, as states will do--although in the eyes of many in "the international community" around opendemocracy, Israel may never fight back against those who attack it. But Israel is not going to do what many people around here want it to do--voluntarily commit suicide. So we must deal with the real world.
In the real world, negotiation for peace is only feasible if there are sincere and capable Palestinian negotiating partners; but there are currently none. This is a problem the Palestinians must solve for themselves. At the moment this means that a fearsome deterrence becomes the prerequisite for any negotiation towards peace in the future.
And if the Palestinian position becomes genocide (as it is for Hamas already), then there are consequences when the potential victims of that genocide have a lot of weapons at their disposal. I'm sorry if that makes people feel bad.
I don't see much crying here, though, over Tibet or Darfur, where the dead victims are in the hundreds of thousands. That's because (I'm sorry to say) it's not Jews doing the bloody work. As a Palestinian poet once said, "We Palestinians are unlucky because you Jews are our enemy and you are militarily powerful, but we are lucky in that you are our enemy and when you are involved the subject is always you--not us."
Big C, you haven't done your homework. Take a look at both at the tone of the text of the last article to appear here on opendemocracy on the Sudan and the comments that are appended to it (NONE of which condemn the government in Khartoum).
Sudan’s Omar al-Bashir: a useful war criminal: 10-16-08.
So al-Bashir and his genocidal killers have murdered hundreds of thousands of civilians but in the most recent article on this subject they get no condemnation from bloggers on opendemocracy, but rather denials or calls for "reconciliation"; Israel kills a 1300 people, most of them Hamas soldiers or other terrorists, and the venom just flows and flows.
I urge you Big C: compare the tone of that article on the Sudan, and the tone of the comments, with, say, the tone of the article "A crisis of dignity in Gaza" by Mary Robinson, and the comments there, on which we two have blogged.
And remember as you do this, Big C, that the Sudanese government has killed probably four hundred times more people than the israelis did, and that they really WERE civilians.
Case closed.
My point, Big C is this: YOU brought up the Sudan as an indication that there aren't double standards around here on opendemocracy, but you didn't do your homework. I took the most recent article, and look what we find in terms of comments. As you yourself admit, there is direct condemnation of a regime that has killed 400,000 civilians. Most other articles have no comments at all. Oh--there is one article among the group that had a comment: a comment that was a condemnation of...wait for it...Israel.
Of course Israel is being subjected to double standards not imposed on ANY other country--even on the Sudan (whose TRULY genocidal government received the hearty defense of the Arab League recently, did it not?) On the most recent Gaza blog ("A Crisis of Dignity") you proudly ACCEPTED the accusation of double standards, admitted that your double-standards behavior fell foul of the EU definition of anti-semitism, and then ascribed that definition to a conspiracy hatched in Europe by the American Jewish Committee.
For readers who are interested,
In the "Sudan's Omar al-Bashir: A useful war-criminal" (opendemocr. 16-10-08), there are five comments:
Mark B used the article to attack not Bashir but Bush, and called Darfur "a trifling conflict"
Otto B called for reconciliation with the Bashir regime
Hassan was hostile to the Bashir regime
EmilyNadeau said she was living in the Sudan and denied there were any atrocities going on
An unnamed person had an incoherent short entry which seemed to say a lot of death was occurring.
NONE of the commentators produced the venom that has been showered on Israel for an action which led to 1/400 the casualties in Darfur and most of them dead terrorists.
Why am I here, BigC? To add another voice (among several, not just me) that will keep you guys minimally honest. You evidently are irritated by this. Since we keep beating you on the facts, I'm not surprised at the irritation.
BigC, you brought up Sudan as an alleged example of no double standards here at opendemocracy. Now you must live with what I've proven about the comments on the 10-16-08 article.
Compare what is said about Sudan on the posting I have cited with the vitriol habitually showered and showered here on Israel for an action that was 1/400th as large, and where the majority of those killed were genocidal terrorists, and you see the problem.
Well, not Big C--he doesn't see the problem. That's because, as he's stated elsewhere, he's proud to apply his double standards to Israel and Israel alone. But perhaps others will see the problem.
BTW, the genocidal Sudanese government was an elected member-state on the UN Human Rights Commission in 2007, and received the hearty backing of the Arab League in 2008.
Big C, you're also not reading well. I didn't say you brought up the Sudan. I said:
"BigC, you brought up Sudan as an alleged example of no double standards here at opendemocracy."
(Today at 15:55)
That is, you brought up Sudan as a way of challenging the assertion of mine about double-standards, in which I cited Darfur. But your challenge of no double standards has been shown to be wrong in the only detailed discussion we have had. I looked at the most recent seven Sudan postings. Either there were no comments at all listed, or one attacking...um...Israel, or the five we have discussed from October 2008. Those are the ones I pointed to. Were you thinking of something farther back?
Big C, when I wrote, "You don't see much crying here over Darfur", I meant primarily in the comments, as opposed to the tons of vitriol poured onto Israel for actions 1/400 (at worst) the same as, e.g, the Sudan. In this I have been proven correct. But perhaps you misunderstood my point.
Big C, I followed your directions and looked at the most recent 6 or 7 articles on the Sudan. Yet you can hardly fault me if, of the last 6 or 7 articles on the Sudan, these called forth no comments at all except..wait for it...one attack on ISRAEL, and except for the five comments on the latest Sudan article from October which we have discussed in detail.
But in any case the tone of the articles about genocidal Sudan is also not in the same vitriolic mode of hostility as the ones published here about Israel.
What the ABOVE article on "Israel's politics of war" needs of course, for the sake of simple decency and balance, is an article on Hamas' Politics of War, or Theology of War, or Theology of Genocide. I'll be waiting for it.
Moderator's note: Edited regarding topic already explained to poster.
Ethanll:
I have recently posted after another article:
"The shrillness, persistence, and sheer volume of the pro-Israeli
apologists on this and other blogs are beginning to sound like
desperation; and their self-certainty, total one-sidedness, fudging of
the facts, and amazing moral blindness are not convincing; in short,
these days, Israel's voice is not believed.
"
You're not helping, you know.
Clear skies!
Has there been enough bashing of Israel by the intelligensia in London? The London Review of Book has a collection of perspectives on Gaza on its website, http://www.lrb.co.uk/web/15/01/2009/mult04_.html
15 contributors, all anti-Israel, some extremely so. You know, it is easy to demonize a people when you repress completely their points of view and only focus on a small minority of dissidents who are willing to criticize it in the strongest terms.
I think LRB and Opendemocracy live in an intellectual ghetto.
Post new comment