Hamas Not Using Hostages

A key defense of powerful nations that terrorize with their military is that civilian casualties are unavoidable because the real terrorists fight dirty using hostages. When Israel besieged Gaza last year they alleged that Hamas was using mosques and hospitals and schools as weapon storage lockers and stuffing them full of civilians in order to incite international outrage when Israel bombed those sites. According to the UN this was a lie. When Israel bombed these locations, the civilians were there, yes, but not the armaments.

Ken Silverstein interviews "Desmond Travers was one of the four members of the United Nations Fact Finding Mission on the Gaza Conflict, which produced the controversial Goldstone Report":

We found no evidence that Hamas used civilians as hostages. I had expected to find such evidence but did not. We also found no evidence that mosques were used to store munitions. Those charges reflect Western perceptions in some quarters that Islam is a violent religion. Gaza is densely populated and has a labyrinth of makeshift shanties and a system of tunnels and bunkers. If I were a Hamas operative the last place I’d store munitions would be in a mosque. It’s not secure, is very visible, and would probably be pre-targeted by Israeli surveillance. There are a many better places to store munitions. We investigated two destroyed mosques—one where worshippers were killed—and we found no evidence that either was used as anything but a place of worship.

So Israel's justifications for targeting these locations proves to be baseless. Will people stop screaming "anti-semitism" now every time the subject of war crimes comes up in relation to Israel? Probably not.

Here's the thing about the hostage argument: if a madman is holding hostages in a building the solution to the problem is never going to be to bomb the building. Negotiate. Wait them out. Prepare to pounce when they make a mistake. Do not, under any circumstances, start lobbing grenades into the room with the hostages! Hamas was not holding hostages, but even if they had been it would be unconscionable that Israel launch an assault under those circumstances.

Yes the terrorists fight unfairly. Sure their tactics are designed to inflict maximum international pressure on Israel. So why give them more ammunition by bombing mosques and hospitals? It just proves there are two madmen in this situation and they are holding everyone else hostage between them.

A Wild Proposal

One of the biggest mistakes people continually make in arguing about the present day situation of Israel is conflating the modern secular democratic nation-state, with the Biblical theocratic kingdom. This mistake is grave for all sides and everyone concerned. Let me explain.

For those in the West, particularly Christians in the West, the conflation of Israel with Biblical Israel brings up guilt-inducing images of the Holocaust. It is a reminder of centuries of institutionalized and theologically legitimized anti-semitism. Relations with Israel for Europe and the United States are an on-going attempt at atonement, to ease troubled consciences. As long as Israel is somehow mixed up in our heads with the mythical kingdom of yore, it is a stand-in for Judaism and ethnic Jews world wide. How we treat Israel, is how we treat Jews.

For those in the Middle East, particularly Muslims, the conflation of Israel with Biblical Israel is a terrifying spectre. So long as Israel is connected to that mythical past in their minds they cannot help but see Israel's behavior in light of Joshua's crusade (the word is chosen intentionally) to cleanse the land. The existence of Israel in its ideal Biblical state means the eradication of other religious and ethnic groups in the region. This is why, for them, the fight is always cast in such extreme terms. Israel has to be wiped from the map (according to Ahmadinejad) because this is Holy War, and they believe Israel intends exactly the same to them.

The problem with both of these views is that they are wildly off-base. Present day Israel is NOT the Kingdom of David. It is NOT God's people. It is a secular democratic nation state. It does not (and should not) represent either the ethnic descendents of Israel and Judah OR the religion of Judaism. It cannot serve, for the West, as a way to expiate our guilty conscience, and it is not, for the East, a movement of Holy War against Islam.

So here is my wild proposal - rename Israel. Reconstitute it explicitly as what it really is and what it always should have been: a secular democratic nation state with geographic rather than ethnic or religious boundaries. Ensure that the new state is explicitly chartered to serve the needs of all people within its boundaries without regard for religion or ethnicity, and hold that nation accountable for its behavior toward its citizens and its neighbors exactly as we would any other. Defend that nation from aggression on the part of its neighbors, and start a diplomatic blitzkrieg of the entire region recasting the entire situation in new terms. It is not Jew vs. Muslim. It is not Israeli vs. Palestinian. That was NEVER the issue, in fact.

There are various options for names. We could go with Palestine since that is what it was called for nearly 2000 years, before the creation of the new state. That would probably arouse suspicions that we were picking a side though, so other options include: Canaan and Philistia. Or perhaps it would be best to avoid anything with misleading historic associations at all. They could invent something entirely new. Call it: the Land of Hope.

Let's wipe the accumulated grime of projected fantasy from our lenses and realize that all of the conflict of the past 60 years has been caused by mass hallucination. We've been so busy dividing the region up along theological lines that we've utterly ignored the reality, which is that the lines are political and socio-economic, not religious or ethnic. Israel as we know it is not Israel as we imagine it once was.

Complex and Simple

It has been difficult for me to contain my anger lately, when it comes to the dominant public response to the Gaza catastrophe. Israel's apologists are suddenly everywhere, once the media starts reporting the body count.

There is some kind of disease rampant in our society right now, which causes people to invert normal moral reasoning. Complex things are suddenly simple, and simple things are suddenly complex to the victims of this disease. Powerful is weak, and weak is powerful. Those suffering from this disease are immune to facts and reason. Mere empirical data has no sway with them. It is maddening to watch the tortured analogies being spewed by "experts" and politicians, bloggers and pundits all turning things into their opposite. It is as if they are living in photo-negative world where black is white, and white is black.

Let me give you an example. This is a quote from Washington Post columnist Charles Krauthammer, used by Senator Jon Kyl who spoke in favor of a resolution supporting Israel's actions in Gaza. The whole text is here. He says:

Some geopolitical conflicts are morally complicated. The Israel-Gaza war is not. It possesses a moral clarity not only rare, but excruciating.

What? With all due respect Senator, have you gone out of your mind? Not complicated?

So I suppose that this current conflict has nothing to do with a century of western imperialism and interventionism in the Middle East. I suppose that this particular conflict is completely hermetically sealed off from the events that established Israel in the first place, or which led to their illegal occupation of territory beyond their internationally recognized borders in the 70's until today. It certainly must have nothing to do with systematic resettlement of palestinian groups, a collapsed infrastructure, the continual involvement of foreign powers on all sides (the US and Britain from the West, Syria and Iran from the East), or an entrenched culture of retaliation. It also was not precipitated by an 18 month siege during which even students were prohibited from entering or leaving the Gaza strip by the Israeli military.

Knowingly or not the Senator is relying on some form of Just War theory in order to make his argument that in this conflict Israel is justified, but he must not know very much about Just War theory, because in no way can Israel's current aggression be regarded as Just. To be just it must be proportional - the body count alone shows it is not the case. To be just it must not put innocents at risk - a vast majority of casualties on both sides have been civilians so far. To be just it must have been a case of last resort - given the enormous disparity in power between these two forces no one can make a credible argument that Israel had no other options available to them.

When we begin making simple things complex and complex things simple we are doing a very dangerous thing.

For example, various sides will describe this conflict as if it were essentially a religious war between Jews and Muslims. Apologists for Israel do this whenever they scream "antisemitism" at anyone who criticizes Israel. Supporters of Hamas, Hezbollah and others are just as bad when everything is "Zionism". This is not principally a religious conflict. Certainly not a straightforward one. Israel is a secular democratic nation. It does not act on behalf of the Jewish people or inspired by Jewish beliefs. Palestinians are not uniformly Muslim, and even those that are Muslim, are frequently more driven by claims of basic injustice and a sense of national identity than by religious ideology. The roots of this conflict are complex and have as much or more to do with economics and international relations than with religion.

On the other hand, there is an aversion to seeing simple truths. Here are two:

Launching military assaults on schools, mosques and residential neighborhoods is wrong. There is no justification for this. Yes, Hamas is despicable for using human shields. But if a criminal bank-robber is using a human shield the police do not take the risk of killing the hostage. They negotiate.

No matter what the provocation, the party with the greater power is the one who bears the most responsibility for the conflict. Power means not having to respond. Israel is a nuclear power with an extraordinarily well equipped and trained military. Hamas is a bunch of lunatics with some homemade mortars. If 5 year olds are throwing rocks at a teenager, the teenager does not have the right to go beat the crap out of the kids.

When it comes to simple truths like these, people will make all manner of complicated excuse for their side. Apologists for Israel have been hammering the point for years that the Israeli army does everything in their power to avoid civilian casualties (except, you know, not fire at civilians). Their attacks are surgical and they give forewarning etc... etc... whereas Hamas flagrantly aims directly for civilian targets. This fact only serves to highlight the disparity of power at play here. Hamas has supposedly been doing their best for years to kill as many Israeli civilians as possible and still they have managed to kill only a tiny fraction of the number that Israel has.

The worst aspect of this topsy turvy disease is that the victims hurl insults at anyone who tries to point out the inverted logic, as though disapproving of Israel's military action meant we wished harm on the citizens of Israel. I deplore all violence, and I refuse to participate in the wild justification of mass-scale murder, whether it is our nation, an ally, or an enemy that commits it. It's that simple.

Addendum: Go read this blog for an intimate human portrait of the situation in Gaza. It is co-written by persons on either side of the Gaza-Israel border.