The Bedouin bus driver who saved 30 young Israelis from the Hamas massacre at the "rave"
The "logic" behind the Israeli siege of Gaza and the looming disease threat to Gaza residents
"Vengeful pathologies" in the LRB; this piece is mixed, but this observation was striking:
Determined to overcome its humiliation by Hamas, the IDF has been no different from – and no more intelligent than – the French in Algeria, the British in Kenya, or the Americans after 9/11. Israel’s disregard for Palestinian life has never been more callous or more flagrant, and it’s being fuelled by a discourse for which the adjective ‘genocidal’ no longer seems like hyperbole. In just the first six days of air strikes, Israel dropped more than six thousand bombs, and more than twice as many civilians have already died under bombardment as were killed on 7 October. These atrocities are not excesses or ‘collateral damage’: they occur by design. As Israel’s defence minister, Yoav Gallant, puts it, ‘we are fighting human animals and we will act accordingly.’ (Fanon: ‘when the colonist speaks of the colonised he uses zoological terms’ and ‘refers constantly to the bestiary’.) Since Hamas’s attack, the exterminationist rhetoric of the Israeli far right has reached a fever pitch and spread to the mainstream. ‘Zero Gazans’, runs one Israeli slogan. A member of Likud, Netanyahu’s party, declared that Israel’s goal should be ‘a Nakba that will overshadow the Nakba of 1948’. ‘Are you seriously asking me about Palestinian civilians?’ the former Israeli prime minister Naftali Bennett said to a reporter on Sky News. ‘What is wrong with you? We’re fighting Nazis.’
"On Strategy, Law, and Morality in Israel's Gaza Operation"; this piece is also quite mixed, although from the other side of the ideological spectrum; but this bit of analysis might be worth noting:
It is not a war crime to kill civilians. It is a war crime to target civilians or to target enemy forces with insufficient attention to the requirements of necessity, distinction, proportionality, and humanity. To assess whether a given strike is a war crime or not, you have to look at what information was available to the decision-maker at the time of the action, not what information is available after the fact.
It is easy enough to look at Hamas’s actions and declare them war crimes. There are mass murders of civilians at close range, after all. There are indiscriminate rocket firings in large numbers. There is the taking of hostages. And there are the atrocities with which all of these actions take place.
The Israeli targeting actions, by contrast, are not nearly as easy to assess. (I address the siege policy distinctly below.) You don’t simply get to look at a grim humanitarian picture and conclude that whatever produced it must be a war crime. Each action that has resulted in civilian harm requires separate examination. Each case will require an answer to questions such as whether the civilians were targeted or whether they were killed or injured in a strike against a legitimate military target. Each case will also require an answer to questions about what military necessity may have prompted the strike and what awareness the relevant actor may (or may not) have had of civilian presence. Each will also require an assessment of whether the anticipated civilian injury was reasonably deemed proportionate to the expected military gain. Each of these questions has to be asked separately about each incident of civilian harm in which a war crime may be suspected.
And there’s a catch. You don’t get to say that because the Israeli cause is just and legitimate self-defense, we should construe all of these fact-intensive individual judgments in favor of the lawfulness of the Israel Defense Forces’ (IDF’s) conduct in the field. And you similarly don’t get to say that because the Palestinian cause is just and we don’t like Israel, we will apply a strict liability standard to Israeli actions in the field and construe all civilian harm in the light least favorable to Israeli soldiers. You actually have to do the analysis before you decide whether and where war crimes were committed—and that analysis requires facts we don’t yet have.
(Thanks to John Bogart and Matthew Silverstein for some of the pointers.)
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