Collective Punishment

So, apparently the UN Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA) in Gaza had some number of its staff involved in the October 7 attack on Israel.  This has resulted in numerous countries halting funding of UNRWA.  The best estimates I can find are that somewhere in the range of a dozen employees of UNRWA are involved.  That’s 12 people - in an organization of thousands, just in Gaza.

There’s a problem here.  The problem is that this amounts to little more than collective punishment. I know that Israel takes the position that anyone near or around someone who had anything to do with the October 7 attacks must be Hamas-aligned.  

In some ways, this is a variation on the “Nazi Bar” analogy, which basically postulates that if you don’t deal immediately and aggressively with Nazis in your bar, you will end up with a Nazi bar in fairly short order.  Israel is essentially arguing that anyone within 10’ of a Hamas supporter is Hamas, and therefore UNRWA is Hamas.  

The problem with the approach being taken in Gaza, and with UNRWA is this:  It isn’t dealing with holding the offenders responsible for their actions, it is in fact holding everyone in the room responsible for their actions.  Returning to the Nazi Bar idea for a moment, it’s as if we have a single Nazi in the bar, so we blow the whole bar up immediately without regard for the other patrons in the bar.  Is the couple sitting at a table having a quiet conversation a pair of Nazis?  No - we have a patron in the bar that is a Nazi, and by blowing up the whole establishment, we are engaging in collective punishment.  

In fact, Israel’s whole approach to the current situation in Gaza demonstrates a collective punishment approach.  They have systematically levelled infrastructure in Gaza regardless of whether it is explicitly Hamas militant or civilian housing.  In essence, Israel has said “we’re going to carpet bomb Gaza into the Stone Age”, and clearly has no interest in distinguishing between Hamas militants and civilian residents.  Sadly, this approach will do little except harden people against each other further, lending further internal justification to the hard line approach taken on both sides of this conflict.  

Let’s say the current focus on UNRWA ends up dismantling the organization for a moment.  What does that accomplish besides making life that much worse for the Palestinian people already marginalized and abused under Israel’s bombardment of Gaza?  Does it solve anything at all?

Now, before anybody starts “yabutting” at me about what Hamas did on October 7, 2023 as justification, let me be abundantly clear here:  What Hamas did on that day was wrong for many of the same reasons that what Israel’s government is doing in Gaza is wrong.  When it comes to this conflict, we can trace it back centuries, and longer - and I assure you that neither side has a lock on “right”.  The simple fact of the matter is that collective punishment for any wrong is never successful.

No, Ms. Kheiriddin, You’re Quite Wrong

Over at Conservative propaganda rag “National Post”, we have Tasha Kheiriddin trying to turn the lack of attention on the civil war going on in Sudan into “why criticizing Israel’s actions is antisemitic”.  

First, I invite Ms. Kheiriddin to inspect the news - particularly North American sources, and consider how much coverage the Sudan war is getting.  If it wasn’t for BBC’s World Service, I wouldn’t even be aware of it, coverage here has been so sparse, but then again, there are numerous armed conflicts going on in various parts of Africa.  

But, Ms. Kheiriddin seems to think that we can’t “walk and chew bubble gum” at the same time.  Apparently, unless we’re condemning the horrors happening in Sudan just as loudly as what we see happening in Gaza, we must be criticizing Israel because it’s a Jewish state.  

This is utterly incorrect.  Most “left-leaning” people I see online are responding to what we are seeing Israel doing in Gaza because it is being covered in real-time in front of them, every time they look at the news.  What do they see in this coverage? Civilians being forcibly displaced by a vastly larger military force, homes and livelihoods being bombed out of existence from the air, and Israeli politicians making statements like “clearing out Gaza is the solution” - which sounds like something between ethnic cleansing (see Rwanda), and Hitler’s “final solution” (yeah, I said it - sue me - we’ll come back to this point in a minute).

You will find that most “leftists” who are criticizing Israel’s actions in Gaza are doing so through the lens of “the State is not its people”.  In other words, Israel’s politicians and political government are accountable for their actions quite apart from the people.  Just as Hamas is an organization and exists as a separate entity from the civilians of Gaza, the STATE of Israel is not “the Jewish People” per se.  That distinction is important, because it separates the civilians from the belligerents in conflict. 

Is it “anti-Semitic” to criticize Israel’s actions in Gaza?  If the narrative was being framed in terms of ethnic and religious identity, perhaps it would be.  However, most writers I see, myself included are talking about the actions of the state and its politicians.  For example, does the fact of Netanyahu being Jewish exempt him from criticism for engaging in a cynical political game of condemning Hamas on one hand, while feeding it on the other?  I would argue that has nothing whatsoever to do with his being Jewish, and just makes him one more cynical politician willing to play any game as long as it gains him political advantage at the polls. 

More to the point, the construct of antiSemitism is built around the idea that discrimination based on someone being Jewish is wrong.  It is not a blanket exemption that anything done by someone who is Jewish from criticism of any sort.  Even if we broadly agree that Israel is a “Jewish State”, that is no blanket exemption from criticism when that state chooses to act in ways that are unacceptable.

This is no different than the clear statement that Hamas isn’t beyond reproach simply because it is Palestinian (I think the world has been clear about that).

Now, I’m going to come back to my earlier statement about ethnic cleansing in Gaza.  I was not joking when I said it echoed the language of Hitler’s “Final Solution”.  Consider the following from a former Israeli defence minister: 

Combined with Israeli government documents that have been published in numerous other places, it’s pretty hard to ignore the eliminationist tone of these statements.  It’s just as difficult to ignore the similarities to Hitler’s “Final Solution”, especially when the tactics of the IDF have clearly been designed to push the 2.5 million inhabitants of Gaza towards the border with Israel.  

Is it “antiSemitic” to say this?  I suppose that those who connect their identities to the very idea of the state of Israel might argue that it is.  I draw a different line, because the State can never be held up as exempt from the norms of international law and convention.  A state that engages in collective punishment, or ethnic cleansing, must be held accountable, regardless of matters of faith, ethnicity, or even long standing historical horrors like the holocaust.

Ms. Kheiriddin is engaging in the most scandalous of rhetorical tactics - she is using unrelated events to deflect criticism away from the situation in Gaza, and to then insulate the State of Israel from criticism by labelling its critics as antiSemitic.  The intellectual dishonesty of that sleight of hand is beyond stunning. 

How Did You Think Gazans Would Respond?

The dispute between Israel and the Palestinian people has been in and out of the news cycle my entire life. For years, the narrative in the news has been very much around “terrorism”, with the Palestinians being broadly characterized as the perpetrators of terrorism.

There is no question that in terms of military capability, Israel is the 500lb gorilla here.  They have one of the most impressive militaries on the planet, and for good reasons. The creation of Israel out of the end of the European colonial empires wasn’t exactly greeted with good wishes by its neighbours.

However, people seem genuinely shocked when Israel puts on display what is clearly the contents of a weapons cache.  Let’s talk about how Israel has treated Gaza, and Palestinians since Netanyahu came onto the political scene (which, mysteriously, isn’t far off when Hamas took political control of Gaza).

About That Hospital in Gaza

There’s been a lot of discussion back and forth about the explosion at Al-Ahli Hospital in Gaza.  Hamas claims it was an Israeli bomb or missile attack, Israel claims it’s the result of a failed rocket launched from within Gaza. 

I have thoughts about this.  Certainly, I agree that the site does not look like a typical high explosive device went off.  That is a point that leans away from the standard bombs that Israel has been using.  

The Israeli claim is that the rocket failed, sprayed fuel around which subsequently caught fire after something at or near ground level exploded.  The part about this that doesn’t add up entirely for me with this is twofold: 

1). The alleged rocket appears to have failed at a fairly high altitude, and if it exploded, there should be evidence of  both fuel and rocket debris in the vicinity.  That hasn’t been identified yet. 

2). IF the rocket’s fuel canisters had managed to fall to the ground, and exploded there, that might explain the smaller crater at the site, but where’s the bits of the canister?  

3). The cars - the cars really bother me here.  The pictures I’ve seen show cars that clearly were subjected to intense heat - not the kind of heat that you see when a car catches fire and causes the one adjacent to burn as well.  Assuming that the Gaza rockets use something like Hydrogen Peroxide as a fuel (it’s relatively easily made, and burns plenty hot), I’m not sure that a fuel load would result in a strong enough fire to do what has been observed.  

*For clarity - I am not an explosives or rocket expert, so I will concede that it seems possible that it could have been a failed rocket.

My concern with the failed rocket scenario is it seems just a little too pat, and too specific.  It’s the kind of specificity that I would expect with an actual forensic report of the site itself, and yet Israel trotted it out within hours. 

It also seems that the world is ignoring another line of explanation:  The use of a Thermobaric Weapon.  Those devices are designed to produce exactly the kind of effect that we see at the hospital, and they’re intended to explode above ground level as a rule.  According to Wikipedia (perhaps not the most reliable source), Israel is rumoured to have had these weapons since about 1990, and they could easily have bought them from the US as well.  

Dropping a moderate sized thermobaric weapon in the courtyard of the hospital would produce a considerable amount of damage, and more specifically could explain the damage to the cars, which were clearly subjected to an intense blast of fire.  Further, thermobaric munitions can be delivered in a variety of ways, ranging from aircraft to traditional ground based artillery.  

Even here, we need to go through the site and find any pieces of whatever container held the explosive.  That requires a far more detailed forensic analysis than is likely possible in the heat of active warfare, but it seems necessary.  Both parties in this conflict have too many reasons to assign blame to the other side to be credible. 

[Update Oct 22, 2023]:  Independent reviews by people with more knowledge than I do are lining up on the “errant rocket” hypothesis.  Although I remain somewhat skeptical of that explanation, I have no compelling evidence to the contrary. 

Quick, Call Lucifer!

We need a temperature check in Hell ... someone in the Vatican said something I agree with:

Cardinal Renato Martino, president of the Vatican's Council for Justice and Peace, made his comments in an interview in the Italian online newspaper Il Sussidiario.net.

"Defenceless populations are always the ones who pay. Look at the conditions in Gaza: more and more, it resembles a big concentration camp", Martino, whose informal title is Vatican "justice minister", was quoted as saying.

More On Israel's Invasion of the Gaza

Apparently, in the minds of the right-wing-o-sphere, the right to defend yourself is unbounded where Israel is concerned. These people sit around scratching their heads, wondering why Israel is on the receiving end of such harsh criticism.

Well, bombing schools is a pretty good start for an offensive that is "not targeting civilians".

Of course, we can't ignore the fact that Israel keeps the Gaza - and other Palestinian lands - under lock-and-key. Borders are closed, the regions are fenced in and so on - effectively making the Palestinian territories open air prisons. You think that might just breed a little animosity both within the territories, as well as outside?

Now, Israel's all outraged over the fact that the denizens of the Gaza (and other territories, no doubt) are building tunnels to subvert the blockades - and are busily trying to destroy those too.

This will accomplish nothing. Israel will bomb the area back into the stone age, and the Palestinians will continue to smuggle in bombs, rocket making materials and so on. The violence will continue because both sides are party to the cycle they have created.

Sadly, Canada's current government seems to be blind to this reality, blaming Hamas for bombs that Israel dropped. (It strikes me that this is a little like blaming the wife when her husband beats her within an inch of her life)

When the Israelis and the Palestinians come to the negotiating table as equals, then and only then, will there be any meaningful progress. That means significant political change has to take place on both sides. Just as Hamas (or whoever the group du jour is) needs to replace bombs and rockets with diplomacy, Israel needs to do the same.

Peace will never be achieved as long as the language is that of occupier/occupied, and the instruments of communication are bombs.