The Perfidy of Justice
In his assault on Gaza, Netanyahu employed an ingenious tactic. He called it war. Had he called it slaughter, the world might have intervened. But he tricked us. He called it war, and we’ve been discussing it ever since.
Wars are allowed, after all, commonplace even. As Hugo Grotius1 soberly observed, war was the only way to get some things done. Grotius, nevertheless, championed a world where states did not rule by warring but submitted to laws all agreed to enforce. His work contributed to the first peace settlement of modern times — the Peace of Westphalia in 1648, which ended the Thirty Years’ War, subduing the troubled Holy Roman Empire. But war continued, erupting and raging unslaked, and so have our discussions of it.
Those discussions were not idle. The Peace of Westphalia itself was a product of talk, lots of it. From our more recent discussions, we have been able to lay on the table the Lieber Code, the Hague Conventions, the Geneva Conventions, meticulously crafted documents prescribing how war is to be conducted vis-a-vis combatants and noncombatants alike. Such careful work might stir hope until we reflect that those agreements represent the limits of what peacekeepers can do: observe, protest, issue sanctions, perhaps publish resolutions against belligerents.
As we head into the sixth month of Netanyahu’s war, we would be justified in asking how its discussions have progressed. With difficulty, would be the answer. Our ability to monitor the conflict has been hampered by severely limited sources of information. Getting reliable reports out of a conflict zone is hazardous in any case, and those trying to get it out of Gaza — Palestinian journalists and media workers — have been falling at an alarming rate. Of the news that does reach us, one is obliged to ferret out the insidious instances of misinformation meant to manipulate world opinion.
The horror of the assault lay not just in its brutality, but its target — a historically traumatized people who came to Israel to live in security, but whose wounds Israel did not permit to heal.
However, certain things no one questions. For example, Netanyahu declared war against Hamas in self-defense, which is okay. Article 51 of the United Nations Charter permits “individual or collective self-defense if an armed attack occurs” against a member state. Israel is a UN member, and all the world knows Hamas attacked Israel October 7, 2023. The horror of the assault lay not just in its brutality, but its target — a historically traumatized people who came to Israel to live in security, but whose wounds Israel did not permit to heal.2
In prosecuting his war, Netanyahu promptly regained control of the Israel territory infiltrated by the enemy, liquidating most if not all of the 3,000 attacking militants, and followed up with a bombardment, then ground invasion of the crate those attackers had broken out of, Gaza.
It was relentless self-defense, for sure: Gaza reduced to rubble, the toll in civilian lives over 30,000 and rising, the suffering and trauma incalculable. Yet Netanyahu’s onslaught continued unabated, forcing us to ask some crazy questions: Is it war to shell an unarmed population enclosed within a compound? Is knocking out all the hospitals and universities self-defense? Is starving civilians allowed? What happened to Hamas? Wasn’t he supposed to be attacking them?
Exactly what he was doing, Netanyahu retorted. A fiend so execrable as to use the entire Gazan population as human shields, Hamas was not fighting — as they pretended to be — for Palestinian self-determination and a return to their land. No! They are terrorists bent on destroying Israel and, while waiting for their chance, have retreated to Gaza where they’ve burrowed under hospitals, cower in universities, hunker down in fourth-floor apartments. But they cannot escape Netanyahu. No! He will lay waste those hospitals, raze those universities, hit those apartment houses, and, yes, shatter those human shields if that’s what it takes to eliminate Hamas.
And so Netanyahu has done. The hospitals, universities, cultural centers, mosques, and neighborhoods now lie in ruins; indiscriminate, prodigal civilian deaths have raised questions of genocide; but Hamas hasn’t been extinguished. Vowing not to stop until they are, Netanyahu is proceeding to demolish what’s left of that shabby compound and disappear every demon soul trapped inside, one way or another. Only with life there expunged can Israel be assured of peace, of security.
The very excess of Netanyahu’s destruction betrays his mission as the obsession of a paranoid, or a trickster.
The very excess of Netanyahu’s destruction betrays his mission as the obsession of a paranoid, or a trickster. In feigned concern for the Israeli hostages Hamas took, Netanyahu holds hostage the entire population confined within the Gaza Strip, snuffing out their lives, day by day, bomb by bomb — by the dozens, by the hundreds, by the thousands — to induce Hamas to give itself up in order to be annihilated by Netanyahu, an act against the UN Charter, by the way. Should Hamas give itself up, its members immediately become noncombatants protected by the Geneva Convention. Which is why Netanyahu doesn’t want them surrendering. Combatants they must remain so he can wipe them out legally. In pursuit of that, he justifies knocking out every human shield protecting them. Yes, removal of the Palestinians is on Netanyahu’s secret agenda, he just needn’t say so because he has so cleverly declared war on Hamas, and Hamas has so obligingly sought refuge in Gaza. Because there is another aspect of Netanyahu’s self-defense no one questions: Israel has always wanted Palestine — all of it — for itself and correctly sees Palestinians as a threat to that acquisition, hence a threat to Israel’s existence, because, embarrassing as the fact may be, the land Israel covets is Palestinian.
Witnessing Netanyahu’s tragic exercise in self-defense has delivered to the world a startling lesson: Forget self-defense, abandon justice. Those highest of civic values are perfidious illusion, their achievement beyond reach of mere mortals because we cannot answer the single necessary question: Who started it all? Rather, we must apply ourselves to what we can do: The talks must go on, with peace, not justice, our goal.
- Hugo Grotius was a 17th century Dutch jurist, humanist, and author of The Rights of War and Peace. ↩︎
- The Chris Hedges Report with Rabbi Shaul Magid on Zionism and the Subversion of Judaism. 22:28—24:12. ↩︎