Say war crimes

As a (half) Jewish American, I can’t help but feel Israel is slaughtering Palestinians in my name. So I wail at the Facebook wall, inveighing against Israel’s war crimes. Invariably, someone responds by pointing out how terrible Hamas is. Yes, and?

Israel may have declared war on Hamas, but it is civilians Israel is murdering and maiming by the tens of thousands. With Israel’s atrocities on daily display, the impulse to blame Hamas for them is just knee-jerk tribalism.

Even staunch Israeli apologists are disquieted by the Palestinian body count. Yet it takes strong forces of experience, and even stronger forces of reason, to realign one’s allegiances and transgress against the tribe. So these apologists sublimate their discomfiture by lamenting, vaguely, the terrible suffering in Gaza–stopping short of blaming Israel for its own heinous acts.

Hamas’ depravity notwithstanding, it should not pain decent people to condemn Israel’s own barbarism. This is a no-brainer for myriad experts on human rights law, including at the UN and the US State Department. Anyone who has difficulty acknowledging Israel’s war crimes needs to examine their own tribalism and prejudice.

If you or your loved ones were forced out of your homes to scramble up and down Gaza for refuge from Israel’s fusillades–and bombed and shot anyway while you fled or waited in line for food relief–you would not be mouthing platitudes in support of your attackers, like ‘war sucks,’ ‘civilians always take the brunt of it,’ ‘Hamas started it’ (a statement which elides decades of subjugation by Israel), and ‘Israel does not intentionally target civilians.’ (It absolutely does; plus, wantonly failing to protect civilians is tantamount to targeting them.)

Such utterances only serve to condone and perpetuate Israel’s savagery.

If Israel were the Middle East’s shining beacon of human rights, it would not be heaping collective punishment on Palestinians, any more than we would justify calling in airstrikes on a synagogue full of worshipper-hostages to kill a band of terrorists who shot their way into it.

If the US were such a standard-bearer of human rights, it would not be breaking its own rules to reward Israel with weapons to murder more Palestinian civilians. Amid this mayhem, Biden administration officials’ rote admonitions to Netanyahu to protect innocent lives is just nauseatingly enabling lipservice. That Hamas fighters embed among civilians does not give Israel license to obliterate Gaza to get at Hamas. Few Israel hawks would advocate leveling the locations where the remaining Israeli hostages are held to kill their captors.

Excerpted: ‘Israel vs. Itself: If You See War Crimes, Say War Crimes’. Courtesy: Counterpunch.org