On Oct. 7, Hamas inflicted a devastating trauma upon the Israeli people. The unconscionable attack involved the cold-blooded murder, decapitation, and butchering of more than 1,400 people, the vast majority of whom were ordinary civilians. The rampage targeted toddlers and the elderly alike. The Israeli military says it has evidence that some of the victims were raped, and footage from body cams suggests that many were set on fire.
To prolong the nightmare, more than 230 Israelis were taken captive and then dragged back into Gaza by their attackers, including 20 children, some as young as six months old, where all but four of them remain as hostages. The fear and trauma that must be consuming them, particularly the children and mothers amongst their number, is almost too dreadful to contemplate.
These acts, which shock the conscience, were perpetrated in a systematic way against non-combatants. It is precisely because of the recognition that waging war on Israeli civilians is so terrible that many voices are now raised against Israel's retaliation. If the unjustified killing of innocents is wrong somewhere, it is wrong everywhere.
This recognition is not anti-Israel or pro-Hamas. It emerges from our shared humanity. It is also the central impulse behind the international human rights law and the international humanitarian law upon which the U.S.-led global order was founded, after the wreckage of World War II.
Israeli leaders appear confused and punch-drunk by the international groundswell of opposition to the siege and bombardment of Gaza.
But while the world only learned of Hamas' attack after it was effectively over (apart from the horrific ordeal of the hostages), Israel's destruction is happening now, in real time, over an extended period, therefore something can be done to stop it.
The devastating shape of the military campaign was in fact presaged by various Israeli officials, with dehumanizing language woven through the threats, demonstrating clear intent to cause maximal harm to ordinary Palestinians. This is morally and legally illegitimate. Under international law only wars of self-defence (or those under the provisions of the UN Charter) are justified. It should therefore go without saying that the laws of war and rules of engagement continue to apply in wars of self-defence—that's the whole point—otherwise those laws would apply to no wars at all.
Israel's siege of Gaza is being prosecuted with active and overt support from the West. Several governments have offered up weapons, military support, and diplomatic cover, and reflexively adopted Israeli talking points. It is legitimate for citizens to interrogate the moral and strategic wisdom of this support, and at the very least to demand equal expressions of compassion for both civilian populations enmeshed in the carnage.
Moreover, whereas Hamas is an isolated and outlawed militant group, Israel is both a democracy and a major non-NATO ally of the United States, receiving more U.S. military aid than any other nation since World War II and laying claim to deeply held shared values with the West. That special status comes with preferential rights—but also with clear responsibilities, including holding oneself to standards which are orders of magnitude higher than those of terrorists, and an understanding that what is at stake is the credibility of democracy itself.
The threat to life to children in Gaza is urgent and extreme. Hundreds of children are foreseeably killed with each passing day of Israel's campaign. The deaths of these young souls is foreseeable for three reasons: because half the population of Gaza are children; because in multiple previous bombing campaigns one in four fatalities were children; and because the child casualty rate of the current campaign is widely reported. There comes a point where the very inevitability and predictability of these deaths collapses the moral distinction between "foreseen" and "intended." If Israeli children were being harmed in this way, there would be an identical global outcry.
Any search for a solution to this crisis inevitably arrives at its strategic context, which is deeply uncomfortable for the Israeli government. Under international law, Israel is the occupying power of Palestinian territory in the West Bank, East Jerusalem and Gaza. No accusations of anti-Semitism or of pro-Hamas bias can scrub out this basic reality. If the tables were turned and Palestine were the occupier, the Palestinians would be implored to stop bombing the homes, schools, houses of worship and evacuation zones of a captive and impoverished population. They would be urged to revive a political pathway for ending the occupation so that all can live in peace and with dignity. And so that extremists in Palestine, Israel and beyond can be marginalised and frozen out.
The very same moral instincts that underwrite the unequivocal condemnation of Hamas lead to criticism of the overwhelming and disproportionate Israeli response in Gaza. Humanity does not operate with the logic of a zero-sum game. It is not picking sides to uphold the equal worth of Palestinians lives to Israeli ones. As the United States learned too late after 9/11, these moments of crisis are a stress test of our most essential civilisational values, and the world is watching. It should not be subversive to mourn the deaths of innocents, and to demand an end to the horrors.
Dr Alia Brahimi is a Nonresident Senior Fellow within the Atlantic Council's Middle East Programs and the author of Jihad and Just War in the War on Terror (OUP)
The views expressed in this article are the writer's own.
Uncommon Knowledge
Newsweek is committed to challenging conventional wisdom and finding connections in the search for common ground.
Newsweek is committed to challenging conventional wisdom and finding connections in the search for common ground.
