Israel’s Supporters Try to Come to Terms With the Killing of Children in Gaza
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Version 0 of 1. While the precise number of civilians killed in Israel’s monthlong bombardment of Gaza is once again the subject of a debate, outrage over the hundreds of Palestinian children killed has been expressed by partisans on both sides of the conflict. The two sides differ sharply, however, over the question of who is ultimately to blame for the Israeli strikes that killed, according to a count from Unicef, 400 children and wounded over 2,500 more. For supporters of the Palestinian cause — as well as senior United Nations officials and some foreign correspondents who observed the carnage at close range — Israel’s military bears responsibility for firing shells and missiles that took so many young lives. But many Israelis and their supporters abroad, forced to grapple with the moral implications of backing a military campaign against guerrilla fighters embedded in a densely populated area, have embraced the rationale offered by Israel’s government that Islamist militants are guilty of provoking the carnage by launching missiles from residential neighborhoods. “Every civilian casualty is a tragedy, a tragedy of Hamas’s own making,” Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu told reporters on Wednesday. He did not address the objection, raised by some of his critics, that Israel’s own military command center is close to a Tel Aviv hospital. Not all Israel’s supporters agree. “A provocation does not relieve one of accountability for how one responds to it,” Leon Wieseltier, the literary editor of The New Republic, wrote on Wednesday, echoing an argument made last month by the Palestinian-American legal scholar George Bisharat. “For this reason,” Mr. Wieseltier added, “the war has filled me with disquiet, which my sympathetic understanding of Israel’s position has failed to stifle.” Mr. Wieseltier then reminded his readers that “On the Slaughter,” a poetic meditation on a bloody pogrom in czarist Russia cited by Israel’s prime minister last month after the killing of three Jewish teenagers by Islamist militants, argued explicitly that the the killing of children was an unfathomable outrage. “After all, even Satan has not yet devised the proper vengeance for the death of a child,” he wrote, paraphrasing the Hebrew poet Hayim Nahman Bialik. “I have been surprised by the magnitude of the indifference in the Jewish world to the human costs of Israel’s defense against the missiles and the tunnels,” Mr. Wieseltier wrote. “Some of the emails I have received have been lunatic in their lack of compassion. According to a poll by the Israel Democracy Institute, 95 percent of Jewish Israelis believe the war in Gaza is just. It is easy to see why: Self-defense is also a moral duty. But only 4 percent believe that the Israeli military has used excessive force. This makes me queasy.” Asked to explain how an offensive that has claimed so many lives is nonetheless supported in Israel, Eva Illouz, a professor of sociology at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, told the German magazine Der Spiegel: “Israelis have a strong sense of their own moral superiority. ‘We ask people to get out of their houses; we call them on the phone to make sure civilians are evacuated. We behave humanly,’ the Israeli thinks. An army with good manners.” Most of her fellow citizens, Ms. Illouz added, “judge by the intention, whereas the world judges by the consequences.” Others, including the Nobel peace laureate Elie Wiesel, have attempted to draw a bright line between Israel’s conduct and that of Hamas and other militant groups who stand accused of using Gaza’s children as “human shields.” In an essay printed this week in the pages of major American newspapers, including The New York Times, as a paid advertisement, Mr. Wiesel invoked the biblical story of Abraham and Isaac to accuse the Islamist fighters of practicing a form of “child sacrifice.” Though that faith-based advertising campaign, paid for by Rabbi Shmuley Boteach’s Values Network, was endorsed by Israel’s foreign ministry, even some supporters of the military campaign remain unconvinced by the argument that Israel is free of blame for the death of Gaza’s children. David Landau, a former editor of the left-leaning Israeli daily Haaretz, who supported a ground invasion of Gaza, argued forcefully that the inevitable killing of civilians in aerial bombardment made that part of the operation a violation of a principle of Halakha, or Jewish religious law. Specifically, he said, there is a “ruling based on the Talmud,” which holds “that the defense of ‘something unintended’ does not apply in cases where a sinful outcome is inevitable.” Referring to a Jewish moral tale about a farmer who chopped off the head of a chicken not to kill it but to give his child something to play with, Mr. Landau wrote: “Like the lopped chicken’s head, there is no defense of no intent when the unintended offense is inevitable. The record shows the death and wounding of noncombatants as virtually inevitable in the bombing of the crowded Gaza Strip.” The Israeli government’s accusation that Islamist militants knowingly used Gaza’s civilians as shields has been disputed by Palestinians. Noura Erakat, a Palestinian-American legal scholar at George Mason University, insisted in a televised debate with Amos Guiora, an Israeli-American professor of law at the University of Utah, that there was simply no evidence for that contention. Ms. Erakat has also argued that “Israel does not have the right to self-defense in international law against occupied Palestinian territory.” (Israel’s argument that it no longer occupies the Gaza Strip has been dismissed by some scholars like Lisa Hajjar of the University of California, who has called it “a self-generated ‘license to kill.'”) Still, the accusation that Hamas used children as shields has become so widely accepted by many supporters of Israel that it has given rise to crude speculation, like the conspiracy theory that four boys killed on a Gaza beach last month by Israeli shelling were sent to their deaths by ruthless militants hoping to tarnish Israel’s reputation. In an interview on Israeli television last week that was shared by Israel’s defenders, the American comedian Joan Rivers repeated that unsubstantiated claim. The day after Ms. Rivers’s interview, an Australian editorial cartoon depicted a militant putting a child in danger for the benefit of public relations. The bombing campaign and the indelible images of dead children have alienated some otherwise staunch defenders of Israel. Louise Mensch, a conservative British politician with a large Twitter following and a track record of support for Israel, was so distressed by the conduct of the Gaza campaign that she lambasted the Israeli government last weekend. Ms. Mensch, whose husband is Jewish, even suggested that Mr. Netanyahu — who told CNN that Hamas had baited Israel into killing civilians to “use telegenically dead Palestinians for their cause” — should undertake a closer study of his faith’s ethical teachings if he felt no responsibility for children killed by Israeli shelling as they played hide-and-seek on a beach. |