Benjamin Wittes edits Lawfare for the Brookings Institution. In the context of exploring Strategy, Law, and Morality in Israel’s Gaza Operation he has written a cogent description of the two societies at war in that benighted corner of the world which captures what Americans don't often know and perhaps are newly learning.
With the possible exception of the Demilitarized Zone in the Korean peninsula, there is no geographic line in the world across which life changes more dramatically over a shorter distance than the border of Israel and the Gaza Strip.
On one side of the line, the per-capita gross domestic product is $55,000 per year, according to the International Monetary Fund—just over two-thirds that of the United States. The population density is low. While Israel itself packs a lot of people into a small area, in general, the region surrounding the Gaza border lies outside of the sprawl that runs up and down the coastal plain and between Tel Aviv and Jerusalem. It is dotted with small agricultural villages. The only major city in the region, Ashkelon, is 13 kilometers away and has fewer than 150,000 people—with closer-by Sderot having only about a fifth that many people.
On this side of the line, governance is the province of a modern, highly functional state, overseen by an elected government. Infrastructure is modern. Social services are highly developed. The sovereignty of that state, while controversial in academic circles worldwide and still unrecognized by a number of regional actors, is firmly established and increasingly recognized by the other states in the region. The lingua franca on this side of the line is Hebrew, but depending on precisely where along the border and how far from it you are, the street language for many people may also be Arabic, Russian, or English.
Cross over into Gaza—and, the proximity being what it is, Israeli villages extend right up to the line—and everything changes. The per-capita income plummets by more than 97 percent to around $1,250 per year, according to the World Bank. Worldwide, only wealthy city-states like Monaco and Singapore and jurisdictions like Hong Kong and Macau exceed Gaza’s population density; more than 2 million people are crammed into an area roughly twice the size of Washington, D.C. Gaza’s infrastructure is a disaster, with drinkable water and electricity alike both scarce, and food insecurity widespread. Government social services are virtually nonexistent. The deprivation is fueled, in part, by a long, partial blockade of the territory maintained by both Israel and Egypt.
San Francisco cease fire demonstration
The territory is ruled by Hamas, a fundamentalist militia that both the United States and the European Union consider a terrorist organization, which won a legislative election in 2006 and seized executive power in a kind of coup the following year. Hamas’s military infrastructure is deeply embedded within the civilian population with both command centers located in civilian buildings and weapons caches and launch sites based in or near civilian institutions or residences. Sovereignty, however, is undetermined. Israel, which was the occupying power until 2005, makes no sovereign claims over Gaza. Neither does Egypt, which occupied the strip from the time of Israel’s founding until 1967. The Palestinian Authority has never declared a Palestinian state and doesn’t control the territory in any event. And Hamas has not declared itself a sovereign entity either. The spoken language on this side of the line is almost uniformly Arabic. Roughly half of the population is under 18.
I draw this picture of contrast neither to assign blame for the shocking disparity in living conditions evident in the descriptions (there’s enough blame to go around), nor to complain on behalf of Palestinians about their comparative misfortune (though complaint is certainly justified), nor to triumph on behalf of Israelis at their comparative windfall (though the accomplishments of the Israeli state are nothing to sneeze at).
Wittes continues to discuss both legal and moral implications of Israel's bombing and apparent impending invasion of the Gaza territory. They say they aim to eradicate Hamas in response to the atrocities of 10/7. He asks, can Israel mount an assault that is more than collective punishment, largely of the innocent, more than a reprisal for evil done that itself is evil in return?
You can read his argument yourself. It's very clear. I was most struck by this:
... as I see it anyway, to wage this conflict even in self-defense without a coherent strategy is morally dicey. It is not, to be clear, a war crime. There is no principle of the law of armed conflict that makes it a crime to respond flailingly and without a well-thought-through strategy to an armed attack.
Yet when a lot of civilians (many of them children) are going to die in a conflict, that fact imparts a certain responsibility to think things through carefully—and specifically to think through the question of how things are going to be better at the end of the conflict than they are now. This same point, by the way, flows from the fact that a lot of Israeli soldiers—for whose lives the Israeli government is more directly accountable—are also going to die. Without a strategy, a sound, well-thought-through strategy, the operation is really just a giant reprisal attack.
... if Israel is not operating pursuant to clear objectives that warrant the cost it is exacting, that is a grave moral problem irrespective of whether the individual strikes are lawful. And it’s a problem that Israel needs to rectify immediately.
Israel's backers, especially the Biden administration, need to be saying this loud and clear.
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After all, the United State, to our sorrow, knows what a war without definable ends looks like. We made exactly that in Afghanistan for 20 years and left, bloodied, without having accomplished anything except spreading misery and a lot of dead Afghans.
Today's New York Times includes a heart-rending account (gift article) by a U.S. Marine veteran sniper turned journalist who got to ride along with a Ukrainian sniper team trying to kill Russian soldiers.
“I don’t want to kill, but I have to — I’ve seen what they’ve done,” Raptor [Ukrainian sniper's nom de guerre] went on, his own moral and martial purpose linked to the atrocities Russian forces had committed throughout the war. For Raptor, the reason for pulling the trigger was clear. For me and my comrades, all these years later, the reason we chose to kill can continue to elude us.
We found ourselves in the middle of some poorly thought-out counterinsurgency strategy, propping up a corrupt government that collapsed almost as soon as the United States left. We were protecting each other. That became a binding ideology, all the clarity we could summon in the puzzle our politicians in Washington handed us. We stumbled through exhausted, mouthing our lines, until our tours ended and we were discharged.
When Israel's Gaza response concludes -- which it must someday -- will justified rage at Hamas atrocities turn to further moral injury to Israel and the supportive world as well as material injury and death to unfortunate Gazans?
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