Hamas
IDF admits killing 3 escaped Israeli hostages in Gaza
Yet more Israelis killed by so-called ‘friendly fire’ after mass deaths 7 October as hostages shot dead
Yotam Haim, one of three Israeli hostages murdered ‘in error’ by Israeli forces
The Israeli army has admitted shooting dead three Israeli hostages who had escaped captivity in Gaza, claiming soldiers ‘mistook’ them for a Hamas threat, prompting a furious reaction among Israeli families against the Netanyahu regime.
IDF spokesman Daniel Hagari claimed the IDF feels ‘deep regret’ over the deaths of Yotam Haim, Samer Talalka and an as-yet unnamed Israeli.
The deaths have been reported by some UK media – unlike the hundreds of Israeli victims now known to have been killed by so-called ‘friendly fire’ from tanks, helicopters, drones and troops during the 7 October Hamas raid, as IDF forces killed indiscriminately under the ‘Hannibal doctrine‘ to prevent hostage-taking.
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Video: IDF driver ‘slowed down to murder two children’ during West Bank refugee camp raid
Raid supposedly in pursuit of ‘terrorist’ pauses to shoot dead two young boys aged 15 and 8 in cold blood
Israeli soldiers slowed down their convoy so the driver of the lead vehicle could murder two young boys in cold blood as they played in the street after an IDF raid on the Jenin refugee camp in the occupied West Bank, according to witnesses. The clip was played today on Al Jazeera’s English broadcast:
Basil Abu al-Waf, 15, and 8-year-old Adam Samer al-Ghoul, were playing outside after the IDF raid finished, believing it was now safe – but were killed by a convoy of troops returning from the camp.
Basil’s father told Al Jazeera that the Al-Basateen neighbourhood where they were playing is ‘known as a very quiet area’. A horrific video of Adam’s shooting as he tried to run away, which took place at the end of November, went viral. Hamas does not operate in West Bank, but Israel has intensified its attacks on the Jenin refugee camp regardless.
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‘Israel is losing war’ says ex-Israeli adviser – as IDF ‘hides mass military casualties’
‘Considerable and unexplained gap’ between admitted casualties and hospital records of severely wounded soldiers at least double acknowledged number
Image: IDF
A former Israeli prime ministerial adviser has said that Israel is losing its war against Hamas – and hospital records suggest the Israeli government and military are hiding at least half of the number of Israeli soldiers killed and injured in Israel’s genocide in Gaza.
In an article for US site The Nation, Daniel Levy – who advised then-Israeli prime minister Ehud Barak – compares the situation in Gaza to the unwinnable US war in Vietnam, where unacceptable casualty levels among US soldiers meant the Viet Cong only had to survive to win, and writes:
It may sound daft to suggest that a group of armed irregulars, numbering in the low tens of thousands, besieged and with little access to advanced weaponry, is a match for one of the world’s most powerful militaries, backed and armed by the United States. And yet, an increasing number of establishment strategic analysts warn that Israel could lose this war on Palestinians despite the cataclysmic violence it unleashed
Levy also notes that the ‘delusion’ that Israel’s conduct did not contribute to the 7 October attack is being exposed and having serious consequences for Israel and its US backers:
the delusion that Israel was just another Western nation peacefully going about its business before it suffered an unprovoked attack on October 7—it’s a comforting fantasy to those who prefer to avoid recognizing a reality they’ve been complicit in creating.
And at the same time, US news site Breaking Point has highlighted studies by Israeli media of Israeli hospital data – and sudden reductions in the official casualty numbers posted on the IDF’s website – to conclude that the real casualty rate inflicted on IDF forces by Hamas’s guerilla tactics are at least twice as high as the Netanyahu government is admitted and that among the wounded there are high rates of severe injuries consistent with videos released by Hamas of grenade and rocket-propelled grenade ambushes on Israeli tanks and infantry:
Breaking Point considers that this high rate of attrition, and a lack of appetite among the Israeli public for casualties in the military, may be driving Israeli efforts to get the US to commit troops as a ‘peacekeeping’ force.
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Did Hamas Carry Out Mass Rapes On October 7?
Did Hamas really carry out a mass rape campaign of Israelis on October 7? That is the claim made by the Israeli government and by the likes of Hillary Clinton, who are asking the world to condemn a premeditated Hamas mass rape atrocity.
Important words by Hillary Clinton: “many women and girls were attacked brutally on October 7th. We must respond to weaponised sexual violence wherever it happens with absolute condemnation. There can be no justification and no excuses. Rape as a weapon of war is a crime against… pic.twitter.com/9AaIcyZRWh
— נריה קראוס Neria Kraus (@NeriaKraus) December 4, 2023
Almost immediately after the seven-day truce and prisoner swap between Hamas and Israel, out of which we heard testimonies that Palestinian women were being raped in Israeli jails, the claims of sexual violence against Israelis on October 7 resurfaced again.
While we should always take very seriously allegations of this sort and give women a fair hearing, there are no accusers, as Israel says all those women were killed, no estimate of roughly how many were raped, and no physical evidence. Major questions have been raised over the credibility of those making the allegations.
For instance, the head of the Israeli investigation commission supposed human rights expert Cochav Elkayam-Levy. Her background includes writing legal defenses for Israeli officials committing crimes against Palestinians, justifying the force-feeding torture method, and she just so happens to have direct connections to the Israeli Prime Minister’s Office.
Making things worse, Elkayam-Levy was caught sharing an image of a murdered Kurdish woman as alleged photographic proof of Palestinian crimes. She also relies on testimonies extracted by the Israeli Shin Bet, who are notorious for torture, making any admissions obtained under such conditions highly suspect. Another source she relies on is the testimonies of ZAKA rescue services, revealed to have been ironically created by “the Haredi Jeffrey Epstein” and serial rapist Yehuda Meshi-Zahav. Also brought to you by ZAKA were the “40 beheaded babies” and “Jewish babies found hanging from laundry lines” atrocity propaganda hoaxes.
The Israeli govt has published a new FAKE photo purporting to show a victim of rape by Hamas militants at the Nova music festival on October 7
The image predates 10/7 and likely shows a female Kurdish fighter killed in action whose corpse was defiled. They are described on a… https://t.co/4SLhLuyOnj pic.twitter.com/Q7Ts25RWVR
— Max Blumenthal (@MaxBlumenthal) November 15, 2023
A number of these Israeli claims, including one coming from an alleged member of Israel’s unit 669, feature significant inconsistencies from the facts established on the ground. Meanwhile, the main source for a BBC report on October 7 mass rapes was no other than politician May Golan, who became infamous after leading an anti-black rally in Tel Aviv, screaming, “I am proud to be a racist.”
BBC’s key voice here is May Golan, a Kahanist thug who led anti-Black race riots in Tel Aviv before she was appointed Israel’s Minister of Women’s Empowerment
“I’m proud to be a racist!” Golan declared at one fascist rally she led
Watch and ask, is this hooligan credible? https://t.co/lQEYY1ZKt8 pic.twitter.com/mKCsJ2J5E3
— Max Blumenthal (@MaxBlumenthal) December 5, 2023
In November, The Times of Israel admitted that no physical evidence was collected for rape, even as it repeated numerous accusations against Hamas. In fact, the allegations started on October 7 itself, before Israeli forces had even secured the areas where the said atrocities took place. On October 10, Joe Biden said that Israeli women were raped at a time when even the Israeli army said there was no evidence yet.
Israel’s commission, painted as trustworthy, has already drawn its conclusions before even taking any direct testimonies. Its response to criticism is that we should “believe all Israeli women,” which sounds great, yet most of the claims are coming from men.
So, until there’s a real independent fact-finding mission or tangible evidence presented, it’s impossible to tell if mass sexual violence did occur. Because if it did, it certainly is a war crime and must be condemned, just as the recent sexual violence against Palestinian women in Israeli prisons should.
Robert Inlakesh is a political analyst, journalist and documentary filmmaker currently based in London, UK. He has reported from and lived in the occupied Palestinian territories and hosts the show ‘Palestine Files’. Director of ‘Steal of the Century: Trump’s Palestine-Israel Catastrophe’. Follow him on Twitter @falasteen47
The post Did Hamas Carry Out Mass Rapes On October 7? appeared first on MintPress News.
US Congress passes resolution declaring anti-zionism is antisemitism
Anti-zionist Jews among millions declared antisemitic by anti-humanity US lawmakers
The US Congress – of which many members are heavily funded by pro-Israel lobby groups – has passed House Resolution 894 ‘firmly’ stating ‘that anti-Zionism is antisemitism’. The House used as its excuse a supposed ‘drastic rise in antisemitism’ since the 7 October Hamas kibbutz raise – despite the fact that race-based violence since the raid has consisted of attacks on Muslims, including the shooting of three Palestinian-American friends that left one of them permanently paralysed.
The resolution was led by Republican members, but the Democrats were also guilty: the vote passed by 311 votes to just 14 – with 95 Democrats voting for the resolution and 92 ‘abstaining by voting present’. Only thirteen Democrats voted against it.
The motion had been promoted by a number of US pro-Israel pressure and funding groups.
Antizionist Jewish group Jewish Voice for Peace Action described the anti-democratic resolution as dangerous:
Falsely stating that anti-Zionism is antisemitism conflates all Jews with the Israeli state and endangers our communities. It fuels deadly violence and censorship campaigns against Palestinians,
The resolution’s conflation of Jewishness and Zionism – which is a political ideology – has also rightly been condemned as deeply dangerous.
The vote came as Israel continued its slaughter of Palestinian civilians, with bombing of southern Gaza – where the apartheid occupation regime ordered residents of northern Gaza to flee – perpetrated daily.
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Dying to Be Free: Releasing Palestinian Captives is Not a Numbers Game
There is a reason why Palestinians are keen on releasing their prisoners, despite the heavy price they continue to pay for their freedom.
It may seem rational to ask the question: what is the point of releasing a few Palestinian detainees from Israeli prisons if the price of doing so is the death of over 15,000 Palestinians in Gaza?
Even if all Palestinian prisoners – numbering about 7,000 – are released, they would not even amount to 30 percent of the total number of Palestinian dead and missing so far in the ongoing Israeli genocide in the Strip.
The logic may sound even more puzzling when we consider that, between October 7 and November 28, Israel detained over 3,290 Palestinians in the West Bank and Occupied East Jerusalem.
Namely, the number of Palestinian women and children detainees released – following several prisoner swaps between Palestinian Resistance and the Israeli army in the period between November 24 and November 30 – is insignificant compared to those who were detained during the same period.
But mathematical equations are irrelevant in liberation wars. If we resort to this kind of logic, then perhaps it is more rational for colonized nations and oppressed groups not to resist in the first place because doing so could multiply the harm inflicted upon them by their colonizers and oppressors.
While Israelis see their captives, whether civilians or military, held in Gaza in terms of numbers, Palestinians approach the issue from an entirely different perspective.
All Palestinians are captives, according to the reality on the ground, because all Palestinians are victims of Israeli colonialism, military occupation and apartheid. The difference between being a prisoner in Megiddo, Ofer, or Ramleh prison, for example, and being a prisoner in an isolated, walled-off Palestinian town under Israeli military Occupation in Area C in the West Bank is rather technical.
True, those in Megiddo are subjected to more violence and torture. They are denied proper food, medicine, and the freedom to move about. But how is that fundamentally different from the incarceration of 2.3 million people living in Gaza now?
Some would even argue that living in Gaza during a time of genocide is more confining and far less safe than being a political prisoner in Israel under ‘normal’ circumstances.
So clearly, the issue is not related to numbers but to power relations.
Under international law, Israel is the Occupying Power. This entitles Israel to certain rights per, for example, the Fourth Geneva Convention and numerous responsibilities. For decades, Israel has abused those ‘rights’ and completely ignored all its obligations. Over the same period, Palestinians have appealed to – even implored – the international community to enforce international law on Israel, unsuccessfully.
This was illustrated in the pitiful display by Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas during a speech at the United Nations General Assembly on May 15. “Protect us,” he said repeatedly before making an analogy between Palestinians and animals. “Aren’t we human beings? Even animals should be protected. If you have an animal, won’t you protect it? Protect us!”
Most Palestinians know well that the US, West-dominated international institutions will not protect Palestinians based on any moral rationale or even their love for animals.
This realization dawned on Palestinians generations ago when the international community failed to enforce a single UN resolution on Israel. Regarding the ongoing Gaza genocide, it proved particularly irrelevant to the extent that UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres pronounced it outright when he said on November 8 that the UN has neither “money nor power” to prevent genocide in Gaza.
Guterres and other top UN officials must be aware of the marginal role that the international community can play in the Israeli war on Gaza because of the strong US stance in support of Israel. As long as Washington continues to serve the role of the vanguard of Israeli war crimes in Palestine, Tel Aviv has no reason to stop.
So, Palestinians do what every other occupied, colonized people did in this situation. They resist. Through their resistance, they hope to introduce a new factor to a long-skewed equation primarily controlled by Israel and its Western allies.
By releasing their prisoners as a direct result of their resistance, Palestinians are, therefore, able to influence outcomes. It means that they are political agents, in fact, political actors who can redefine the game’s rules altogether.
Indeed, Palestinians approach the issue of prisoners as part of a more extensive campaign of liberation struggle. Those who can free 100 or 7,000 detainees would, then, set a historical precedent that would, eventually, allow them to release the whole Palestinian people.
Israel is fully aware of the power and representation of the prisoners’ issue because Israel imprisons Palestinians as an expression of power and control over every aspect of Palestinian lives. Though some of the Palestinian detainees are considered, in the eyes of Israel, ‘security prisoners’, many were detained for social media posts, for WhatsApp status, or for no reason at all.
Many Palestinian women were detained for visiting the families of other prisoners or for mourning the deaths of Palestinian youths killed by Israel. Israel detained these women for the same reason that far-right National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir had outlawed the rights of Palestinians to celebrate their children’s freedom.
Specifically, Israel wants to control every aspect of Palestinian lives – their actions, real or symbolic, but even their anger, their joy and all other emotions.
When Palestinians are released through prisoner exchanges, they emerge, proudly and with heads held high, from Israeli dungeons despite the numerous obstacles, restrictions, and Israel’s insistence on keeping all Palestinian captives. For Palestinians, this is an unparalleled victory.
So, no, this is not a numbers game. Though every Palestinian individual matters, whether those being killed in Gaza or those held captive in Israeli prisons, for Palestinians, all issues are linked to one single project called liberation.
It is for this coveted collective freedom that Palestinians have fought, generation after generation, despite the high cost of death, imprisonment, and perpetual captivity.
Feature photo | A man is detained during an Israeli military operation in the Palestinian village of Safa, near the Jewish settlement of Bat Ayin. Nasser Shiyoukhi | AP
Dr. Ramzy Baroud is a journalist, author and the Editor of The Palestine Chronicle. He is the author of six books. His latest book, co-edited with Ilan Pappé, is ‘Our Vision for Liberation: Engaged Palestinian Leaders and Intellectuals Speak Out.’’ His other books include ‘My Father Was a Freedom Fighter’ and ‘The Last Earth.’ Baroud is a Non-resident Senior Research Fellow at the Center for Islam and Global Affairs (CIGA). His website is www.ramzybaroud.net
The post Dying to Be Free: Releasing Palestinian Captives is Not a Numbers Game appeared first on MintPress News.
Video: Israel’s ‘minister for Hamas rape propaganda is ‘proud to be a racist’
May Golan was withdrawn by Israel in May as proposed new New York consul after outrage over racist rally – now she’s pushing wild claims about Hamas atrocities
Israel’s ‘Minister for the advancement of women’, May Golan, has been at the forefront of the apartheid regime’s latest attempt to dig itself out of the pit of its PR and propaganda disaster over the 7 October Hamas raid.
Among a long list of failed propaganda attempts, the Israeli regime has been caught out trying to fake a ‘Hamas ambush’, faking a ‘recording’ of Hamas operatives, faking ‘evidence’ that Israel did not bomb a hospital and kill five hundred or more refugees – and seeing the news that Israel forces killed many of the Israelis who died during the raid, including the child it used for its atrocity-propaganda push, spread rapidly despite the silence of so-called ‘mainstream media.
So the regime’s latest tactic is to push claims that Hamas committed ‘widespread’ rapes during the raid – and, as so often, its ‘evidence’ is a single ‘eyewitness’. Israel has even been caught using an old image of a killed Kurdish woman soldier that it claimed was an Israeli rape victim. The ‘commissioner’ appointed to ‘investigate’ the rapes is an Israeli lawyer who has previously written a position to justify Israel circumventing the human rights of Palestinian captives and who runs an agency closely linked to Israel’s far-right government – and the commission did not even take any testimony from witnesses.
And one of the main faces of the latest propaganda push is May Golan – a woman who has told a far-right Israeli rally that she is ‘proud to be a racist’ and that ‘it’s our right to be racist’:
So great was outrage at her racism earlier this year that Israel withdrew its proposal to make her its consul in New York – yet despite this very recent history, her claims have been transmitted without scrutiny by the BBC and other UK and international ‘mainstream’ media, and with no mention of her record. Some media have even claimed ‘witnesses upon witnesses’ have testified to the commission about sexual assault by Hamas, even though it heard none.
Israel’s propaganda disaster continues – but so-called ‘mainstream’ media and commentators are slavishly, even enthusiastically, pushing the latest unevidenced narrative.
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Scandal-stained Israeli ‘rescue’ group fuels October 7 fabrications
Founded by a serial rapist known as the “Haredi Jeffrey Epstein,” Israeli ultra-Orthodox rescue group ZAKA is responsible for some of the most obscene post-October 7 atrocity fabrications, from beheaded babies to “mass rape” to a fetus cut from its mother. Secretary of State Tony Blinken and President Joseph Biden have each echoed demonstrably false ZAKA testimonies about Hamas atrocities. Marred by allegations of financial fraud, ZAKA is leveraging October 7 publicity to raise unprecedented sums of cash. Its rival, […]
The post Scandal-stained Israeli ‘rescue’ group fuels October 7 fabrications first appeared on The Grayzone.
The post Scandal-stained Israeli ‘rescue’ group fuels October 7 fabrications appeared first on The Grayzone.
Israel says it will pursue Gazan Palestinians on Lebanese, Turkish and Qatari territory
Israeli security service director’s threat on Israeli national TV
The director of Israel’s domestic security service, the Shin Bet, has said that the Israeli government intends to pursue Palestinian resistance activists outside Palestine – specifically threatening Turkey and Qatar.
Speaking to Kan, Israel’s national broadcaster, and reported by Israeli paper Haaretz, Ronen Bar compared the 7 October kibbutz raid to the 1972 massacre of Israeli athletes, saying:
This is our Munich. Everywhere – in Gaza, in the Palestinian territories, in Lebanon, in Turkey, and in Qatar. It will take us a few years, but we will be there to do it… we are drawing our lessons from the events and are already passing them on to other arenas, not just in the Gaza Strip…
the scope of threats facing the State of Israel is unprecedented in the past year, even before these
events. Even in this case, the main thing is hidden from the eye. There are many things brewing beneath the surface.
As well as constituting an open threat to the sovereignty of three nations, Bar’s comments are exposed as a farce by the fact that Israel knew what Hamas was planning at least a year before the kibbutz raid and did nothing – and that a growing mountain of evidence now shows that the bulk of Israeli casualties during the raid were caused by the Israeli military firing on buildings and vehicles that contained Israeli citizens, and at people on foot that pilots and tank commanders did not pause to identify before destroying.
Despite the mounting evidence, UK and western media have refused to cover the fact of Israeli ‘friendly fire’ under the military’s ‘Hannibal doctrine‘, as it would fatally undermine Israel’s attempts to justify its genocide of Palestinians in Gaza.
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Israel, Hamas, and “Blowback” (guest post)
“The proportionality constraint is backward-looking in the following sense: to determine how bad a prospective harm is for a potential innocent victim, we sometimes need to look at what that victim has suffered in the past, and whether we’re responsible for what they’ve suffered” as well as “whether we should have acted differently in the past thereby avoiding the need to inflict that harm now.”
In the following guest post, Saba Bazargan-Forward (UC San Diego) argues that these backward-looking elements imply that “we should not adopt an ‘ahistorical’ approach when adjudicating proportionality in Israel’s war against Hamas”
It is part of the ongoing series, “Philosophers On the Israel-Hamas Conflict“.
[Paul Apal’kin, “Invasion”]
Israel, Hamas, and “Blowback”
by Saba Bazargan-Forward
Hamas’ attack against Israeli civilians on October 7th, 2023 was not just an act of terrorism but an act of genocide, and should be condemned as such. The brutal attack was shocking in its scope and sadism. Suppose, for the sake of argument, that attacks from Hamas are generally foreseeable consequences of unjust policies Israel has imposed upon Palestinians in Gaza over the past few decades. This supposition, even if true, does not lend moral legitimacy to Hamas’ terrorism. Nor does it mitigate the culpability of Hamas’ leadership. But it does raise this question: if Hamas’ terrorism is “blowback” from unjust Israeli policies toward Gaza, does this affect how Israel is permitted to fight back? Here, I address this question.
War ethics, both in its canonical form and in its more recent revisionary derivations developed since the turn of the century, tends to focus on “the moment of crisis”—the point in time at which a state is seriously considering a resort to war. The problem with assessing the morality of war at the moment of crisis is that sometimes the state considering a resort to war is partly responsible, by having committed past wrongs, for creating the situation in which a resort to war becomes necessary in the first place.
It seems to me that there are at least two special moral considerations restricting how these “blowback” conflicts should be fought, which, in turn affects whether such conflicts can be fought. (I discussed this issue in an article where I focused on the relevance of compensation; here, I consider other factors.)
The first moral consideration relevant to evaluating “blowback” conflicts is this: if Israel has unjustly immiserated Gazan civilians in the recent past, then the collateral harm Israel inflicts in its current war against Hamas harms civilians in Gaza twice over. This is relevant to the comparative weight that these harms should receive when deciding whether to inflict such harms. It is relevant because harming people whom you have already wrongfully harmed is harder to justify than harming people you have not.
To see this, imagine that Rescuer can prevent Innocent from being murdered only by collaterally breaking another innocent person’s arm: person A or person B. They’re identical, except that Rescuer wrongly broke A’s arm last year. If Rescuer chooses the action that collaterally harms A now, she will have thereby infringed A’s rights twice, whereas if she chooses B now, she will have thereby infringed B’s rights once. Since the former is morally worse than the latter, it seems Rescuer should choose B over A. There is a way out: Rescuer could permissibly flip a coin in deciding whom to choose, provided she will compensate A for the independent past harm. But assuming Rescuer won’t compensate A, it seems to me that A has a stronger claim than B against being harmed. A corollary to this claim is that the harm averted to Innocent must be greater to justify breaking A’s arm than B’s arm.
Some might demur. To see why, consider a variant of the case in which the details are the same, except there’s no person B. So, the only way to rescue Innocent is by collaterally harming A. It might seem strange to think that Innocent’s claim to be saved can depend on whether Rescuer unjustly harmed A in the past. After all, Innocent didn’t have anything to do with Rescuer’s past mistreatment of A. Yet it now seems that Innocent must bear the costs of that mistreatment! That seems unfair. It’s true that Innocent’s claim to be saved does not depend on whether Rescuer unjustly harmed A in the past. But it’s also true that Innocent’s claim does indeed depend on the weight of the prospective harm Rescuer will collaterally inflict on A. And I’m suggesting that Rescuer’s past mistreatment of A can affect how we should weigh the prospective harm that Rescuer will collaterally inflict on A in saving Innocent. To be clear, this doesn’t mean that Rescuer shouldn’t save Innocent. Rather, it means that Rescuer’s past mistreatment of A is morally relevant in the decision whether to save Innocent by harming A.
Let me clarify what I’m not claiming. I am not claiming that we always have decisive reasons to prefer harming those we haven’t unjustly harmed in the past over those we have unjustly harmed in the past. There are all sorts of factors that might outweigh or override the relevance of past harms. Rather, I am claiming that past unjust harms can be morally relevant in evaluating prospective harms. I am also not claiming here that past unjust harms for which you’re not responsible are relevant in weighing prospective harms. Though I do certainly think such harms can be relevant, I am not leaning on such a claim here.
This simplistic example in which you must choose between A and B is not meant as an analogy of the situation between Israel and Gaza. Rather, its purpose is more general. It suggests that the proportionality constraint is backward-looking in the following sense: to determine how bad a prospective harm is for a potential innocent victim, we sometimes need to look at what that victim has suffered in the past, and whether we’re responsible for what they’ve suffered. If Israel has indeed unjustly immiserated Gazans over the past few decades, this makes it harder for Israel to satisfy the proportionality constraint now in its current conflict in Gaza.
The second moral consideration relevant to evaluating “blowback” conflicts is this. Assuming Hamas’ terrorism was a foreseeable consequence of unjust Israeli policy toward Gazans, Israel bears some responsibility for the fact that it needs to resort to self-defense now. (Again, I am not claiming that responsibility is zero-sum—Israel’s responsibility for its situation does not diminish Hamas’ responsibility. Nor am I claiming that they are equally responsible, or that they are the only parties responsible). This means Israel bears more responsibility for the deaths of Gazans it collaterally kills than it otherwise would. To see this, imagine you have a neighbor who for no reason at all unjustly attacks you with the intention of breaking your arm. You can defend yourself, but only by engaging in an action that collaterally harms his young child. Now compare this with a nearby case. Imagine you have a neighbor whose car you unjustly vandalize. You suspect, prior to doing so, that in response he will unjustly attack you with the intention of breaking your arm. Again, you can defend yourself, but only by collaterally harming his young child. Holding all the harms fixed in these two cases, it seems that the harm to the child in the second case should be weighed more heavily than the harm to the child in the first case. This is because you can be morally expected to have avoided the harm in the second case but not the first.
Again, this simplistic example is not meant as an analogy of the situation between Israel and Gaza. Rather, it suggests that the proportionality constraint is backward-looking in the following sense: to determine how bad a prospective harm is for a potential innocent victim, we need to look at whether we should have acted differently in the past thereby avoiding the need to inflict that harm now. If this describes Israel’s situation currently, it makes it all the more difficult for Israel to satisfy the proportionality constraint.
The moral is that we should not adopt an “ahistorical” approach when adjudicating proportionality in Israel’s war against Hamas. This is because the proportionality constraint includes important backward-looking elements. If Hamas’ terrorism is “blowback” from unjust Israeli policy toward Gaza, then Gazan lives should be weighed especially heavily. This, in turn, makes it more difficult for Israel to satisfy the proportionality constraint in its conflict against Hamas.
The post Israel, Hamas, and “Blowback” (guest post) first appeared on Daily Nous.