By David K. Shipler
In nearly two years since the Gaza
war began, the world has learned what Israel does when it feels its very
existence is threatened. It invades, bombs, maims, starves, blockades, sickens,
dislocates, and traumatizes an entire population of innocents whose most
radical leaders and their followers have committed intimate atrocities against
innocents inside Israel: Sacrifice innocents for innocents. It attacks
throughout the Middle East, in Lebanon, Iran, Yemen, and Qatar. It defies
international condemnation. It dismisses evidence of its victims’ suffering as antisemitic
propaganda.
What it has
not done, obviously, is use its nuclear weapons, which Moshe Dayan revealed
to me in 1981 could be quickly assembled. As Defense Minister, he reportedly
urged consideration of their use when Israel was attacked by Arab countries
in the 1973 Yom Kippur War. Whether the possibility came up this year, as
Israel bombed Iran’s nuclear facilities, is not yet known publicly.
The lesson
couldn’t be clearer: Born as a refuge for Jews after the Holocaust, Israel
inherits a legacy of anxiety and persecution, and therefore treasures its
military strength. It feels risk beyond what hard-headed security
experts might assess. Nevertheless, as Henry Kissinger once said about the
Jewish state, even paranoids can have real enemies.
And so, when its own intelligence
and military hierarchy grew so complacent that Hamas terrorists could easily
flow in from Gaza on Oct. 7, 2023 to slaughter, rape, and kidnap, a traumatized
Israel sensed doom and replied with terrorism of its own, which an
international commission of the UN Human Rights Council has
now defined as genocide.
No more terrible accusation could
be leveled against a state that rose from the ashes of genocide. The label,
which carries consequences under international law, is a conversation-stopper. While
critics of Israel can disagree about its accuracy, the “g-word” debate has
created an odd sense of abstraction. It has become shorthand for a panoply of
atrocities, which, when listed, make an indictment even more telling. That is
what the UN commission has tried to do.
Israel has generally blocked
international journalists from Gaza, thereby preventing independent, neutral
reporting. But the commission’s 72-page condemnation assembles in one document
a detailed picture from international medical and aid workers, humanitarian
agencies, individual Palestinians, and others.
The report gives particular
attention to the fate of future generations of Palestinians, charging Israel
with deliberately targeting maternity hospitals and clinics, and in one case a facility
providing in vitro fertilization. The commission argues that Israel has “destroyed
in part the reproductive capacity of the Palestinians in Gaza as a group.”
As early as November 2023, “Oxfam
reported that newborns up to three months old were dying of hypothermia,
dehydration and infection as mothers had little to no medical support and were
living in appalling conditions without water, sanitation, heat or food,” the
commission writes.
Children have suffered gunshot wounds,
suggesting that they were targeted. Hundreds have had limbs amputated, some
without anasthesia, due to Israel’s blockade of medical supplies, the
commission says. “Gaza is home to the largest cohort of child amputees in
modern history,” according to a representative of the United Nations Office for
the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs.
The famine induced by Israel’s
periodic blockade and limits on food shipments have caused deaths, but will also
have lifelong consequences for children who survive, given the damage done by
malnutrition during critical periods of brain development. As of this month,
the report says, acute malnutrition is being experienced by 70,000 children
under the age of five and 17,000 pregnant or lactating women.
“Short-term complications could
include infants not meeting motor developmental milestones within the first
year of life,” the commission says. “In the medium term, children would be
unable to develop speech and meet language milestones, and their cognitive
abilities could potentially be impaired in the long-term.”
There are many more charges:
torture and sexual abuse of prisoners; trauma intentionally induced by threats
of killings; widespread destruction of agriculture that curbs food production;
the repeatedly forced displacement of some 1.9 million Palestinians; and the
targeting of civilian homes, schools, and hospitals.
Israel contends that Hamas has been
stealing food from shipments, but of course if there were sufficient food, none
would have to be stolen. It is the shortage itself that creates the conditions
ripe for theft and black markets.
Israel also argues correctly that
Hamas located itself among civilians. That goes unmentioned in the commission’s
report, which is a missed opportunity to discuss the ethics of killing
civilians in large numbers when they are being used by the enemy as human
shields.
A finding of genocide requires a
finding of intent, which is hard to prove. The commission cites statements by
three top officials: Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu likening the
Palestinians to the Old Testament enemy Amalek, whose men, women, children, and
infants God ordered the Israelites to annihilate. President Isaac Herzog, who announced
absurdly, “It’s an entire nation out there that is responsible.” And Defense
Minister Yoav Gallant, who ordered “a complete siege,” declaring: “no
electricity, no water, no food, no fuel. We are fighting human animals, and we
act accordingly.”
In addition, the commission finds
genocidal intent supported by the “circumstantial evidence” of a repeated
pattern of conduct that persisted even after its devastating effects on the
civilian population were documented.
It’s hard to see any motivation
other than to remove Palestinians from Israel’s security landscape.
Although the country’s physical survival
was not truly in jeopardy, despite the rhetoric of Israeli leaders, the attack
by Hamas, a beneficiary of Iran, was amplified by attacks from Iran itself and
its proxies—Hezbollah in Lebanon and Houthis in Yemen—raising the specter of
hostile encirclement. Israeli communities near the borders with Gaza and
Lebanon were ghost towns after tens of thousands of Israelis fled and became
internal refugees.
In response, Israel redrew the
region’s military map by obliterating Hamas’s armed capacity, decimating
Hezbollah, and, with American help, seriously damaging Iran’s nuclear-weapons
program.
But the Israelis have also inflicted
one of modern history’s most devastating, sustained assaults on a civilian
population, which continues in Gaza far beyond military necessity. Combined
with officially permitted vigilante and army assaults in the West Bank, Israel is
making life unlivable for many Palestinians in those territories, apparently hoping
that most will flee—somewhere—and that Palestinian statehood will evaporate as
a realistic prospect.
Israel has a longstanding practice
of multiplying the harm it suffers with brutal retaliation a thousand-fold or
more. The Gaza war is Israel’s most extreme exercise of that strategy in its
history, and history will judge. It will also judge the two weak American
presidents who enabled these crimes against humanity: Joe Biden, who merely
wrung his hands, and Donald Trump, who is blind to people and sees Gaza as a real
estate opportunity.
The supreme irony is this: In
securing its physical existence, Israel has lost its existence as a moral
enterprise, the basis on which it was founded. Its moral authority is buried in
the rubble of Gaza, where it is indeed fighting that existential war—and losing.
