It is time to consider Israel's responsibility for restraint is tempered by their need to survive...
The restraints being demanded by some after the horrendous massacre of innocent Jews on October 7 are inconsistent with how nations under attack go to war. The lives of innocents are always a price an aggressor pays for their hostility— especially when their attacks specifically target innocents and their tactics are brutal.
Without equating the magnitudes of responses, in WW II America and its allies felt justified in indiscriminately targeting innocents in Dresden and Hiroshima (for me, Nagasaki is another story but that is for a different diary.) After 9/11, the targeting of innocents in the World Trade Center elicited even more brutal retaliation in Afghanistan and Iraq in which a large portion of the deaths were among non-combatants:
The U.S. post-9/11 wars in Iraq, Afghanistan, Yemen, Syria, and Pakistan have taken a tremendous human toll on those countries. As of September 2021, an estimated 432,093 civilians in these countries have died violent deaths as a result of the wars. As of May 2023, an estimated 3.6-3.8 million people have died indirectly in post-9/11 war zones. The total death toll in these war zones could be at least 4.5-4.7 million and counting, though the precise mortality figure remains unknown. Civilian deaths have also resulted from U.S. post-9/11 military operations in Somalia and other countries.
There is little parsing of “etiquette” in war beyond the agreement of nations to abide by the rule of the Geneva Conventions. Diarists on this site have made the point that Israel has the right to retaliate but only to its own disadvantage. The whole point of Hamas’ brutal attack crossing into Israel and killing innocents— only innocents—was to place non-combatant civilians at the center of the conflict. The taking of hostages— all innocent non-combatants— reiterates their disabuse of the Geneva Conventions’ protocols while Hamas uses all innocents, theirs and those murdered and taken hostage on October 7, as shields.
I expect some incoming for this position, but it is pure sophism to pretend that war is somehow restrained by rules other than those that center on survival and retaliation. Without the former, there is no latter.
To impose on Israel a condition of war that is not even a consideration of Hamas is both unfair and antisemitic in its most literal sense. It comforts and encourages its enemy. In a perfect war, no civilians would be targeted. There are no perfect wars only ones with winners and losers. The current discussion requires perspective and a bit of self-awareness:
In World War II military deaths numbered 21-25 million including POWs
Civilian deaths topped 38 million
Total death due to the war was estimated to be more than 70 million, or about 3% of the world's population at the time.
Germany alone accounted for 17 million civilian deaths— 6 million, more than one-third of those, were Jews.
This isn’t about defending Israel for the deaths of Palestinian civilians. Israel has a right to defend itself against Hamas and a responsibility to avoid civilian casualties. Hamas bears the heavier burden for starting the hostilities and for using its own civilians and innocent Israeli hostages as shields to hide behind and among. No nation engaged in wars past would accede to the demands being asked of Israel. And few combatants share a similar history with Israelis.
Israel is the result, in part, of the antisemitic intolerance for Jews for millennia in Europe prior to WW II. Ethnic Jews have faced systemic intolerance throughout history in both the Christian and Islamic worlds. Jews were a small ethnic minority dispersed among religio-nationalist societies whose intolerance for them was an established pattern in Europe that paved the way for the genocidal movements in the 20th century throughout Europe, but especially in Germany and Russia:
This basic pattern would continue to dominate European Jewish history for hundreds of years, well into the medieval period. Robert Chazan, who has studied this period extensively, points out that antisemitism is a combination of both inherited stereotypical themes that combine with the existing majority (in this case Christian) society as well as the Jewish minority to form the specific manifestations of antisemitism that are particular to that time and place…
The Holocaust brought together all the strands of past antisemitism, connected them and produced a system devoted to the total annihilation of the Jewish people in Europe (and in other countries projected to fall under Nazi rule). Jews were dehumanized, (by being described as "untermenschen" - subhuman), demonized,36 and condemned theologically.37 They were economic manipulators, both capitalist38 and communist.39 They were sexual corrupters, polluting racial bloodlines,40 as well as being traitors to Germany, responsible for the German defeat in World War I.
— The Museum of Intolerance. “Antisemitism: A Historical Survey.” by Mark Weitzman
The scapegoating of Jews, and attributing to them the ills that befell society at the time, became the rationalization for the holocaust. The Germans sometimes employed pseudo-science to justify their pogrom of Jews. The intolerances of the past led to the ultimate decision by the Nazis to dehumanize, then, eliminate them:
Having offered a diagnosis that relied, in great part, on scientific and medical authority, the proposed Nazi solution followed suit. As one Nazi doctor at Auschwitz put it "The Jews are the gangrenous appendix of mankind. That's why I cut them out."42
— Weitzman
In all, about 60% of the European Jews were slaughtered in the holocaust( 6 million of an estimated 9 million European Jews). That number represented a little more than a third of the total Jewish worldwide population at the time, estimated at 17 million. Is it a wonder, then, that when a marauding army entered their cities along the border of Gaza and slaughtered without cause or warning more than 1400 innocents, Israel was provoked to engage in a war to eliminate Hamas? Just as the Israelis realize that had the Nazis won there would be no accountability-- no Nuremberg-- to assert judgment for their war crimes, it is left to us to compare our own wartime decisions at Hiroshima and Nagasaki, for example. Within the context of Sherman’s recognition that “war is hell,” it is inescapable that one of the spoils is that victors get to assign fault and justify their wartime decisions.
It is understandable that those of us outside the conflict want to temper the loss of innocent lives and abhor the targeting of civilians within Gaza. Understandable that our own government recognizes Israel's right to retaliate while warning them of the responsibility to protect innocent civilians to the extent possible. Given the history of their people, it is also important to note that to Jews each new threat to their people is an existential one. The avowed aim of Hamas is the annihilation of not just Israel, the nation, but Jews as a people.
It might be good for us to measure our criticism and understand the consequences at stake for not just Jews in Israel, or the Palestinians in Gaza, but for the rest of us. The existential threat represented by Hamas is aligned with the threat of peace everywhere. Israel should not get a pass here, but it should be noted that the consequences of their war are dissimilar to those with whom they are fighting. The elimination of Hamas as a threat is not the same as their threat to eliminate the Jews. The Israelis may be allowed to have a more visceral response to the threat surrounding them. For them, the war is not territorial, it is not about dominance in the region. It truly is, for them, existential. As stated by their enemies over the centuries, this war is the same war waged against their people in pogroms past. It is an unbroken promise of an incomprehensible hatred of a people for no other reason than that they exist.
In the Nazi camps, there were only innocents, and the slaughter of six million of them are a constant reminder to all Jews of their responsibility to survive.