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What gives Israel the right to annihilate Gaza? [1]
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Date: 2023-10
In the past days we’ve seen reminders that all civilian life has equal value (Baerbock), commitments of humanitarian aid (Biden), and acknowledgments of Palestinian suffering (British PM Rishi Sunak). But we’ve yet to see a national leader in the West, apart from UN Secretary General António Guterres, suggest that stopping the indiscriminate attack would save more lives than a humanitarian corridor.
The crux of the problem, we are told by political leaders and much of the media, is that Israelis and Palestinians are caught in a loop. Yes, the Israeli government can be a bit heavy-handed and makes mistakes. But the Palestinians too have their share of blame. All parties, we hear, should respect international law.
To the subscribers of this narrative, the fact that Israel has for decades maintained an occupation of Palestine that is illegal under international law pales into insignificance considering the war crimes committed by Hamas. Their conclusion is that, in a tragedy of such unimaginable pain on all sides, chasing after the one who threw the first punch, and pinning it all on them, is a fool’s errand. Both are to blame.
We oppose violence too. But one might ask: why focus on condemning both parties equally? If the crux of the issue is rooted in historical and contextual injustice, does equating the violence of both parties not divert from understanding this context? Doesn't this approach potentially ensnare the discourse in a quagmire of mutual blame and perceived equal suffering?
Never balanced
When the capacity of one side to exert violence over the other is so overwhelmingly disproportionate, surely even to the most moderate of moderates, something rings discordant here.
At the start of the invasion, Israel’s defence minister said that “We are fighting human animals and we are acting accordingly”. Hundreds are now being killed every day, and when Palestinians in the north obeyed Israel’s order to travel south they were bombed anyway. The tired metaphor of ‘shooting fish in a barrel’ has never been so apt. Every message we have received from colleagues and friends in Gaza is the same: Israel’s bombardment is like nothing they have ever experienced before.
The balance metaphor only works if weights of equal measure are distributed on both plates. If power were equally distributed, so too would be responsibility. But with Israel-Palestine these two weights are in no way equivalent.
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[1] Url:
https://www.opendemocracy.net/en/beyond-trafficking-and-slavery/what-gives-israel-the-right-to-annihilate-gaza/
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