“Is the killing of almost 1,000 children a week self-defence?”
That was the opening line in a commentary last weekend by the global affairs editor of the Australian television network ABC, writing from Israel.
“Imagine if 1,000 American children were being killed a week,” he said. “The world's response would be completely different.”
I think he’s right. I think it would. To be blunt, I think the world’s response, the Western world’s anyway, would be completely different if 1,000 Israeli children were killed in a week. I think it would be different if yesterday Hamas had caused casualties at a population center in Israel equivalent to the casualties Israel caused at the Jabalya refugee camp in Gaza. It’s hard to deny.
But like everything in this vicious war, it’s not that simple. Palestinians and all who condemn Israel for their suffering have an answer about self-defense. They would say no, it does not, cannot, justify what Israel is doing to Gaza. They would say Israel cannot defend the indefensible.
But Israelis, and all who sympathize with their losses and their fear of more, have an answer too. They might say, however awful the cost, yes. They might say that if Hamas hides itself among civilians, they have no choice. They might say that this war is existential and if they don’t win, they lose. Everything.
This is not just a no-win case where there is no easy answer. It is a case where there is no answer at all. There are trails of blood and rivers of tears on both sides.
I have been an advocate for Israel since the day the war broke out because however harshly it has treated the Palestinian people— and without getting into the explanations for that, it has— that does not justify the targeted terror attacks against it— the kidnappings, the killings, the maulings— on October 7th.
But I am not watching in a vacuum. I am not watching without pity. The stories out of Gaza are horrifying.
A pediatrician at the Kamal Adwan Hospital there, Dr. Hussam Abu Safyia, wrote a few days ago in The New York Times that the hospital is still functioning but only barely. He is part of a team from MedGlobal, which helps communities all over the world suffering from disasters.
“Lights are off most of the time, elevators are out and patients are carried between floors. When the fuel runs out, we will no longer be able to function at night after the sun goes down. Most of the tools and equipment needed to run a modern hospital like ventilators, defibrillators and our neonatal units will become useless. When the generators fall silent, we will be relegated to practicing medieval-level medicine.”
They’re already sterilizing injured patients’ wounds with vinegar.
But again, it’s not that simple. The more we learn about grim shortages in Gaza— shortages of fuel and food, shortages of medicine and drinking water— the more we know about the reasons why. Reportedly Hamas has stockpiled supplies for itself that are running out elsewhere: food and water to keep its commanders and fighters going for months, and hundreds of thousands of gallons of fuel for rockets and explosives, and just the need to get around. The validity of these reports is reinforced by an obvious observation: Hamas is still getting around. It is still firing rockets at Israel. From what we can see, it has not been degraded.
Another Palestinian, a New York City psychologist and counselor at NYU named Hala Alyan, has written about the human cost. “These days,” she says, “everyone is trying to write about the children. An incomprehensible number of them dead and counting.” The global organization Save The Children says the number of children killed so far in Gaza already exceeds the number killed around the world in each of the past four years in all other conflicts combined. There is no way to read that without bottomless sorrow. Alyan hopes for a day when images from Gaza will awaken the world to its suffering. “Will this be the image that finally does it? This half-child on a rooftop? This video, reposted by Al Jazeera, of an inconsolable girl appearing to recognize her mother’s body among the dead, screaming out, ‘It’s her, it’s her. I swear it’s her. I know her from her hair’?”
Yet as horrible and heart-breaking as that is, it is still not that simple, because the equation has become this: it will be catastrophic today in Gaza or it will be catastrophic the day after in Israel. It’s not simple, because there is no way to reconcile the two. Israel faces excruciating choices, and now that it has gone to the ground in this bloody war, they are choices that will hurt Israelis as well as Palestinians.
Yesterday’s strike at Gaza’s largest refugee camp was an awful start.
Even if Israel did kill one of Hamas’s primary planners of the massacres on October 7th, the large-scale civilian casualties will raise questions, even from its allies, about Israel’s adherence to the laws of war. In a briefing yesterday for the Council on Foreign Relations, senior fellow Matthew Waxman defined two principles of those laws. The “principle of distinction” says that forces may deliberately strike military targets or personnel, but cannot deliberately target civilians or civilian property. It also says that defenders cannot deliberately put civilians in harm’s way. Israel is on the right side on that principle. But Waxman explained that the other principle, the “principle of proportionality,” means “the anticipated civilian harm of a military operation can’t be excessive compared to the expected military gain.” We don’t yet know whether Israel can pass that test.
Columnist David French recently wrote, “There is no way for decent people to see the death and destruction and not feel anguish for the plight of the innocent.” No there’s not, not when you read the the last part of the essay by the Gaza pediatrician: “On Oct. 20, as I finished operating on a girl who had lost her leg, I stepped into the hallway and my wife was there to hug me. Our home, she told me, had been destroyed in an airstrike on an adjacent building while I was in surgery. The hospital is now our only home. At night, I go to my office and close the door to cry.”
It should be just as true that there’s no way to see death and destruction on the Israeli side and not feel anguish for the plight of the innocent.
It will sound cold and cruel, but there’s a fact of warfare affirmed by history: civilian casualties are part of the gut-wrenching cost of war. Hundreds of thousands of innocent civilians died when we bombed Hitler’s Germany into rubble but if we hadn’t, the Nazi atrocities might have continued. The Israelis aren’t the first to do it, the Palestinians aren’t the first to suffer it. They call it the collective punishment of millions for the crimes of Hamas. Maybe it is.
But maybe, if Israel has to eradicate Hamas to prevent another October 7th, it’s inescapable. Veteran war correspondent Megan Stack recently wrote, “Killing the children of Gaza… is not the answer.” But then, if Hamas hides behind the children, what is?
Over more than five decades Greg Dobbs has been a correspondent for two television networks including ABC News, a political columnist for The Denver Post and syndicated columnist for Scripps newspapers, a moderator on Rocky Mountain PBS, and author of two books, including one about the life of a foreign correspondent called “Life in the Wrong Lane.” He also co-authored a book about the seminal year for baby boomers, called “1969: Are You Still Listening?” He has covered presidencies, politics, and the U.S. space program at home, and wars, natural disasters, and other crises around the globe, from Afghanistan to South Africa, from Iran to Egypt, from the Soviet Union to Saudi Arabia, from Nicaragua to Namibia, from Vietnam to Venezuela, from Libya to Liberia, from Panama to Poland. Dobbs has won three Emmys, the Distinguished Service Award from the Society of Professional Journalists, and as a 37-year resident of Colorado, a place in the Denver Press Club Hall of Fame.
Thanks you, Greg, for your deep wisdom about the Middle East.
Yes, This situation is horrible, and Hamas is to blame for these horrifying Palestinian casualties, because Hamas uses the whole population of Gaza as human shields. But Israel is responsible for Hamas. Yes. Would they even exist if the Palestinians had been treated fairly from 1948 until today?
May this incomprehensible suffering lead at last to a fair solution for the Palestinians, while allowing for the peaceful existence of Israel.
Within the devastation it is easy to see that a new generation of reactionary terrorists are being born.
Vendetta is a natural reaction when one sees their family's killed.