Human beings and inhuman problems

Hamas has forced Israel into an unbearable moral dilemma.

In Gaza today, dozens of children are being held captive below the ground — babies, toddlers, elementary schoolers. They have not seen the sun in weeks. Some know their families are dead. Others wonder where they are. They must be terrified, not knowing what the strangers who stole them from their homes plan to do with them, not able to explain what is happening to them and why. Nobody has come to visit and check on them — no Red Cross, no UN. We can only pray that their physical conditions are adequate.

In Gaza today, hundreds of thousands of children are captive above the ground. They are captive to the terror of bombs falling from the sky, of food and water running short, of their lives and routines disrupted, of adults in their lives dead. And many children, too, have died. We see images of their bodies. We see images of their parents in the worst agony imaginable.

When children suffer like this, I believe our first instinct must be to witness — to acknowledge the suffering. But what then?

The Baltimore-based Rabbi Daniel Burg last week visited the remains of Kibbutz Be’eri, where terrorists tortured, raped, and killed on Oct. 7. In his reflections, he observed:

“The (Hebrew) verb l’tzapot, to anticipate, is closely related to the verb litzpot, which means to gaze. To witness something heartbreaking or unjust is to expect it to get better and, by implication, to help bring that healing or repair about. We gaze at an unredeemed world, and we cannot unsee, and having seen, we feel called to act.”

For me, one of the great emotional challenges of this war is that the actions I support will have the immediate effect of making things worse for one set of these children. I believe this is a war for Israel’s survival and, as I will explain below, that Israel’s conduct in the war is not the primary cause of Palestinian suffering.

But it doesn’t feel like an answer. It doesn’t feel like an adequate response to what we witness.

In this post, I want to share how I am thinking through Israel’s intolerable dilemma: How to save its children from an enemy who hides behind his own children.

My support for Israel’s war is inconsequential for what happens, but that is no reason to demur from this dilemma, as it confronts all of Israel – indeed, all people of conscience. And I hope readers will appreciate that, even as we recoil from the horror of what is happening on the ground, we must grapple with the chain of events that produces it. We must check our very human instinct to heap blame on the last actor in that chain.

This is not a simple case of oppressor and oppressed. This is a case of human beings dealing with inhuman problems.

The moral dilemma

If you confront the suffering of Palestinian children as you confront the suffering of Israeli children, then believing that your side is acting justly in some larger sense is cold comfort indeed.

But we must engage in this kind of reasoning about justice, even if it feels detached, like it’s occurring in a different and in some ways perverse dimension. Because, after the attacks of Oct. 7, we must act. Any response is a choice, an action. The wrong choice could bring still more death and suffering, on either side, or both. Among terrible choices, it is our responsibility to choose wisely.

And the moral calculus of a war must include not only the victims, but also the combatants. As I explained in my last post, I am convinced that for Israel this is a war of necessity — that if Israel does not fight this war, the survival of many of its people and even of the state itself will be imperiled.

I am convinced that the moral responsibility for the suffering of Gazan innocents falls overwhelmingly on the terrorist dictatorship of Hamas. This is true not only because Hamas provoked the war with its barbaric attack on Israeli civilians. It is also true because Hamas does everything it can to endanger its own civilians. Israel is effectively fighting Hamas on two fronts: Struggling to kill Palestinian combatants fighting for Hamas, and struggling to save Palestinian noncombatants from Hamas.

Left-wingers who hate Israel often reject this argument as cheap propaganda. But they are simply wrong. There is overwhelming evidence that Hamas repeatedly and deliberately puts Palestinian civilians in the line of fire. This is why they put their central command bunker underneath a hospital. It is why they sought to prevent people from fleeing the northern Gaza strip. The purpose is not only to use civilians as human shields to prevent attack. It’s also to ensure maximum casualties among Palestinian civilians when conflict breaks out.

The logic is this: Hamas is fighting an asymmetric war. It can never overpower Israel, as long as Israel fights back. But if many civilians die, the game changes. First, it inflames the Arab world against Israel. Second, it inflames American and European opinion against Israel, leading friendly nations to pull back their support. And third, it often functions as a moral constraint on Israel, preventing the country from fighting with its full power.

So what should Israel do? Play into the hands of Hamas and accept that killing terrorists will also mean killing innocents? Or hold its fire and let the death cult maraud further among its people while other enemies calculate their own odds?

The moral imbalance

If the view from the battlefield is damning to Hamas, then some Israel critics will try a wider aperture. They will argue that Hamas may be bad, but Israel is also terrible. Both combatants are indifferent to the death of innocents and commit human rights abuses, they will argue. Even if this were true, it would not justify attempts to draw lethal fire to civilian targets. But it’s simply not true that there is any comparison here.

There is a vast moral gulf between Hamas and Israel. Hamas is a terrorist dictatorship that tortures and massacres men, women, and children in their homes; that publicly celebrates such atrocities as triumphs; and that cynically seeks to subject its own people to suffering because it’s good propaganda to wield against the enemy. These victims, it’s worth repeating, are not being sacrificed for a freedom struggle. They are being sacrificed for a death cult that plans and celebrates torture, rape, kidnapping, and murder of innocents.

Israel is a democratic country that operates under the rule of law (yes, including military law in the territory it captured after the defensive war of 1967); with strong institutional and societal commitments to the notion that abuses of human rights are a moral stain; and with a free press and commitment to international legitimacy that keep it accountable to this standard. Yes, Israel’s current government includes truly loathsome individuals. Yes, society has developed an extremist wing that must be brought to heel. Yes, occupying another people is undemocratic — but as the case of Gaza shows, unwinding such an occupation is no simple matter.

Think about it this way. Can you imagine Hamas having lawyers present when it determines where to attack? Referring to the laws of war? Counting the number of civilians and viewing their presence as a reason to hold back instead of firing?

If you can’t see the difference here, then you probably also can’t see the difference between the United States and North Korea.

Tactics and trust

The middle ground between pacifism and all-out belligerence here is obviously that Israel must fight, but do it with constant sensitivity to civilian casualties. This is where, in my mind, there is most room for reasonable people to disagree – but also where we have the least ability to make judgments.

It is clear that many civilians are being killed in Gaza. Does this mean that Israel is engaging in “indiscriminate” bombing or being callous about civilian casualties? It could, but it’s certainly not proof. Civilians always suffer in war, and there are at least three reasons to think civilian casualties in this war would be higher than in cases that you might think of as comparable. 

1) First, as noted, Hamas wants civilian casualties and deliberately puts military targets beside, in the middle of, or underneath civilians, so that virtually every strike decision for Israel involves terrible tradeoffs.

2) Second, this is an incredibly complicated battlefield. It’s often been compared to the terrible fight the Americans waged in Fallujah, but in fact, it’s even worse. As an extension of point (1), Hamas has spent billions in the last decade building a vast infrastructure of tunnels underneath Gaza’s cities (and not, notably, in the strip’s unpopulated areas). These tunnels would become death traps for the IDF’s ground troops if left intact, and so I assume the air campaign is aimed partly at destroying them and partly at creating lines of sight that make ambush less likely.

3) Third, evacuation is virtually impossible, because neither Hamas nor Egypt want to let people across the border. They and many left-wing critics dismiss such an evacuation as “ethnic cleansing.” That would only be true if it were forced and if Israel prevented the refugees from returning, but let’s leave that discussion for another post.

Critics of Israel tend to gloss over these problems and, when confronted, suggest the IDF should simply work some kind of special-forces magic to make Hamas go away while killing no innocents. As one correspondent, a professor whose academic work I deeply respect, wrote to me: “I guess I expect Israel to able to conjure up even military solutions to political problems that don't amount merely to rubble.” But no amount of conjuring will make Israel’s hard choices go away.

In any case, nobody reading this blog, and certainly not the person writing it, has the information to weigh all the tactical factors and render judgment. Until the archivists and historians get involved, it will come down, in the end, to a matter of trust. So — should we trust the Israel Defense Forces?

On the negative side of the ledger, it is deeply troubling that the current ruling coalition — though not the war cabinet — includes a racist party whose leaders indulge in eliminationist rhetoric along the lines of “erasing Gaza” — rhetoric which is also circulating in portions of a scared and angry Israeli public. It is also deeply disturbing that Israel has not cracked down hard on extremist West Bank settlers who have been terrorizing Palestinian civilians there.

Even so, at the end of the day, I have a fair amount of faith in the IDF’s ethics and accountability mechanisms. Sadly, I think Israel’s military is probably more sober and restrained in these matters than its government. As with the U.S. under Trump, I view the Israeli military as a stabilizing force with liberal commitments, reporting to a coalition with authoritarian tendencies. It’s also of note that the Israeli military is truly a citizen’s army that relies heavily on draftees and reservists. Many Israeli reservists warned over the summer that they would refuse to serve if the government went ahead with judicial reforms they viewed as undemocratic. In prior years, Israeli soldiers caused the military great trouble by refusing to serve in the occupied territories, which they believed Israel should vacate. The IDF drafts Druze conscripts, and other Arab Israelis serve as volunteers. Do you think all these people would participate in campaigns of indiscriminate carpet bombing and just keep quiet about it? 

But it’s not trust alone that must operate here. It is also clearly in Israel’s strategic interest to constantly balance harm to civilians against its military aims. Israel knows that getting this balance wrong will ultimately lead to a withdrawal of even the broad American and European support it has gotten so far.

Finally, I am glad that the Biden administration is pressuring Israel over the issue of civilian casualties. Such pressure, in a context of support, is likely to be heeded. Joe Biden in this war can be the angel over one shoulder of the Israeli military leadership, reminding them to be true to their code. By contrast, activists who fling unfounded accusations of “war crimes” and even “genocide” will be ignored, and actually reduce the space for Israeli society to debate civilian casualties.

Inhuman choices

Satellite analysis suggests that at this point in the war, at least 15 percent of buildings in Gaza have been reduced to rubble. Some might argue that the mere sight of all these ruins, and the innocent death they imply, should be enough to oppose this war.

I understand that sentiment. I want to make this stop. I want it to be clear. I want to yell, when children die, no matter who is to blame, you do what you must to make it stop.

But Hamas has forced Israel to fight to survive and save its own children, and to do so on terms that are devastating to innocents. To refuse these terms would be to surrender to the terrorists who murdered 1,400 Israelis a month ago in cold blood, who continue to hold at least 240 hostage, and who would eagerly kill more if they could. So Israel is left fighting an awful war filled with incomprehensible choices.