It’s estimated that Israel has dropped some 15,000 bombs on Gaza and killed some 15,000 people. Quite a Jewish-bomb-to-dead-Arab ratio, if an expensive one. The bombs are American. They’ll continue to fall indefinitely or until the US and Israel run out of bombs. Jerusalem is pleased. Washington is pleased. They see themselves on the side of the angles.
Israel says that the bombs are intended to destroy Hamas, a loosely structured criminal organization woven into the civilian population. As part of a tiresome ritual, the world half-heartedly lectures Israel to be mindful of the two million Gaza civilians when bombing the place. And Israel, also as part of the ritual, trots out the standard line: We don’t target civilians.
Practically, Israel gives the world the finger. As it always has. (Curiously, it instantly bleated for US help when the shit hit the fan on 7 October. Suckers that they are, the Americans leaped into the breach with billions and ordnance.) Like the US in its “Great War on Terror,” Israel’s lawyers long ago figured out how to self-exculpate by—presto!—declaring the offing of collaterals to be legal.
How does that work? Easy. The killing of collaterals, the policy goes, would be unlawful only if the anticipated civilian casualties were excessive in relation to the anticipated military advantage. A truck-sized qualifier. An Israeli commander who, even with only a single Hamas operative in his crosshairs, didn’t pull the trigger because civilian Palestinians were at risk does not exist.
Nor does it matter. First, the press won’t bother with intricacies like this. Reports of Palestinian deaths will drown in reports of US and European warnings to Israel over civilian casualties, messages intended to reaffirm Western virtue. But what, exactly, Washington says to Jerusalem is never revealed. A guess? Knudge-knudge, wink-wink … bomb away! Blinken on his knees before Bibi.
Second, like the US, Israel will never subject itself to legitimate legal proceedings. That might risk culpability for the thousands of civilian deaths it has caused solely to push the twin narratives of revenge and messaging, i.e., to make sure Palestinians have no hope of a decent future, let alone of legal remedies in US courts for harms suffered. Only Israelis are entitled to legal redress.
None of this will stop the avalanche of tedious, rote invocations of a country’s obligations under the laws of war. But those invocations are pure obtuseness, exercises in abstraction whose only achievement is to give the bombers and their accomplices (suppliers, financiers, commentariat) comfort. As for the maimed Palestinian kid, he’ll care only for an eventual, and justifiable, revenge.
