I've just come across an article in the Guardian, written by a certain Peter Beaumont, which goes on in some detail about what the aftermath of Israel's Operation Cast Lead has been for some families in Gaza. The details are harrowing, and I think it's worthwhile that such things be more widely known, if only to ensure that no one ever starts to fall under the illusion that war is something else than a hellish, murderous undertaking, never something to plunge into lightly.
Having said this much, I do have a major problem with articles like Beaumont's, which is this: while they spare no effort to bring the suffering of innocents to life for readers in as graphical a manner as possible, all too often they fail to give nearly enough context to realize something of essential importance, which is that, far from Israel's government having simply decided to start to rain bombs down on Palestinian women and children for the sheer malice of it, Israel was actually pushed to go to war by a months-long, sustained campaign of provocation initiated by Hamas, Gaza's incumbent government, and one freely chosen (as Hamas apologists usually spare no effort to remind us) by the very same Palestinians whose sufferings we are supposed to feel so moved by, and it is not as if the Palestinians didn't know precisely what they'd be getting when they voted. Robbed of such vital context, any reporting on Palestinian suffering necessarily devolves into tear-jerking agitprop.
Had the Palestinians in Gaza chosen to support a party other than one committed to war with Israel, there simply wouldn't have been a war, nor would there be an Israeli blockade of Gaza's borders to give cause for complaint about Israeli indifference to humanitarian relief - indeed, in with a healthy Gazan economy doing bustling trade with Israel and Egypt, there would have been no need for humanitarian relief in the first place. Gaza's inhabitants could have chosen to make something of all the infrastructure left behind in the abandoned Israeli settlements and factories, but rather than using this newfound autonomy to build up something for themselves and their children, the Gazan populace threw their energies into attempting to destroy Israel instead. Can anyone therefore plead surprise at the fate which has now befallen them? Why are we therefore supposed to empathize more with the Palestinians than we did with, say, all the defenseless German mothers and daughters raped and slaughtered by the oncoming Red Army in 1945? Surely they too were just as human as a Shifa Salman?
Seeing pictures of burnt out shells of houses with body parts scattered about, or a child's head lying in rubble with flies buzzing about its eyes, one has to be inhuman not to feel a sense of remorse at the wasteful brutality of warfare, and a desire for a future in which war is firmly a thing of long gone, darker ages, but the great irony is that as long as least one side in a conflict feels it can mobilize such noble human sentiments as propaganda on behalf of its cause, powerful incentives will remain to engage in reckless behavior which will guarantee that we will see many more ugly images of mayhem. It is a great pity that the leaders of movements such as Hamas and Hezbollah care far more about the killing of Israel's children than they do about the lives and welfare of their own - and a disgrace that so many "journalists" allow themselves to be passive vehicles for the propagation of such tendencies.
You know, I hesitate to get into a conversation about Israel, but ISTR that the conventional wisdom was that a lot of the folks in the Palestinian Authority who voted for Hamas were voting for an anti-corruption agenda rather than the Jew killing.
Posted by: Andrew Reeves | July 06, 2009 at 07:07 PM
Yes, i've seen that argument made plenty of times, but I consider it as specious as absolving German voters of responsibility for World War 2 and the Holocaust because they were supposedly only voting for "law and order" or "a German revival".
Just as with the National Socialists and their obsessions with "lebensraum" and a "Jew-free Europe", one cannot simply consider one aspect of Hamas' programme without looking at the other, frankly much more central portions of it; what makes it worse with the Gazans is that at least the Nazis spent some effort engaging in puff-talk about "peace" in their breakthrough electoral years (and even well into the late 1930s), while Hamas has *never* claimed to be seeking anything more than a temporary truce on the way to the final goal of Israel's destruction, so in that respect the Palestinians have even less of an excuse than the Germans of the 1930s.
PS: It should also be noted that it's not as if there were an upswelling of opposition to Hamas amongst the Gaza populace subsequent to the elections, once it became clear that Hamas was intent on pursuing the programme of aggression it had always declared was its goal. The great majority of Gazans at minimum tacitly supported Hamas' rocket firings into Israel - at least until it finally called down massive Israeli retribution ...
Posted by: Abiola | July 06, 2009 at 09:19 PM
Okay, I mostly agree with your follow up post, but have one nitpick. The main difference between, say, Germany in the early 30's and a lot of the Islamic world where people can actually vote is that there's no real secular good-government agenda. A 1933 German still had lots of options to choose from. In places like Pakistan or the Palestinian Authority, the two flavors that the voter has to choose from seem to be "corrupt" and "brutal, but consistently so."
Posted by: Andrew Reeves | July 07, 2009 at 04:16 PM
Which brings us to the question of why this is so consistently the case throughout the Islamic world. What internal factors prevent so many Muslim countries from having political alternatives other than a choice between militant theocracy and corrupt autocracy? Why does secular liberalism seem to be a non-starter in that part of the world?
Posted by: Abiola | July 07, 2009 at 09:48 PM