One year later, I still stand with Israel
On the question of Israel and Palestine, where does one start? October 7th 2023? Or perhaps 1967? Or 1948? Or must one go back and cover everything from the founding of Solomon’s Temple onwards, through the Roman Empire, the Muslim Conquest, the Ottoman Empire, and the Mandate for Palestine? There is no clear start and no clear end, and so this is inevitably merely a statement of what I’ve personally found salient.
I have the luxury of not having any particular connection to this conflict. But walking down the street on which I live, I can see several Palestine flags displayed in people’s windows. It’s a largely white, middle class suburb. Given that context, and how differently I evidently feel from those around me, I am compelled to say how things appear to me.
If you’d asked me before October 7th about my position on the Israel/Palestine conflict I’d have given the standard milquetoast answer: “it’s complicated, there’s a long history, faults on both sides, etc., etc., etc.…” And even after watching the events of October 7th unfold, horrific though it was, the question of how to weigh that up in the long history of conflict was not obvious to me. But while it’s true that there is a long and complex history, and while it’s also true that you can point to faults on both sides – after all, who could remain pure over more than a century of conflict? – as I’ve observed the situation over the last year and dug further into the history of the region, there is a moral clarity that has emerged.
A key moment when I realised that my thinking had turned a corner was a few weeks after the start of the current conflict when I heard about the Al-Ahli Hospital explosion. I first read about the explosion on X, and it was clear immediately that there was a fair amount of uncertainty about the cause. Nonetheless, the BBC went right ahead with “Hundreds killed in Israeli strike on Gaza hospital - Palestinian officials”. How could it happen that the state broadcaster – with, in theory, a commitment to neutrality – would write a headline like that? And if that’s what the BBC are doing, could I have been misled on the overall situation?
So what does it mean to say that I stand with Israel? I mean this: Israel has a right to defend itself against the attacks from Hamas, and that right extends to the aims and methods of the current war: to free the hostages, to remove Hamas from power, and to do so as humanely as one can reasonably expect such a war to be carried out.
One of the questions that you have to confront if you support Israel in the current war is whether the inevitable deaths of civilians can be justified?
It’s first of all worth pointing out that Hamas does not make any distinction between civilians and combatants when it comes to casualties. It’s hard to know how many deaths are combatants without relying on IDF assessments because Hamas refuses to draw that distinction. Even the quoted number of child casualties doesn’t rule out them being combatants since children are recruited as soldiers by all the major Palestinian armed groups.
Precise numbers aside, though, there are inevitably going to be large numbers of civilian casualties in a war of this sort – the more so because of the Hamas practice of embedding their military facilities throughout civilian areas, precisely so that Israel cannot target them without a high risk of causing civilian casualties.
That being the situation, though, Israel have gone to great lengths to avoid civilian casualties. For example, there is this story about a man instructed to guide his neighbours to safety. The IDF has made many thousands of these phone calls. Consider what it must cost them: each call is hours of additional delay, each call is an advance warning to enemy combatants to move themselves and their weapons. This can only be a massive sacrifice of initiative on Israel’s part for the sake of the civilians on the opposing side of the war.
It is often pointed out that there are wildly different numbers of casualties on the Israeli and Palestinian sides. But mostly this tells you that the Israeli government puts more effort into defending its citizens than Hamas do. Rockets are launched constantly from Gaza, roughly aimed at Israel’s population centres. These attacks are basically indiscriminate; each is by any sane standard a war crime. Israeli civilian casualties would be far higher if it weren’t for the enormous effort that Israel puts into civilian defence.
More fundamentally, though, this is not a game in which playing sportingly means allowing an equal number of deaths on either side. It is a war, and the goal is to achieve one’s aims and end it.
From Israel’s point of view, what is the alternative to war? Yes, they might get more international sympathy if they fought purely defensively and only on their own territory, doing what they could to repel attacks but not doing anything to prevent future ones. But then where would the incentive be for Hamas to stop? Some of Hamas’s blows would surely land, even if most of them failed. As long as they could launch rockets from Gaza they wouldn’t even have to take any risks. They would be fêted and funded by Iran and everyone else who wants Israel to disappear. Is the hope that they would just get bored by the money and adoration?
Terrible things happen in war. While acknowledging the tragedy of death, the sad reality is that war is hell. The Gazans chose to have this war, and if they wish to end it then they can always surrender.
Looking at Hamas specifically, and bearing in mind that they are the government of Gaza, it would be easy to assume that the government wants to achieve the best possible outcome for its people. But what Hamas consider to be in the best interests of their people may not be the vision of a quiet, peaceful life that would be comprehensible to a Westerner. Hamas’ founding charter set its goal as creating a unified Palestine under Islamic rule and, in doing so, destroying Israel:
The Islamic Resistance Movement believes that the land of Palestine is an Islamic Waqf consecrated for future Moslem generations until Judgement Day. It, or any part of it, should not be squandered: it, or any part of it, should not be given up. Neither a single Arab country nor all Arab countries, neither any king or president, nor all the kings and presidents, neither any organization nor all of them, be they Palestinian or Arab, possess the right to do that. Palestine is an Islamic Waqf land consecrated for Moslem generations until Judgement Day.
Though Hamas claims that “under the wing of Islam followers of all religions can coexist in security and safety,” they also quote approvingly:
The Prophet, Allah bless him and grant him salvation, has said:
“The Day of Judgement will not come about until Moslems fight the Jews (killing the Jews), when the Jew will hide behind stones and trees. The stones and trees will say O Moslems, O Abdulla, there is a Jew behind me, come and kill him. […]”
So I don’t think I’d want to be a Jew in a Hamas-run state.
In their new 2017 charter (which does not unambiguously supersede the 1988 charter) they affirm that:
The establishment of “Israel” is entirely illegal and contravenes the inalienable rights of the Palestinian people and goes against their will and the will of the Ummah;
So there is no hope of Hamas accepting a two-state solution. They have never seriously offered recognition of Israel as part of any peace negotiation. They have never credibly held out any hope that Jews could live peacefully alongside Muslims in Palestine. As long as Hamas remain in government in Gaza, they should be expected to take any opportunity to repeat what they did on October 7th.
Now that the war has intensified in the north, and Hezbollah (who have been launching rockets at Israel since October 8th) are now in the spotlight, perhaps it’s worth taking a look at their goals too. Some versions of their 1985 manifesto included a section titled “The Necessity for the Destruction of Israel”, which I quote in full:
The Necessity for the Destruction of Israel
We see in Israel the vanguard of the United States in our Islamic world. It is the hated enemy that must be fought until the hated ones get what they deserve. This enemy is the greatest danger to our future generations and to the destiny of our lands, particularly as it glorifies the ideas of settlement and expansion, initiated in Palestine, and yearning outward to the extension of the Great Israel, from the Euphrates to the Nile.
Our primary assumption in our fight against Israel states that the Zionist entity is aggressive from its inception, and built on lands wrested from their owners, at the expense of the rights of the Muslim people. Therefore our struggle will end only when this entity is obliterated. We recognize no treaty with it, no cease fire, and no peace agreements, whether separate or consolidated.
We vigorously condemn all plans for negotiation with Israel, and regard all negotiators as enemies, for the reason that such negotiation is nothing but the recognition of the legitimacy of the Zionist occupation of Palestine. Therefore we oppose and reject the Camp David Agreements, the proposals of King Fahd, the Fez and Reagan plan, Brezhnev’s and the French-Egyptian proposals, and all other programs that include the recognition (even the implied recognition) of the Zionist entity.
It’s good to know where one stands.
More broadly, this part of the conflict points to Iran’s involvement in the funding, arming and training of Hezbollah. Iran, to be clear, has no territorial dispute with Israel. It shares no borders with Israel. It doesn’t even share borders with any country that shares borders with Israel. Prior to the Iranian Revolution in 1979, relations with Israel were generally neutral. But now, as an Islamic theocracy, Iran can’t abide the existence of Israel.
If you’ll permit me to speculate, it seems that the issue here is not so much the plight of the Palestinian people, but rather that the existence of a non-Islamic state in the Middle East is an affront to Islamic pride.
Surely it’s just Hamas and their allies that want this war, and the majority of the Gazans are just caught up in the mess? Surely they just want to live their lives in peace and quiet? Unfortunately this may not be the case.
There are plenty of caveats that one can and should apply when considering public opinion in Palestine, and I would not for a moment assume that Palestinians are a monolithic bloc. It’s been eighteen years since the last election in Palestine, and “normalisation” of relations with Israelis is a crime.
Nonetheless, the available evidence points in a depressing direction. Hamas did, after all, win that election in 2006 with 44% of the proportional vote. Those lines about Jew-killing were apparently not too great a turn-off for the electorate. In July 2023 58% of Gazans polled had a positive view of Hamas; 56% disagreed with the statement “I hope someday we can be friends with Israelis, since we are all human beings after all”; and 72% agreed that “the Palestinians should move to a new intifadah and make armed struggle their top priority”. And alongside Hamas there are a host of other organisations with similar levels of popular support that also participated in the October 7th attacks.
After the 2005 Israeli disengagement from the Gaza Strip (in which Israel ordered Israelis in the Gaza Strip to leave their homes and ceded control to the Palestinian Authority) and the subsequent Hamas victory, rocket attacks from the Gaza Strip into Israel increased dramatically. You might have hoped that the autonomy that they had after 2005 – not to mention the billions of dollars in aid that they receive – would have dampened their desire to wage war on Israel, but it seems that it has not.
If you haven’t already done so, I invite you to watch this video of Shani Louk’s body being paraded through the streets for cheering Gazans to spit on. If your mental model of Palestinians doesn’t reckon with this grim reality then you will forever be surprised by the failures of the peace process.
There’s a secondary issue which I find striking: the curious position of the human rights enthusiasts. Admittedly, it doesn’t really reflect on the object level of the conflict, but it does tell you something about the information environment that we are in.
In the 18 years of its existence, the UN Human Rights Council has issued more condemnations of Israel than of the rest of the world put together. If it were just the case that the HRC had issued a proportionally larger number of condemnations of Israel than it did of most other countries then my assumption would be that there was a problem with Israel’s human rights record. But when it gets to more than the rest of the world combined I can only conclude that it’s a problem with the HRC.
Can anyone really believe that Israel has a worse human rights record than Russia, a dictatorship in which opposition figures die mysteriously in remote prisons? Or than Iran, a theocracy whose morality police regularly detain women for the crime of wearing improper hijab? Or China, a one-party state which has put a million Uyghurs into detention camps? And not only worse than each of those in particular, but that Israel, a democracy with a population about the same size as Greater London, is worse than all of those put together? Where do the Israelis find the time to sleep?
The HRC has two permanent standing agenda items, one quite reasonably looking at the human rights situation in the world as a whole, and the other:
Item 7. Human rights situation in Palestine and other occupied Arab territories
- Human rights violations and implications of the Israeli occupation of Palestine and other occupied Arab territories
- Right to self-determination of the Palestinian people
No other region in the world, no matter how troubled its history, gets a permanent agenda item. The only sane conclusion has to be that the UN Human Rights Council is a Kafka-esque farce.
Scott Alexander describes a style of argument that he calls an isolated demand for rigor. Analogously, we can posit an isolated demand for moral purity. Yes, it is right to scrutinise Israel’s human rights record and where they make mistakes it is right to criticise them. But if you’re only going to scrutinise Israel and only going to call for their punishment, while ignoring the actions of anyone else, then that surely indicates a problem with your attitude towards Israel.
It sadly cannot be overstated the extent to which human rights NGO’s have beclowned themselves on this issue. I might once have regarded Amnesty International with respect, but over the last year that has been thoroughly beaten out of me.
Amnesty International tells us that Israel is an apartheid state.
But what trust can you put in a document that introduces the situation like this?:
In the course of establishing Israel as a Jewish state in 1948, its leaders were responsible for the mass expulsion of hundreds of thousands of Palestinians and the destruction of hundreds of Palestinian villages in what amounted to ethnic cleansing.
Anyone with even a passing familiarity with the history of the region will recognise this as a gross misrepresentation. Disliked by both Arabs and Jews, the British withdrew from Mandatory Palestine in 1948. The UN had proposed a partition plan in 1947 that would have divided Mandatory Palestine into separate Arab and Jewish states. This proposal was accepted by the Jews but the Arabs refused any engagement in the discussions and rejected all proposals. On the 14th of May 1948 the British withdrew and the state of Israel was declared. And on the 15th of May the new state was invaded by a coalition of Palestinian militia and the armies of Egypt, Transjordan, Syria, Lebanon and Iraq, with Saudi Arabia and Yemen also sending troops. During that war civilians on both sides were displaced, including Jews from areas ultimately held by Egypt and Jordan.
In Amnesty’s telling there is no mention of the war nor how it started. It is as if Israel acted out of the blue. If Amnesty are willing to mislead in that way, what else might they be willing to mislead on?
Well, here’s something:
And what exactly did this writer do?
Daqqah was handed a life sentence in 1986 after being convicted of commanding members of the terror cell the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP), to abduct and kill 19-year-old Israeli soldier Moshe Tamam in 1984.
The kidnap, a ransom bid that failed, turned into murder on Daqqah’s orders.
Tamam, who was on leave from the military when he was murdered, vanished after accompanying his girlfriend to her home in the city of Tiberias and returning by bus to Tel Aviv.
His body was found four days later near the entrance to the town of Mevo Dotan in the West.
Tamam’s killers gouged out his eyes, mutilated his body and castrated him before taking him to an olive grove and shooting him dead, according to reports at the time.
As the community note points out, criminals die in prison all the time, across the world. And yet Amnesty want to tell us that this particular death illustrates “Israel’s disregard for Palestinians’ right to life”? Why would you say that unless you wanted to stir up prejudice against Israelis?
When we hear about human rights issues in Israel, a frequent source of information is B’Tselem, an Israeli organisation. Israel has a notable capacity for self-reflection and self-criticism. The IDF, in contrast to some other forces in the region, has a disciplinary process to ensure that its soldiers follow its guidelines. This is all subject to democratic oversight in a country with an active left wing. In that context, I struggle to take seriously the sheer volume of accusations levelled against the country.
Of course, the middle-class liberals in my street putting up Palestine flags in their windows aren’t antisemitic. They’re opposed to racism in any form. They don’t have any problem with Jews. It’s only Zionism that they’re opposed to.
What is Zionism? The belief that Jews have a right to their own state in the Middle East. Wikipedia tells us that “self-determination is a cardinal principle in modern international law”. And where could the Jews have any reasonable claim to self-determination if not in Judea?
Though they have been exiled by successive waves of conquest, the territory of Jerusalem and the surrounding areas is undeniably where the Jews came from. It is where Solomon’s Temple was built. And then the Second Temple after the first was destroyed. And there have been Jews in the Middle East continuously to the present day.
If you’re in favour of self-determination for all peoples except the Jews then perhaps that is antisemitic, actually.