AVOIDING ARMAGEDDON

PART I of III

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INTRODUCTION

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As a child, I would listen intently to a neighbour who had been a prisoner of the Japanese in World War II. He told me that some of the POWs who had fared worst, had been lawyers in civilian life. They could too often see the other side of the argument: in wartime that may not help you survive or win.

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For my Jewish and Arab friends, when it comes to the tragic events in Israel, Gaza, and the West Bank, it’s mainly a case of ‘if you are not with us, you are against us’, right now.

But to mediate peace effectively we must sometimes upset all sides along the way. No doubt some of what I say here will do just that.

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In Part I, I first dispense with some false narratives on each side and quote some memorable words from a storied Israeli warrior, who could also see the other side of the argument. Next, I shall frame what is to follow, with some international law and commonalities between the different ‘Abrahamic’ ethics of warfare. Throughout will be some oft-forgotten history because context matters.

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In search of elusive paths to peace and flourishing, amidst the horrors (and in the Realpolitik) of the moment, I will set out in Part II some reasons for optimism.

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In Part III, I shall plot one such path, drawing lessons from nation building techniques (old and new) that have worked before and can work again if the right leadership and skills can be pragmatically harnessed to a powerfully expressed vision for a better future, and the will to succeed.

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HUMANITARIAN and HUMAN RIGHTS LAW

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‘The applicable legal framework governing the hostilities is the law of armed conflict, also referred to as international humanitarian law, in particular its rules regulating the conduct of hostilities’.

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It is a given for international lawyers that the events of 7 October 2023 obliged Israel to take steps to protect its citizens and gave it a right to use proportionate force to do so. But there is much confusion in the media about what is legally ‘proportionate’.

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The rule of proportionality states that ‘it is prohibited to carry out an attack when the

expected incidental loss of civilian life, injury to civilians, or damage to civilian objects would be excessive in relation to the concrete and direct military advantage that is anticipated from the attack.[1]’. This expectation is to be judged from the standpoint of commanders operating in the moment in the battlefield, and not with hindsight.

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Pacifists can quarrel with the ethics of this legal test (and it may provide a flimsy defence to charges of hypocrisy and collective punishment against Israel) ?but it certainly is not a sick calculus about killing an equal and opposite number of non-combatant men, women, and children, by similarly cruel means, for the purposes of revenge.

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?It is not too soon to be appalled by both the events of 7 October 2023 and the continuing ‘domicide’ and loss of civilian lives in Gaza, but only the former can yet be judged as entailing war crimes[2].

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It may seem odd for ‘humanitarian law’ to be a synonym for the laws of war. But warfare has ever been the crucible of humanity’s worst inhumanities. The rules regulating its conduct define which of such inhumanities are to count as crimes.

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‘Just War’ in the Abrahamic Traditions

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Modern rules of lawful war emerge from ancient notions of ‘Just War,’ with detailed rules on the conduct of hostilities traceable to the American Civil War and President Abraham Lincoln’s Lieber Code of 1863.

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?In the West, Hugo Grotius is regarded as having fathered international law with his ‘De Jure Belli ac Pacis ‘(‘On the Law of War and Peace’) of 1625. ?It is little appreciated that Grotius was a ‘Johnny Come Lately’ to the topic.

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?Much earlier Chinese and Greek Classical thought had things to say on the topic of warfare long before Grotius, but (sticking with the ‘Abrahamic’ strands of thought) the Old Testament kicks off the chronology.

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?Rather as the Ottomans had sought to codify aspects of Islamic law in the Majallah or Civil Code in 1876, the great Jewish thinker Maimonides (aka Rambam) (1135-1204 CE) had endeavoured a coherent collection of the rules for life and conduct (including hostilities) to be found in the Pentateuch in his ‘Misneh Torah’ and had illuminated them in his ‘Guide for the Perplexed’ in the late 12th Century, more than four hundred years before Grotius.

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In the Islamic strain of thought, Imam al-Shafi’s Book of Jihad (Kitab al Jihad), thought to date from around 820 CE, pre-dated De Jure Belli ac Pacis by some seven centuries.

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?Notions of, proportionality, non-combatant immunity and humanitarian considerations are common to all of these writings. ?Ideas of obligatory war (encompassing pre-emptive self-defence in the Jewish concept of Melchemet Mitzvah) are also seen in the bellicose aspects of Islamic notions of Jihad and in the motivation for the Crusades in Christendom.

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?All of the above helped to keep the acquisition of territory by force more or less fair game until the 20th Century, with principles for preserving territorial integrity (and the exercise of self-determination within it) finding expression in the Covenant of the League of Nations in 1919, followed by the explicit embargo on the unjustified or unauthorised use of force in the UN Charter of 1945.

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?Human Rights

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Secular International Human Rights Law may be seen as a creature of the European Enlightenment but has undeniable Judeo-Christian underpinnings. The unalienable rights of man proclaimed in the US Declaration of Independence, as well as the equal status of every person, are both said to be endowed by a Creator God. Neither proposition would have been held as a self-evident truth by earlier, non-monotheistic, civilisations.

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It is all too easy for secular humanists to get hung up on the shortcomings of different manifestations and mutations of the Abrahamic faiths. Any moderate adherent to these faiths must surely edit their literal dogmas in some respects. For example, there are plenty of stoning offences in the Old Testament, whereas it is necessary to go beyond the Quran to the Sunnas and Hadiths to find them in Islam. ‘Let he that hath no sin cast the first stone’ may be an improvement, but the Christian formula of loving the sinner but hating the sin is still unconvincing to many parents who love their gay and/or divorced children wholeheartedly and do not condemn their actions either.

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Rather than focussing on these difficulties and what many secular humanists regard as the superstitions of the three great Semitic religions, it may be more helpful to focus on turning shared nominal claims to being religions of peace into pragmatic realities.

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?But we cannot easily get there from a starting point of either false moral equivalence or real hypocrisies twinned with fake histories. It is necessary to first clear the ground of some of these.

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A FALSE MORAL EQUIVALENCE

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14 May 1948

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‘The State of Israel… will foster the development of the country for the benefit of all its inhabitants…it will ensure complete equality of social and political rights to all its inhabitants irrespective of religion, race or sex; it will guarantee freedom of religion, conscience, language, education and culture; it will safeguard the Holy Places of all religions; and it will be faithful to the principles of the Charter of the United Nations.’

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18 August 1988

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‘…?the Islamic Resistance Movement [i.e. Hamas] aspires to the realisation of Allah's promise, no matter how long that should take. 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. Only the Gharkad [Salt Bush] tree would not do that, because it is one of the trees of the Jews."?.

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One might think that anybody who is not a pathological fanatic must hold it to be a self-evident truth that the first aspiration is virtuous, and the second wicked. But amidst today’s ‘Crisis of Meaning’,? the beguiling ideology of Post-Modernism has spawned a tyranny of victimhood, and identity politics (undergirded by an inability to discern right from wrong).

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The essence of this false narrative is memorably captured by the late Sir Roger Scruton’s summation[3] of Michel Foucault’s ‘Les Mots et les Choses’. “…The text that seemed to justify every form of transgression by showing that obedience is merely defeat…composed with a Satanic mendacity, selectively appropriating? facts in order to show that culture and knowledge are nothing but the ‘discourses’ of power… that ‘truth’ requires inverted commas, that it changes from epoch to epoch and is tied to the form of consciousness…imposed by the class that profits from its propagation.’.

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My late Japanese POW mentor (Billy Watson was his name) ?with his dim view of lawyers, may have been surprised by Scruton’s discovery that ‘The common law of England is proof that there is a real distinction between legitimate and illegitimate power, that power can exist without oppression and that authority is a living force in human conduct. English law, I discovered, is the answer to Foucault.’.

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The common law of England (unlike the? ‘top-down’ edicts from on high in parliamentary or congressional legislation and civil law codes) is an elaborately evolved oral history which has discerned right from wrong taking a ‘bottom up’ approach, case by case. Its point of departure ?is the premise that we are all free, as individuals, to do as we wish until that freedom unacceptably infringes on the freedom of others. It is inherent in this worldview that being an oppressor and being a victim are not immutable conditions but depend on behaviours. In the present context neither Israeli Jews nor Palestinian Muslims (being the typical identity politics delineation between oppressor and victim) can have an automatic monopoly of right or wrong.

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What can be said for certain is that, even though if State of Israel falls short of? the above-stated aspiration from its own declaration of independence, this is inestimably better than the prospect of Hamas succeeding in its mission statement. That mission statement is ‘Hearsay’ which jars with the Quran itself – e.g. ‘Children of Israel! Recall My favour which I bestowed upon you, exalting you above all nations.(2.47)’

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It is hard to remain unmoved? (for any English-speaking person, at least) by the white-hot impassioned rhetoric of? Israel’s Special Envoy to the UN on combatting Anti-Semitism. Michal Cotler-Wunch, rails against the ‘Orwellian inversion’ of equating Zionism with racism and genocide. She calls this out as the latest mutation of the Anti-Semitic virus. Equally she gainsays that the Holocaust caused the State of Israel and contends that it was the absence of the State of Israel that allowed the Holocaust to happen: ‘Never Again’ is what Israel must act to ensure, right now; this is her call to arms[4]. The force and velocity of this argument does not mean, nonetheless, that the Israeli narrative is free from distortions and fake histories of its own.

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Fake History and Real Hypocrisy

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According to Benjamin Netanyahu (or what we might call the ‘Bibi Spin’[5]), ?being a Palestinian is a made-up construct.?Before the Jewish Return, Palestine had been a mainly empty and barren land. ?Those fleeing in the Naqba or Catastrophe of the 1948 War had been welcome to stay had they not been directed to flee by their leaders. This version of events is not securely anchored in historical truth.

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The fact that Israeli historian Benny Morris has managed to upset both Jewish and Arab opinion with his extensive research and nuanced account of? the reasons for the depopulation and destruction of ?many Palestinian villages and towns from 1947 to 1949[6] seems to indicate that what he says is about as? reliable as the fog of war and mists of time permit. Some stayed, but many left (with varying degrees of coercion) and destruction and atrocities occurred on a significant scale. It was war then as it is now, and the nascent State of Israel had been attacked by armies from Egypt, Jordan, Iraq, Syria, and Lebanon.

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There is certainly more truth, however, to the perspective that Jew, Muslim, and Christian had typically rubbed along together reasonably harmoniously under four hundred odd years of Ottoman rule,? and much better than they did after the 1917 Balfour Declaration, promising Jews a national home in Palestine, became hardwired into the British Mandate by 1922.

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It also seems that the DNA of the present-day occupants , whether Arab or Jew, suggests that their gene pool owes less to the invaders from the Arabian peninsula than to earlier common forbears, so that the narrative of? Israeli Zionists as white European? colonizers of the Arabic aboriginals is in some respects a further distortion.

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Part of the hypocrisy of the victim narrative is that pointing the finger of blame solely at the State of Israel lets Hamas and the Palestinian Authority off the hook and, most importantly, ignores any responsibility of Arab neighbours (most especially Jordan and Egypt) for the perma-refugee status of Palestinians. The birth of the State of Israel (just as many well-integrated Jews of Western Europe, who opposed Zionism, feared[7]) prompted a significant exodus of Jewish refugees from North Africa and elsewhere in the Middle East, but they have long since been integrated in Israel and elsewhere.

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A Balanced View in an Unbalanced World

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There is no false moral equivalence in grieving the loss of all innocent lives equally.? Proportionality, as we have seen, is not a numbers game in the law of armed conflict. Nor is it the ethic of ‘an eye for an eye’ which risks leaving us all blind. Each maiming, bereavement and benighted life is a unique tragedy, and here it is necessary to see the other side of the argument, with empathy.

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The following were words spoken at the funeral of a young Israeli in April 1956 at Kibbutz Nahal Oz. Roi Rothberg had been ambushed and shot dead from the adjacent Gaza Strip, whilst guarding the Kibbutz.

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‘Let us not cast blame on the murderers today. Why should we declare their burning hatred for us? For eight years they have been sitting in the refugee camps of Gaza, and before their eyes we have been transforming the lands and villages, where they and their fathers dwelt, into our estate. It is not among the Arabs in Gaza, but in our own midst that we must seek…Beyond the furrow of the border, a sea of hatred and desire for revenge is swelling, awaiting the day when serenity will dull our path.’

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The speaker giving the eulogy was Israeli Chief of Staff, Moshe Dayan. It is eerie that what still lay ahead for the one-eyed warrior then was to become the hero of the Six Day War in June 1967, only to become vilified for seeming to have had his own ‘path dulled’ so that the IDF was taken by surprise on 6 October 1973, just as it has been again fifty years and a day later, on the holiest festival in the Jewish calendar.

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On 7 October 2023 some twenty Hamas fighters occupied Kibbutz Nahal Oz for twelve hours murdering families in their homes and kidnapping a family of five, whilst livestreaming it for the world to see on the mother’s phone. Who knows whether any of their grandparents had been in Moshe Dayan’s one good eye or better mind’s eye when he spoke those words in 1956.

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Having been demonised in Israel after this 1973 Yom Kippur/Ramadan/October War, many thought that Dayan’s public life was over, and yet when Menachem Begin was elected as Israeli PM in 1977, he needed someone with international standing to help sanitise his own past and brought Dayan back as Foreign Minister. Menachem Begin had led Irgun, the Jewish armed group which claimed responsibility for bombing the headquarters of the British Mandate authorities in the King David Hotel in Jerusalem, on July 22, 1946, leaving 91 dead and 46 injured (including British, Jewish, and Arab civilians and military). Triumph may allow ‘Terrorist’ to be labelled ‘Freedom Fighter’ in the rear-view mirror, but when actions rather than identities are judged, this was a terrorist attack.?

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Following his return to political life, Moshe Dayan went on to play an essential role in negotiating the March 1979 Peace Treaty with Egypt. When he had continued his words at Roi’s funeral in April 1956, saying ‘This is our life’s choice – to be prepared and armed strong and determined, lest the sword be stricken from our fist and our life cut down’, we hear the realist axiom that we must prepare for war if we want peace. Thirty years later, Israeli novelist David Grossman echoed Moshe Dayan when he paid a deeply moving tribute to his son Uri, killed the day before the 1986 truce in Lebanon. He closed by saying. “For now, I am not going to say anything about the war in which you were killed. We, your family have already lost this war, The State of Israel will have to do its own self-examination.’.

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We shall look at today’s context for necessary self- examination by all the concerned actors in Part II to lay the ground for the actions suggested in Part III.

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[1]? Both quotations are succinct and accurate summaries (with emphasis added) from Israel’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs Hamas-Israel Conflict 2023: Key Legal Aspects. Updated to November 2, 2023

[2] At the risk of being accused of using horror for rhetoric, I challenge anyone to deny that there were war crimes having seen this: Visual evidence of the October 7 attacks (official; warning, disturbing images) -https://drive.google.com/file/d/1mlbMlU9aW8uc-DZUYXA2XrxWbXR8qz3o/view?usp=drive_link

[3] ‘Gentle Regrets: Thoughts from a Life.’ Continuum 2005 p 35

[4] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xTFV1t9_AuQ&t=11s

[5] https://youtu.be/4OcaMRLTyGI?si=QdasTlCseIRa0-0p

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[6] The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem, 1947-1949? and The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem Revisited. Cambridge University Press,1988 and 2004.

[7] ?Hence, the drafting of the Balfour Declaration had evolved as follows: ‘ His Majesty's Government view with favour the establishment in Palestine of ?the a national home for the Jewish people, and will use their best endeavours to facilitate the achievement of this object, it being clearly understood that nothing shall be done which may prejudice the civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine, or the rights and political status enjoyed by Jews in any other country.’? When the terms of the Mandate were agreed between the Allied Powers in San Remo in April 1920 so as to incorporate this language, there was a ‘Note Verbale’ by France to the effect that ‘civil rights’ of the non-Jewish communities was to be regarded as including their political rights. See.https://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/jsource/History/Minutes_of_the_1920_Conference_of_San_Remo.pdf

This language was in turn included in the Treaty of Lausanne (1923) in which Turkey (as successor State to the Ottoman Empire) ceded its Palestinian territories to Britain as the Mandatory.