A just and criminal war

By Yirmiyahu Yovel
Professori emeritus of the Hebrew University, teaches at the New School for Social Research and won the Israel Prize in Philosophy.
Tags: Hamas, Israel news, Gaza

Since the early 1980s Israel has been fighting enemies without uniforms. An entire generation of soldiers has been born into a situation in which the enemy is interwoven into the civilian population. As a result, restrictions were put on the army's actions. But many restraints have been loosened time and again with the justification of one operational necessity or another until, in the war in the Gaza Strip, the fetters were removed in an almost unprecedented way.

In the name of a justified goal, Israel rained down fire and destruction on a closed ghetto with one of the highest population densities in the world. For three weeks, parents and children were crowded into unprotected apartments or fled from one school to another, from one hospital to the next; but they had no refuge from the bombs of the best air force in the world, or the shells of ground forces that sacrificed scores, even hundreds of these people in order to minimize the risk to its own soldiers, and to strike at terrorist fighters, who should justly be hit, but not at any price.

About 1,300 people were killed, mostly non-combattants, including hundreds of children. Entire families were destroyed, thousands were injured and some 60,000 homeless people are now scrabbling among the ruins of Gaza to gather remnants of their possessions.
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This is a tragic scene, which the citizens of Israel have barely seen on their television screens - and the little they saw they are trying to blur or repress at this moment of supposed "victory," which is nothing but a cease-fire. But the tragedy is not only Gaza's: It is also a tragedy for Israel. The impoverished prisoners of the Strip are trapped by two systems of occupation that oppress them: by the Israeli power that knowingly has operated with little restraint (following a "landlord went crazy" policy, as this was dubbed), and by a fanatical religious organization that is blind to reality and prepared to fight "the Zionist entity" and its inhabitants down to the last Gazan child.

The last time the Israel Defense Forces fought regular armies as such was in 1973 - before today's battalion and brigade commanders were even born. Since then the conflict has deteriorated into a war between two peoples, two civilian populations. Hence, the throbbing hatred this war has generated, as have the acts of injustice and criminality it entails. From Israel's perspective, it is now caught in a trap that prevents it from acting, even in cases of justified defense, without committing humanitarian crimes, some of which are war crimes.

There are Israelis prepared to pay such a high moral price, either consciously or while repressing it. As can be gathered from the reactions today, many people are ready to accept the paradox inherent in the term "a just and criminal war," and to live with it while blurring its significance. Presumably most of those who are prepared to do this console themselves with the thought that this is a temporary situation, not a permanent feature that defines the mode of existence of the society and state to which they belong.

But is that true? The Gaza war dramatically demonstrated that the conjunction of justified combat and war crimes is not an individual instance of this war or that, rather it is becoming a permanent model for the struggle between Israelis and Palestinians. As long as this is a struggle between two populations, occupier and occupied, and as long as there is no peace between Israel and an independent Palestinian state existing beside it, the Israeli soul will be divided between justice and crime, holding onto each other with no way out, like two Siamese twins

The more we become insensitive to the full implications of our acts, the more will a sense of revulsion, regret, and the loss of the significance of Israel as a just state prevail beneath the surface - and not only in the eyes of the outside world, which in time might condemn Israel as an evil state, but also in the eyes of many of the Israel's own Jewish citizens.

If this combination evolves into a permanent psychological and social pattern in Israel, it might portray Israel as an international pariah and spur severe domestic alienation among many of its inhabitants, those who today confine themselves to shame and silence, or conceal their faces from others and themselves. Such an outcome will be far more dangerous for the state's existence than terror.

Therefore, anyone who holds with the doctrine of "the sword shall devour forever" (2 Samuel 2:26) must take into account that in the existing circumstances of occupation, this is a double-edged sword.

The way to overcome this is to create conditions for peace with the Palestinians. Toward this end, Israel should mobilize all of its resources, and its supporters abroad, in order to strengthen Palestinian society and the capability of its leaders to rehabilitate its people, and to carry out effective governance.

Building the Palestinian economy and government is a vital advance payment on peace, and therefore an Israeli interest of the first order.

Prof. Yirmiyahu Yovel, emeritus of the Hebrew University, teaches at the New School for Social Research and won the Israel Prize in Philosophy.