Last year, I laid out my position on the war in Israel. ‘This is a very clever article’, my friends told me. ‘You outlined the history of the war so clearly, dear Elewa. Should we give you an award for being a chronically online historically accurate psychopath?’ They probably should have.
However, I now realize that my position wasn’t all that accurate. In fact, it was quite stupid actually. In the article, I made this point to show just how barbaric Israel was being toward the innocents of Palestine.
But it's obvious to me, and anyone who follows our very fine post World War II moral establishment closely, that even if Hitler himself were hiding in a school, it doesn't give you leave to bomb it and kill all the students therein.
At the time this point made sense to me. There should be laws regarding wars, and you cannot justify killing innocents because you want to hit a military target. So if Hitler hides in a school, you should not bomb it, and should actually allow him to live out his life amongst kindergartners.
I’m not the only one with this erroneous assumption. In a recent New Yorker article, former Ambassador to Israel, Jacob J. Lew, had the following disturbing comments to say about the attack on Hamas commanders.
The general pattern was that in-the-moment stories were inaccurate, and that the Israeli military and government establishment were not in a position to fully explain yet. We could almost never get answers that explained what happened before the story was fully framed in international media, and then when the facts were fully developed, it turned out that the casualties were much lower, the number of civilians was much lower, and, in many cases, the children were children of Hamas fighters, not children taking cover in places.
In the interview, Lew justifies the deaths of children in Palestine by arguing that the kids were usually children of Hamas commanders. As expected, this justification was met with thousands wailing about the horribleness of it all. How can you justify killing innocent children because they are kids of Hamas commanders. How can you, indeed.
When I first read the article, I’ll confess that I was also hit with the same shock. This is a truly evil character, I thought. Don’t you have kids at home? Would you be happy if your kids were killed because of your role in the U.S military? How can you justify such barbarism? How can you, indeed.
I’ll show you how.
Let’s assume that this is our moral standard. That the children of opposing commanders cannot, under any circumstances, be murdered. Let’s assume we have that standard. What would happen?
I’ll show you what would happen, if I were a military commander. I would form a squad of children no older than seven who would follow me everywhere. They would be my insurance; my anti-bombing kit. Since no one would dare bomb me while kids are with me, I would be invincible except to direct attacks. And I can escape even that by strapping a three year old to my front and back and running away in zigzag motion. Do you really want to be the soldier that kills a single innocent child just to win a war? I mean, what’s a war to a child’s life?
Not only that, I would retire back home to my extended family — who coincidentally have lots of kids — and be ensured of a sound night’s rest. Especially if I sleep in the children’s room. It would be my invincible charm and would ensure my survival for the entirety of the war. More than that, I would commission a large scale children importing program and build little schools and hospitals around every important command post we have.
What, you want to bomb our central command center? Too bad the next room is filled with sick kids dying of cancer. What a random coincidence that the room adjacent ours also has a fine elementary school for the poorest kids of my country. It’s too bad, dear enemy. My central command is basically invincible now. What are you going to do?
It seems macabre, but it’s obvious that if you consider killing children as collateral damage to be taboo, you merely incentivize the use of children as human shields. You may think you’re doing a good thing, but that’s the outcome you’ll get hundred out of hundred times. The road to hell is paved with good intentions, and the road to children as human shields is paved by regarding the murder of children as taboo.
An even more macabre conclusion is obvious. Showing that targets can be taken out anywhere will do more to stop children from being used as human shields than anything else. It is a moral paradox that seems practically true; protecting children absolutely might harm them more in practice.
The core of this article, which is that soldiers could use our moral standards against the cause we have them for, isn’t unfounded. While ISIS was still going strong, its fighters behaved exactly in this manner. ISIS fighters were embedded in dense civilian areas. They built command posts underneath or close to places like Mosques, Churches and so on. They did this because they knew the U.S coalition forces would hesitate to strike such places (and the coalition forces did this, not because they especially cared about civilians, but because there is a political cost to pay for any US administration that murders innocents, even if it were collateral damage).
Unfortunately, there are no such political costs for Netanyahu and the long nose gang to pay. If you can believe it, Bibi is even more moderate than many members of his own party and large swatches of the Israeli public. So the human shield strategy doesn’t work on them.
In any case, if (and this is a huge IF, as I take all news out of the black hole of Gaza with a pinch of salt) the children killed were mostly killed when their Hamas parents went back home, the fault for their death rests squarely on the shoulders of their parents. If I knew that I had a missile shaped target on my back, and loved my children, I simply wouldn’t sleep at home and expect that my enemies wouldn’t bomb me just because I’m at home and have my children with me. That would be a ridiculous expectation to have, and if I and my children ended up dead because of that, I would blame no one but myself. And it would be stupid for anyone to blame anyone but me for that turn of events.
This does not mean the Israelis aren’t waging this war with extreme prejudice. In my earlier article, I stated that the October 7th attack probably happened with the full knowledge of the Israeli government, as it knew it would provide international pretext to level Gaza. I know that they won’t leave the strip until their job is done. It is hard to find the One Bad Party to blame for this turn of events, and one can only hope that both of them lose.
Of course, this reasonable conclusion is guaranteed to get many Very Serious people mad. Sadly, you cannot really help people suffering from a bad case of suicidal empathy.
essayists like you are the arteries of any sane society