Crime and Blame during Protective Edge

Rabbi Lerner captures much of my nuance in understanding crimes and blame during Protective Edge.  He blames Israel for instigating the war.  He blames Hamas for falling into Israel’s trap and shooting rockets at civilians because it terrorized Israelis, but equally as important giving Israel an excuse to bombard Gaza and for rejecting a cease-fire early in the conflict only to accept the same terms after so many more deaths and destruction.  He blames the international community for standing by and allowing the tragedy to happen. 

I reprint Lerner’s entire introduction below, although above ideas are just the first part of the essay.

The Shame of Israel and Hamas

Rabbi Lerner’s Editor's Note accompanying a report by Robert Tait describing children’s suffering in Gaza City in the aftermath of Protective Edge.

Feb. 1, 2015

The crimes committed against human rights this past summer linger both in the incredibly terrible suffering of the Gazan people, many of whom are facing winter with no shelter, and hundreds of thousands of children suffering from shell shock (see the story below), but also in the trauma that has moved millions of Israelis toward the political right and moral insensitivity at the suffering the Occupation is causing as those Israelis still recall a summer in which almost every day they were forced to run to shelters to protect themselves from the bombs sent from Hamas.

Both sides have acted in a shameful way.

Israel sought to punish Hamas for pursuing a path of reconciliation with the PA--Palestinian Authority (after Israel had canceled the negotiations)  and used the excuse of those bombings, which were (thankfully) totally ineffective, given the Iron Dome cover that Israel had been given by the U.S.

That reconciliation was sought by the Palestinian Authority after Israel refused to live up to its commitment to the P.A. and the U.S. to release Palestinian prisoners as part of the deal that had made it politically possible for the PA to enter into negotiations about the West Bank even as Israel kept building more settlements. After a rogue element of Hamas in the West Bank brutally kidnapped and murdered 3 Israeli youth, Israel started an assault on Hamas members in the West Bank, supposedly with the excuse of searching for the 3 disappeared youth, though Israeli intelligence already knew that the 3 were dead and that it was not Hamas that had ordered the murders. It then began to kill Hamas activists in Gaza by drone attacks. Meanwhile, lynch mobs wandered the streets of Jerusalem and other Israeli cities, beating anyone suspected of being an Arab. Israeli Palestinian citizens who had long sought reconciliation with the Jewish majority started to despair that it would ever be safe for them as a minority group amongst an Israeli majority that had abandoned the Torah teaching to "love the stranger."  A random Palestinian youth was snatched by Israelis near his home in East Jerusalem and burnt to death alive. That was no more an act of "the Israelis" than the murder of the Israeli youth had been an act "of the Palestinians" or even of "the Gazans."

Faced with almost daily assault on their operatives by Israel, Hamas responded with attempts to shell Israeli cities, which provided Israel with the excuse it needed to bomb and ground assault Gaza, killing more than two thousand Gazans, and wounding or maiming another 8,000 and destroying the homes of hundreds of thousands more during the summer assault. Hamas' targeting of civilians in Israeli towns was not only a clear human rights violation, but a terrible injustice to its own people who were suffering from the Israeli attack. Israel proposed a cease-fire which Hamas rejected, only to accept the same terms 6 weeks later after the Gazan population had faced a terrible slaughter from the Israeli assault. Hamas leaders justified this behavior by claiming that they would not follow the example of Jews in the Holocaust who had, according to them, not resisted and walked passively into the Nazi gas chambers. "We are being killed anyway, so why not die with dignity?" Hamas leaders said. But this was a distortion. Israel was in fact violating the human rights of the Palestinian people by occupying the West Bank and blockading Gaza. But it is simply not true that Israel was seeking to follow the Nazi policy of killing every possible Jew in its occupation and blockade--Israel’s actions were morally horrific but they were not the genocidal policies of the Nazis, and they did not leave Gazans with "no alternative" but to engage in what was quickly seen as a futile effort to bomb Israelis. That bombing only accomplished a tightening of Israeli anger at Palestinians, nothing more, and gave Israel the public relations excuse it needed to devastate Gaza. So Hamas leaders should be brought to trial for human rights violations, and so should Israeli leaders who pursued that policy this past summer. Meanwhile, the suffering of the people of Gaza continues at this moment--not only with the estimated 370,000 children who are shell-shocked, but with a million more homeless and the entire population without democratic means to repudiate their Hamas leadership.

This enormous human tragedy is both a stain on the credibility of the world community which has promised to rebuild Gaza but has not done so, on the Jewish people who uncritically rallied to support Israel's criminal acts this past summer, and on Hamas whose criminal acts this past summer should not be excused away as inevitable or without alternatives.

One need not hold any of the actors free of ethical culpability, but one can have compassion both for the Israelis who grew deeply fearful and angry (particularly when misled by their own government and media about why it was all happening) and the Gazans who had been suffering for years from the Israeli blockade and its consequent lack of adequate food and building supplies to repair past assaults by Israel. There are no guilt-free parties in this horrific reality, but the children of Gaza do not deserve to suffer any more, and massive aid from the West should be delivered immediately.

But does this even-handedness apply to the Israeli destruction of Palestinian homes within Israel? Answer this for yourself after reading the UN report that Israel demolished the homes of 1,177 Palestinians (with the usual ethnic cleansing scenario: Israel gives home permits for Jews to expand their homes and settlements, but refuses to grant permits for Palestinians to expand their homes to fit growing families; when the Palestinians then add a room to a crowded house the Israeli authorities destroy the entire house. This double standard is what gives the enemies of Israel their grounds for calling Israeli policy apartheid-like. Read the UN report or the article about this in Ha'aretz. Feb.1st.