What 'The West Wing' Might Have to Say About Israel's Destruction of Gaza
Anywhere else in the world, the indiscriminate slaughter of 12,000 people would be considered a genocide. Why does Israel get a free pass?
Saturday night I was watching The West Wing with Shandi. We’re in Season Five, just as Sam Seaborn, played by Rob Lowe, is being replaced by Will Bailey, played by Joshua Malina. In the middle of the season is a two-episode arc, centered on President Bartlet’s second Inauguration. The subplot, however, features questions of moral responsibility on the part of the United States of America to send American troops to the fictional Republic of Kundu, where reports indicate the beginning of a genocide as one people group in the country turns against another. While the obvious comparison the writers were looking to make is with Rwanda, I couldn’t help but think of the on-going siege of a destroyed Gaza by a much larger, much more powerful opponent in the State of Israel.1
It should be obvious by now that I wholeheartedly condemn Hamas for their terrorist attack in Israel which killed nearly 1,400 people. But similar logic would also ask that I condemn Israel for their unending pulverization of Gaza, so far leading to the deaths of nearly 12,000 people, nearly all of them innocent civilians, women, and children. Israel has used guided bombs on refugee camps, has targeted Gaza’s largest hospital, and Israel’s Prime Minister has publicly stated that one of their objectives is to directly control ‘the security’ of Gaza. While Israel claims to be hunting Hamas, and that Hamas uses human shields as defnse, Israel seems to have no qualms with killing thousands of civilans in a ham-fisted attempt to eliminate one or two Hamas fighters.
When I pointed out the clear violation of the war-time law of proportionality on Twitter, I was pointed to a Tweet thread that, as far as I am concerned, stretched the limits of self-defense so far beyond the definition that it wasn’t even funny. Since Twitter no longer plays nice with Substack, here are some screenshots:
I had three specific thoughts to offer, recognizing that I am not an expert in international relations and the various doctrines of warin the 21st century.
Guglielmo is purposefully moving goalposts. Not only that, he's tying the goalposts to the so-called 'defensive objective.' In this case, G says that the defensive objective of Israel is to destroy Hamas' capability which sounds, to my untrained ears anyway, a lot like an offensive objective, not a defensive one. On G's reading, then, anyone could give any objective as a defense objective, which has the effect, then, of stretching the definition of proportionality beyond its limits. G suggests that to ask a state to halt before it has met its self-defense objectives is like asking that nation to give up their defense. And yet, as I point to above, if your 'defensive objective' is the total destruction of the enemies capability on enemy territory, and you know that this will necessarily involve significant civilian casualties - again, on enemy territory - then you've ultimately found a way to justify the slaughter of defenseless human beings, and you've done so by stretching the reasonable limits of both 'defensive objective' and 'proportionality.'
The shift to uncompassionate realism is nowhere more apparent than the shrug that is given to the (unspoken) suggestion that Israel make an effort to preserve civilian lives, appealing, of course, to Hamas' use of human shields. For realists like G, this is the starting and ending point of the justification for the use of overwhelming destructive and deadly force - if Hamas' would just play fair, the story goes, then we wouldn't 'tragically' lose so many innocent lives. After all, war is hell, c'est la vie! But this is also flawed thinking, as my tweeted example (the North American hostage situation) shows. If we are to believe in the prowess of Israel's Mossad, one of the most feared covert warfare organizations in the world, we know they can enter Gaza, find their targets and eliminate them with nowhere near the current level of causalities. Yet Israeli politicians, including Netanyahu, have repeatedly made it clear that they intend to pulverize Gaza until it is an inhospitable wasteland, human casualties be damned - the idea that this is a defensive operation is, by this point, a joke.
Accusations of anti-semitism against supporters of Palestine serve as a useful foil for the Israeli government. By falsely tying criticism of Israel to anti-Jewish hatred, exculpatory violence is implicitly legitimated. Perversely, this gives cover to actual Jew haters, who find themselves with a sudden influx of supposed fellow-travellers, providing a sense of safety and invincibility that permits them to commit more brazen hate crimes. It's no surprise that we are seeing a documented rise in actual anti-Jewish hate crimes as the number of accused anti-Semites swells - people feel more comfortable showing their hate if they *think* they are not alone.
In conclusion
Don't move the goalposts ad hoc on proportionality to justify civilian deaths; defense ≠ offense
Hamas' use of human shields doesn't justify the use of pulverizing force and a civilian death rate, to-dare, of nearly 12,000 men, women, and children.
Inappropriate accusations of anti-semitism provide cover for both Israel & Nazis.
In the West Wing clip I posted above, the President asks new speechwriting aide Will Bailey why a Kundanese life is worth less than an American life. Bailey responds by saying, “I don’t know, sir, but it is.” Today we should be asking why a Palestinian life is worth less than an Israeli life. Because if the past few weeks have been any indication, the global community seems to agree that it is.
All FREE subscribers have access to Dinner Table Digests, and to any past content that has been pulled from behind Peter’s Support (Pay)Wall.
Content behind the paywall will include Special Edition Digests, rough drafts of essays, shorter, more personal essays, and acerbic social commentary.
Thank you so much for supporting my writing, with your eyeballs, your time, and your $5 bills. I am deeply grateful, and I appreciate any feedback you might have. Please feel free you leave a comment below, or, if you’d like to connect with me directly, you can email me at peter(at)peterthurley(dot).ca. You can also connect with me on Facebook or on Twitter.
I am very well aware that some folks may see my arguments as anti-Semitic, and by extension, me as anti-Semitic. To them I say two things:
It's possible, perhaps even preferable, to be able to make valid criticisms of the policies and actions of the State of Israel without implicating the Jewish people or their faith. The same principle applies when we distinguish the Chinese State’s genocide of Ughur peoples in Xinjiang from the Chinese people.
I will never forget the images I saw at the Vancouver Holocaust Memorial Museum when I was 12 or 13. My mother had brought us to see for ourselves the realities we'd only read about in Anne Frank's Diary. The Holocaust was a truly reprehensible, morally catastrophic, heinous crime against humanity, the extermination of 6 million Jews and an additional 5 million more undesirables, carried out by a people and a state who truly believed that Jews were vermin. It was then, and remains still, a stain on humanity. If never again truly means never again, not even the State of Israel qua State of Israel can get a pass from the humanitarian rules we've put in place since the end of the Holocaust to prevent such an event from ever occurring again. Never again is for everyone or it's for no one. If, in your eyes, that makes me an anti-semite, then that is between you and your maker. My conscience is clean.