Israel’s right to self-defence must be proportionate, lawful and humane

The premeditated, evil barbarity unleashed on hundreds of innocent human beings by Hamas, a terrorist organisation, can never be justified or excused. Nor can the belief systems that conceived of the massacres and put them into effect. By any standard, they are heinous crimes against humanity and can only be viewed as such.

The question that arises now is one of response. What can and should be done in response? At the absolute minimum, it is not only legitimate but obligatory to firstly prevent any recurrence and then to seek out and bring to justice all the perpetrators – gunmen, weapons providers and political planners. Rescuing all the poor hostages from their captors is also an imperative.

Israeli prime minister Binyamin Netanyahu – mortified by intelligence lapses – has promised a response that will “echo across the generations”. We should remember that anything that is done or not done now will have lasting historical reverberations. If any aspect of the history of Israel and Palestine is clear and beyond dispute, it is that the use of violence begets further violence and that killing Israelis and Palestinians drives peace further away and only endangers the lives of the great mass of innocent people.

More than two million human beings live in the Gaza Strip. Their awful circumstances are the legacy of war and oppression. Gaza is not a concentration camp and it is not a ghetto of old. Many Israelis would describe any such descriptions of Gaza as anti-Semitic and as belittling the Holocaust.

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But Gaza remains what it undeniably is – a terrible place and an inhuman pressure cooker. And Israel jointly shares responsibility and blame for what it is – and what it has become – with neighbouring Arab states that unleashed wars in 1948, 1967 and 1973. Gaza is a sump of hopelessness, deprivation and political subjection to the extremists who control it.

It is contended by many that the rise of Hamas to ascendancy in Gaza was initially encouraged by Israel as occupier, in the short-sighted view that encouraging a local variant of the Muslim Brotherhood would diminish the power, standing and effectiveness of the Palestine Liberation Organisation (PLO) and the secularist, left-wing politicians who dominated the Palestine Authority. Splitting the Palestinian political entity in two was seen by some as an opportunity to divide and conquer.

If so, that strategy has dramatically backfired. It has dealt heavy blows on any two-state solution to the Israel/Palestine political conflict. That may suit the hard right in Israel in their strategy of creeping annexation of the West Bank and kettling two million Palestinians under Hamas in Gaza.

There is a risk that Netanyahu will now unleash such terrible destruction by air and land on Gaza that tens of thousands of innocent humans will die, hundreds of thousands will be made homeless, and millions left with no social infrastructure, water, electricity, sewage, gas or access to food or health facilities. Reduction of millions to a living hell of disease and despair.

If that is the response that Netanyahu thinks will “echo across the generations”, all of Israel’s western supporters will share the blame if they allow it to happen.

US president Joe Biden should wake up to what he is watching. Netanyahu’s vengeance has the capacity to critically damage the West in a relatively short time frame. Biden has the lives of tens of thousands of people in his hands and he must take the responsibility if he transfers them into the cupped hands of Netanyahu.

Terrorism depends on horror in the minds of others. It thrives on outrage. It has been said that last weekend was Israel’s 9/11. The 2001 terror attacks in the US begat worldwide outrage, sympathy and calls for a “war on terror” by the Bush administration. Who won that war? Is it still ongoing? Can it ever end?

If Hamas deserves to be toppled – and it does – how will reduction of Gaza to stone-age rubble address the long-term security needs of Israel? How will that play across the Islamic world? Who knows how the Saudis and the Gulf states will view the Hamas massacres, or how they will play out if Gaza is razed and many thousands of Palestinians die? Could Israeli-Arab rapprochement survive a war in Gaza that will “echo across generations”?

Europe sat on its hands on the annexation of the West Bank. Those of us in the Seanad who passed the Settlement Goods Bill as a small but important symbolic rejection of the creeping illegal annexation of the West Bank were described by the Israeli government as anti-Semitic.

Ireland must now shout out loud against total war in Gaza. The only response that will avoid further long-term catastrophe is restraint and adherence to international law. Israel’s right of self-defence must be proportionate, lawful and humane. That response might echo across the generations.