“In Gaza and Israel, side with the child over the gun.” This was the headline for an article published on October 11th in which essayist Naomi Klein criticised a section of the Left for being unable to express true compassion for the victims of the civilians and children massacred by Hamas on October 7th, on the basis that the weapons had been in the hands of the oppressed and the colonised.
At a time when mothers in Gaza have been reduced to using marker pens to write their children's names on different parts of their bodies so they can be identified if they are torn apart by Israeli bombs, the priority is to stand with the families and children of Gaza.
The enclave, where under 14s represent 40% of the population, has become in UNICEF's words “a graveyard for thousands of children”. Some 3,760 have died since the start of the conflict and more than 7,200 have been wounded, according to the United Nations body. These figures are based on data from the Ministry of Health in Gaza which is controlled by Hamas, but they have been used by the World Health Organisation (WHO) and are plausible given the scale of the destruction. And in previous wars in Gaza, the figures from that ministry tallied with those from non-governmental organisations (NGOs) and journalists.
Enlargement : Illustration 1
It has been said that, in relation to the size of the Israeli population, the massacres of October 7th which saw more than 1,300 victims was equivalent to the attack on the Bataclan – the Paris music venue that was hit by a terrorist attack in November 2015 – claiming 9,500 lives. If one continues with such miserable calculations and relates the 9,000 deaths in Gaza to a population total of around 2.3 million, then it is like France having lost 264,000 people in four weeks, more than 100,000 of them children.
Let's continue with these macabre extrapolations. According to one source close to the Israeli scrutiny services quoted by Le Monde, up to 15 Hamas commanders have been killed so far. Fifteen Hamas commanders for 9,000 dead: or 600 deaths for each Hamas chief executed. One can only imagine the final tally if the ratio remains the same for the dozens or even hundreds of senior Hamas officers that Israel has said it wants to eliminate.
Two sides of the wall
The figures, as questionable as they might be and as terrifying as they are, do not in any case tell the human stories of the lives cut short or the suffering of family and friends. Separated by a physical and emotional wall, the two worlds face each other today amid total mutual incomprehension of the other side's pain and memories.
Traumatised by the horror of the Hamas attacks on October 7th , in which men, women and children were savagely killed at point blank range or burnt by terrorists who had sought them out in their own homes, Israeli society is burying its dead and waiting in torment for news of the hostages. There are 242 in all, some of them dual nationals and foreigners, and according to the Israeli army they are being held in Gaza's underground tunnels.
A few kilometres away, the tomb is starting to close in over the Gaza strip. Shut behind walls with no chance to get out, entire families have been decimated; inhabitants are short of everything, including basic supplies: water, food and healthcare. Where they have not been destroyed the hospitals are struggling to help, lacking medicines and also electricity. Surgeons are operating without anaesthetics, with what remains of the generators running the equipment. The weakest are no longer being treated. Parents can no longer protect or feed their children; short of drinking water, they drink salty or brackish water from agricultural wells.
The bombardment of Gaza is ceaseless, even in the southern zones that are supposedly spared, where some 700,000 people have found refuge according to UNWRA, the UN agency that deals with Palestinian refugees.
A cemetery without graves, Gaza is collapsing before our eyes. The dead have been deprived of their stories, their faces. They are dehumanised, transformed first into figures, then into numbers to which we add zeros. Prevented from entering and bringing them aid, the NGOs are themselves also powerless, with very rare exceptions.
Indiscriminate collective punishment
The bloody and blind approach to the distinction between combatants and civilians with which the war is today being waged by Israel is frightening. But despite its violence and scale it should not surprise us. By bringing former army chiefs Gadi Eisenkot and Benny Gantz into the 'war cabinet' which is now leading the operations, Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu claimed to be surrounding himself with professionals and distancing himself from Jewish supremacists Bezalel Smotrich and Itamar Ben-Gvir. In the last government these two threw their weight behind attempts to weaken the Supreme Court and the low-intensity conflict that has been taking place for months in the West Bank.
However, Gadi Eisenkot was head of the Israeli Defence Force's northern front during the 2006 war against Lebanon and Hezbollah. At the time he developed the 'Dahiya doctrine' - named after a Shi'ite district of Beirut razed to the ground by the Israeli Army – which makes no distinction between civilians and combatants. Eisenkot took responsibility for applying “disproportionate force” and causing much human death and destruction because, from his point of view, these areas were not “civilian villages” but “military bases”. As for Benny Gantz, he was chief of the IDF general staff during the 2014 war against the enclave, and took pride in having bombed parts of Gaza “back to the Stone Age”.
Concerning the October 7th massacres Avner Gvaryahou, president of the Israeli organisation Breaking the Silence which brings together former IDF soldiers opposed to the occupation, recently told Mediapart: “The responsibility for the murders remains with the murderers. And no one with an ounce of humanity can excuse the atrocities committed. That doesn't mean that there is not also fault on the part of our government.”
In the same way one can state that the responsibility for the murders of the Gaza civilians and children remains with the Israeli Army, but that Hamas cannot excuse itself from the abyss in which it has plunged its own people.
Saying that does not amount to suggesting symmetry between the two camps currently facing each other. To quote the words of Michel Warchawski, a tireless peace campaigner in Israel: “I reject symmetry between the two parties. There is an occupier and an occupied. Even if the occupied can use unacceptable methods that one has to denounce. We must never forget: Israel is the occupier, it has the keys to the solution.” But the Islamist organisation set a trap for Israel into which it rushed headlong, adopting a broad view and disproportionate use of the right to defend itself, one which involves the death of thousands of innocents, and inflicting upon the Palestinians indiscriminate collective punishment.
The carnage at Jabaliya
The ground invasion by the Israeli army makes the carnage worse, far from view but still close to the hearts of the increasing number of people who support Gaza. The tanks entered the strip on Friday October 27th accompanies by elite units on the ground. Fighting is now taking place house by house while the aerial bombardment intensifies. The blackout that has fallen on the area hides the tragedy that is unfolding: communications have been blocked and and journalists are either killed or otherwise stopped from working. The latest figures were 31 deaths according to the Committee To Protect Journalists and according to the legal compaint filed by Reporters Without Borders (RSF) at the International Criminal Court. Because of the lack of external observers and of witnesses and images, we just have a partial and vague view of the crimes being committed.
On October 31st and November 1st Israeli bombardments targeted the Jabaliya refugee camp in the north of the enclave leading to many civilian victims in one go – 195 according to Hamas, who said there were 120 people missing under the rubble, and 777 wounded. The few images available on Monday showed a gigantic crater in the middle of a town in ruins, and inhabitants desperately searching through the rubble looking for survivors. The residential buildings were blown deep into the ground and formed a cavity in keeping - according to the Israeli army – with the presence underground of many networks of tunnels designed to shelter Hamas fighters.
Israel justified this particular operation by stating that it was targeting a Hamas command post. “We knew that Bieri [editor's note, Jabaliya brigade commander Ibrahim Bieri] was in a tunnel system under the camp,” chief military spokesperson Rear Admiral Daniel Hagari told a press conference. “At Jabaliya, Hamas structures are blended in with the urban system. The [Hamas] men can come out of the network, fire rockets and RPGs to attack our soldiers,” said the spokesperson. He then added: “There was a team of terrorists there who had carried out the acts of October 7th.”
After these bombardments the UN, who have been calling for an “immediate humanitarian ceasefire for the past week, issued a warning to Israel. “Given the high number of civilian casualties & the scale of destruction following Israeli airstrikes on Jabalia refugee camp, we have serious concerns that these are disproportionate attacks that could amount to war crimes,” declared the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights Volker Türk on X (formerly Twitter).
How much longer before this tragedy comes to an end? Does the right to self-defence imply an unlimited right to vengeance? Is there a limit to the number of 'collateral victims' that the Israeli army judges 'acceptable' in order to eradicate Hamas? The massacre of one inevitably leads to the carnage of others in a cycle that, given the balance of power at play, and if nothing is done there to stop it, can only lead to the destruction of the people of Gaza, who are prevented from leaving by Israel and also by Egypt who, however, have escaped general criticism.
Convert compassion into pressure
In the short-term, the compassion inspired by the current fate of Gaza – in response to or despite the atrocities committed on October 7th by the Israelis, many of whom were activists favouring peace and coexistence with the Palestinians – must be converted into pressure.
This means pressure from Western governments – in particular the United States – on Israel for an immediate ceasefire; and pressure from Arab countries – in particular Qatar and Egypt – on Hamas for the freeing of the hostages. This depends on growing pressure from Western populations on their representatives, including French, about them giving a blank cheque to the Israeli reprisals or about how they continue the confusion by one day proposing an international coalition against Hamas and the next day an ill-defined humanitarian coalition.
This pressure can only come in the form of citizens' demonstrations and threats at the ballot box. If the United States seems on the way to changing, in words if not reality, its “unconditional support” for the Israeli government, it is doubtless less out of a suddenly-acquired humanitarian conscience than because the Joe Biden administration is starting to realise that it could suffer electorally because of its responsibility for the ongoing destruction in Gaza.
“Gaza risks being wiped from the map if the international community, in particular the United States of America and Europe, doesn't help stop – rather than allowing or even encouraging – the war crimes caused by the intensity of the Israeli riposte,” Orly Noy, an Israeli human rights figure who is president of human rights group B’Tselem, told Mediapart.
As the French anthropologist, sociologist and medical doctor Didier Fassin has also pointed out in an article for Le Monde, thanks to a 2005 UN vote member states have a “responsibility to protect”, obliging them to protect a population “against genocide, war crimes, ethnic cleansing and crimes against humanity”. Fassin wrote: “This commitment has been used in a dozen situations, nearly always in Africa. The fact the European Union doesn't invoke it today, but that on the contrary the Commission president Ursula von der Leyen went to Israel with no mandate and used the warlike language of the government there, shows the extent to which double standards govern international relations.”
Opening a political space in the face of fanatics
If one looks beyond the humanitarian emergency - a solution to which only pressure from populations can impose on governments who are caught up in their ideological reflexes, political blindness and lack of human decency - there is a need to reopen a political space.
And even if the prospect of 'solutions' involving one or two states, something almost impossible to propose today, seems further away than ever, it is hard to see how any future developments can occur without Israeli and Palestinian civil societies first freeing themselves from the grip of these leaders who have delivered the very worst for them.
Benjamin Netanyahu is certainly in the dock for not having protected his citizens and for having favoured the development of Hamas in Gaza with the open aim of making the prospect of a Palestinian state impossible. But in Tel Aviv the men in power are even less ready to lower their weapons knowing that they will have to answer for the security blunders that allowed Hamas's bloody incursion on their soil. Among them are many dangerous fanatics who have gone on a crusade driven by conviction.
In fact, some of the declarations made by those on the Israeli Right and far right at the highest levels of state only serve to confirm the fears of those who are worried that there is a process of genocide taking place in Gaza, concerns recently stated by a group of seven UN-mandated experts, speaking in their own name (see our article, in French, here)
On October 9th, for example, the Israeli defence minister Yoav Gallant declared that his country was fighting “human animals” and that he was going to “eliminate” the enemy in Gaza. During a visit to Paris in March this year the Israeli finance minister Bezalel Smotrich launched into a diatribe against Palestinians, declaring that there was “no such thing as Palestinians because there’s no such thing as the Palestinian people”.
Natanyahu started the war by trotting out the hackneyed refrain of a battle of civilisations, when the reality is that we are seeing a battle between barbarisms. But on October 25th the Israeli prime minister changed tone by declaring during a televised address: “We are sons of light, they are sons of darkness, and the light must triumph over darkness. … we shall fulfil the prophesy of Isaiah.”
The prime minister also invoked the need to eradicate “Amalek”, the name of the head of a tribe of nomads who had attacked the Israelites in the Sinai desert after their exodus from Egypt. Of him Deuteronomy says: “When the Lord your God gives you rest from all the enemies around you in the land he is giving you to possess as an inheritance, you shall blot out the name of Amalek from under heaven. Do not forget!”
Without launching into biblical textual analysis, suffice it to say that such vocabulary from a man who had not hitherto made such language a major part of his public speeches is symptomatic of the Israeli government's desire to frame the struggle between their peoples in a messianic and timeless context, one which leaves no political outlet for a resolution of what is a territorial and historic conflict.
This dimension is also there on Hamas's side, where the concept of extermination is also openly acknowledged. “Israel is a country that has no place on our land,” Hamas spokesperson and member of its political bureau Ghazi Hamad said recently.
The same spokesperson said that similar attacks to that of October 7th would take place for as long as Israel existed. “We are the victims of the occupation. Period. Therefore, nobody should blame us for the things we do. On 7th October, 10th October, one-millionth October, everything we do is justified,” Ghazi Hamad said. This word salad undermined the amendments to Hamas's charter in 2017 which suggested that the organization had abandoned its demand for the extermination of the “Zionist entity”, something which had underpinned its founding text since the 1980s, and that the group was ready to accept recognition of the existence of Israel within the 1967 borders.
The parallel made between Hamas and Islamic State remains dubious, as an article in Israeli publication Haaretz and analysis by academic Héloïse Fayet on Mediapart show. The jihadist organization founded by Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi has, moreover, never placed the Palestinian cause at the centre of its struggles.
Nonetheless, while one component of Hamas cannot be disconnected from the Palestinian national cause, and while it is illusory to deny that it is part of the Palestinian resistance against the occupying Israeli power, another component of the group cannot be separated from its jihadist dimension.
Through its ideology, its religious fundamentalism, its method of operating, its use of fighters ready to due as martyrs, Hamas is no stranger to the jihadist world. And that world is dripping with a hatred of Jews that goes beyond hatred of Israel, as was seen with the attacks carried out by Mohamed Merah at Toulouse in south-west France and by Mehdi Nemmouche at the Jewish Museum in Brussels, to give just two examples.
So to equate Palestinian Hamas and the Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO) or Algeria's National Liberation Front (FLN) means denying that the Hamas members who committed the October 7th massacres are not just killers of colonisers, or even of Israelis, but also killers of Jews.
The downward spiral of language from both Hamas and the Israeli government, based on civilisations and religions, can only make one fear that these will become self-fulfilled prophecies, given that the rest of the world, and the United States in particular, is ideologically open to the concept of an “axis of good” facing an “axis of evil”.
Galvanised by this situation, anti-Semitism has been unleashed in many countries. In turn, this just strengthens the convictions of the Israeli leaders who are at ease with implementing the colonial plan of occupying Palestinian lands. We are seeing this in the West Bank where the Israeli army is not stopping settlers from expelling, terrorising and killing Palestinians. Since October 7th more than 130 have been shot dead by soldiers or Israeli settlers, according to the Ministry of Health at the Palestinian Authority. In this respect, the recent appointment of far-right fundamentalist Zvi Sukkot as chair of a Knesset subcommittee on West Bank issues is terrifying.
A need for unconditional humanity
So is there still hope that one can escape from this endless and hellish escalation? “In the dark times/Will there also be singing?/Yes, there will also be singing/About the dark times,” wrote playwright Bertold Brecht in 'The Svenborg Poems' published in 1939. In the 1970s the Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish predicted a dark future for Gaza, but was sure that its people would resist what was thrown at them. “It is busy with rejection/ Hunger with rejection/ Thirst with rejection/ Diaspora with rejection/ Torture with rejection/ Siege with rejection /Death with rejection,” he wrote in 'Silence for Gaza', part of his collection 'Journal of an Ordinary Grief'.
If it has always been the time for poets, it is nonetheless first and foremost now the time for political solutions. There is an urgent need to acknowledge that, on each side of the wall, the life of one civilian is worth the same as another, that a child in the sights of a weapon must be defended unconditionally, whatever the cost, whether they are Israeli or Palestinian. Crossing that red line is an irrevocable step.
One cannot allow hundreds of Israeli families to be murdered in their homes. One cannot let thousands of Palestinians die under bombs or be displaced in their hundreds of thousands. Cutting water and electricity, preventing the restocking of food, the targeting schools, ambulances and hospitals, bombarding civilians who are fleeing to a supposedly protected zone all amounts to condemning the inhabitants of Gaza to death, trapped as they are inside the enclave. Allowing this tragedy to unfold before our eyes amounts to complicity.
Ending the fighting and embracing this unconditional humanity is clearly first and foremost something that is required to save Israeli and Palestinian lives. But it's also necessary for us, too. And not just for selfish reasons, with the possibility of a regional or even global conflagration something that cannot be discounted, even if it does not seem imminent.
But it's also necessary because to abandon the Palestinians – who have nowhere else to go – to their fate would amount to burdening the future of the whole of humanity in the sense that it is our collective responsibility to act to protect the children and civilians of the Middle East, whether they live in Israel, Gaza or the West Bank.
Let us rise up while there is still time against dehumanising words which, in the French media for example, call for a distinction to be made between young victims depending on how they died (see here, here and here). Such language leads straight to catastrophe. On the contrary, in order to reinvigorate ourselves we should read the powerful appeals regularly made by the UN general secretary António Guterres attacking indifference, complacency and inaction.
In French and in English we sometimes remark that there is no word to denote a person who has lost their child, the equivalent of the word 'orphan' for a parent, given how such a situation goes against the natural order of things. However, it so happens that such a word exists in two languages, Arabic, where one is called thekla, and Hebrew in which one is said to be shakol. The only way to avoid these words becoming commonplace is to stop now the vengeance currently underway in Gaza, whatever the atrocities that triggered it, and whatever the more ancient causes that might in turn have acted as a catalyst for them.
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- The original French version of this op-ed can be found here.
English version by Michael Streeter