Israel and Palestine: “There ought to be a law!”

How recent is the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide? It was adopted on 9 December 1948, after the Holocaust and going on two generations after the Turks’ attempted genocide of Armenians in 1915. One day later, the United Nations General Assembly announced the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.

Think about that. This Jewish New Year, which began in September, is now Year 5784, not far from six millennia. If we take that as a rough gauge of the span of recorded human history, we self-appointed Homo sapiens have outlawed genocide and recognized human rights globally for just 75 years, or 1.3% of our recorded history.

Before the Convention, we not only tolerated genocide. We celebrated it. I can remember, as a high-school student of Latin in the early sixties, learning about ancient Rome’s obliteration of Carthage. Cato the Elder stood up in the Roman Senate and repeatedly declared “Carthago delenda est!”, or “Carthage must be destroyed.” And eventually Rome did just that. It attacked Carthage with overwhelming force. It killed most of Carthage’s able-bodied men (plus many women and children), took the survivors as slaves, burned down the city, tore down the stone city walls, and sowed the city’s fields for crops with salt. It was a deliberate attempt to wipe out an entire city and its people completely and forever. And it succeeded.

No one in my high-school Latin class, least of all the teacher, called it a “genocide.” The term hadn’t yet come into general use. The general attitude was one of grudging admiration. We all viewed the genocide as evidence of both the power of Cato’s oratory and the awesome might and grandeur, for its time, of ancient Rome. Only much later did I learn that the cause of this genocide was basically a commercial dispute: Carthage had been eating into Rome’s commercial markets in the Middle East.

Much later, the European conquerors of North America adopted the slogan, “The only good Indian is a dead Indian.” (This referred to Native Americans, not people from India.) The once-foreign conquerors didn’t subsequently wipe them all out. Instead, they forced Native Americans off their traditional lands, rounded many up into “Reservations” on lands no white settlers wanted, and herded their kids into “Indian Schools,” whose explicit purpose was to erase their languages and culture, and where many of them were abused and died.

What’s the point of reciting these dismal tales of historical fact? Our social evolution proceeds slowly, but far more rapidly than our biological evolution. Just three years after the invention and first use of nuclear weapons, we apparently began to understand that ceaseless tribal warfare and attempts at genocide, if only by provoking violent responses, might eventually lead to the extinction of our species, and by our own hands.

A second point is the evolution of international law. It also reflects our social evolution, but often it doesn’t happen fast enough. Two centuries ago, women were pretty much property (i.e., slaves to their husbands) in most of the world. Now things have changed a bit: women can own property, divorce their husbands, retain custody of children, vote, and become leaders (maybe some day even President!), in most of the developed world. But there’s backsliding, of course; witness the attempts, in many American states, to make pregnant women slaves for baby bearing.

So what does all this say about the current Israel-Hamas war? It illustrates the biggest perennial problem on our species’ plate. How do we tamp down, and eventually eliminate, the senseless tribal conflicts that produce untold death, destruction and despair, and that could spin out of control in the nuclear age?

The Israeli-Palestinian dispute is just the most recent and the most ugly. In the last thirty years, we’ve see the Myanmar Buddhists force out and massacre the Rohingya, the 1995 attempted genocide of Tutsi and other tribes by the majority Hutu in Rwanda, and the repetitive, deadly clashes between Christian Armenians and Islamic Azerbaijanis. And try not to think of what Russia is doing in its “Far East,” ethnically cleansing a number of tiny ethic minorities by sending their young men to Ukraine as cannon fodder.

We all know these tribal wars are senseless, horrendously destructive, and serve no useful purpose. In the end, and if not controlled, they could produce our species’ extinction, whether by triggering a wider war that might go nuclear, or by distracting us from planetary heating of our own making, which is our species’ greatest, most pressing and most immediate existential threat.

We all know, deep down, how wrong these wars are. Yet most of us don’t try hard to stop them; many of us just choose sides. In the case of Israel and Palestine, it’s easy to choose sides because the warring parties themselves make religion an issue. There are plenty of Muslims and Jews (and non-Jewish sympathizers) around the world to take up the cudgel of tribalism. Often they cheer on the perpetual, reciprocal “smiting” that the Bible so well describes but provides no remedy for. Or they twist themselves into rhetorical knots trying to justify the unjustifiable, or trying to parse and differentiate varying levels of pure evil.

Let’s be honest. Murdering innocent men, women and children in their houses, places of worship, crop fields and beds is wrong, let alone raping and torturing women before killing them, and mutilating their bodies afterward. All that ranks quite low on the “bad-ometer.”

Maybe holding over two million civilians prisoner for decades in a tiny strip of land, without adequate food, water, human interchange, and electricity, let alone commercial supplies to build a decent economy and a modern way of life, is not as evil. But it’s still not good. The same is true of progressively changing the “rules of engagement” to permit more and more of those civilians to be killed and maimed in a so-far-futile quest to wipe out the terrorists hiding among them.

And then there were the Israeli extremists who smashed and burned the homes and cars of innocent Palestinian Arabs in the West Bank, then killed them when they tried to defend their homes and property. Sure, there were only a few such incidents. But they happened.

Although partly assimilated, I’m an American Jew. While Hamas’ massacres of innocent Israelis on October 7 of course shocked and outraged me, I can’t ignore the near-reckless destruction of homes, hospitals, lives and families in Gaza, nor Gaza’s growing similarity to the Warsaw Ghetto in World War II (with, we hope, no similar final outcome).

Nor can I ignore what happened in the West Bank. In the late nineteenth century, my own ancestors—and those of many of my Jewish friends—fled what’s now Ukraine (then Russia), because of similar attacks on their communities. The attacks in Ukraine then were more frequent, more persisent, and more deadly than those in the West Bank now, and sometimes the Russian Army and the Cossacks participated. But the dismal truth is much the same. We now see the specter of Jews (Jews!) committing pogroms in the West Bank, mostly (as far as I can tell) without much pushback from official Israel and without strict accountability.

The word “pogrom” comes from the Russian and Ukrainian words “to burn.” And if it strikes you as something “minor” compared to what Hamas did in Southern Israel, imagine it being done to your home, let alone by people who consider you subhuman, irredeemably violent, or otherwise undeserving of life, let alone basic human rights. And recall that some of the defending Palestinians were in fact killed.

I’m NOT trying here to equate clearly different levels of evil. Nor am I trying to emulate our Demagogue by saying there are “very fine people on both sides.” I’m just trying to show that attempts to compare and contrast levels of atrocity will get our species nowhere. All must be repudiated and condemned. All must be stopped.

So the task for good people outside the war zone is not to assess shades of guilt. It’s to stop the horror. Just as “good people” react to a bar fight by grabbing and controlling the fighters, the outside world has to step in and stop these repetitive, reciprocal atrocities. If not, they will continue forever, perhaps until a real genocide by one side or the other results.

Who else can stop the cycle of violence? Israel’s current war obejctive is to wipe out Hamas and its terrorists in Gaza. But to do so, Israel has so far accepted an unacceptable level of “collateral damage,” if only because Hamas is embedded and hidden inside Gaza’s civilian population, in tunnels and basements and maybe even mosques and hospitals.

The key to understanding the practical difficulty of what Israel has undertaken is knowing that Gazans likely distrust and hate Israelis even more than they may distrust and despise Hamas.

What might happen, for example, if a trained security force of Palestinians, all native speakers of Arabic, were to undertake the same task? Wouldn’t they be much less likely to cause horrendous “collateral damage,” to kill innocent civilians, women and children? Knowing the language, the religion and the culture, wouldn’t they be much more likely to secure the trust and assistance of the civilian population and succeed? And having destroyed or captured most of Hamas, wouldn’t they be more capable of capturing or marginalizing the remnants and nurturing a civil society with basic human rights and some capacity for future success?

This is not the place to put forward a detailed plan. That would require great military and cultural expertise. But the greater likelihood of success for such a force, as compared to Israeli invaders bent on revenge, is self-evident.

Where might the Palestinian soldiers and spooks come from? There are millions of displaced Palestinians living peacefully in Jordan, and no doubt many in Egypt. Some might even be found in broken, battered and dysfunctional Syria. All they might need is incentives, training, weapons and pay. Isn’t the thought of a cleansing military force of Palestinian Arabs who know the price of displacement and terrorism but also the value of peace, law and order worth considering?

Somehow, the world outside the warring parties has to step in and stop the progressive, reciprocal atrocities. If not, they are likely to continue forever, just like the reciprocal “smiting” described in the Bible some two millennia ago.

To provide a framework to do that in a rational and systematic manner, there has to be some law. Law can provide the abstract basis for stepping in, plus a blueprint for future intervention. Just as the then-unprecedented Nuremberg Trials imposed personal responsibility on leaders, instead of their hapless dupes [search in linked post for “other shoe”], so the law should focus on the individuals who keep the flames of conflict growing, and the leaders who luxuriate abroad while the carnage continues.

I don’t underestimate the magnitude of the task in war-torn Isael and Palestine. In 1945, Germany was broken, battered and beaten. So was Japan. It was easy for the victorious Allies to step in and impose their own rules.

But look at what happened next. Germany has become human history’s most contrite and repentant once-brutal conqueror. It has made and continues making reparations. It has outlawed hate crimes, giving us reason to believe that not all speech is helpful. It teaches its past sins in detail to its children. And it was mostly disarmed until the Russian atrocity in Ukraine renewed the need for military strength.

While less explicitly and completely repentant, Japan has assumed a leading position among advocates for peace and rational economic rules. The two nations, once broken in war, now enjoy the world’s third and fourth largest economies, despite their small populations relative to India, China, the USA, and even Indonesia. They are universally respected for their engineering, science, productivity and consumer products.

All of this, I contend, was no accident. It was a direct result of our nation’s and Europe’s enlightened occupation of the beaten enemies and our gentle inculcation of human rights and rational law as the foundation for economic and civic success. We and Europe spread the Enlightenment, which began about four centuries ago in Britain and France, to the once-fearsome “Axis” powers of the last century.

Today, the problem is much harder. There is no general war and so there will be no decisive victory. In fact, the last thing we outside the region want is for war to spread and grow. So we have to use our collective strength to impose good rules on both Israel and Palestine, without widening the war. We have to get both groups to recognize each other as human, and thus to honor the human rights of every individual. Whether that means a “two-state solution,” or Palestinian Arabs and Christians living as equals to Jews and happy citizens inside an Israel that is democratic, peaceful and accommodating to all its citizens, is for future history to tell.

But two things should be clear by now. First, the outside world, including our own nation (but excluding Jordan), has been mostly AWOL in the struggle for reason and against extremism in the Middle East. It must bear the responsibility, and much of the cost, for imposing a solution. Without the outside world stepping in, making law and enforcing it, the “smiting” could continue forever, and this conflict, plus maybe others between Iran and the Arab nations, could distract us all from the climate change that is our species’ principal enemy. Such senseless conflicts could help extinguish our species.

The old German phrase “Macht macht recht!” (“Might makes right!”) was abhorrent when used by one people to justify aggression, atrocities and genocide against others, let alone under a nonsense theory of racial superiority. But it has a gentler ring when applied to an Enlightened global community, and when it includes not just military might and terrible weapons, but the softer “might” of economic pressure, blandishments, embargoes, boycotts and diplomacy, and the still softer “might” of general rules of law, moral judgments and the universal human desire for a peaceful, prosperous and healthy world in which to raise families.

The international community, with special emphasis on the warring parties’ neighbors, must make good law and enforce it. Otherwise, this ghastly conflict will make the Biblical inter-tribal “smiting” the hallmark of our twenty-first century, like all the numbered centuries that came before.

If that happens, it could vastly increase the chances for a big planetary heating die-off and/or human extinction. Every one on this planet has a stake in stopping this atrocity-filled international escalation of a bar fight before it goes regional, global or nuclear, and before it makes our still-young new century more terrible than the last.

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