“Israel and Hamas are not similar in any way when it comes to morality,”
This, however, brings into view what one could venture to say is the most pertinent argument that is in play within the Israeli public relations campaign.
But is it true? Short answer: No, you cannot get a long answer from a yes/no question. However, you can give a detailed answer from a specific question which may require more than ‘yes’ or ‘no’ as an answer. The below post is an analysis of Zachary Foster, an historian on Palestine.
Thus, ‘moral equivalence’ is not a legal term; it is an emotionally charged rallying cry. Therefore, let us turn our focus to the second-best thing – the international humanitarian law. In this context we find two of the main legal principles that are often debated in conflict and war; proportionality and distinction. Well, how do Israel and Hamas each shape up to each one of these principles?
In this post, we will look at distinction. Recall that distinction call upon armed groups as well as states to distinguish between civilian and military objects.
In the first seven years of its militancy from 1987-1994, most of Hamas attacks were on Israeli military installations during the following incidents: February, 1989, May, 1992, July, 1992, October, 1992 and December 1992. Unlike previous Unknown gunman attacks, none of these attacks caused the death of any civilians. It also abducted and killed four Israeli civilians in two attacks; one in December 1990 and the other in June 1993.
At roughly the same time, the Israel defense forces executed more than 1,000 Palestinians who were non-combatants and most of whom could not possibly pose any danger to the soldiers that murdered them. Israeli security services often fired at civilians in a reckless manner, for example, shooting at protesters as, for example, on December 10, 1987, when Israeli security forces opened fire at Palestinians, killing 17-year-old Hatem Abu Sisi, or on October 8, 1990, when Israeli security forces massacred 22 unarmed Palestinians.
This is true in the sense that from 1987-1994 Hamas could not indeed be compared to Israel in any way. On the issue of distinction, Hamas enjoyed one thing – the clear moral superiority.
There were certain changes in the business that began in 1994 when Baruch Goldstein killed 29 Palestinians who were praying at the Ibrahimi Mosque in Hebron. That led to a ten-year campaign of aggression from the Palestinian Authority – military operations in which Palestinian guerrillas killed more than 1,200 Israeli noncombatants between 1994 and 2005.
Hamas engaged in deliberated attacks killing non-combatants in dozens of synchronised raids on Israeli buses and cafes. The second phase of violence occurred from September 28, 2000 to February 8, 2005 and within this period, Palestinians has conducted 138 suicides attacks and killed 1038 Israelis.
Of course, Israel also intentionally attacked Palestinian civilians during this ten-year war. Through its “closure” policy Israel deprived millions of Palestinians of their sources of income; In 1993 Palestinians in the occupied territories were locked down for 17 days, in 1994 for 64 days, in 1995 for 84 days, in 1996 for 90 days, in 1997 for 57 days, in 1998 for 14 days and in 1999 for 7 days only.
Total lockdown in 1990s was demonstrated by 70% unemployment rate in the Gaza Strip. When the Israelis put into effect recurring sieges, the Palestinians’ ordinary earnings decreased more than one-third from the year 2000 to 2004. It was, for instance, established that by 2004, nearly half of the Palestinians lived in poverty and more than 600, 000 individuals equivalent to sixteen percent of the total population could barely make provision for basic subsistence needs.
Of course, all of this was done with purpose. All this was due to the policy of collective punishment that Israel employed, while it lacked any attempt of demarcating a clear line between civilians and combatants.
The degree of poverty and the rate of mortality are best of friends as it can be seen from the above data. Another study showed that poverty had antecedents with a 42% accelerated death rate. National also noted that those persons who have been at or below the poverty line for ten years consecutively were 71 percent more likely to die.
In other words, Israel’s war on the Palestinians’ ability to sustain themselves in terms of their livelihoods had claimed the lives of hundreds if not thousands of Palestinians; it had cut down Palestinians’ life expectancy; it had denied the Palestinians their right to access timely and needed medical care, thus causing the unnecessary loss of innocent lives. Lockdowns, in a word, are deadly — and that was Israel’s M. O., for more than a decade during the 1990s and 2000s.
At the same time, from 2000 to 2004, the special services of Israel have eliminated 3,135 Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza Strip. Hearths are filled with these testimonials of numerous people who were executed by the Israeli forces while they were not endangering any soldier’s life but they were shot dead all the same.
According to the date, for example, on the September 29, 2000, the Israeli security services murdered 7 Palestinians. Read this: They fired guns at children, with the intent to kill, in Palestine. Ala Badran, 12, who lost an eye and Mohammed Joda, 13, lying critically in intensive care ward of Makassed Hospital in East Jerusalem but declared brought in dead after three days and Majdi Maslamani, 15, buried in cemetery of jerusalem’s Beit Hanina locality. Most of them were apparently simple civilians who were deliberately gunned down by the Israeli troops.
In the period between 1994 and 2007 it is rather obvious that both Hamas and Israel were acting unlawfully and breaching the law of distinction. It is possible to be a rational human being and disagree on the evaluation of the moral rights and wrongs of Israel and Hamas during this period.
Now let’s dwell on the last period, from 2007 till the present moment.
In 2007, for example, Israel declared and implemented a land, air and sea blockade of Gaza. In international law, the institution of a blockade is looked at as an act of war. (As does Israel, of course, which famously saw the Egyptian Blockade of the Straits of Tiran to Israeli shipping as “an act of war” on the eve of the June 1967 War.)
This is to say that Israel has been engaged in a war against armed civilians of Gaza continuously: for every second in each minute in each day in each month in each year starting from the year 2007 and up to the present. However, one of the perceived major objectives of the blockade was, for example, “a wish to punish the population of the Gaza Strip for voting for Hamas.”
Israel’s blockade continues to deprive civilians particularly women and children in the Gaza strip the necessities of life and currently 80% of households are on the receiving end of food aid. Half of the population in the same year were using less money on health or on utilities (water, electricity) to afford food alone. The number of Palestinians who have died slow, miserable, silent—and easily preventable—deaths owing to the blockade alone is, as the narrative and statistics presented above demonstrate, almost certain to be in the many thousands since 2000.
Out of them was Fatimah al-Masri, a 2-year-old girl who died in 2022 since she was denied the travel document, she required to travel to seek the specialist treatment for an ailment she was diagnosed with since the blockades did not allow the kind of treatment she required in Gaza. Five military campaigns were conducted by Israel in the past sixteen years. In the later part of 2008 early 2009, Israel’s defence forces assassinated 926 mostly noncombatant Palestinians in Gaza and Hamas killed 3 wholly noncombatant Israelis by means of randomly fired rockets aimed at Israeli populated areas.
The UN tried to scrutinize 15 strikes in which 216 were killed. An attack against hostile military forces was not claimed in 6 of the 15 strikes. In other words, whereas both Hamas and Israel killed innocent civilians, Israel murdered ~100 times more well, innocuous civilians than Hamas.
A jump forward to October 2023, though, in this case we can easily guess what the answer will be. It drastically attacked on October 7th for which its militants slayed ~1,000 innocent Israeli civilians. Human Rights Watch has also been able to confirm several videos wherein hamas has been observed to attack Israeli civilians. Hamas officials also announced their desire to do October 7th ‘again and again.’ The attack constitutes the gravest war crime perpetrated by Hamas thus far. It was a massacre.
In analyzing this statement, the following equation comes to mind If Hamas committed a massacre — Israel responded by committed 20 such massacres. A +972-investigation found that “the army significantly expand its bombing of targets that are not distinctly military in nature. These include private residences as well as public buildings, infrastructure, and high-rise blocks.”
Based on conversations with current & former members of Israel’s military intelligence & air force involved in operations in the besieged Strip, the investigation discovered that Israel’s assault on civilian targets is “mainly intended to harm Palestinian civil society: at least to ‘create a shock’ that, inter alia, will resonate messianically and “force the civilians to impose pressure on Hamas”, in one interlocutor’s words. We know today that the Israeli military deliberately and willingly kills civilians. It also identifies the number of Palestinian deaths that are ‘likely’ in each attack.
Coming to the case of Israel, the campaign of mass murder has been conducted with a lot of enthusiasm and without any feeling of compassion or pity. To the best of my knowledge Israel has already killed between 15,000 and 20,000 innocent Palestinian civilians. It has displaced 1,7 million people from their homes many of whom live in the open-air camps and schools waiting for 5-10 hours a day a piece of bread.
Everyone is an unsure of when the next drop of fresh water will be available, not to mention the next meal. Consequently, Israeli leaders have stated their desire in those terms of making the conditions of life in Gaza unbearable in order to eliminate every human being therein, while implementing a total encirclement and ceaseless aerial bombardment that has been designed to make Gaza uninhabitable, not for Hamas but for all the 2. 3 million inhabitants of the place.
Hamas, and to some extent Israel have consistently violated the distinction between combatants and non-combatants. Until 1994, Hamas was the side that could claim the position of moral superiority, which makes the conflict from 1987 to 1994 an exception to Most’s general contention. This is the reason why it is hard to have a clear MORAL winner between Israel and from 1994-2005 Hamas. Further, if in 2007-2023 both Israel and Hamas violated the principle of distinction, Israel’s violation of law of distinct has led to 1-2 orders of magnitude more of destruction, disability, and death in the Palestinian side.
Similarly, Henry A. Giroux says, it is possible to condemn the killing of civilians and children but this cannot be done by brandishing the claim that all the parties involved in the war on Gaza are equally wrong. What Hamas did on October 7th 2023 however reprehensible is not on par with the pain and fear that the Israeli state has inflicted on Palestinians collectively in the past and at the current time where the scale is fast becoming of industrial genocide.
The continuous shooting of children by the Israeli Defense Forces and its erasure of the bare essentials of life of Palestinians in Gaza is not colourable, an abstraction to be dismissed as a mere sound bite which can be contained in the paradigm of parity, or for that more shameful, the unworthy shriek for balance. The death of the innocent children has persisted in increasingly heinous ways with Israel’s policy of these collective punishments.
Gazan children – over twelve thousand up to February 22, 2024, 43% of all the deceased Palestinians are children; more than a thousand children have had one or both legs amputated; thousands of children are still missing; and over nine thousand are wounded (Haiven, 2024; Aljazeera, 2024). It is estimated that one Palestinian child is killed every fifteen minutes or over a hundred a day (Alsaafin and Osgood, 2024).
Alas, perhaps, these two cannot be compared too, when it comes to moral equating – Israel and the Hamas.
Should we choose to remain silent amidst this conflict and opt not to engage both individually and collectively in efforts to halt its progression, the number of innocent lives lost, particularly children, will escalate. The very essence of the violence and aggression characteristic of the political ideologies of right-wing nationalists, anti-Semitic individuals, and Islamophobes will continue to dominate. In the not-too-distant future, the pervasive and destructive nature of authoritarian governance will overshadow any semblance of hope derived from the ideals of robust democracy and the peaceful advocacy for global harmony.
The abhorrent massacre of children in Gaza represents a more profound issue that has plagued our contemporary era: the amalgamation of colonial practices with neoliberal economic policies. Irrespective of its varied manifestations across different regions, this politics is fundamentally dehumanizing, driven by greed, disposability, and the pursuit of annihilation. Its loyalty is not to the preservation of human dignity but to the benefits derived from militarism, conflict, state-sponsored violence, displacement, and the suppression of dissent and wider movements for economic and social equity. The pursuit of truth, justice, freedom, and equality has transcended mere political goals; it has become an ethical necessity at a juncture when the global democratic system is embattled and striving for survival.
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