April 3rd, 2024 - 17th Report: Famine

 

April 3rd, 2024

Dear family and friends,

Report number 17: Famine

 

I’ve been circling around this report for weeks. I’ve started writing it at least four times, only to discard whatever I’ve written a day or two later. This will be my last try. If I can’t write this report, I’ll have to end this whole series.

Israel is doing bad things in Gaza, and it’s the obligation of a thinking patriot to admit it. I’m no bleeding heart or pacifist. From 18 to 21 I served in the IDF. Until age 40 I cumulatively spent another two years on reserve duty. I know about weapons, and soldiers, and armies. And service, and duty. I went to war three weeks after our wedding, with nary a second thought. I know Israel would long ago have been destroyed were it not for its strong army, and its tenacious and determined soldiers. This is a simple fact. Now more than ever.

We’re facing an evil foe. Back in October there was a discussion as to whether October 7^th had been like the Shoah or not. I thought not. It was ghastly, but we were fighting back from the beginning, and the IDF was in control of events by the next day. Can’t get much further from the Holocaust than that. The trickier question was about Hamas: are they wannabe Nazis? Again, I thought not. I’ve seen no evidence that Hamas has the governing or bureaucratic stamina for murdering Jews systematically and over as many years as needed, nor that they ever tried to create such abilities. But the Nazis set an unusually high bar, and Hamas is no less bloodthirsty, cruel and evil for not being Nazis. A war to destroy Hamas’ military capabilities and ability to rule is a justified war. After October 7^th, and as it continued to fire at civilians across Israel on October 8^th and thereafter, such a war was urgent. Six months later Hamas continues to hold, torture and rape somewhere between 50-100 Israelis it kidnapped on October 7^th and it has no intention of freeing them anytime soon. For Israelis, not only was October 7^th a national and personal trauma that will linger and scar us for decades, it’s not even over. It’s still October 7^th.

Too often writers make a statement and then pivot with the word But. As in, Hamas’ attack was reprehensible, But Israel’s response… I’m not going to do that. Hamas’s attack was wicked. Its eagerness to plan, prepare and fight from the schools, mosques, hospitals, kitchens and children’s bedrooms of its own civilians is abominable. Its strategic decision to invest billions in preparing a war that would inevitably destroy the towns of its own people rather than work to protect and serve their lives, is heinous. Its determination to poison the minds of its nation is vile.

No But. Rather: Also. Hamas is depraved. Israel’s war against it is just. There’s no conceivable path to peace with the Palestinians as long as Hamas dominates their national ethos. Also, Israel’s way of waging the war is immoral. It’s also unsuccessful. Much as he deserves any opprobrium he’s acquired, Netanyahu isn’t alone. Too much of the Israeli public supports too much of our unjust way of waging war.

There. I’ve said it. And I say so as a fervent and active patriot. The hundreds of protests I’ve participated in these past 15 months (and counting) are an expression of my commitment to this country. My country, right or wrong – well, there’s much that is wrong, and I own it.

*            *            *

In spite of the endless media reporting, we can’t really see a full picture of the decision makers nor the military commanders. I say this with certainty. Between 2011-2018 I served as Israel’s State Archivist. I ran the State Archives. I had high security clearance, and could see the documentation from previous governments and officialdom. Eye witnesses, leaks, the best of investigative journalism, even memoirs, go only so far in unveiling the dynamics of the decision-making process. For that you need the contemporary documents.

Here’s an example. I once carefully read the investigation of a case where we either murderously or accidentally killed a group of Palestinian civilians. At the time the international community damned us for what we’d done, and the internal investigation was carried out in that context. It was meticulous and detailed, and showed mostly how the planners had been thoughtless and callous, but hadn’t intended to be murderous. This discrepancy between external and internal appearances was so great, that I went to the author of the investigation, who was still in the system, and asked him to declassify it. The truth – stupidity – seemed to me better than the allegations – murderousness. Being a creature of the system, he refused. We don’t declassify our internal military deliberations for 50 years, he said. (Yet another example of stupidity). There are thousands of such documents.

Another, broader example. After I left the archives, I ordered 12,000 files which reflect the role of the system in our settlement project since 1967. The archivists declassified many of them, grudgingly and with clenched teeth, but I knew how to insist. For the past two or three years I’ve been reading them, and have learned, to my chagrin, that they tell a worse story than I’d expected. The shenanigans we’ve used to take over land are worse than I’d been aware, and the determination to protect the settlements has caused greater harm to peace negotiations than I’d thought.

My point is that we don’t really know much about the present Israeli decision-making process. All of Israel’s intelligence agencies had just failed catastrophically: what kind of information were they supplying the decision-makers on October 8^th? By mid-October our leaders and spokesmen were earnestly assuring us they had a plan to defeat Hamas: the IDF knew what it was doing. Did these plans foresee the situation we’re in six months later? Did they realize how mid-bogglingly extensive and intricate the Hamas tunnels were? Did they expect the Hamas leaders still to be alive at this stage? Did they understand that rescuing hostages through daring military raids was going to be almost impossible? That more than half the hostages would still be missing? Did they understand that our military action would result in mass destruction of the buildings of Gaza? Did they care? Did they have estimates of the numbers of dead Gazan civilians they would need to kill in order to destroy Hamas? Did they foresee massive hunger? Did the possibility of famine cross their minds? If it did, what did the thought do to their minds? Did they understand the diplomatic consequences, and if not, how not? I could easily think of hundreds of similar questions we could ask, but the answers to which we do not have. Describing the response of our leadership to the Hamas invasion requires a degree of guesswork and conjecture.

The immediate rhetoric was that Israel would destroy Hamas. The official war goals were published about a week later, after Benny Gantz’ centrist party had joined the government and the newly constituted war cabinet. they deserve a close look, for what’s in them, and what’s not.

1.       Topple the Hamas government and destroy its military capabilities.

2.       Remove the threat of terror from Gaza to Israel.

3.       Maximal effort to resolve the hostage issue.

4.       Defend the country’s borders and citizens.

Toppling Hamas and defanging its military sounded straightforward though vague. Removing the threat seems redundant, unless it meant that the Palestinian Islamic Jihad and other splinter groups were also to be destroyed, in which case why not say so? The fourth point wasn’t a goal at all, rather a basic principle of sovereignty, but I suppose the ministers felt it needed saying given the calamitous failure they’d just allowed to happen.

Making an effort to resolve the hostage crises was infuriating, because it wasn’t a goal at all, merely a promise of a process. The government would destroy Hamas, but merely try to deal with that pesky issue of hostages, who had allowed themselves to get in the way. There was a public outcry and the goal was hurriedly changed: returning the hostages became a war goal. Almost six months later it’s obvious these were just cynical words. The government’s position was and remains that freeing the hostages is less important than destroying Hamas. Their original formulation, horrible as it was, reflected the reality of their priorities. Unlike the corrected version, the original formulation was honest.

There were three Everest-sized things not mentioned in the goals. Genocide, peace, and hunger.

Genocide, along with crimes against humanity, were first defined as crimes after the Shoah. Phillipe Sands compellingly tells, in his excellent East West Street, how fundamental the Nazi persecution of the Jews was in driving the two Jewish legal scholars Rephael Lemkin and Hersh Lauterpacht to prod the newly invented United Nations to outlaw them. The young State of Israel joined the international conventions against them, as a matter of course, soon after it joined the UN.

While the crime of genocide was formulated in response to the Holocaust, the intention was to prevent future crimes, not commemorate a previous one. As defined, a country could aim at less than total murder and still be guilty. The Genocide Convention of 1951 defined the crime as "acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group."  In order for large-scale destruction and murder to be genocide there must be intention. Merely killing lots of people isn’t genocide, just as the intention to destroy a specific group will be genocide even if there’s no intention to kill them all.

Our war goals contained no genocidal intentions. There was no government policy to commit genocide. There were some extreme politicians who said horrible things, but Netanyahu purposefully cut them out of the decision-making process, and once the international impact of their foul language became clear, even they shut up. It’s been months since any of them has shot off his mouth. The Army invested considerable effort in getting the Gazan population away from areas we were about to attack. None of this looks like a country committing genocide.

But a horrible thought has been gnawing at me: is it possible to commit genocide, or even only to appear genocidal in the eyes of the world, even without intention, by needlessly prolonging inhumane conditions? The Americans, British, Jordanians and others have taken to parachuting supplies into Gaza. The Americans are building a port. It’s our army that’s limiting the inflow of supplies by land. Why? Are we being obtuse, or malicious? Even if only obtuse, does that make it any less horrible?

Peace. There’s no constituency for it in Israel these days, and probably not amongst the Palestinians, either. The 2^nd Intifada of 2000-2003 destroyed Israel’s political peace camp, and the few politicians who still believed in it were relegated to a very small dog house. Still, many Israelis of the political center would have agreed that if everything would change, they’d also change and could envision living in peace alongside the Palestinians – just that everything would never change. Since October 7^th, Israelis who build sentences with words such as peace or compromise are met with derision from all sides, as I can personally attest. Even normally cool-headed centrist media types don’t get anywhere near, not even with 20-foot poles. Eventually this will change, but not yet, and not soon.

There’s a cruel irony in this. I’ve read the Cabinet protocols of 1967, which tell how almost the entire government after the Six Day War hoped they could barter the territories they’d just taken in return for peace with the Arab world. They hoped, but didn’t believe it could happen. Had someone told them about an American-Saudi initiative, backed by most of the world and most of the Arab world, for peace along the borders of June 5^th 1967, they would have whooped with joy and signed that evening. But that was a long time ago. Nowadays, not only is the idea a non-stater, it’s very mention is serving Netanyahu as his sole route to political survival: You voters have to support me. I’m the only Israeli leader with the guts to stand up to the Americans who are willing, naively, to destroy us by rewarding the Palestinians for their murderousness by handing them a state.

But that’s a mid-term issue. In the immediate term, Netanyahu’s refusal even to discuss what will happen in Gaza after our military action means we’re fighting a war with no political goals, leaving only the military goal of destruction.

One of the many cruel fundamentals of war is that it destroys innocent lives. Even sterile wars between tanks in the desert permanently scar family members of the dead soldiers, and most wars aren’t sterile. To be clear, the laws of war permit killing innocent lives, if they’re caused in a legitimate manner. The formulators of these laws weren’t credulous or other-worldly. Once an army has a legitimate goal, and there’s none more legitimate than self-defense, the war must be conducted in a proportionate manner. All reasonable precautions must be taken to shield innocents, and the means of fighting must be calibrated to achieving the justified goal with the absolute minimum of collateral damage. Fighting war can sometimes be unavoidable, but there are limits. Some actions are forbidden, even if they make it easier to win. But if you’re careful and measured, the justified war must still be fought, and innocents will be killed.

Imagine Israel had killed 50,000 Hamas fighters and 1,000 civilians in two months, then pulled back from Gaza to make room for a mostly-Arab international peace force brought in to oversee reconstruction by and for Palestinians. There would have been justified sorrow over the dead thousand, but no reasonable voices would have damned Israel for a genocidal war. (Plenty of unreasonable voices will damn Israel no matter what). Given the extreme degree of Hamas’ integration into the physical fabric of Gazan society – tunnels everywhere, rocket launchers in schools, fighters in mosques, command centers under hospitals – that scenario was impossible. The moment Hamas launched its invasion, the Israeli response was always going to kill more than a thousand civilians and wreak widespread destruction. But there’s a difference between cauterizing a murderous semi-army so as to create a better reality for everyone, and turning the eradication into the goal itself.

IDF ground forces didn’t enter Gaza for more than three weeks. There was time for careful deliberation. The government could have defined a political goal, and built international agreement about it. We could have said we would seriously degrade Hamas’ military capabilities and then immediately turn towards building constructive alternatives, in collaboration with Western and Arab partners. These alternatives would have included an eventual governing Palestinian presence, which Israel would allow under conditions it deemed essential to its security. We could have declared victory in December, and negotiated a hostage deal by January.

We did none of this. Not in October, and not now. So the military does what it’s built and trained to do. It searches for Hamas fighters and kills them. It maps their tunnels and dynamites them. We’ve destroyed at least 30% of the buildings in Gaza. Homes, schools, hospitals, businesses. As long as there remain Hamas fighters, we’ll keep on killing them, even if it takes months, or years – which it will, given the endless supply of angry young Gazans. We won’t allow the population back to the areas we forced them from and mostly destroyed, because that will encumber the military goal of killing Hamas fighters.

Most ominous of all: if there’s no way off the track we’re currently on, will a day arrive when we’ll look around and find that the world does blame us for genocide? Or famine?

Famine. There is widespread hunger in Gaza. I’s hard to maintain a balanced diet when two million people are crammed into a small area that previously was crowded with one million, and none of the normal chains of production and supply are working. There’s widespread suffering. The medical system is failing. Social services, education, employment; they’re all in limbo. But is there famine? I don’t know. How reassuring is that? When you’re not yet convinced your country is causing famine? Is there anything worse one might say about Israel?

The most troubling thing about the potential famine we’re creating in Gaza, after the fact itself, is the hostile indifference of Israeli society. There are the official and semi-official denials, of course, and the accusations that the UN and other outsiders are inflating the suffering so as to defame Israel, or perhaps to pressure it into prematurely ending its operation and thereby causing us to lose the war (Netanyahu’s main line). But I’m talking about a pervasive feeling in Israel that Hamas is so evil, and the world is so antisemitic, that the Gazans deserve what they’re getting, and we’ve no choice but to fight until some mythical “total victory” (Netanyahu, again, channeling public opinion).

In 2003 or 2004 our son Meir was serving in Hebron. The 2^nd Intifada was still raging, and his unit was dealing with lots of violence. The week after he moved elsewhere a young woman soldier was killed. No-one was playing games. Each evening after the daily patrols and altercations they had a meeting with the captain. They’d analyze the day’s events, and sharpen their procedures: If they throw a brick at us we don’t shoot because we have personal armor and the brick is slow-moving. If they drop a metal-frame bed from the roof we do shoot because that’s an attempt to kill. A practical nightly seminar in the laws and morality of war, run by a 22-year-old with 19-year-olds. No university seminar could hold a candle to it, if you ask me.

A few weeks into our invasion of Gaza, a full colonel held a similar session with the officers of his brigade. A 40-year-old, I imagine, with reserve officers ranging from 23-43. If we arrest Hamas fighters, said the colonel, I expect all of you to warn your troops that we treat them humanely. 33-year-old Reserve Captain H.S. stood up: No way. I personally will punch and kick them, he said. The colonel ordered him out of the room, but H.S. stood his ground. He turned to everyone else and reprimanded them: Come on, you all agree with me. Stop being cowards, and stand up to say so. Within a few minutes of exhortations and in the face of the colonel’s ire, many of them had. (It’s the Israeli army, and they’re all reservists. Military hierarchy here works differently than you imagine).

A friend heard the story from H.S’s father, after he was killed a week or two later. For the father, it was a source of pride.

In the larger scheme of things, kicking captive Hamas fighters isn’t a heinous war crime. The point is that 20 years ago, captains felt it part of their job description to train their troops not only to fight, but also the limits of fighting. These days, it seems, the captains think those rules are for wusses. As a result, soldiers grow cold-hearted and trigger-happy. In the first month of the invasion, 20% (twenty percent!) of IDF casualties were from friendly-fire incidents, when troops shot first and asked later. Three hostages who managed to escape their captors were shot by IDF troops who not only shot first and then asked no questions, but they understood their mistake only because one of the dead hostages had flaming red hair and didn’t look like a Gazan. (He had red hair also just before he was shot, but no-one was looking). Yesterday we killed seven foreign aid workers in a mistake that had to include both ground troops and the air support they called in, on a road where the aid workers were supposed to be. They were trying to feed the population, a task that by law is our responsibility as the occupying power. Our leaders have apologized, of course, but you have to wonder. How many civilians have we also killed in preventable miscalculations and mistakes?

We’re not wondering. Instead, bereaved fathers find solace in the ruthlessness of their fallen sons. Most Israelis are refusing to see what we’re doing in Gaza, including most of the independent media, whose job it is to make us wonder. We’re so absorbed in our own very real pain, and in our truly justified rage, that we don’t have room for anything else. The women and children who returned from Gaza in late November told how crowds of Gazan civilians jeered them when they were brought into captivity, and we saw the hatred that surrounded the Red Cross jeeps evacuating them. It’s a rare Israeli these days with patience for the suffering of Gaza’s civilians. Even – woe to us – the children. Imagine a nation of Jews, indifferent to the terror and suffering of hundreds of thousands of children.

In more than one way, this is our darkest hour. But there’s still hope.

The most impressive speaker at last night’s demonstration was Noga Friedman, whose husband, Ido, raced from his home that Saturday morning, and was killed a few hours later in the mostly-successful defense of Kibbutz Alumim. Noga has catapulted to fame from her previously banal anonymity because of her biting and iconoclastic Facebook posts about life and death and raising their three children without him.  “They used to go on crazy trips, just the four of them. Now they’re left with the wrong parent”. On the stage she commanded our fullest attention from her first sentence. Something about her voice, or her face. Her unflinching manner. She was mesmerizing. “The essence of widowhood is that I speak in singular. There’s no plural left”. Near the end of her words (to call it a speech would be to diminish it) she said that our actions cannot include the starving of the civilians and children of Gaza. All 20,000 of us roared our agreement, and she seemed a bit startled. “The very fact this even needs saying shows how desperately we need to change” – and we roared again.

*            *            *

In 1954 21-year-old Private Nathan Elbaz jumped on a grenade during training and saved the lives of his comrades. Generations of soldiers, myself included, were raised on his heroic sacrifice. In all our wars and between them, there have been nine such heroes. On October 7^th 2024 and in the days that followed, there have been another nine.

This is still very much a place worth dying for.

 

Yaacov