Here is Friday’s Gaza headline: “Israel’s defense chief says military ‘thoroughly planning’ offensive in crowded Gaza border town”.  One might ask: What the hell does that mean?  I don’t know which is more shocking, the idea that it has not been thoroughly planned (aside from those first few days), or that it has. And that is perhaps the point.  We spend an enormous time reading, thinking and arguing about the What.  Is it a genocide? Is it antisemitic? Is it shielding? Was Hamas attack justified? Is this a humanitarian crisis? Has it been sufficiently planned? And so forth.

Moving beyond what is happening

I am more confounded by the Why than the What.  On the Israeli side, at least, the Why seems less mysterious: Netanyahu saving his political career or keeping himself out of jail, or Israel obliterating a proximate threat, or the belief in religious destiny, fear + history + racism + hatred, etc.  What I struggle to understand is why the US government (or the West more generally) is so staunchly entrenched on one side of this conflict given Israel’s arguably genocidal and inarguably targeted campaign to destroy civilian life in Gaza.  It would have been relatively easy to support Israel militarily behind the cloak of much more nuanced public positioning.  Ditto for the UK or Germany.

The US will pay a steep price for this solidarity. Insight from the ever-incisive Nesrine Malik: “When a less safe world becomes an acceptable price to pay for loyalty to allies, the west’s claim to authority as a political and military custodian of law and order looks increasingly tenuous.  Once that authority is gone, the system is rocked from within.”  Certainly, the US position can be explained in negative terms: that these governments are stuck with the fruits of their tortured allegiances, or wedded to the finances of military spending, or that 2024 is a campaign year for embattled President Biden (and PM Sunak), or that the West maintains a double-standard, or that their hypocrisy reveals the inner rot of Western hegemonic power and narcissism.  Certainly these explanations describe influences, but none seems sufficient; none seems reason enough to undermine the West’s own global power and so efficiently gut the very ideals that are so central to wielding this power. Not to mention running the risk of indictments in the genocide cases to come.   

I want to step out of my depth (read: speculation alert!) and ask, what really is at stake for America? Here, let’s postulate some stakes. And if I get it all wrong, please use the comments to enrich the discussion.

An assault on IHL

Violence such as in Gaza today or Mosul in 2016-17 exposes the inherent destructiveness of a military strategy based upon bombardment of densely populated areas, pulverizing alike the people and the social fabric of a people. The mass erasure of the countless details that make us human is not excusable as collateral damage. Is the concussion being delivered to international humanitarian law (IHL) a deliberate strategy to whittle away the safeguards – the rules of war – through which the West has been exercising power, even if also skillfully ignoring these rules when necessary. This time, though, the curtain of hocus pocus surgical strikes has been pulled back. War is messy. That’s why we created rules.

One major difference here is the absence of that oldest of survival strategies – flight. There is literally nowhere to seek safety, nowhere to shield your children.  Now 134 days too late, even President Biden expresses his concern over the impossibility of evacuating to a place of safety. The strategy of bombardment is thus the airborne equivalent of shooting fish in a barrel; barrel after barrel for months on end, with the additional stipulation that the Israeli military has claimed it is only trying to shoot the sharks, who happen to be shielding in the same barrels. Welcome to urban warfare against an irregular armed enemy. Welcome to the end of IHL’s doctrine of proportionality. Welcome to the wider public watching, reading and talking about it.

The strategy is to normalize this type of warfare, to expand the boundaries of justifiable (i.e., legal) or publicly acceptable combat tactics, because urban warfare is the future of an urbanized world.  It’s not just the shelling of civilians, Gaza marks a rebranding of the tolerable when it comes to civilians, where tactics such as cutting off food and electricity or blocking aid are openly declared.

Shielding – Maintaining the West’s options

Recall the loud condemnation of Hamas’ practice of hiding among civilians – known as “shielding”. And the quieter explanation that while shielding is a forbidden tactic, IHL does not condone using an enemy’s shielding as justification for indiscriminately and indifferently killing lots of civilians.[1] With global access to making and viewing videos, violations of the law become ever more un-deniable and un-explainawayable; hence the need in an age of asymmetric warfare to normalize previously less public and “necessary” transgressions.  

Shielding – Protecting soldiers at the expense of civilians

The heavy reliance on bombardment can also be seen as a strategy of deliberate shielding by the Israelis, as with the US in Iraq. The domestic political imperative in Western democracies now demands sacrificing civilians over there in order to protect military expenditure, popular support, and election votes at home. Israel’s approach in Gaza, like the US’s (and allies) actions in Mosul, shows how this practice forms a more surreptitious form of shielding: one military places “enemy” civilians in the path of violence to protect itself from the enemy military. Bloody and destructive as it might be, invading on foot maintains a much higher level of control over the use of lethal weaponry, reducing civilian casualties/costs but adding steeply to those among the invading soldiers. For Western democracies, this means casualties at the ballot box.

Looking forward

Why such unwavering (and carefully worded criticism) US support to Israel? Is it that the US (or the West) needs and wants Israel to be the dirty cop in the region? Is that enough? Or does it reflect a shift in realpolitik thinking, a belief that law and norms like IHL will prove ever more inadequate in a fast-charging future where inequity, brutality and naked self-interest will be both necessary for the securitization of the West’s idealized societies and widely broadcast (when the West is involved, as with Gaza).  The new world political calculation is that widespread demolition from afar thus becomes “necessary” for the defense of democracy and the rule of law. Perhaps this was always the case, but that was never the ideal presented to the public.

I feel as if I am being prepared to accept tomorrow what constitutes a futurist dystopia of today.  In fact, I think we are being initiated into tolerating it. Seems we as a society are halfway through Niemoller’s poem, and that doesn’t even count our acceptance if not collective ignorance of the war in Sudan, ethnic cleansing in Nagorno Karabakh, mass civilian deaths in Tigray, Rohingya persecution, or the re-education camps in China’s Uighur region (not an exhaustive list). 

I worked for years on the protection (witnessing and advocacy) side of humanitarian action. I preached the idea that if only we could communicate more powerfully what was happening, it would stop (or, at least, slow), or bring justice. Either times have changed, or I have long been too much of an idealist. A less safe world, as Malik says above.  This is the gambit on which we have now more decisively embarked.  Creating a less safe world, and at the same time one where the costs will be inequitably distributed, imposed upon the have nots in order to create and maintain the safety of the haves.

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[1] In the US or the UK, nobody would support a SWAT team decision to shoot dozens of pedestrians in order to stop the escape of one murderer. Or claim that in a hostage situation it was OK to lob grenades from afar (killing all) rather than take the risk of losing police in storming the location. We expect and police expect to place civilian safety above their own (within limits). IHL is the same. But the home country politics of US soldiers dying on foreign soil increasingly gives rise to a different weighting of lives, where one American non-civilian trumps [fill in the foreign blank of men, women and children].