They aren’t inhuman monsters. They’re human monsters

As you are all probably aware, Hamas recently launched an attack on Israel that took more than a thousand lives, most of them civilians. That’s monstrous. Nothing I’m about to says changes that.

The thing is, though, it’s also monstrous that Israel;s declaring that all Palestinians are guilty and deserve the bloodshed that’s coming: “They could have risen up. They could have fought against that evil regime which took over Gaza in a coup d’etat.” They didn’t, so they have it coming. If we go with that logic, does that mean Israel had it coming for its treatment of the Palestinians in the years prior to the attack? Like the sniper who bragged of shooting 42 Palestinian protesters?

As Roy Edroso says, Americans calling this Israel’s 9/11 sounds alarmingly like signing off on whatever Israel’s retaliation is. Post-9/11 we locked up hundreds of people without charging, let alone convicting the, purely on the president’s claim they were the “worst of the worst” — something the US constitution explicitly bans (the right of habeas corpus). We invaded Iraq, which had no connection with 9/11 (and our government had good evidence it didn’t), bombed it into a failed state and killed more than 200,000 people. We had good evidence Saddam had no WMDs but lots of people in our government wanted our former ally gone and W wanted the political clout that came with being a war president.

Lest we think this was a radical departure from history, President Nixon installed a murderous Chilean dictatorship and bombed Vietnam “back to the stone age.”

Neither are unverified claims Hamas beheaded babies. The first thing I thought of was the lies in the first Gulf war that the monstrous fiends in Saddam’s army  were pulling Kuwaiti babies from incubators. Our enemies are always unspeakable monsters and the first casualty of war is truth. In the US, it’s fitting into pre-existing anti-Arab  bias: we shouldn’t accept Palestinian refugees (ditto!). Chris Rufo, the shitbag who made “critical race theory” a big deal by screaming about it constantly, now recommends linking Black Lives Matter to Hamas. Crisis is just another word for opportunity.

This doesn’t mean “Hamas gets a pass,” but Israel shouldn’t get a pass either. Nobody should. But all too often, “what we have instead are mostly people who believe that violence is only the legitimate province of some people, and what is morally required of everyone else is submission.”  Hamas has targeted civilians; Israel is doing the same. Amnesty International has documented war crimes on both sides (a shout out to them and to Doctors Without Borders, which provides medical care where needed). And points for the Biden administration convincing Israel not to shut off water in the Gaza.

The point of my title is that none of this is new. It’s always appealing to imagine that our enemies are beyond human; when the Iranians threw out the US-backed Shah there was lots of talk about how incomprehensibly savage and dangerous Those People were. But the savagery, the potential for war without mercy, lies in all of us. It’s why we’ve struggled so hard for so long to define a just war and set legal limits on soldiers’ actions. Finding an excuse to take the gloves off is not the way to go.

I stand with attacked civilians, but that’s as far as I can go.

“Men who take up arms against one another in public war do not cease on this account to be moral human beings, responsible to one another and to God.”—Francis Lieber, 1863 Army regulations

UPDATE: I don’t normally try updating posts based on current news but this is worth reading (“if someone wants to say, “these attacks should not be used to precipitate potential further war crimes” or to point to past human rights abuses on the part of settlers or IDF personnel — not as a justification, but as part of an intellectually consistent rejection of all violence — those statements do not condone what’s happened. Calling the attacks “necessary” or draping kidnapping and massacre in the rhetoric of some sort of noble resistance does. . . “)