Feed Kids
My modest proposal
Greetings friends and enemies, Jews and Gentiles, folks for and against Palestinians and Israelis. This post replies to this prompt:
My shortest answer is just a couple minutes:
Hi internet stranger, I’m happy to explain this! To start with international law and war crimes, starving civilians is very much defined as a war crime.1 Now I don’t think that’s magic, for a few reasons. International law is not absolutely agreed by everybody, and not usually enforced, and not dictated by God. But I think it does a decent job of summing up some points a whole lot of us agree on strongly from a lot of different angles.
One big idea of international law is that there are two separate issues of just cause for war and just conduct of war. This idea goes way back, with roots in Judaism via Augustine,2 and says that some evils justify war, but some evils are never justified even within war. Some shit is not right in even the best war against the worst enemy. Even then don’t rape and don’t exterminate for example.
I know there’s room to say look if some group attacks my group then we will slaughter them all. It makes a certain sense, and has plenty of precedent, Amalek included. But international law, and many other political or ethical or spiritual views, say no. Kill the fighters, kill the leaders, accept some collateral damage to others—but don’t exterminate. Don’t slaughter civilians. Don’t rape and torture prisoners. And don’t starve whole populations.
A few more thoughts and then a few receipts:
I’m horrified by all the evil shit done to Jewish people through the ages. And I appreciate how it could very reasonably push Jews in two different directions. One would be “never again” in the sense that we will never again allow this to happen to us. The world is evil and brutal but we will never again let ourselves be on the receiving end of that evil brutality. We will defend ourselves as aggressively and ruthlessly as necessary.
The other angle says actually we can make the world less brutal and evil and awful. We should change it so this stuff doesn’t happen again at all. Maybe that’s naive in certain ways. And maybe Jews have faced danger and hatred and suffering that other groups have not. At the same time maybe that first angle of “never again—to us” has led the Israeli state to do to others so much of what was done to Jews through history. Maybe the hate and cruelty and violence suffered so miserably for so long across Europe by Jews is now done by Jews in Israel in ways that would horrify Jewish ancestors.
Now about how this thing started. I know that on October 7th Hamas and allied fighters attacked Israel, and that started this present round of violence. In that sense Palestinians started this war.
And I know many Israelis and their supporters say it’s always like that. History has had aggressive Arabs attacking out of savagery and antisemitism and grudges and God knows what, while innocent Israel is forced to defend itself. Moral purity and patriotic pride flow from that sort of story. But it’s mythology not history. It’s the sort of skewed story plenty of countries tell. But it’s not true.
Yes there is Arab antisemitism and Muslim antisemitism in and around Israel. And we can ask why, and when it started, and how it developed. Is it an ancient ethnic or religious beef? Is it something especially evil and wrong about Palestinians, or all Arabs, or all Muslims? Is it largely a reaction to what the Israeli state has done there?
Whatever you think there it’s still a stark fact that Palestinians did not start this fight. They lived for centuries in what’s now Israel, and before that was British Palestine, and before that the Ottoman Empire. Yes Jews had been there earlier. But then they were mostly gone for 1800 years. Then from 1917 to 1947 there was a ton of migration. And from 1947 to 49 there was a brutal conquest. And from 1967 onward brutal occupation. That’s the context of Palestinian violent resistance, and non-violent resistance.
So even if you reject international law, and just conduct of war, and things like not slaughtering their babies just because they started the fight—even then, on the principle that if they do start the fight you do slaughter their babies—well they didn’t start this fight. So don’t slaughter their babies. Don’t exterminate them. And don’t starve them.
Further Reading:
Thank you for your interest friends and enemies and internet strangers.
It’s a war crime under the Rome Statute to impede relief supplies or otherwise starve people as Israel is doing. The starvation is also collective punishment, a war crime under the Geneva Conventions.
Got that wrong in the recording, mea culpa. Started not with Saint Tommy from Italy but further back with Saint Gus from Hippo.
