January 21, 2009

Israeli offensive in Gaza: Is it a proportionate response?

By Judith Sudilovsky

JERUSALEM (CNS)—For many people abroad, the photos of bleeding and dead children, of wounded Palestinians lying in crowded hospital wards and people sifting through the rubble of their homes say all that needs to be said about the Israeli offensive in the Gaza Strip.

The key word in discussions is “proportionality.” Is Israel using disproportionate force to eliminate Hamas gunmen who have been lobbing missiles into southern Israel for eight years? Since 2001, some 1,000 Israelis have been injured in the attacks and almost 30—including several children have been killed.

Father Jamal Khader, dean of the faculty of arts and chairman of the religious studies department at Bethlehem University, said while he was angry at what Hamas was doing it did not justify Israeli military actions in Gaza or the high number of civilian casualties.

Some 1,100 Palestinians— including nearly 350 children—have been killed since the war began Dec. 27, according to U.N. and Gaza health officials. In that same time period, 13 Israelis have been killed, four by Hamas rocket fire.

“When you speak of Israeli casualties or Palestinian casualties these are all human beings, so they need to be treated equally,” Father Khader told Catholic News Service.

“All these people are casualties of power politics,” he said. “But the sides are not symmetric. You can’t compare the might of the Israeli army with Hamas rockets. Israel is the stronger part and has a big responsibility about what is going on in Gaza. That doesn’t mean Hamas is innocent.

“To pretend to save lives and then kill 1,000 people is not justified,” he said. “What Hamas did is unjustified, too, but (one) can see it as crying out about what is going on in Gaza. It was a desperate act with insignificant rockets.”

Israel began a blockade of the Gaza Strip shortly after Hamas took control of the area in June 2007, when Hamas split with Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas’ Fatah movement. Fatah still controls the West Bank.

Father Khader said the high number of civilian Palestinian casualties will only serve to strengthen Hamas’ stronghold in Gaza.

Moshe Halbertal, philosophy professor in the department of Jewish thought at Hebrew University, told CNS the whole world is viewing the war in Gaza as a David and Goliath battle, with the Palestinians in the role of David. However, he said, Israelis have a more long-range view of the conflict.

“It is horrible and tragic when children are killed and civilians are killed, but that is part of ... the de-contextualization of the situation,” Halbertal said. “But as viewed from the Israeli perspective, both Hamas and (Lebanon’s militant Islamic group) Hezbollah are not a small power, but are fueled by a larger power called Iran and more extreme Islamic powers in the region (who advocate the destruction of Israel). This is the larger issue.”

These forces, he added, are also a threat to such moderate countries in the region as Egypt and Jordan.

Very simply put, he said, a just war is one a country undertakes in self-defense. Under such criteria, he said, the current violence in Gaza from an Israeli perspective certainly is justified.

However, he said he did not have a clear picture of what is happening in Gaza.

Israel maintains that the number of Palestinian civilian casualties is so high because Hamas continues to use the civilian population as a shield for its military actions.

“It will be absolutely wrong to target (the) civilian population but ... from what I know Israel is not targeting civilians,” Halbertal said. It is very difficult to avoid injuring and killing civilians in such densely populated areas, he added.

“It is not enough to put a camera in the door of a hospital. You have to ask what the proportion is between combatants and civilians” in that hospital, he said.

“The judgments people utter about this depend on their general view of the conflict more than what is actually happening. It depends whether Israel is viewed as the aggressor here or as a country which had no choice but to defend itself and, unfortunately, had to use harsh measures to do it,” he said.

Paulist Father Michael McGarry, director of the Tantur Institute for Ecumenical Studies, told CNS that in order for a war to be considered just according to Christian theory there needs to be a reasonable chance of success. He said to justify war a country must have good reasons, which could include defending civilians against aggression, taking back stolen land and the exhaustion of all other nonviolent means.

“I would question the justness of going into war” in Gaza now, said Father McGarry, noting that Israel was unclear about its goals when it launched the offensive other than saying it wanted to damage Hamas’ ability to attack Israel with rockets.

He said everyone has differing opinions about what provoked the Israeli attacks, but added he thought the Christian concept of prudence should come into play.

He said because Hamas combatants were intermingled with civilians it was hard to know how many of the Palestinian casualties have been civilians and how many have been Hamas combatants.

And though he termed Hamas’ actions from within a civilian population “terrible” and condemned rocket strikes into Israel, he also wondered how much suffering Palestinians could withstand due to the Israeli-imposed border closure of Gaza.

Once a war begins, he said, there are limitations to what can be done, including protecting civilian targets.

“Short of an A-bomb, what kind of proportional weapons can one use and which amount of collateral damage can one inflict before it becomes disproportionate?” he asked. “Is 926 disproportionate when 920 is within reason? Where do you draw the line?”